to be executed; that
retaliation, to be just, should fall on the party setting the guilty
example, not on an innocent party which was not even chargeable with an
acquiescence in it.

When deprived of this flimsy veil for a prohibition of our trade with
her enemy by the repeal of his prohibition of our trade with Great
Britain, her cabinet, instead of a corresponding repeal or a practical
discontinuance of its orders, formally avowed a determination to persist
in them against the United States until the markets of her enemy should
be laid open to British products, thus asserting an obligation on a
neutral power to require one belligerent to encourage by its internal
regulations the trade of another belligerent, contradicting her own
practice toward all nations, in peace as well as in war, and betraying
the insincerity of those professions which inculcated a belief that,
having resorted to her orders with regret, she was anxious to find an
occasion for putting an end to them.

Abandoning still more all respect for the neutral rights of the United
States and for its own consistency, the British Government now demands
as prerequisites to a repeal of its orders as they relate to the United
States that a formality should be observed in the repeal of the French
decrees nowise necessary to their termination nor exemplified by British
usage, and that the French repeal, besides including that portion of the
decrees which operates within a territorial jurisdiction, as well as
that which operates on the high seas, against the commerce of the United
States should not be a single and special repeal in relation to the
United States, but should be extended to whatever other neutral nations
unconnected with them may be affected by those decrees. And as an
additional insult, they are called on for a formal disavowal of
conditions and pretensions advanced by the French Government for which
the United States are so far from having made themselves responsible
that, in official explanations which have been published to the world,
and in a correspondence of the American minister at London with the
British minister for foreign affairs such a responsibility was
explicitly and emphatically disclaimed.

It has become, indeed, sufficiently certain that the commerce of
the United States is to be sacrificed, not as interfering with the
belligerent rights of Great Britain; not as supplying the wants of
her enemies, which she herself supplies; but