sion of, a new and more equal convention." "The spirit of speculation," such was the remark of another orator concerning us, "rarely sacrifices an actual gain to the future prosperity, much less to the dignity of a country. The voice of private interest prevails over that of national honour." With such sentiments concerning our national energy and character, the deputies went quietly to repose. We say, therefore, that the message which disturbed that repose, which convinced M. Salverte that one solemn treaty being repudiated, we should not go to the trouble of making another; and which satisfied M. Bignon that we had not entirely adopted the ironical apostrophe, "Quid enim salvis infamia nummis?" for our literal maxim, could not be otherwise than useful, conveyed as it was from a high department of the government, in an official communication to the assembled representatives of the states and the people. It intimated to France that whatever construction she might be disposed to place upon the deliberate acts of her government, we had adopted and should adhere to our own; that the day of entreaty had gone by; and that in this regard at least, we had done with ante-chambers. It called the attention of England and the English press to an extraordinary breach of engagement, and to a construction of the treaty power to which Europe had, till that time, been a stranger. It called her attention, too, to a very slack and vague impression of the sanctity of a pecuniary promise-a fault by which the "nation boutiquière," to her credit be it spoken, is always exceedingly scandalized. It touched France, therefore, not merely with apprehensions of a vexatious custom-house, and perhaps maritime war-apprehensions which, in a good or glorious cause, she is as capable of despising as any nation on earth-but it annoyed her with the idea of such a strife entered upon for a very inadequate and mercenary end; for a dubious right, and on questionable grounds, with her nearest European ally opposed to her in sentiment, and her most valuable customer at once converted from a paying friend into a capturing enemy. So much for the effect of the message. Whether the time had come to produce that effect, as a proper and decorous effort on the part of the American nation, the state of the issue on the 1st of December will best enable us to judge.

The unanimous vote of the House of Representatives has decided, that so long ago as the 2d of February, 1832, we acquired certain rights from France by a solemn stipulation with that nation, and that those rights are of such a nature that it neither comports with the honour nor interest of the United States to suffer them to be modified or abrogated. That vote asserted what the sense of the universal nation dictated-that we stood no longer upon litigated points, on appeals to magnanimity and justice, or on the mere provisions of the law of nations. The United States, through their representatives, invoked the bond mutually executed,

and on their part strictly observed, guarantying to us a liquidated sum, payable at fixed periods, in consideration of ancient injuries received, and new benefits to be conferred by us. We had concluded and ratified our bargain with the legitimate authority delegated by France for that purpose among others. We had on our part punctually fulfilled the conditions precedent of that bargain, without an intimation that compliance with them would be nugatory. France had taken, was still taking advantage of our punctuality, thereby adding another seal to the solemnity of her previous engagements. Whether it would have been proper for our government longer to postpone the disagreeable intimation that she was under certain obligations in return, we shall endeavour to settle, not by a reference to any code of diplomatic ceremonial, but by an appeal to the instinctive self-respect of every American citizen, who will follow us in a short review of the history of the question.

England and France became avowed and fierce enemies in 1793, and so remained, with the short intermission of the peace of Amiens, for twenty years. With the war of 1793 began the practical exposition of the new principles of maritime law-the law of the strongest-which were openly acknowledged and unblushingly defended on its re-commencement in 1803, by both belligerents; and which, strange as it may appear, seem not to have been without champions in a recent legislative assembly. So early as March, 1794, President Washington presented the subject to Congress in a separate and formal message-a ceremony which he and his successor, up to the year 1800, had frequent occasion to repeat. The measures which the United States found it necessary to adopt for the vindication of their sovereignty, led at last to the convention with France of the 30th September, 1800, which, by the agreement of the contracting parties, was to remain in force for eight years. By this convention, all questions concerning the construction of pre-existing treaties, and of general indemnity for the violation of those treaties, were left untouched, though provision was made by the fourth and fifth articles for the restoration of captured vessels and cargoes not then condemned, and for the recovery of debts. The claims, by the way, accruing under those articles, and others intervening between the conclusion of the convention of 1800, and that of the Louisiana treaty, amounted, aside from those which have been adjusted, to the sum of $1,564,538 52,* all which were outstanding and unsettled up to the date of the recent compromise of Mr. Rives. The stipulations of the convention, however, which chiefly demand attention, (for the claims which originated prior to 1800 are no longer to be insisted upon,) are those which provided for the future security of our maritime

* Vide Mr. Van Buren's Instructions to Mr. Rives, 20th July, 1829.

rights, and which, had the whole history of the succeeding ten years been spread out before the American negotiators, could hardly more accurately have anticipated the exigencies of the case. These stipulations guarantied, in brief, free commerce between the contracting parties, and between either party and the enemy of the other, unless to ports actually blockaded, and that in the latter case no capture should ensue until after notice given. They specified articles considered contraband of war; asserted broadly the principle that free ships make free goods; defined the documents requisite to establish the national character of the vessels of each party, in case of war with a third power; distinctly limited the right of search, and provided for the manner of its execution; directed that receipts should be given for all the papers of a captured vessel, the hatches of which were never to be broken at sea; and finally, they explicitly declared that no prize should be condemned, save by the regular courts established for the cognizance of prize causes in each country respectively, and that the motive of condemnation should appear in the sentence.* We shall see, by and by, the construction by which it was attempted, so late as the debate in the French Chamber in April, 1834, to gloss over the gross infractions to which every article above mentioned was subjected during the whole term of eight years, to which the convention was limited.

