plenipotentiary of the United States at Paris, on the fifth of August, 1810, announced that the decrees of Berlin and Milan were revoked and should cease to operate on the 1st of the succeeding November, provided that a condition presented to England, or another condition presented to the United States, should be performed. The condition presented to the United States was performed, and this performance rendered absolute the repeal of the decrees. So far therefore from this repeal depending on conditions in which Great Britain could not acquiesce, it became absolute, independently of any act of Great Britain, the moment the act proposed for the performance of the United States was accomplished. Such was the construction given to this measure by the United States from the first; and that it was a correct one has been sufficiently evinced by the subsequent practice of France.

ment.

Several instances of the acquittal of American vessels and cargoes, to which the decrees would have attached, if still in force against the United States, have, from time to time, been presented to his Britannick majesty's governThat these cases have been few, is to be ascribed to the few captures, in consequence of this repeal, made by French cruisers; and should no other such case occur, it will be owing to the efficacy of this repeal, and to the exact observance of it, even by the most wanton and irregular of those cruisers.

From the first of November 1810, to the 29th of January of the present year, as appears by a note which I had the honour to address to the predecessor of your lordship, on the 8th of February last, the Berlin and Milan decrees had not been applied to American property, nor have I heard that such application has since been made.

But against the authentick act of the French government, of the 5th of August, 1810, and the subsequent conduct of that government mutually explaining each other, and confirming the construction adopted by the United States, a report said to be communicated by the French minister of foreign affairs to the conservative senate, is opposed. Without pretending to doubt the genuineness of that report, although it has reached this country only in a newspaper, yet it is to be lamented that as much form and evidence of authenticity have not been required, in an act considered as furnishing cause for the continuance of the orders in

council, as an act which, by the very terms of these orders, challenged their revocation. The act of the 5th of August, 1810, emanating from the sovereign of France, officially communicated to the British government, and satisfactorily expounded and explained by the practical comments of more than eighteen months, is denied to afford convincing evidence of the repeal of the French decrees, while full proof of their continuance is inferred from a report, which, from its very nature, must contain the mere opinions and speculations of a subject which is destitute of all authority until acted upon by the body to which it was presented, which has found its way hither in no more authentick shape than the columns of the Moniteur, and for the proper understanding of which not a moment has been allowed.-But even were the cause thus assigned to the report just, it is still difficult to discover what inference can be fairly deduced from it, incompatible with the previous declarations and conduct of the French government, exempting the United States from the operation of its decrees. The very exception in that report with regard to nations who do not suffer their flag to be denationalized, was undoubtedly made with reference to the United States, and with a view to reconcile the general tenour of that report with the good faith with which it became France to observe the conventional repeal of those decrees in their favour. However novel may be the terms employed, or whatever may be their precise meaning, they ought to be interpreted to accord with the engagements of the French government, and with justice and good faith.

Your lordship will, I doubt not, the more readily acknowledge the propriety of considering the report in this light, by a reference to similar reports made to the same conservative senate, on the 13th of December, 1810, by the duke of Cadore (the predecessor of the present French minister of exterior relations) and by the count de Simonville. In these reports they say to the emperor, (which sufficiently proves that such reports are not to be considered as dictated by him :) "Sire, as long as England shall persist in her orders in council, so long your majesty will persist in your decrees," and "the decrees of Berlin and Milan are an answer to the orders in council. The British cabinet, has, thus to speak, dictated them to France. Europe receives them for her code, and this code shall

become the palladium of the liberty of the seas." Surely this language is as strong as that of the report of the tenth of March, and still more absolute; for there is no qualification in it in favour of any nation; yet this language has, both by an explanation from the duke of Cadore to me at the time, and by the uniform conduct of the French government since, been reconciled with the repeal of these decrees, so far as they concerned the United States.

Had the French decrees originally afforded an adequate foundation for the British orders, and been continued after these reports, in their full force and extent, surely during a period in which above a hundred American vessels and their cargoes have fallen a prey to these orders, some one solitary instance of capture and confiscation must have happened under those decrees. That no such instance has. happened incontrovertibly proves either that those decrees are of themselves harmless, or that they have been repealed; and in either case they can afford no rightful plea or pretext to Great Britain, for these measures of pretended retaliation, whose sole effect is to lay waste the neutral commerce of America.

