ot be distinctly perceived."

The friends of the treaty did not shrink from discussion; and the
debate, which lasted a fortnight, was opened by Madison with a speech,
elaborate in its details and carefully prepared. He maintained that
there was the grossest want of reciprocity exhibited in that part of the
treaty that related to the settlement of disputes growing out of the
compact of 1783. The British, he asserted, got all they asked--the debts
due their merchants with damages in the shape of interest. We got
nothing, he said, for the valuable negroes carried away, and we received
nothing for damages accruing from the long detention of the western
posts. And they, he said, were received with conditions respecting the
Indian trade which made them almost useless to us, as to influence over
the savage tribes, in which alone their greatest value consisted; and he
considered the agreement to pay the American claims for spoliations as
no offset for the loss of the negroes.

The same want of reciprocity, he said, prevailed in the portion of the
treaty respecting neutral rights and the law of nations. By it we
yielded the favorite principle, long ago enunciated, that "free ships
make free goods," and had actually added naval stores and even
provisions to the list of contraband articles. He severely animadverted
upon the provisions which conceded to British subjects the right to hold
lands within the territory of the United States; the stipulation
concerning the navigation of the Mississippi; and the permission to open
all American ports to British shipping, while our own vessels were
excluded from the colonial harbors.

The latter measure, allowing Great Britain to retain her colonial
monopoly and preserve intact her colonial system, he denounced as "a
phenomenon which had filled him with more surprise than he knew how to
express." And more vehement than all, because it interfered with his
favorite scheme of commercial coercion, was Madison's denunciations of
the provisions which prevented the Americans from retaliating upon the
British, in the event of their making commercial restrictions to our
disadvantage by further discriminations. He concluded with scouting the
idea that war would ensue if the treaty should be rejected, because the
hostilities England were then waging with France were quite as much as
she was able to manage at that time.

Madison's speech alarmed the country, especially the sensitive
mercantile class