quickly; Canning held the protocols, and pushed the act of federation to its conclusion; but the general business of the congress made little progress before the return of Napoleon from Elba.
When the congress dispersed upon the return of Napoleon, Canning went back to Switzerland with the act of federation approved by the congress (Declaration, 20 March 1815), whereby the ‘precious gift of neutrality’ was accorded to the cantons on condition of political impotence, and his first duty was to induce the cantons to accept the slight modifications introduced at Vienna, and to furnish a contingent to the allied armies now concerting measures against Napoleon. Both these objects he effected before Waterloo removed any remaining grounds of hesitation. During the ‘hundred days’ an opportunity occurred for a rear attack by the Swiss contingent on the French corps d'armée which had marched through Geneva to meet the Austrians; Canning at once grasped the position, and urged an immediate attack; but the Swiss general had no instructions which permitted so daring a movement, and the chance was lost. The envoy's principal work was now accomplished, but there were still numerous details to be settled in the constitutions of the twenty-two cantons. He was even induced by the entreaties of the Swiss to draw up a plan for organising a federal army; and the force of 100,000 men which the protestant cantons mustered in 1847 against the Sunderbund was the result of the military system founded by the civilian thirty years before. During the earlier part of the six years occupied by the Swiss mission, Zürich was his headquarters, and the life seems to have been somewhat dreary; the men were too grave and serious, and the ‘wives and daughters were more remarkable for their domestic virtues than for the charms and accomplishments of polite society.’ The grandeur of Alpine scenery, of which he retained an enthusiastic memory at the age of ninety, made amends for the dulness of man, and the lack of society was to some extent remedied when he moved the embassy to Bern in 1815, and still more when, after a visit to England in 1816, he brought back as wife the daughter of Henry Raikes. His married happiness, however, was shortlived; he took a villa about two miles from Lausanne in the spring of 1817, but in the following year Mrs. Canning died in childbirth, and the blow induced her husband to apply to government for his recall. His work in Switzerland was done; it had been quiet and unobtrusive, but not less important and difficult.
Canning had not been long in England when he was appointed to the embassy at Washington with a seat in the privy council. On 18 Sept. 1819, Richard Rush, the United States minister in London, had an interview with Lord Castlereagh, and was informed by the latter that Canning had been selected as envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to the United States, in accordance with ‘an anxious desire to keep up the system of conciliation which had been acted upon with so much advantage to both countries by Mr. [afterwards Sir Charles] Bagot,’ and with the belief that Canning ‘possessed every qualification for treading in the same path.’ Lord Castlereagh referred eulogistically to his services at the Porte, at Vienna, and in Switzerland (RUSH, Court of London from 1819 to 1825, 1873 ed., p. 157). The American mission, for which Canning set out on 14 Aug. 1820, was one of peculiar delicacy. The war of 1812–15 was but recently over. The convention of 1818 had partly settled some of the more serious differences between England and the States, but many remained in a dangerous position, and the temper of the States was such that the greatest tact and discretion were needed to bring about a pacific solution of the questions in dispute. ‘Sir,’ said Secretary Adams to Canning at Washington, ‘it took us of late several years to go to war with you for the redress of our grievances; renew these subjects of complaint, and it will not take as many weeks to produce the same effect.’ The most pressing questions at the time were those of the right to search American ships for British seamen, and the suppression of the slave trade by a sort of general police on the seas, to which England found a great obstacle in the susceptibilities of the Americans. Canning succeeded in inducing a somewhat more conciliatory spirit among the American ministers, in spite of considerable friction with Adams, whose temper was uneven. The climate of Washington, and his dislike of American manners and politics, however, made his transatlantic residence far from pleasant. In impaired health, he returned in the autumn of 1823 to arrange a treaty in London, embodying the settlement of the various outstanding differences. An account of the conferences held in January and February 1824, of which Canning drew all the British instructions and the protocols, and in which he and Huskisson and Rush were the plenipotentiaries, has been preserved by the last, and shows that, in spite of the unsparing demands of the Americans, against which the English representatives ‘vehemently’ protested, their
