ss at the opening of its present
session.

Your excellency begins by observing that nothing could have prepared
His Majesty's Government for the impressions made upon it by the
President's message, and that if the complaints he makes were as just as
you think them unfounded, still you would have reason to be astonished
at receiving _the first communication of them in such a form_. If His
Majesty's Government was not prepared to receive complaints on the part
of the United States for nonexecution of the treaty, everything I have
said and written since I have had the honor of communicating with your
excellency and your predecessors in office must have been misunderstood
or forgotten. I can scarcely suppose the first, for if my whole
correspondence is referred to and my verbal representations
recollected they will be found in the most unequivocal language to
express an extreme solicitude for the execution of the treaty, a
deep disappointment at the several delays which have intervened, and
emphatically the necessity which the President would be under of laying
the matter before Congress at the time when in fact he has done so if
before that period he did not receive notice that the law had passed for
giving effect to the treaty. To urge the obligation of the treaty, to
prepare His Majesty's Government for the serious consequences that must
result from its breach or an unnecessary delay in executing it, was my
duty, and it has been faithfully and unremittingly executed. To my own
official representation on the 26th I added on the 29th July last the
precise instructions I had received, to inform His Majesty's Government
that "the President could not avoid laying before Congress on the 1st of
December a full statement of the position of affairs on this interesting
subject, or permit the session to end, as it must do on the 3d March,
without recommending such measures as the justice and the honor of the
country may require."

In this alone, then, there was sufficient, independently of my numerous
applications and remonstrances, to prepare His Majesty's Government
for the just complaints of the United States and for the "impression"
they ought to produce, as well as for the "_mode_" in which they were
communicated, a mode clearly pointed out in the passage I have quoted
from my note of the 29th of July--that is to say, by the annual message
from the President to Congress, which, as I have already had occasion
to observe, His