unmistakable terms that they should not be abandoned. On the other hand there was the risk that persistence might throw the Americans back into the arms of France. The bolder course recommended itself to the mind of Shelburne, notwithstanding the persuasions of Vaughan, who undertook another journey from Paris to try to induce him to give way. Strachey was instructed to return to Paris, and while accepting the main propositions already put forward, to demand the addition of certain limitations taken from former treaties with France, as to the distance within which the American fishermen were to be allowed to fish off Cape Breton and other islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and to insist once more on an indemnity for the estates of the refugees and the Loyalists, and for the proprietary rights of the Penns and the heirs of Lord Baltimore, and for a recognition of the validity of debts contracted subsequently as well as prior to 1775.[1] "It is no idea of interest," Shelburne wrote to Oswald, "which actuates us in regard to the refugees; it is a higher principle. This country is not reduced to terms of humiliation, and certainly will not suffer them from America. If Ministers through timidity or indolence could be induced to give way, I am persuaded the nation would rise to do itself justice, and to recover its wounded honour. If the Commissioners reflect a moment with that coolness which ought to accompany their employment, I cannot conceive they will think it the interest of America to leave any root of animosity behind, much less to lodge it with posterity in the heart of the treaty. It is a very inferior consideration, and what you will do me the justice to acknowledge that I never leant to, what affects the Ministers of the day. Our uniform conduct ought to speak for itself, and it must lie with the Americans what return they choose to make.
"If the American Commissioners think that they will gain by the whole coming before Parliament, I do not imagine the refugees will have any objection."[2]