With the remnant of those decrees, which is still in force, and which consists of municipal regulations, confined in their operation within the proper and undeniable jurisdiction of the states where they are executed, the United States have no concern. Nor do they acknowledge themselves to be under any political obligation, either to examine into the ends proposed to be attained by this surviving portion of the continental system, or to oppose their accomplishment. Whatever may be intended to be done in regard to other nations by this system, cannot be imputed to the United States, nor are they to be made responsible, while they religiously observe the obligations of their neutrality for the mode in which belligerent nations may choose to exercise their power, for the injury of each other. When, however, these nations exceed the just limits of their power by the invasion of the rights of peaceful states on the ocean which is subject to the common and equal jurisdiction of all nations, the United States cannot remain indifferent, and by quietly consenting to yield up their share of this jurisdiction, abandon their maritime rights.-France has respected these rights

by the discontinuance of ber edicts on the high seas; leaving no part of these edicts in operation to the injury of the United States; and of course, no part in which they can be supposed to acquiesce, or against which they can be required to contend. They ask Great Britain, by a like respect for their rights, to exempt them from the operation of her orders in council. Should such exemption involve the total practical extinction of these orders, it will only prove that they were exclusively applied to the commerce of the United States, and that they had not a single feature of resemblance to the decrees, against which they are professed to retaliate.

It is with patience and confidence that the United States have expected this exemption, and to which they believed themselves to be entitled by all those considerations of right and promise, which I have freely stated to your lordship. With what disappointment, therefore, must they learn that Great Britain, in professing to do away their dissatisfaction, explicitly avows her intention to persevere in her orders in council, until some authentick act hereafter to be promulgated by the French government, shall declare the Berlin and Milan decrees to be expressly and unconditionally repealed. To obtain such an act can the United States interfere? Would such an interference be compatible either with a sense of justice or with what is due to their own dignity? Can they be expected to falsify their repeated declarations of their satisfaction with the act of the 5th August, 1810, confirmed by abundant evidence of its subsequent observance, and by now affecting to doubt of the sufficiency of that act, to demand another which in its form, its mode of publication, and its import, shall accord with the requisitions of Great Britain? And can it be supposed that the French government would listen to such a proposal made under such circumstances, and with such a view?

While, therefore, I can perceive no reason, in the report of the French minister, of the 10th of March, to believe that the United States erroneously assumed the repeal of the French decrecs to be complete in relation to them; while aware that the condition on which the revocation of the orders in council is now distinctly made to depend, is the total repeal of both the Berlin and Milan decrees, instead as formerly of the Berlin decree only; and while I

feel that to ask the performance of this condition from others, is inconsistent with the honour of the United States, and to perform it themselves beyond their power; your lordship will permit me frankly to avow, that I cannot accompany the communication to my government, of the declaration and order in council of the 21st of this month, with any felicitation on the prospect which this measure presents of an accelerated return of amity and mutual confidence between the two states.

It is with real pain that I make to your lordship this avowal, and I will seek still to confide in the spirit which your lordship in your note, and in the conversation of this morning, has been pleased to say actuates the councils of his royal highness in relation to America, and still to cherish a hope that the spirit will lead, upon a review of the whole ground, to measures of a nature better calculated to attain its object, and that this object will no longer be made to depend on the conduct of a third power, or upon contingencies over which the United States have no control, but alone upon the rights of the United States, the justice of Great Britain, and the common interests of both.

I have the honour to be, &c.

JONATHAN RUSSELL.

The Rt. Hon. Viscount Castlereagh.

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. A PROCLAMATION.

WHEREAS the Congress of the United States, by virtue of the constituted authority vested in them, have declared by their act bearing date the eighteenth day of the present month, that war exists between the united kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and the dependencies thereof, and the United States of America and their territories; now therefore I, James Madison, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim the same to all whom it may concern: and I do specially enjoin on all persons holding offices, civil or military, under the autho

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