ill hardly be
thought to be among either the duties or the privileges of a minister
abroad to make formal remonstrances and protests against proceedings of
the various branches of the government at home, upon subjects in
relation to which he himself has not been charged with any duty, or
partaken any responsibility."

You have not been requested to bestow your approbation upon the treaty,
however gratifying it would have been to the President to see that, in
that respect, you united with other distinguished public agents abroad.
Like all citizens of the republic, you are quite at liberty to exercise
your own judgment upon that as upon other transactions. But neither your
observations nor this concession cover the case. They do not show, that,
as a public minister abroad, it is a part of your official functions, in
a public despatch, to remonstrate against the conduct of the government
at home in relation to a transaction in which you bore no part, and for
which you were in no way answerable. The President and Senate must be
permitted to judge for themselves in a matter solely within their
control. Nor do I know that, in complaining of your protest against
their proceedings in a case of this kind, any thing has been done to
warrant, on your part, an invidious and unjust reference to
Constantinople. If you could show, by the general practice of diplomatic
functionaries in the civilized part of the world, and more especially,
if you could show by any precedent drawn from the conduct of the many
distinguished men who have represented the government of the United
States abroad, that your letter of the 3d of October was, in its general
object, tone, and character, within the usual limits of diplomatic
correspondence, you may be quite assured that the President would not
have recourse to the code of Turkey in order to find precedents the
other way.

You complain that, in the letter from this department of the 14th of
November, a statement contained in yours of the 3d of October is called
a tissue of mistakes, and you attempt to show the impropriety of this
appellation. Let the point be distinctly stated, and what you say in
reply be then considered.

In your letter of October 3d you remark, that "England then urged the
United States to enter into a conventional arrangement, by which we
might be pledged to concur with her in measures for the suppression of
the slave-trade. Until then, we had executed our own laws in our own