out in the Constitution, it not being possible that the deputies from the more distant parts of the kingdom can be assembled by the 1st of March, of the said year, the first ordinary Cortes will therefore open their session on the 1st of October, 1813. And for this purpose shall be held electoral assemblies of parishes, districts, and provinces, in conformity to the instructions for the Peninsula and ultra marine possessions which accompany this decree.

3. That with a view of facilitating the elections at a period when the extraordinary circumstances in which the whole kingdom is placed, oppose obstacles of so many kinds to the necessary verification of the elections, and to the first assembling of the ordinary Cortes which is to result from them: the regulations contained in the instructions for each of the two hemispheres, which accompany this decree, shall be observed and followed in the provinces of the Peninsula and adjacent isles, and in those beyond the sea, respectively.

4. That all the ultra marine deputies repair to this city of Cadiz, where the place in which they are to open their sittings shall be communicated to them by the permanent deputation of the Cortes; for this purpose they ought to be assembled in this city at the commencement of the month of September, 1813.

5. The deputies to the present general and extraordinary Cortes cannot be re-elected for the ensuing ordinary Cortes.

The Regency shall take the proper measures for executing this

decree, causing it to be printed, published, and circulated.

JOSE MARIA GUTIERREZ DE

TERAN, President. JOSE DE ZORRAQUIN, JOAQUIN DIAZ CANEJA, Secretaries. Given at Cadiz the 23d of May,

1812.

To the Regency of the kingdom.

We therefore order all tribunals, justices, chiefs, governors, and other authorities, civil, military, and ecclesiastical, to observe, and cause to be observed, fulfil and execute the present decree in all its parts; and that the same be printed, published, and made known in order to its fulfilment.

JOAQUIN DE MOSQUERA Y FIGUEROA, President. JUAN VILLAVICENCIO, IGNACIO RODRIGUES DE RIVAS, The Conde DEL ABIZBAL. Cadiz, May 24, 1812.

AMERICA.-Message from the President of the United States to the Senate and House of Representa tives of the United States.

I communicate to Congress certain documents, being a continuation of those heretofore laid before them, on the subject of our affairs with Great Britain.

Without going beyond the renewal, in 1803, of the war in which Great Britain is engaged, and omitting unrepaired wrongs inferior magnitude, the conduct of her government presents a series of acts hostile to the United States

as an independent and neutral nation.

British

British cruizers have been in the continued practice of violating the American flag on the great highway of nations, and of seizing and carrying off persons sailing under it, not in the exercise of a belligerent right, founded on the law of nations against an enemy, but of a municipal prerogative over British subjects. British jurisdiction is thus extended to neutral vessels in a situation where no laws can operate but the law of nations and the laws of the country to which the vessels belong; and a selfredress is assumed, which, if British subjects were wrongfully detained and alone concerned, is that substitution of force for a resort to the responsible sovereign, which falls within the definition of war. Could the seizure of British subjects, in such cases, be regarded as within the exercise of a belligerent right, the acknowledged laws of war, which forbid an article of captured property to be adjudged without a regular investigation before a competent tribunal, would imperiously demand the fairest trial, where the sacred rights of persons were at issue. In place of such trial, these rights are subjected to the will of every petty commander.

The practice, hence, is so far from affecting British subjects alone, that under the pretext of searching for these, thousands of American citizens, under the safe-guard of public laws, and of their national flag, have been torn from their country, and from every thing dear to them,--have been dragged on board ships of war of a foreign nation, and exposed, under the severities of their discipline, to be exiled to the most distant and

deadly climes, to risk their lives in the battles of their oppressors, and to be the melancholy instruments of taking away those of their own brethren.

Against this crying enormity, which Great Britain would be so prompt to avenge if committed against herself, the United States have in vain exhausted remonstrances and expostulations: and that no proof might be wanting of their conciliatory dispositions, and no pretext left for continuance of the practice, the British government was formally assured of the readiness of the United States to enter into arrangements, such as could not be rejected, if the recovery of the British subjects were the real and sole object. The communication passed without effect.

British cruisers have been in the practice also of violating the rights and peace of our coasts. They hover over and harass our entering and departing commerce. To the most insulting pretensions they have added lawless proceedings in our very harbours, and have wantonly spilt American blood within the sanctuary of our territorial jurisdiction. The principles and rules enforced by that nation, when a neutral nation, against armed vessels of belligerents hovering near her coasts, and disturbing her commerce, are well known. When called on, nevertheless, by the United States to punish the greater offences committed by her own vessels, her government has bestowed on their commanders additional marks of honour and confidence.

Under pretended blockades, without the presence of an adequate

force,

force, and sometimes without the practicability of applying one, our commerce has been plundered in every sea; the great staples of our country have been cut off from their legitimate markets; and a destructive blow aimed at our argricultural and maritime interests. In aggravation to these predatory measures, they have been considered as in force from the dates of their notification; a retrospective effect being thus added, as has been done in other important cases, to the unlawfulness of the course pursued and to render the outrage more signal, these mock blockades have been reiterated and enforced in the face of official communications from the British government, declaring, as the true definition of a legal blockade, "that particular ports must be actually invested, and previous warning given to vessels bound to them not to enter."

Not content with these occasional expedients for laying waste our neutral trade, the cabinet of Great Britain resorted, at length, to the sweeping system of blockades, under the names of orders in council, which has been moulded and managed as might best suit its political views, its commercial jealousies, or the avidity of British cruisers.

