The National Register.
London, England, 1812-08-02 00:00:00

THE NATIONAL REGISTER.

proof iniglit ,vatiting of their corn., .i •ly dispositions, arid no
pr.:text left f,,)r coon:in:mice of the practice, the British Government
was !urinal!) assured cr the readiness of the United States to enter into
arrangements, such es could not be rejected, if the recovery of the
British subject. were the real and the sole object. The communica.
non passed without effect.
British cruisers have been in the practice also of violating the rights
and the peace ()four coasts. They hover over and harass our entering
and departing commerce. To the most insulting pretensions they
have added lawless proceedings hi our very harbours, and have wane
tinily spilt American blood within the sanctuary of our territorial ju...
tisilicrion. The principles and rules enforced by that nation, whets
,1 neutral nation, against .armed vessels of belligerents hovering near
her coasts, and disturbing her commercei are well known. VVbers
called on, nevertheless, by the United States to punish the greater of.
fences committed by her own vessels, her Government has bestowed•
on their commanders additional marks of honour and confidence.
Under pretended blockades, withait the presence of an adequate
force, and sornetimes without the practicability of applying one,_ our
commerce has been plundered in every sea ; the great staples of our
country have been cut eff from their legitimate markets.; and a de•ii
structive blow aimed at our agricultural and tnaritim: interests, lit
aggravation of these predatory Measures, they have been conskiered as
in force from the dates of their notification; a retrospective effect
being thus added, as has been done in other important cases, to thst
unlawfulness of the course pursued : and to render the outrage more
signal, these mock blockades have been reiterated and enforced in the
face of official communications froin the British Government, de-
claring, as the true definition of a legal blockade, " that particular
ports must be actually invested, and previous warning given to yes.
sels bound to them not to enter."

Not content with these occasional expedients for laying waste our
neutral trade, the Cabinet of Great Britain resort. d, at length, to that
sweeping system of blockades, u:lder the names of Orders in Council,
which has been moulded and managed as might best suit its political
views, its commercial jealousies, or the avidity of British cruisers.
To our remonstrances against the complicated and transcendent in.
justice of this innovation, the first reply was, that the Orders were
reluctantly adopted by G reat B ritain as a necessary retaliation on decrees
of her enemy proclaiming a general blockade of the British Isles, at
a time when the naval force of the enemy dared not to issue from his
own ports. She was reminded without effect, that her own prior
blockades, unsupported by an adequate naval force actually applied
and continued, were a bar to this plea ; that executed edicts against
millions of our property could not be retaliation on edicts confessedly
impossible to be executed ; that retaliation, to be just, should tall
on the party setting the guilty example, not on an innocent party,
which was not even chargeable. with an acquiescence in it.
When deprived of this flimsy veil fora prohibition of our trade with

Great Britain, her Cabinet, instead of a corresponding repeal, or at
practical discontinuance of its Orders, formally avowed a determina—
tion to persist in them against the United States, until the markets or.
her enemy should be laid open to British products ; thus asserting
an obligation on a neutral Power to require one belligerent to encou-
rage, by its internal regulations, the trade of another belligerent; con.
tradicting her own practice towards all nations in peace as well as its
war ; and betraying the insincerity of those professions which incul.
rated a belief, that, having resorted to her Orders with regret, she was
anxious to find an occasion tor putting an end to them.
Abandoning still more all respect for the neutral rights of the
United States, and for its own inconsistency, the British Government
now demands as pre-requisites to a repeal of its Orders, as they re.
late to the United States, that a formality should be observed in the

repeal of the French Decrees no wise necessary to their termination,
nor exemplified by British usage; and that the French repeal, besides
including that portion of the Decrees which operates within a tern-
ritorial jurisdiction, as well as that which operates on the high seas
against thecommert.e of the United States, should not be a signal spe.
cial repeal in telation to the United States, but should be extended to
whatever other neutral nations unconnected with them may be ef-
fected by those Decrees.
And, as an additional insult, they are called on for a formal disa-
vowal of conditions and pretensions advanced by the French Govern-
ment, for which the United States are so tar from having been them..
selves responsible, that, in official explanations which have been pub.
fished to the world, and in a correspondence of the American Minister
at London with the British Minister tor Foreign Affairs, such a respon.
sibility was explicitly and emphatically disclaimed.
It has beCome, indeed, sufficiently certain that the commerce or
the United States is to be sacrificed, not as interfering with the belli•
gerent rights of Great Britain—not as supplying the wants of theft
enemies, which she herself supplies—but as interfering with the mo-
nopoly which she covets for her own commerce and navigation. She
carries on 4 war against the lawful commerce of a friend, that she may
the better carry on a commerce with an enemy,—a commerce pol-
luted by the forgeries and perjuries which ate for the most part the
only passports by which it can succeed.
Anxious to make every experiment short of the last resort of in.
dared nations, the United States have withheld from. Great Britain
under successive modifications, the benefits of a free intercourse with

their market, the loss of Which could Hot but outricislt thi RF9ll‘to