and censure would have been complete.  Having delivered your letter of the 13th of February to the French government, and having received the President’s approbation of that proceeding, it is most manifest that you could be in no degree responsible for what should be done afterward, and done by others.  The President, therefore, cannot conceive what particular or personal interest of yours was affected by the subsequent negotiation here, or how the treaty, the result of that negotiation, should put an end to your usefulness as a public minister at the court of France, or in any way affect your official character or conduct.

It is impossible not to see that such a proceeding as you have seen fit to adopt might produce much inconvenience, and even serious prejudice, to the public interests.  Your opinion is against the treaty, a treaty concluded and formally ratified; and, to support that opinion, while yet in the service of the government, you put a construction on its provisions such as your own government does not put upon them, such as you must be aware the enlightened public of Europe does not put upon them, and such as England herself has not put upon them as yet, so far as we know.

It may become necessary hereafter to publish your letter, in connection with other correspondence of the mission; and although it is not to be presumed that you looked to such publication, because such a presumption would impute to you a claim to put forth your private opinions upon the conduct of the President and Senate, in a transaction finished and concluded, through the imposing form of a public despatch, yet, if published, it cannot be foreseen how far England might hereafter rely on your authority for a construction favorable to her own pretensions, and inconsistent with the interest and honor of the United States.  It is certain that you would most sedulously desire to avoid any such attitude.  You would be slow to express opinions, in a solemn and official form, favorable to another government, and on the authority of which opinions that other government might hereafter found new claims or set up new pretensions.  It is for this reason, as well as others, that the President feels so much regret at your desire of placing your construction of the provisions of the treaty, and your objections to those provisions, according to your construction, upon the records of the government.

Before examining the several objections suggested by you, it may be proper to take notice of what you say upon the course of the negotiation.  In regard to this, having observed that the national dignity of the United States had not been compromised down to the time of the President’s message to the last session of Congress, you proceed to say:  “But England then urged the United States to enter into a conventional arrangement, by which we might be pledged to concur with her in measures for the suppression of the slave-trade.  Till then we had executed our own laws in our own way.  But, yielding to this application, and departing from our former principle of avoiding European combinations upon subjects not American, we stipulated in a solemn treaty, that we would carry into effect our own laws, and fixed the minimum force we would employ for that purpose.”