to them that unless they ceased their aggressions America would hold no intercourse with them; that their ships would be seized if they ventured into American ports; that the productions of their soil or industry should be forfeited.  Here was an undisguised menace in clear, unequivocal terms, and of course, according to the argument against which I contend, neither France nor England could deliberate under its pressure without dishonor.  Yet the Emperor of France, certainly an unexceptionable judge of what the dignity of his country required, did deliberate, did accept the condition, did repeal the Berlin and Milan decrees, did not make any complaint of the act as a threat, though he called it an injury.  Great Britain, too, although at that time on not very friendly terms with the United States, made no complaint that her pride was offended.  Her minister on the spot even made a declaration that the obnoxious orders were repealed.  It is true he was disavowed, but the disavowal was accompanied by no objections to the law as a threat.  Should the objection be to the nature of the remedy proposed, and that the recommendation of reprisals is the offensive part, it would be easy to show that it stands on the same ground with any other remedy; that it is not hostile in its nature; that it has been resorted to by France to procure redress from other powers, and by them against her, without producing war.  But such an argument is not necessary.  This is not the case of a national measure, either of menace or action; it is a recommendation only of one branch of Government to another, and France has itself shown that a proposal of this nature could not be noticed as an offense.  In the year 1808 the Senate of the United States annexed to the bill of nonintercourse a section which not only advised but actually authorized the President to issue letters of marque and reprisal against both France and England, if the one did not repeal the Berlin and Milan decrees and the other did not revoke the orders in council.  This clause was not acceded to by the Representatives, but it was complete as the act of the Senate; yet neither France nor England complained of it as an indignity.  Both powers had ministers on the spot, and the dignity of neither seems to have been offended.

If the view I have now taken of the subject be correct; if I have succeeded in conveying to His Majesty’s ministers the conviction I myself feel that no right exists in any foreign nation to ask explanations of or even to notice any communications between the different branches of our Government; that to admit it even in a single instance would be a dangerous precedent and a derogation from national dignity, and that in the present instance an explanation that ought to be satisfactory has been voluntarily given, I have then demonstrated that any measure founded on such supposed right is not only inadmissible, but is totally unnecessary, and consequently that His Majesty’s ministers may at once declare that previous explanations given by the minister of the United States, and subsequently approved by the President, had satisfied them on the subject of the message.