historical student. Great Britain was engaged in a great conflict not
only for her own national security but also for the integrity of {317}
Europe, then dominated by the insatiable ambition of Bonaparte. It was
on the sea that her strength mainly lay. To ensure her maritime
supremacy, she found it necessary, in the course of events, to seize
and condemn neutral American vessels whenever there was conclusive
evidence that their cargoes were not the produce of the United States,
but had been actually bought in an enemy's colony and were on their way
to the mother country. But such an interruption of a commerce, which
had been carried on for years at a great profit by American merchants,
was by no means so serious an affair as the stoppage of American
vessels on the high seas, and the forcible abduction and impressment,
by British naval officers, of sailors who were claimed as British
subjects, even when they had been naturalised in the United States. To
such an extent did Great Britain assert her pretensions, that one of
her frigates, the _Leopard_, actually fired into the American cruiser
_Chesapeake_, off the coast of the bay of the same name, and made
prisoners of several men who were claimed as deserters from an English
man-of-war--a national outrage for which Great Britain subsequently
made an apology and gave a measure of reparation. Then came the
British orders in council which forbade American trade with any country
from which the British flag was excluded, allowed direct trade from the
United States to Sweden only in American products, and permitted
American trade with other parts of Europe only on condition of touching
at English ports and paying duties. Napoleon retaliated with decrees
which {318} were practically futile while England was victorious on the
ocean, but which nevertheless threw additional difficulties in the way
of the commerce of a country like the United States, which possessed
such exceptional facilities for its development from its position as a
neutral nation, and its great maritime and mercantile enterprise. The
British measures meant the ruin of an American commerce which had
become very profitable, and the Washington government attempted to
retaliate by declaring an embargo in their own ports, which had only
the result of still further embarrassing American trade. In place of
this injudicious measure a system of non-intercourse with both England
and France was substituted as long