The reproaches which President Jackson considers himself authorized to address to France may be summed up in a few words.  The King’s Government promised to present the treaty of July 4 again to the Chambers as soon as they could be assembled.  They were assembled on the 31st of July, and the treaty has not yet been presented to them.  Such is exactly the whole substance of the President’s argumentation, and nothing can be easier than to refute it.

I may first observe that the assembling of the Chambers on the 31st of July, in obedience to a legal prescription that they should be called together within a stated period after a dissolution of the Chamber of Deputies, was nothing more than a piece of formality, and if President Jackson had attended to the internal mechanism of our administrative system he would have been convinced that the session of 1835 could not have really commenced at that session of 1834.  Everyone knew beforehand that after a fortnight spent in the forms of installation it would be adjourned.

The President of the United States considers that the bill relative to the American claims should have been presented to the Chamber within that fortnight.  I can not understand the propriety of this reproach.  The bill was explicitly announced in the speech from the throne on the very day on which the Chambers met.  This was all that was required to make known the opinion and design of the Government, and to prevent that species of moral proscription to which absolute silence would have given authority.  With regard to the mere act of presentation so long before discussion could possibly take place, this proceeding would have been so unusual and extraordinary that it might have increased the unfavorable prepossessions of the public, already too numerous, without producing any real advantage in return.  Above all, the result which the President had in view, of being able to announce the new vote of the Chamber of Deputies in his message, would not have been attained.

President Jackson expresses his regrets that your solicitations (instances) had not determined the King’s Government to call the Chambers together at an earlier day.  How soon soever they may have been called, the simplest calculation will serve to shew that the discussions in our Chambers could not have been known in the United States at the opening of Congress, and the President’s regret is therefore unfounded.

Moreover, the same obstacles and the same administrative reasons which rendered a real session impossible during the months of July or August were almost equally opposed to its taking place before the last weeks of the year.  The head of a government like that of the United States should be able to comprehend more clearly than anyone else those moral impossibilities which arise from the fixed character of the principles of a constitutional regime, and to see that in such a system the administration is subject to constant and regular forms, from which no special interest, however important, can authorize a deviation.