m European complications and to
settle international difficulties by treaty and not by war. But this
party was in a hopeless minority, during the critical times when
international difficulties were resolving themselves into war, and was
unable to influence public opinion sufficiently to make negotiations for
the maintenance of peace successful, despite the fact that it had a
considerable weight in the states of New England.

The international difficulties of the United States entered upon a
critical condition when Great Britain, in her assertion of naval
supremacy and restricted commerce as absolutely essential to her
national security, issued an order-in-council which declared a strict
blockade of the European coast from Brest to the Elbe. Napoleon
retaliated with the Berlin decree, which merely promulgated a paper
blockade of the British Isles. Then followed the later British
orders-in-council, which prevented the shipping of the United States
from trading with any country where British vessels could not enter, and
allowed them only to trade with other European ports where they made
entries and paid duties in English custom-houses. Napoleon increased the
duties of neutral commerce by the Milan decree of 1807, which ordered
the seizure of all neutral vessels which might have been searched by
English cruisers. These orders meant the ruin of American commerce,
which had become so profitable; and the Washington government attempted
to retaliate, first by forbidding the importation of manufactures from
England and her colonies, and, when this effort was ineffective, by
declaring an embargo in its own ports, which had only the result of
still further crippling American commerce at home and abroad.
Eventually, in place of this unwise measure, which, despite its
systematic evasion, brought serious losses to the whole nation and
seemed likely to result in civil war in the east, where the discontent
was greatest, a system of non-intercourse with both England and France
was adopted, to last so long as either should press its restrictive
measures against the republic, but this new policy of retaliation hardly
impeded American commerce, of which the profits were far greater than
the risks. The leaders of the Democratic party were now anxious to
conciliate France, and endeavoured to persuade the nation that Napoleon
had practically freed the United States from the restrictions to which
it so strongly objected. It is a matter beyond