This decision of His Majesty’s Government, contained in your excellency’s note to me of the 7th August, was duly transmitted to the President, and it naturally produced upon his mind the impressions which I anticipated in my letters to your excellency that it would produce.  He saw with the deepest regret that a positive assurance for convening the Chambers as soon as the constitution would permit was construed to mean only a disposition to do so, and that this disposition had yielded to objections which he could not think of sufficient force to justify a delay even if there had intervened no promise, especially as the serious consequences of that delay had been earnestly and repeatedly brought to the consideration of His Majesty’s Government.  In fact, sir, what were those objections?  I do not speak of those which were made to presenting the law in the session of July last, for although no constitutional impediment offered itself, yet it was not strongly insisted on, because an early session in the autumn, would have the same effect; and the President, for the same reason, says that it might have been overlooked if an early call of the Chambers had been made.  They are the objections to this call, then, which immediately demand our attention.  What, in fact, were they?  None derived from the constitutional charter have been or could have been asserted.  What, then, were they?  Your excellency’s letter of the 3d of August to me contains none but this:  “His Majesty’s Government finds it impossible to make any positive engagement on that point.”  In that of the 7th of August there are two reasons assigned:  First, the general inconvenience to the members.  This the President could surely not think of alleging to Congress as a sufficient reason for omitting to lay the matter before them.  The next, I confess, has a little more weight, and might have excused a delay if the assurance given by Mr. Serurier had been, as your excellency construes it, merely of a disposition to hasten the presentation of the law.  If the engagement had amounted to no more than this, and His Majesty’s ministers thought that an early call would endanger the passage of the law, it might possibly justify them in not making it.  But the President, who relied on the promise he had received, who in consequence of it had deferred the performance of an important duty; the President, who had given timely and official notice that this duty must be performed at the opening of the next Congress; the President, who could see no greater prospect of the passage of the law in a winter than in an autumnal session—­how was he to justify himself and redeem the pledge he had made to his country?  He did it in the way he always does—­by a strict performance.