practice by just and prudent' arrangements between thetwo governe ments. You would make war with all the world for treating a single sailor of yours, as you have treated many thousands of ours.Nay, you would not spare a precious subject of your own that should commit the comparatively venial crime of putting one of them on shore on a desert Island, where at worst he could only starve; and this multiplied and continual aggression on your part is not to be considered a ground for War, because we have borne it so long without alleging it as such. of You ought to know, for it is no secret in your Navy, that many your officers make no scruple to impress an American seaman, wherever they can find him; and even boast of it.-Perhaps too, if you scrutinize, you will find that your own orders to restore such have not always been obeyed.-We do not acquit you of any share in this iniquity; the shoals of our scamen sent ashore in the Fox administration, and only then, furnish pretty strong presumptive evidence of connivance in their successors as well as in those that preceded them; but we believe you are sometimes deceived, and clear it is, that the best intentions of an administration must fail, while officers, not immediately under their eye, and wanting men, are licensed judges in their own cause. We would do every thing in the world, would even help to procure for you every man to whom you are entitled, according to your own principles and acknowledged practice; but as long as you will not suffer the officer of any nation under the sun to visit your ships, and take out whomso ever he may please to call subjects of his own; you will look in vain for any acquiescence on our part in a measure fraught with such distressing injury to our citizens. 31st Par" As if to throw additional obstacles in the way of peace, the American Congress at the same time passed a law, prohibiting all intercourse with Great Britain, of such a tenor, as deprived the Executive Government, according to the President's own construction of that Act, of all power of restoring the relations of friendly intercourse between the two states, so far, at least, as concerned their commercial intercourse, until Congress should re-assemble.” The law here referred to put an end to those powers for restoring the intercourse which the President had in vain exerted for years, and which were incompatible with a state of war. No encouragement could be entertained in America, at that time, to hope for a revocation of the Orders in Council. It was five days after the declaration of war in America that those orders were revoked in Sce the case of Captain Lake. England, and not a symptom of relaxation, but the strongest pledges to the contrary were exhibited till within a week of that revocation in England, and till the last hour of the declaration of War, and even after that declaration, by your Minister hère.-The very document, from which you draw this construction of the President, recommends the adoption of an equitable mode of preventing any inconvenience to individuals from your unexpected retreat. 32d Par." The President of the United States Iras, it is true, since proposed to Great Britain an Armistice; not, however, on the admission, that the cause of war hitherto relied on was removed; but on condition, that Great Britain, as a preliminary step, should do away a cause of war, now brought forward as such for the first time: namely, that she should aban don the exercise of her undoubted right of search, to take from American merchant vessels British seamen, the natural-born subjects of his Majesty; and this concession was required upon a mere assurance that laws would be enacted by the Legislature of the United States, to prevent such seamen from entering into their service. But independent of the objection to an exclusive reliance on a foreign state, for the conservation of so vital an interest, no explanation was, or could be, afforded by the agent who was charged with this overture, either as to the main principles upon which such laws were to be founded, or as to the provisions which it was proposed they should contain." In reply to paragraph 30, we have shown some of the precious effects of the practice which it is here attempted to defend. It remains only to add the propositions that were made by us many years ago, when Mr. Monroe was our Minister in England, and which have never yet been withdrawn.-We then offered to enter into engagements to allow of no protection to British seamen; but on the contrary, to deliver them up, whenever they sought refuge among us. To aid in searching for, seizing, and restoring them; and to enact laws for this purpose; to keep them in our prisons, when thereunto required, and to prohibit our citizens, under adequate penalties, from carrying them off or employing them. All this was proffered by our Government for an exemption from that seizure upon the high seas of all persons not liable thereto by the laws of Nations, which could not, in the case supposed, attach on any British sailor. For our naturalized citizens, comprising few, if any, of this class of men, and none that have not become so by three years' longer residence among us than is required for the same privilege with you, we ask only the protection which you extend to your own. Who the agent charged with the reiteration of the overture was, or how instructed, we pretend not to know; but we cannot doubt that he was authorized to pledge all the power of the executive Go vernment to procure the enactment of adequate penalties to prevent a breach of the contract; and moreover we are convinced that, under an amicable arrangement to this effect, the American Merchant and seaman, seeing in it his own security and that of his brethren, would exert a vigilance to see it carried into execution, that would leave no escape for those deserters of their country's call, that might possibly escape the hands of the officers charged with it. We have not a doubt that if the subjects, to which your own laws and practice intitle you, were all you are in quest of, you would recover more of them by this process than by any other that could be adopted. 33d Par." This proposition having been objected to, a second proposal was made, again offering an armistice, provided the British Government would secretly stipulate to renounce the exercise of this right in a treaty of peace. An immediate and formal abandonment of its exercise, as preliminary to a cessation of hostilities, was not demanded; but his Royal Highness the Prince Regent was required, in the name and on the behalf of His Majesty, secretly to abandon what the former overture had proposed to him publicly to concede." 34th Par.