To our remonstrances against the complicated and transcendant injustice of this innovation, the first reply was, that the orders were reluctantly adopted by Great Britain as a necessary retaliation on decrees of her enemy proclaiming a general blockade of the British isles, at a time when the naval force of the enemy dared not to issue from his own ports. She

was reminded without effect, that her own prior blockades, unsupported by an adequate naval force actually applied and continued, were a bar to this plea; that executed edicts against millions of our property could not be retaliation on edicts confessedly impossible to be executed; that retaliation, to be just, should fall on the party setting the guilty example, not on an innocent party, which was not even chargeable with an acquiescence in it.

When deprived of this flimsy veil for a prohibition of our trade with Great Britain, her cabinet, instead of a corresponding repeal, or a practical discontinuance of its orders, formally avowed a determination to persist in them against the United States, until the mar kets of her enemy should be laid open to Briush products; thus asserting an obligation on a neutral power to require one belligerent to encourage, by its internal regulations, the trade of another belligerent; contradicting her own practice towards all nations in peace as well as in war; and betraying the insincerity of those professions which inculcated a belief, that, having resorted to her orders with regret, she was anxious to find an occasion for putting an end to them.

Abandoning still more all respect for the neutral rights of the United States, and for its own consistency, the British government now demands as pre-requisites to a repeal of its orders, as they relate to the United States, that a formality should be observed in the repeal of the French decrees no wise necessary to their termination, nor exemplified by British usage; and

that

that the French repeal, besides including that portion of the decrees which operates within a territorial jurisdiction, as well as that which operates on the high seas against the commerce of the United States, should not be a single special repeal in relation to the United States, but should be extended to whatever other neutral nations unconnected with them may be affected by those decrees.

And as an additional insult, they are called on for a formal disavowal of conditions and pretensions advanced by the French government, for which the United States are so far from having been themselves responsible, that, in official explanations which have been published to the world, and in a correspondence of the American minister at London with the British minister for foreign affairs, such a responsibility was explicitly and emphatically disclaimed.

It has become, indeed, sufficiently certain that the commerce of the United States is to be sacrificed, not as interfering with the belligerent rights of Great Britain -not as supplying the wants of their enemies, which she herself supplies-but as interfering with the monopoly which she covets for her own commerce and navigation. She carries on a war against the lawful commerce of a friend, that she may the better carry on a commerce with an enemy, -a commerce polluted by the forgeries and perjuries which are for the most part the only passports by which it can succeed.

Anxious to make every experiment short of the last resort of injured nations, the United States have withheld from Great Britain,

under successive modifications, the benefits of a free intercourse with their market, the loss of which could not but outweigh the profits accruing from her restrictions of our commerce with other nations. And to entitle those experiments to the more favourable consideration, they were so framed as to enable her to place her adversary under the exclusive operation of them. To these appeals her government has been equally inflexible, as if willing to make sacrifices of every sort, rather than yield to the claims of justice, or renounce the errors of a false pride. Nay, so far were the attempts carried to overcome the attachment of the British cabinet to its unjust edicts, that it received every encouragement, within the competency of the executive branch of our government, to expect that a repeal of them would be followed by a war between the United States and France, unless the French edicts should also be repealed. Even this communication, although silencing for ever the plea of a disposition in the United States to acquiesce in those edicts, originally the sole plea for them, received no attention.

If no other proof existed of a predetermination of the British government against a repeal of its orders, it might be found in the correspondence of the minister plenipotentiary of the United States at London, and the British secretary for foreign affairs in 1810, on the question whether the blockade of May, 1806, was considered in force or as not in force. It had been ascertained that the French government, which urged this blockade as the ground of its decree,

was

was willing, in the event of its removal, to repeal that decree; which being followed by alternate repeals of the other offensive edicts, might abolish the whole system on both sides. This inviting opportunity for accomplishing an object so important to the United States, and professed so often to be the desire of both the belligerents, was made known to the British government. As that government admits that an actual application of an adequate force is necessary to the existence of a legal blockade, and it was notorious that if such a force had ever been applied, its long discontinuance had annulled the blockade in question, there could be no sufficient objection on the part of Great Britain to a formal revocation of it; and no imaginable objection to a declaration of the fact that the blockade did not exist. The declaration would have been consistent with her avowed principles of blockade, and would have enabled the United States to demand from France the pledged repeal of her decrees; either with success-in which case the way would have been opened for a general repeal of the belligerent edicts, or without success, in which case the United States would have been justified in turning their measures exclusively against France. The British government would, however, neither rescind the blockade, nor declare its nonexistence, nor permit its non-existence to be inferred and affirmed by the American plenipotentiary. On the contrary, by representing the blockade to be comprehended in the orders in council, the United States were compelled so to regard it in their subsequent proceedings.

There was a period, when a favourable change in the policy of the British cabinet was justly considered as established. The minister plenipotentiary of his Britannic Majesty here, proposed an adjustment of the differences more immediately endangering the harmony of the two countries. The proposition was accepted with a promptitude and cordiality, corresponding with the invariable professions of this government. A foundation appeared to be laid for a sincere and lasting reconciliation. The prospect, however, quickly vanished. The whole proceeding was disavowed by the British government, without any explanation which could at that time repress the belief, that the disavowal proceeded from a spirit of hostility to the commercial rights and prosperity of the United States: and it has since come into proof, that, at the very moment when the public minister was holding the language of friendship, and inspired confidence in the sincerity of the negociation with which he was charged, a secret agent of his go vernment was employed in intrigues, having for their object a subversion of our government, and a dismemberment of our bappy union.

In reviewing the conduct of Great Britain towards the United States, our attention is necessarily drawn to the warfare just renewed by the savages on one of our extensive frontiers; a warfare which is known to spare neither age nor sex, and to be distinguished by features particularly shocking to humanity. It is difficult to account for the activity and combinations which have for some time been developing