And to render the outrage the more signal these mock blockades
have been reiterated and enforced in the face of official communications
from the British Government declaring as the true definition of a legal
blockade "that particular ports must be actually invested and previous
warning given to vessels bound to them not to enter."
Not content with these occasional expedients for laying waste our
neutral trade, the cabinet of Britain resorted at length to the sweeping
system of blockades, under the name of orders in council, which has
been molded 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 injustice
of this innovation the first reply was that the orders were reluctantly
adopted by Great Britain 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 that enemy dared not 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 fall on the party setting the guilty
example, not on an innocent party which was not even chargeable with an
acquiescence in it.
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