You have not been requested to bestow your approbation upon the treaty, however gratifying it would have been to the President to see that, in that respect, you united with other distinguished public agents abroad.  Like all citizens of the republic, you are quite at liberty to exercise your own judgment upon that as upon other transactions.  But neither your observations nor this concession cover the case.  They do not show, that, as a public minister abroad, it is a part of your official functions, in a public despatch, to remonstrate against the conduct of the government at home in relation to a transaction in which you bore no part, and for which you were in no way answerable.  The President and Senate must be permitted to judge for themselves in a matter solely within their control.  Nor do I know that, in complaining of your protest against their proceedings in a case of this kind, any thing has been done to warrant, on your part, an invidious and unjust reference to Constantinople.  If you could show, by the general practice of diplomatic functionaries in the civilized part of the world, and more especially, if you could show by any precedent drawn from the conduct of the many distinguished men who have represented the government of the United States abroad, that your letter of the 3d of October was, in its general object, tone, and character, within the usual limits of diplomatic correspondence, you may be quite assured that the President would not have recourse to the code of Turkey in order to find precedents the other way.

You complain that, in the letter from this department of the 14th of November, a statement contained in yours of the 3d of October is called a tissue of mistakes, and you attempt to show the impropriety of this appellation.  Let the point be distinctly stated, and what you say in reply be then considered.

In your letter of October 3d you remark, that “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.  Until 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.”

The letter of this department of the 14th of November, having quoted this passage, proceeds to observe, that “the President cannot conceive how you should have been led to adventure upon such a statement as this.  It is but a tissue of mistakes.  England did not urge the United States to enter into this conventional arrangement.  The United States yielded to no application from England.  The proposition for abolishing the slave-trade, as it stands in the treaty, was an American proposition; it originated with the executive government of the United States,