e, Russia, Prussia, and Austria. England laid the _projet_
of a treaty before them, to which all but France assented. This
so-called Quintuple Treaty, signed December 20, 1841, denounced the
slave-trade as piracy, and declared that "the High Contracting Parties
agree by common consent, that those of their ships of war which shall be
provided with special warrants and orders ... may search every
merchant-vessel belonging to any one of the High Contracting Parties
which shall, on reasonable grounds, be suspected of being engaged in the
traffic in slaves." All captured slavers were to be sent to their own
countries for trial.[58]

While the ratification of this treaty was pending, the United States
minister to France, Lewis Cass, addressed an official note to Guizot at
the French foreign office, protesting against the institution of an
international Right of Search, and rather grandiloquently warning the
powers against the use of force to accomplish their ends.[59] This
extraordinary epistle, issued on the minister's own responsibility,
brought a reply denying that the creation of any "new principle of
international law, whereby the vessels even of those powers which have
not participated in the arrangement should be subjected to the right of
search," was ever intended, and affirming that no such extraordinary
interpretation could be deduced from the Convention. Moreover, M. Guizot
hoped that the United States, by agreeing to this treaty, would "aid, by
its most sincere endeavors, in the definitive abolition of the
trade."[60] Cass's theatrical protest was, consciously or unconsciously,
the manifesto of that growing class in the United States who wanted no
further measures taken for the suppression of the slave-trade; toward
that, as toward the institution of slavery, this party favored a policy
of strict _laissez-faire_.

73. ~Final Concerted Measures, 1842-1862.~ The Treaty of Washington, in
1842, made the first effective compromise in the matter and broke the
unpleasant dead-lock, by substituting joint cruising by English and
American squadrons for the proposed grant of a Right of Search. In
submitting this treaty, Tyler said: "The treaty which I now submit to
you proposes no alteration, mitigation, or modification of the rules of
the law of nations. It provides simply that each of the two Governments
shall maintain on the coast of Africa a sufficient squadron to enforce
separately and respectively the laws, rights,