t meeting of Congress, it will be found,
according to present appearances, that instead of an adjustment with
either of the belligerents, there is an increasing obstinacy in both;
and that the inconveniences of embargo and non-intercourse have been
exchanged for the greater sacrifices, as well as disgrace, resulting
from a submission to the predatory system in force." Not that he wanted
war; his faith in passive resistance was still unshaken; embargo and
non-intercourse he was still confident would, if persisted in long
enough, surely bring the belligerents to terms. But as to this act, he
weighs the chances as in a balance. In England some impression may be
made by the prices of cotton and tobacco,--"cotton down at ten or eleven
cents in Georgia; and the great mass of tobacco in the same situation."
He has, however, no "very favorable expectations." But as to France, he
evidently is not without hope that she will be wise enough to see that
"she ought at once to embrace the arrangement held out by Congress, the
renewal of a non-intercourse with Great Britain being the very species
of resistance most analogous to her professed views." But he was clearly
not sanguine.

If that was his wish, however, it was gratified. Napoleon did take
advantage of the act, but in such a way as to reverse the relative
positions of the two nations by seizing for France and taking from the
United States the power or the will to dictate terms. The French
minister, Champagny, announced in a letter merely, in August, the
revocation of the Berlin and Milan decrees from the 1st of the following
November; and, a day or two after, such new restrictions were imposed
upon American trade, by prohibitory duties and a navigation act, as
pretty much to ruin what little there was left of it. The revocation of
the edicts, moreover, was coupled with the conditions that Great Britain
should not only recall her order in council, but renounce her "new
principles of blockade," or that the United States should "cause their
rights to be respected by the English." Napoleon had in this three ends
to gain, and he gained them all: First, to secure France against a
renewal of the non-importation act of the United States, if the
President should accept this conditional recall of the decrees as
satisfactory; second, to leave those decrees virtually unrepealed, by
making their recall depend upon the action of England, who, he well
knew, would not listen to the proposed c