REPORTS AND PUBLIC LETTERS.

REPORT

On Foreign Relations, submitted to the House of Representatives, Nov. 29th, 1811.

The Committee to whom was referred that part of the President's Message, which relates to our Foreign affairs, beg leave to Report in part :

That they have endeavored to give the subject submitted to them, that full and dispassionate consideration which is due to one so intimately connected with the interest, the peace, the safety and honor of their country.

Your committee will not encumber your journals and waste your patience with a detailed history of the various matters growing out of our foreign relations. The cold recital of wrongs, of injuries and aggressions, known and felt by every member of this Union, could have no other effect than to deaden the national sensibility and render the public mind callous to injuries with which it is already too familiar.

Without recurring, then, to the multiplied wrongs of partial or temporary operation, of which we have so just cause of complaint against the two great belligerents, your committee will only call your attention, at this time, to the systematic aggressions of those powers, authorized by their edicts against neutral commerce-a system, which, as regarded its princi

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ples, was founded on pretensions that went to the subversion of our national independence; and which, although now abandoned by one power, is, in its broad and destructive operations as still enforced by the others, sapping the foundations of our prosperity.

It is more than five years since England and France, in violation of those principles of justice and public law, held sacred by all civilized nations, commenced this unprecedented system, by seizing the property of the citizens of the United States, peaceably pursuing their lawful commerce on the high seas. To shield themselves from the odium which such outrages must incur, each of the belligerents sought a pretext in the conduct of the other-each attempting to justify his system of rapine as a retaliation for similar acts on the part of his enemy. As if the law of nations, founded on the eternal rules of justice, could sanction a principle, which if ingrafted in our municipal code could excuse the crime of one robber, upon the sole plea that the unfortunate object of his rapacity, was also a victim to the injustice of another. The fact of priority could be true as to one only of the parties; and whether true or false, could furnish no ground of justification.

The United States, thus unexpectedly and violently assailed by the two greatest powers in Europe, withdrew their citizens and property from the ocean; and cherishing the blessing of peace, although the occasion would fully have justified war, sought redress in an appeal to the justice and magnanimity of the belligerents. When this appeal had failed of the success due to its moderation, other means founded on the same pacific policy, but applying to the interests, instead of the justice of the belligerents, were resorted to. Such was the character of the non-intercourse and non-importation laws, which invited the return of both powers to their former state of amicable relation, by offering commercial advantages to the one who should first revoke his hostile edicts, and imposing restrictions on the other.

France, at length, availing herself of the proffers made equally to her and her enemy, by the non-importation law of May, 1810, announced the repeal, on the first of the following November, of the decrees of Berlin and Milan. And it affords a subject of sincere congratulation to be informed, through the official organs of the Government, that those decrees are, so far at least as our rights are concerned, really and practically at an end.

It was confidently expected that this act on the part of France would have been immediately followed by a revocation on the part of Great Britain of her orders in council. If our reliance on her justice had been impaired by the wrongs she had inflicted; yet when she had plighted her faith to the world that the sole motive of her aggression on neutral commerce was to be found in the Berlin and Milan decrees, we looked forward to the extinction of those decrees, as the period when the freedom of the seas would be again restored. In this reasonable expectation we have, however, been disappointed. A year has elapsed since the French decrees were rescinded, and yet Great Britain, instead of retracting pari passu that course of unjustifiable attack on neutral commerce in which she professed to be only the reluctant follower of France, has advanced with bolder and continually increasing strides. To the categorical demands lately made by our Government for the repeal of her orders in council, she has affected to deny the practical extinction of the French decrees, and she has moreover advanced a new and unexpected demand, increasing in hostility the orders themselves.

She has insisted, through her accredited minister at this place, that the repeal of the orders in council must be preceded, not only by the practical abandonment of the decrees of Berlin and Milan, so far as they infringe the neutral rights of the United States; but by the renunciation on the part of France, of the whole of her system of commercial war

fare against Great Britain, of which those decrees originally formed a part.

This system is understood to consist in a course of measures adopted by France and the other powers on the continent subject to, or in alliance with her, calculated to prevent the introduction into their territories of the products and manufactures of Great Britain and her colonies, and to annihilate her trade with them. However hostile these regulations may be on the part of France towards Great Britain; or however sensibly the latter may feel their effects, they are, nevertheless to be regarded only as the expedient of one enemy against another, for which the United States, as a neutral power, can, in no respect, be responsible; they are, too, in exact conformity with those which Great Britain has herself adopted and acted upon in time of peace as well as war. And it is not to be presumed that France would yield to the unauthorized demand of America what she seems to have considered one of the most powerful engines of the present

war.

Such are the pretensions upon which Great Britain founds the violation of the maritime rights of the United States-pretensions not theoretical merely, but followed up by a desolating war upon our unprotected commerce. The ships of the United States, laden with the products of our own soil and labor, navigated by our own citizens and peaceably pursuing a lawful trade, are seized on our own coasts, and at the very mouths of our harbors, condemned and confiscated.

Your committee are not, however, of that sect whose worship is at the shrine of a calculating avarice. And while we are laying before you the just complaints of our merchants against the plunder of their ships and cargoes, we cannot refrain from presenting to the justice, and humanity of our country the unhappy case of our impressed seamen. Although the groans of these victims of barbarity for the loss

of (what should be dearer to Americans than life) their liberty -although the cries of their wives and children in the privation of protectors and parents, have, of late, been drowned in the louder clamor at the loss of property; yet is the practice of forcing our mariners into the British navy, in violation of the rights of our flag, carried on with unabated rigor and severity. If it be our duty to encourage the fair and legitimate commerce of this country by protecting the property of the merchant, then indeed, by as much as life and liberty are more estimable than ships and goods, so much more impressive is the duty to shield the persons our seamen, whose hard and honest services are employed, equally with those of the merchants in advancing, under the mantle of its laws, the interests of their country.

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To sum up, in a word, the great causes of complaint against Great Britain, your committee need only say-That the United States as a sovereign and independent power, claim the right to use the ocean, which is the common and acknowledged highway of nations, for the purpose of transporting in their own vessels, the products of their own soil and the acquisitions of their own industry, to a market in the port of friendly nations, and to bring home, in return, such articles as their necessities or convenience may require—always regarding the rights of belligerents, as defined by the established laws of nations. Great Britain in defiance of this incontestable right, captures every American vessel bound to, or returning from a port where her commerce is not favored: enslaves our seamen, and in spite of our remonstrances perseveres in these aggressions.

To wrongs so daring in their character, and so disgraceful in their execution, it is impossible that the people of the United States should remain indifferent. We must now tamely and quietly submit, or we must resist by those means which God has placed within our reach.

Your committee will not cast a shade over the American