antages gained by the
British along the Canadian frontier. The fortunes of each
campaign were followed with great interest on both sides
of the line. But on the other side of the Atlantic the
British home public had Napoleon to think of at their
very doors; and so, for the most part, they regarded the
war with the States as an untoward and regrettable
annoyance, which diverted too much force and attention
from the life-and-death affairs of Europe.
All these peculiar influences are reflected in the
different patriotic annals. Americans are voluble about
the Lakes and the naval duels out at sea. But the completely
effective British blockade of their coast-line is a too
depressingly scientific factor in the problem to be
welcomed by a general public which would not understand
how Yankee ships could win so many duels while the British
Navy won the war. Canadians are equally voluble about
the battles on Canadian soil, where Americans had decidedly
the worst of it. As a rule, Canadian writers have been
quite as controversial as Americans, and not any readier
to study their special subjects as parts of a greater
whole. The British Isles have never had an interested
public anxious to read about this remote, distasteful,
and subsidiary war; and books about it there have
consequently been very few.
The two chief authors who have appealed directly to the
readers of the mother country are William James and Sir
Charles Lucas. James was an industrious naval historian;
but he was quite as anti-American as the earlier American
writers were anti-British. Owing to this perverting bias
his two books, the _Naval_ and the _Military Occurrences
of the late War between Great Britain and the United
States_, are not to be relied upon. Their appendices,
however, give a great many documents which are of much
assistance in studying the real history of the war. James
wrote only a few years after the peace. Nearly a century
later Sir Charles Lucas wrote _The Canadian War of 1812_,
which is the work of