that its treaties with other nations cannot be executed without the establishment and enforcement of new principles of maritime police, to be applied without our consent, we must employ a language neither of equivocal import nor susceptible of misconstruction.  American citizens prosecuting a lawful commerce in the African seas, under the flag of their country, are not responsible for the abuse or unlawful use of that flag by others; nor can they rightfully, on account of any such alleged abuses, be interrupted, molested, or detained while on the ocean; and if thus molested and detained while pursuing honest voyages in the usual way, and violating no law themselves, they are unquestionably entitled to indemnity.”

This declaration of the President stands:  not a syllable of it has been, or will be, retracted.  The principles which it announces rest on their inherent justice and propriety, on their conformity to public law, and, so far as we are concerned, on the determination and ability of the country to maintain them.  To these principles the government is pledged, and that pledge it will be at all times ready to redeem.

But what is your own language on this point?  You say, “This claim (the British claim), thus asserted and supported, was promptly met and firmly repelled by the President in his message at the commencement of the last session of Congress; and in your letter to me approving the course I had adopted in relation to the question of the ratification by France of the quintuple treaty, you consider the principles of that message as the established policy of the government.”  And you add, “So far, our national dignity was uncompromitted.”  If this be so, what is there which has since occurred to compromit this dignity?  You shall yourself be judge of this; because you say, in a subsequent part of your letter, that “the mutual rights of the parties are in this respect wholly untouched.”  If, then, the British pretension had been promptly met and firmly repelled by the President’s message; if, so far, our national dignity had not been compromitted; and if, as you further say, our rights remain wholly untouched by any subsequent act or proceeding, what ground is there on which to found complaint against the treaty?

But your sentiments on this point do not concur with the opinions of your government.  That government is of opinion that the sentiments of the message, which you so highly approve, are reaffirmed and corroborated by the treaty, and the correspondence accompanying it.  The very object sought to be obtained, in proposing the mode adopted for abolishing the slave-trade, was to take away all pretence whatever for interrupting lawful commerce by the visitation of American vessels.  Allow me to refer you, on this point, to the following passage in the message of the President to the Senate, accompanying the treaty:—­