Mr. Huelsemann proceeds to remark, that “this extremely painful incident, therefore, might have been passed over, without any written evidence being left on our part in the archives of the United States, had not General Taylor thought proper to revive the whole subject by communicating to the Senate, in his message of the 18th [28th] of last March, the instructions with which Mr. Mann had been furnished on the occasion of his mission to Vienna.  The publicity which has been given to that document has placed the Imperial government under the necessity of entering a formal protest, through its official representative, against the proceedings of the American government, lest that government should construe our silence into approbation, or toleration even, of the principles which appear to have guided its action and the means it has adopted.”  The undersigned reasserts to Mr. Huelsemann, and to the Cabinet of Vienna, and in the presence of the world, that the steps taken by President Taylor, now protested against by the Austrian government, were warranted by the law of nations and agreeable to the usages of civilized states.  With respect to the communication of Mr. Mann’s instructions to the Senate, and the language in which they are couched, it has already been said, and Mr. Huelsemann must feel the justice of the remark, that these are domestic affairs, in reference to which the government of the United States cannot admit the slightest responsibility to the government of his Imperial Majesty.  No state, deserving the appellation of independent, can permit the language in which it may instruct its own officers in the discharge of their duties to itself to be called in question under any pretext by a foreign power.

But even if this were not so, Mr. Huelsemann is in an error in stating that the Austrian government is called an “iron rule” in Mr. Mann’s instructions.  That phrase is not found in the paper; and in respect to the honorary epithet bestowed in Mr. Mann’s instructions on the late chief of the revolutionary government of Hungary, Mr. Huelsemann will bear in mind that the government of the United States cannot justly be expected, in a confidential communication to its own agent, to withhold from an individual an epithet of distinction of which a great part of the world thinks him worthy, merely on the ground that his own government regards him as a rebel.  At an early stage of the American Revolution, while Washington was considered by the English government as a rebel chief, he was regarded on the Continent of Europe as an illustrious hero.  But the undersigned will take the liberty of bringing the Cabinet of Vienna into the presence of its own predecessors, and of citing for its consideration the conduct of the Imperial government itself.  In the year 1777 the war of the American Revolution was raging all over these United States.  England was prosecuting that war with a most resolute determination, and by the exertion of all her military means to the fullest extent.