I shall do this with a sincere
desire to avoid everything that may excite irritation or increase
difficulties which already unfortunately exist. Guided by this
disposition, I shall confine myself to an examination of your note,
considered only as an exposition of the causes which His Majesty's
Government thinks it has to complain of in the message sent by the
President of the United States to Congress at the opening of its present
session.
Your excellency begins by observing that nothing could have prepared
His Majesty's Government for the impressions made upon it by the
President's message, and that if the complaints he makes were as just as
you think them unfounded, still you would have reason to be astonished
at receiving _the first communication of them in such a form_. If His
Majesty's Government was not prepared to receive complaints on the part
of the United States for nonexecution of the treaty, everything I have
said and written since I have had the honor of communicating with your
excellency and your predecessors in office must have been misunderstood
or forgotten. I can scarcely suppose the first, for if my whole
correspondence is referred to and my verbal representations
recollected they will be found in the most unequivocal language to
express an extreme solicitude for the execution of the treaty, a
deep disappointment at the several delays which have intervened, and
emphatically the necessity which the President would be under of laying
the matter before Congress at the time when in fact he has done so if
before that period he did not receive notice that the law had passed for
giving effect to the treaty.
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