is
discovery is very amusing, and the accounts of the interviews between
the two are among the most pleasing episodes in the history of our
foreign relations. Nor are they less interesting as a sort of
confidential peep at the asperities of diplomacy. It appears that
besides the composed and formal dignity of phrase which alone the
public knows in published state papers and official correspondence,
there is also an official language of wrath and retort not at all
artificial or stilted, but quite homelike and human in its sound.

One subject much discussed between Mr. Adams and Mr. Canning related
to the English propositions for joint efforts to suppress the slave
trade. Great Britain had engaged with much vigor and certainly with an
admirable humanity in this cause. Her scheme was that each power
should keep armed cruisers on the coast of Africa, that the (p. 138)
war-ships of either nation might search the merchant vessels of the
other, and that mixed courts of joint commissioners should try all
cases of capture. This plan had been urged upon the several European
nations, but with imperfect success. Portugal, Spain, and the
Netherlands had assented to it; Russia, France, Austria, and Prussia
had rejected it. Mr. Adams's notion was that the ministry were, in
their secret hearts, rather lukewarm in the business, but that they
were so pressed by "the party of the saints in Parliament" that they
were obliged to make a parade of zeal. Whether this suspicion was
correct or not, it is certain that Mr. Stratford Canning was very
persistent in the presentation of his demands, and could not be
persuaded to take No for an answer. Had it been possible to give any
more favorable reply no one in the United States in that day would
have been better pleased than Mr. Adams to do so. But the obstacles
were insuperable. Besides the undesirability of departing from the
"extra-European policy," the mixed courts would have been
unconstitutional, and could not have been established even by act of
Congress, while the claims advanced by Great Britain to search our
ships for English-born seamen in time of war utterly precluded the
possibility of admitting any rights of search whatsoever upon her (p. 139)
part, even in time of peace, for any purpose or in any shape. In vain
did the Englishman reiterate his appeal. Mr. Adams as often explained
that the insistence of England upon her outrageous claim had rendered
the United States so sens