The Louisiana treaty and its accompanying conventions were signed on the 30th April, 1803. As a part of the consideration for the cession, the United States assumed the debts of France to the citizens of the former country, contracted previously to the 30th September, 1800, under certain reservations, and to an amount not exceeding twenty millions of francs; and France, on her part, admitted the competency of the citizens of the United States to demand payment of all debts contracted by her to them subsequent to the same date. By the estimate to which we have already referred, the outstanding claims in behalf of our citizens under this stipulation would amount (were they not extinguished by the late treaty) to $134,786 06. It does not appear that, up to the conclusion of the Louisiana treaty, any violations of the convention of 1800 of sufficient note to be made the subject of negotiation, had taken place. Nor would the comparatively trifling item above stated to be due, under the 12th article of the former instrument, be deemed of sufficient importance to find a place here, were it not for the pertinacity with which the French cabinet has uniformly urged another branch of the same transaction, the eighth article of the treaty of cession providing, as it alleges, a perpetual privilege for French shipping in the ports of Louisiana,

*"Convention between the French Republic and the United States of America," finally ratified at Paris, 31st July, 1801.

The assertion of this privilege, worth to France by accurate calculation but 14,000 francs per annum, and daily diminishing in value, (as the American tonnage by the economy with which it is navigated is monopolizing the carriage of freight,) and depending moreover upon a construction utterly repudiated by the United States, has been one of the principal means by which France for a series of years has evaded not merely the payment of a sum secured by the same treaty, and of which, small as it is, 14,000 francs per annum would not pay half the interest, but of withholding from the citizens of the United States very many millions upon which France has not paid and never will pay any interest at all. We shall have more to say upon this topic hereafter. It has been a favourite one in the Chamber, as it so long was with the ministry, because both one and the other well knew that their construction of the eighth article is diametrically opposed to the provisions of our Constitution, and of course can never be yielded to by the United States. It is therefore one of the stalking-horses under which the real hostility to our pretensions has been most frequently concealed.

Pretermitting any detail concerning that item in the estimate of the American claims which arose between the execution of the Louisiana treaty and the year 1805, we will barely mention that its amount is $1,065,081 98, and that it was consigned to oblivion along with its predecessors on the conclusion of the late convention. All the grounds of claim already mentioned were over and over again rejected by the French ministers, and held not to form any part of the consideration on which indemnity could be sought. We are not prepared to say, that at the close of a harassing negotiation, the American minister did wrong in waiving these claims; but we mean to be understood that, aside from Mr. Rives's late arrangement, the greater part of them were indisputably valid, and must be so represented in a historical review of our intercourse and negotiations with France. We pass however to more important considerations.

The year 1806 exhibited our commerce literally crushed between the orders and decrees of the European belligerents, like the ships of the ancients between the shifting Symplegades. We played a great game with fortune, and were burned, pillaged, and confiscated on every sea and every shore: at peace with all the world, yet every where treated as an enemy; the only carrying, almost the only commercial neutral, entitled under every law to full immunity, yet bearing as it would seem, the caput lupinum, the sign of outlawry at our very mast head. Great Britain drew a magic circle round the continent, within which it was ruin to penetrate, though there was not so much as a buoy to indicate its existence. France, like the magnet mountain in the romance, but wrecked the adventurer whom she attracted to her coasts.

The universal law was founded on the ethics of victory, and administered by judges in uniforms; and if men embarked their fortunes on the ocean, it was but as a gamester pawns his gold, with a prayer to the genius of possibilities. The English admiralty notoriously shaped its decrees according to the dictates of the ministry-the French Emperor went farther, and reversed the most solemn awards of his own tribunals, which at last he dispensed with altogether. If an American of the present generation, proud of the character and confident in the resources of his country, should inquire wherefore it submitted to this protracted piracy and outrage, we can but turn his attention to the immature strength and undeveloped resources of the United States at that period; and to that anomalous and painful state of our domestic politics, which not only embarrassed the action of the national government, but kept the country suspended between two powerful enemies without the opportunity of successful resistance to either. The celebrated Berlin decree of the 21st November, 1806, openly and in terms cancelled, with a stroke of the pen, all those provisions of the treaty of 1800, and of the law of nations, on which the United States had relied for their security and protection. It was the imperial warrant for plunder, the avowed revocation of that principle to which the honour and faith of France had six years before been solemnly pledged, that the flag of the Union should, with the single exception of contraband, render inviolable the property beneath it. To that revocation the United States never assented, and they protested against that conduct "digne en tout des premiers âges de barbarie," which adopted while it reprobated the example of an adversary, and completed the injustice of which it complained.* The Milan decrees of the 23d November and the 17th December, 1807, shortly taught us however that this was by no means to be the limit of our evils, and that it would not be easy to define the extent of profitable aggression. The first gave to the officers of the customs full powers, on bare suspicion of false certificates or oaths of origin, to place property to any amount in embargo, to await a decision protracted occasionally for years; the other, with a gratuity of insult, stripped the flag from every American vessel which by chance or necessity had submitted to the visit of a British cruiser, and declaring it by that means to have become denationalized, (denationalisé,) gave a new term as it had given a new law to the administration of despotism. Still it was supposed that even despotism would respect its own voluntary stipulations, and that the fortunate few who, allured to the attempt by the official language of the Moniteur, and the express invitations of the imperial

* Vide the considerations preliminary to the Berlin decree, particularly the 4th, 7th, and 8th.