accordingly insisted that the American Commissioners should
disregard their instructions and, without the knowledge of
France, should deal directly with Great Britain. In this
contention he was supported by Adams when he arrived, but it was
hard to persuade Franklin to accept this point of view, for he
was unwilling to believe anything so unworthy of his admiring and
admired French. Nevertheless, with his cautious shrewdness, he
finally yielded so far as to agree to see what might come out of
direct negotiations.

The rest was relatively easy. Of course there were difficulties
and such sharp differences of opinion that, even after long
negotiation, some matters had to be compromised. Some problems,
too, were found insoluble and were finally left without a
settlement. But such difficulties as did exist were slight in
comparison with the previous hopelessness of reconciling American
and Spanish ambitions, especially when the latter were supported
by France. On the one hand, the Americans were the proteges of
the French and were expected to give way before the claims of
their patron's friends to an extent which threatened to limit
seriously their growth and development. On the other hand, they
were the younger sons of England, uncivilized by their wilderness
life, ungrateful and rebellious, but still to be treated by
England as children of the blood. In the all-important question
of extent of territory, where Spain and France would have limited
the United States to the east of the Alleghany Mountains, Great
Britain was persuaded without great difficulty, having once
conceded independence to the United States, to yield the
boundaries which she herself had formerly claimed--from the
Atlantic Ocean on the east to the Mississippi River on the west,