national measure, either of menace or action; it is a
recommendation only of one branch of Government to another, and France
has itself shown that a proposal of this nature could not be noticed as
an offense. In the year 1808 the Senate of the United States annexed to
the bill of nonintercourse a section which not only advised but actually
authorized the President to issue letters of marque and reprisal against
both France and England, if the one did not repeal the Berlin and Milan
decrees and the other did not revoke the orders in council. This clause
was not acceded to by the Representatives, but it was complete as the
act of the Senate; yet neither France nor England complained of it as
an indignity. Both powers had ministers on the spot, and the dignity of
neither seems to have been offended.

If the view I have now taken of the subject be correct; if I have
succeeded in conveying to His Majesty's ministers the conviction
I myself feel that no right exists in any foreign nation to ask
explanations of or even to notice any communications between the
different branches of our Government; that to admit it even in a single
instance would be a dangerous precedent and a derogation from national
dignity, and that in the present instance an explanation that ought to
be satisfactory has been voluntarily given, I have then demonstrated
that any measure founded on such supposed right is not only
inadmissible, but is totally unnecessary, and consequently that His
Majesty's ministers may at once declare that previous explanations given
by the minister of the United States, and subsequently approved by the
President, had satisfied them on the subject of the message.

The motives of my Government during the whole course of this
controversy have been misunderstood or not properly appreciated, and the
question is daily changing its character. A negotiation entered into for
procuring compensation to individuals involved no positive obligation
on their Governments to prosecute it to extremities. A solemn treaty,
ratified by the constitutional organs of the two powers, changed the
private into a public right. The Government acquires by it a perfect
right to insist on its stipulations. All doubts as to their justice seem
now to have been removed, and every objection to the payment of a debt
acknowledged to be just will be severely scrutinized by the impartial
world. What character will be given to a refusal to pay such a debt on
the a