I have no mission, sir, to offer any modification of the President's
communication to Congress, and I beg that what I have said may be
considered with the reserve that I do not acknowledge any right to
demand or any obligation to give explanations of a document of that
nature. But the relations which previously existed between the two
countries, a desire that no unnecessary misunderstanding should
interrupt them, and the tenor of your excellency's letter (evidently
written under excited feeling) all convinced me that it was not
incompatible with self-respect and the dignity of my country to enter
into the detail I have done. The same reasons induced me to add that the
idea erroneously entertained that an injurious menace is contained in
the message has prevented your excellency from giving a proper attention
to its language. A cooler examination will show that although the
President was obliged, as I have demonstrated, to state to Congress
the engagements which had been made, and that in his opinion they had
not been complied with, yet in a communication not addressed to His
Majesty's Government not a disrespectful term is employed, nor a phrase
that his own sense of propriety, as well as the regard which one
nation owes to another, would induce him to disavow.
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