cial correspondence, and particularly to a despatch addressed on the 20th of April to his majesty's secretary of state for foreign affairs, I find that he there states, that he had submitted to your consideration the three conditions specified in those instructions, as the ground work of an arrangement which, according to information received from this country, it was thought in England might be made, with a prospect of great mutual advantage. Mr. Erskine then reports verbatim et seriatim your observations upon each of the three conditions, and the reasons which induced you to think that others might be substituted in lieu of them. It may have been concluded between you that these latter were an equivalent for the original conditions; but the very act of substitution evidently shows that those original conditions were in fact very explicitly communicated to you, and by you of course laid before the President for his consideration. I need hardly add, that the difference between these conditions and those contained in the arrangement of the 18th and 19th of April, is sufficiently obvious to require no elucidation; nor need I draw the conclusion, which I consider as admitted by all absence of complaint on the part of the American government, viz.: that under such circumstances his majesty had an undoubted and incontrovertible right to disavow the act of his minister. I must here allude to a supposition, which you have more than once mentioned to me, and by which, if it had any the slightest foundation, this right might perhaps have been in some degree affected. You have informed me that you understood that Mr. Erskine had two sets of instructions, by which to regulate his conduct; and that upon one of them, which had not been communicated either to you or to the publick, was to be rested the justi fication of the terms finally agreed upon between you and him. It is my duty, sir, solemnly to declare to you, and through you, to the President, that the despatch from Mr. Canning to Mr. Erskine which you have made the basis of an official correspondence with the latter minister, and which was read by the former to the American minister in London, is the only despatch by which the conditions were prescribed to Mr. Erskine for the conclusion of an arrangement with this country on the matter to which it relates.

To return to the immediate subject of your letter. If, sir, it be your intention to state, that no explanation whatever has been given to the American government of the reasons which induced his majesty to disavow the act of my predecessor, I must, in that case, observe that in the instructions conveying to him his majesty's intention, those reasons were very fully and forcibly stated; and if he has not transmitted them to you, I can only attribute it to the peculiar delicacy and embarrassment of his situation, for which he probably trusted to the President's goodness to make some allowance; and he might the more reasonably be led to that reliance on it, as a full and ample communication was also made upon the subject by his majesty's secretary of state for foreign affairs to Mr. Pinkney, to whom the whole of Mr. Erkine's original instruction was read, and who it was natural to suppose, would convey to his government so much information upon a very momentous occasion, as would relieve Mr. Erskine from the necessity of entering into minute details of the misunderstanding that had occurred. At all events, no complaint. can be substantiated against his majesty's government on this score, seeing that they not only instructed the minister who had made the disavowed arrangement as to the motives which occasioned the disavowal, but also with frankness, promptitude, and a most scrupulous regard to national honour, gave notice to the American minister in London of the disavowal, of the motives of it, and of the precautions spontaneously taken by his majesty to prevent any loss or injury accruing to the citizens of the United States from a reliance on any agreement, however unauthorized, made in his majesty's name. The mere allusion to this latter circumstance dispenses me from further noticing the effects which you describe as being produced upon the United States by the circumstances of this agree ment. How far they are irrevocable it is not for me to determine; but the word irreparable seems to imply that à loss had been sustained on the occasion by the publick, or by individuals of this country. So far as his majesty could be by possibility supposed answerable for such an eventual loss, he has, as I have before stated, taken the utmost precautions to avert it.

As to the expectation entertained here, that the explanation of his majesty's share in this transaction should be

made through me, I might content myself with simply observing, that I was not provided with instructions to that effect, because it was known that the explanation in question had already been given. But it accords with the sentiments of his majesty towards this country to observe also, that he considered, that as some time must necessarily elapse between my appointment and my entrance on the duties of my ministry, it would be a more friendly mode of proceeding to state without delay, and through the channels I have already mentioned, the motives that compelled his majesty to disavow the agreement, than to leave the American government in uncertainty in these respects, till the unavoidably protracted period of my arrival in America. I say this in regard to the original notification of his majesty's determination and of the motives of it, which being already made, it could not be supposed in London that a repetition of them would be expected from me; and of course no such case has been foreseen in my instructions. But if, beyond this, any incidental explanation or discussion should be wished for by this government, I came fully prepared to enter into them. I even consider them to have taken place between us. I have certainly derived great satisfaction from the several hours which we have spent in conference upon these subjects, because they have enabled me to remove some misunderstandings, and to refute many misrepresentations, which you yourself informed me of, in regard to the conduct of the British government. I consider such mutual explanations as highly beneficial to a right understanding of the views and interests of the two countries, and I should with much pleasure have renewed them, if you had not informed me that the President had been pleased to prescribe another and a different mode of conducting our negotia

tions.