-"This most offensive proposition was also rejected, being accompanied, as the former had been, by other demands of the most exceptionable nature, and especially of indemnity for all American vessels detained and condemned under the Orders in Council, or under what were termed illegal blockades-a compliance with which demands, exclusive of all other objections, would have amounted to an absolute surrender of the rights on which those Orders and blockades were founded." We cannot comment on these propositions without having them fairly before us. If an armistice were proposed during the temperate discussion of rights which we have never for a moment aban doned; and rejected, because we would not tamely surrender a property, in innocent merchandize, which we have never ceased to demand;--which no other nation under heaven conceives you have any right to; and to the restoration of which we are clearly intitled, by your own construction of the law of Nations, very recently promulgated; there can be no difficulty in appealing to the world, and to posterity, as to which of us is chargeable with the calamities of war. It is a subject of easy demonstration, and has been clearly demonstrated, that the Orders under which this property has been seized, will not bear the test of the laws of Blockade.-Nay, it has been demonstrated, that your own administration has denounced them as illegal; and whatever the law located in England may say, the See on this subject letters from a Cosmopolite to a Clergyman, 28 and 3d letter.' truc law, diffusa in omnes, constans, sempiterna, which has no locality, and pronounced in any other part of the world, acquits us.— Moreover you paid us for similar spoliations in the administration of Mr. Pitt: so did your allies in the invasion of neutral rights.— Perhaps in discussing the question we might agree to a similar reference; perhaps our mutual friend Russia might give us a casting vote; or lend us an umpire. You must not expect to be always judge in your own cause; were it enemy's property there could be no other tribunal, but this is not even pretended. 35th Par.-"Had the American Government been sincere in representing the Orders in Council, as the only subject of difference between Great Britain and the United States, calculated to lead to hostilities; it might have been expected, so soon as the revocation of those Orders had been officially made known to them, that they would have spontaneously recalled their ' letters of marque,' and manifested a disposition immediately to restore the relations of peace and amity between the two powers. 36th Par." But the conduct of the Government of the United States by no means corresponds with such reasonable expectations. 37th Par.-"The Order in Council of the 23rd of June being officially communicated in America, the Government of the United States saw nothing in the Repeal of the Orders in Council, which should of itself restore peace, unless Great Britain were prepared, in the first instance, substantially to relinquish the right of impressing her own seamen, when found on board Ame, rican merchant ships." Here again we must refer to paragraph 30. Once for all, we never did represent the Orders in Council as the only subject calculated to lead to hostilities. And if we have shown, as we have abundantly shown, that we had other most irritating and most cruel causes of hostility; how can you have the conscience to turn our forbearance to commence it, into a jesuitical pretence of insincerity on our part? 38th Par.-"The proposal of an armistice, and of a simultaneous repeal of the restrictive measures on both sides, subsequently made by the commanding officer of His Majesty's naval forces on the American coast, were received in the same hostile spirit by the Government of the United States. The suspension of the practice of impressment was insisted upon, in the correspondence which passed on that occasion, as a necessary preliminary to a cessation of hostilities: negociation, it was stated, might take place without any suspension of the exercise of this right, and also without any armistice being concluded; but Great Britain was required previously to agree, without any knowledge of the adequacy of the system which could be substituted, to negociate upon the basis of accepting the legislative regulations of a foreign state, as the sole equivalent for the exercise of a right, which she has felt to be essential to the support of her maritime power." VOL. I. Pam. No. II. 2 L 39th Par." If America, by demanding this preliminary concession, intends to deny the validity of that right; in that denial, Great Britain cannot acquiesce; nor will she give countenance to such a pretension, by acceding to its suspension, much less to its abandonment, as a basis on which to treat. If the American Government has devised, or conceives it can devise, regulations which may safely be accepted by Great Britain, as a substitute for the exercise of the right in question, it is for them to bring forward such a plan for consideration. The British Government has never attempted to exclude this question from amongst those on which the two States might have to negociate it has, on the contrary, uniformly professed its readiness to receive and discuss any proposition on this subject coming from the American Government; it has never asserted any exclusive right, as to the impressment of British seamen from American vessels, which it was not prepared to acknowledge, as appertaining equally to the Government of the United States, with respect to American seamen when found on board British merchant ships : but it cannot, by acceding to such a basis in the first instance, either assume or admit that to be practicable, which, when attempted on former occasions, has always been found to be attended with great difficulties; such difficulties as the British Commissioners, in 1806, expressly declared, after an attentive consideration of the suggestions brought forward by the Commissioners on the part of America, they were unable to surmount." We shall only add to our former observations on this subject, that the regulations of a foreign state here referred to, were the regulations of the undoubted maritime rights of her own merchant ships; such regulations, as you neither will, nor ever have suffered to be invaded in your own case, recommended moreover by the continual abuse of the power for which you are contending against all right, and infinitely better calculated to give you all that you pretend to want. And what is this pretence of a readiness to receive and discuss any proposition that may come from the American Government on this subject?-discuss the propositions already made, and recapitulated above, and, which, but for a change of administration, we have little doubt would have been agreed to as soon as the popular deceptions en this subject, which it required time to surmount, could have been removed.-Let us hear your objections to them at once, if you have any to make. We want none of your sailors, nor any of your sub. jects. We cannot deny them the rights of hospitality, Et cunctis undamque auramque patentem. but you may be assured we covet them not:-they graft not to advantage on our stock :-there are few of them that we would not willingly be rid of :-and if you were to take them back one with the other; |