rs. This the President
could surely not think of alleging to Congress as a sufficient reason
for omitting to lay the matter before them. The next, I confess, has
a little more weight, and might have excused a delay if the assurance
given by Mr. Serurier had been, as your excellency construes it,
merely of a _disposition_ to hasten the presentation of the law.
If the engagement had amounted to no more than this, and His Majesty's
ministers thought that an early call would endanger the passage of
the law, it might possibly justify _them_ in not making it. But the
President, who relied on the promise he had received, who in consequence
of it had deferred the performance of an important duty; the President,
who had given timely and official notice that this duty must be
performed at the opening of the next Congress; the President, who could
see no greater prospect of the passage of the law in a winter than in an
autumnal session--how was _he_ to justify himself and redeem the pledge
_he_ had made to his country? He did it in the way he always does--by a
strict performance.

From this detail your excellency will, I hope, see that the President's
causes of complaint can not, as you suppose, be confined within the
narrow limit you have assigned to them. The failure to present the law
in the session of July was not the only, nor even the principal, point
in which he thought the engagement of Mr. Serurier uncomplied with;
for although he saw no reason for the omission that could be called
a constitutional one, yet he expressly says that might have been
overlooked. He always (it can not too often be repeated) looked to the
promise of Mr. Serurier as it was given at Washington, not as it was
interpreted at Paris, and he had a right to believe that as on previous
occasions the Legislature had, in the years 1819, 1822, 1825, and 1830,
held their sessions for the transaction of the ordinary business in
the months of July and August, he had a right, I say, to believe that
there was no insurmountable objection to the consideration of this
extraordinary case, enforced by a positive promise. Yet, as I have
remarked, he did not make this his principal cause of complaint; it
was the omission to call the Chambers at an earlier period than the
very end of the year.

On this head your excellency is pleased to observe that the same
reasons, drawn from the usual course of administration, which rendered
the presentation of the law in the sessi