I will nevertheless avail myself of that mode which he still permits to repeat to you, that his majesty has authorized me, notwithstanding the ungracious manner in which his former offer of satisfaction for the affair of the Chesapeake was received, to renew that which Mr. Erskine was instructed to make. You have said that you so fully understood the particulars of that offer, that I deem it unnecessary to recapitulate them here; I regret that, since they were so clearly understood by you, you should not

yet have been enabled to state to me, either in our personal communications, or in the letter which I am now answering, whether they are considered by the President as satisfactory, or whether they are such as he ultimately means to accept. You seem not so distinctly to have understood the form of proceeding in this affair, which I took the liberty of suggesting as likely to lead to a satisfactory result, without however at all precluding any other method which might appear preferable to you. My proposal was, not to communicate a note tendering satisfaction, but to agree with you beforehand upon the terms of a declaration on the part of his majesty, which should actually give the satisfaction (the conditions of which I informed you that I was authorized to carry into immediate execution) and of a counter declaration to be signed by you on the part of the United States, for the purpose of accepting such satisfaction. I expressly stated that this interchange of official documents was not meant by me as the means of conveying to each other our respective sentiments; that I understood to be, as is usual, the object of our conferences; and I imagined that the papers to be signed by us respectively, would be the result of those sentiments so communicated, and that by being reciprocally corrected and modified, and simultaneously delivered, they would form one compact by which the two countries would be equally bound. This course of proceeding is conformable to the practice of the courts of Europe on similar occasions. You did not at the time appear to object to it; you even requested me to come the next day prepared with a draft or project of a paper, framed in pursuance to these ideas, and although you desired to refer the subject to the President for his approbation, I do not find in your letter either an expression of his sentiments upon it, or the substitution of any other form that might be more agreeable to him, than the one which I have proposed.

I touch with considerable and very sincere reluctance upon that part of your letter, in which you state that I had not assigned "any reason whatever why the reasona ble terms of satisfaction tendered and accepted have not been carried into effect."

I believe that I had observed to you, in the words of my instructions, that if his majesty were capable of being actuated by any desire to retract an offer of reparation 33

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which he had once made, his majesty might be well war? ranted in doing so, both by the form in which his accredited minister had tendered that reparation, and by the manner in which that tender had been received. I believe that I elucidated this observation by a reference to the particular expressions, which made the terms of satis faction appear to be unacceptable even to the American government, at the very moment when they were accepted, and which at all events put it totally out of his majesty's power to ratify and confirm any act in which such expressions were contained.

On the subject of his majesty's orders in council, I have had the honour of informing you that his majesty having caused to be made to the government of the United States certain proposals, founded upon principles, some of which were understood to originate in American authorities, and others to be acquiesced in by them; and having afterwards ascertained, in the manner mentioned in a former part of this letter, that the sentiments of the American government were so different from what they were at first understood to be, I was not instructed to renew to you those proposals: nor to press upon your acceptance an arrangement which had been so recently declined, espe cially as the arrangement itself is become less important, and the terms of it less applicable to the state of things now existing.

Those considerations which were first intimated in Mr. Canning's official letter to Mr. Pinkney of the 23d Sept. 1808, and which, in the process of the following six months, acquired greater weight and influence, induced his majes ty, before the result of Mr. Erskine's negotiation was known, to modify the orders in council of November, 1807, by that of the 26th April, 1809.

The effect of this new order is to relieve the system under which the former orders were issued, from, that which has always been represented in this country, as the most objectionable and offensive part of it, the option given to neutrals to trade with the enemies of Great Britain through British ports on payment of a transit duty. This was originally devised and intended as a mitigation of what is certainly more correct but more rigid in principle, the total and unqualified interdiction of all trade with the enemy. If, however, this mitigation was felt as