By this act a proposition was made to all nations to place our commerce with each on a basis which it was presumed would be acceptable to all.  Every nation was allowed to bring its manufactures and productions into our ports and to take the manufactures and productions of the United States back to their ports in their own vessels on the same conditions that they might be transported in vessels of the United States, and in return it was required that a like accommodation should be granted to the vessels of the United States in the ports of other powers.  The articles to be admitted or prohibited on either side formed no part of the proposed arrangement.  Each party would retain the right to admit or prohibit such articles from the other as it thought proper, and on its own conditions.

When the nature of the commerce between the United States and every other country was taken into view, it was thought that this proposition would be considered fair, and even liberal, by every power.  The exports of the United States consist generally of articles of the first necessity and of rude materials in demand for foreign manufactories, of great bulk, requiring for their transportation many vessels, the return for which in the manufactures and productions of any foreign country, even when disposed of there to advantage, may be brought in a single vessel.  This observation is the more especially applicable to those countries from which manufactures alone are imported, but it applies in great extent to the European dominions of every European power and in a certain extent to all the colonies of those powers.  By placing, then, the navigation precisely on the same ground in the transportation of exports and imports between the United States and other countries it was presumed that all was offered which could be desired.  It seemed to be the only proposition which could be devised which would retain even the semblance of equality in our favor.

Many considerations of great weight gave us a right to expect that this commerce should be extended to the colonies as well as to the European dominions of other powers.  With the latter, especially with countries exclusively manufacturing, the advantage was manifestly on their side.  An indemnity for that loss was expected from a trade with the colonies, and with the greater reason as it was known that the supplies which the colonies derived from us were of the highest importance to them, their labor being bestowed with so much greater profit in the culture of other articles; and because, likewise, the articles of which those supplies consisted, forming so large a proportion of the exports of the United States, were never admitted into any of the ports of Europe except in cases of great emergency to avert a serious calamity.