At the very outset, I do not hesitate to affirm, that this country in particular, and the public law in general, have suffered more by this negotiation of experiment than by all the battles together that we have lost from the commencement of this century to this time, when it touches so nearly to its close.  I therefore have the misfortune not to coincide in opinion with the great statesman who set on foot a negotiation, as he said, “in spite of the constant opposition he had met with from Prance.”  He admits, “that the difficulty in this negotiation became most seriously increased, indeed, by the situation in which we were placed, and the manner in which alone the enemy would admit of a negotiation.”  This situation so described, and so truly described, rendered our solicitation not only degrading, but from the very outset evidently hopeless.

I find it asserted, and even a merit taken for it, “that this country surmounted every difficulty of form and etiquette which the enemy had thrown in our way.”  An odd way of surmounting a difficulty, by cowering under it!  I find it asserted that an heroic resolution had been taken, and avowed in Parliament, previous to this negotiation, “that no consideration of etiquette should stand in the way of it.”

Etiquette, if I understand rightly the term, which in any extent is of modern usage, had its original application to those ceremonial and formal observances practised at courts, which had been established by long usage, in order to preserve the sovereign power from the rude intrusion of licentious familiarity, as well as to preserve majesty itself from a disposition to consult its ease at the expense of its dignity.  The term came afterwards to have a greater latitude, and to be employed to signify certain formal methods used in the transactions between sovereign states.

In the more limited, as well as in the larger sense of the term, without knowing what the etiquette is, it is impossible to determine whether it is a vain and captious punctilio, or a form necessary to preserve decorum in character and order in business.  I readily admit that nothing tends to facilitate the issue of all public transactions more than a mutual disposition in the parties treating to waive all ceremony.  But the use of this temporary suspension of the recognized modes of respect consists in its being mutual, and in the spirit of conciliation in which all ceremony is laid aside.  On the contrary, when one of the parties to a treaty intrenches himself up to the chin in these ceremonies, and will not on his side abate a single punctilio, and that all the concessions are upon one side only, the party so conceding does by this act place himself in a relation of inferiority, and thereby fundamentally subverts that equality which is of the very essence of all treaty.