departing commerce. To the most insulting pretensions they have added
the most lawless proceedings in our very harbors, and have wantonly
spilt American blood within the sanctuary of our territorial
jurisdiction. The principles and rules enforced by that nation, when
a neutral nation, against armed vessels of belligerents hovering near
her coasts and disturbing her commerce are well known. When called on,
nevertheless, by the United States to punish the greater offenses
committed by her own vessels, her Government has bestowed on their
commanders additional marks of honor and confidence.

Under pretended blockades, without the presence of an adequate force and
sometimes without the practicability of applying one, our commerce has
been plundered in every sea, the great staples of our country have been
cut off from their legitimate markets, and a destructive blow aimed
at our agricultural and maritime interests. In aggravation of these
predatory measures they have been considered as in force from the dates
of their notification, a retrospective effect being thus added, as has
been done in other important cases, to the unlawfulness of the course
pursued. And to render the outrage the more signal these mock blockades
have been reiterated and enforced in the face of official communications
from the British Government declaring as the true definition of a legal
blockade "that particular ports must be actually invested and previous
warning given to vessels bound to them not to enter."

Not content with these occasional expedients for laying waste our
neutral trade, the cabinet of Britain resorted at length to the sweeping
system of blockades, under the name of orders in council, which has
been molded and managed as might best suit its political views, its
commercial jealousies, or the avidity of British cruisers.

To our remonstrances against the complicated and transcendent injustice
of this innovation the first reply was that the orders were reluctantly
adopted by Great Britain as a necessary retaliation on decrees of her
enemy proclaiming a general blockade of the British Isles at a time when
the naval force of that enemy dared not issue from his own ports. She
was reminded without effect that her own prior blockades, unsupported by
an adequate naval force actually applied and continued, were a bar to
this plea; that executed edicts against millions of our property could
not be retaliation on edicts confessedly impossible