This inviting opportunity for
accomplishing an object so important to the United States, and professed
so often to be the desire of both the belligerents, was made known
to the British Government. As that Government admits that an actual
application of an adequate force is necessary to the existence of a
legal blockade, and it was notorious that if such a force had ever been
applied its long discontinuance had annulled the blockade in question,
there could be no sufficient objection on the part of Great Britain to a
formal revocation of it, and no imaginable objection to a declaration of
the fact that the blockade did not exist. The declaration would have
been consistent with her avowed principles of blockade, and would have
enabled the United States to demand from France the pledged repeal of
her decrees, either with success, in which case the way would have
been opened for a general repeal of the belligerent edicts, or without
success, in which case the United States would have been justified
in turning their measures exclusively against France. The British
Government would, however, neither rescind the blockade nor declare its
nonexistence, nor permit its nonexistence to be inferred and affirmed
by the American plenipotentiary. On the contrary, by representing the
blockade to be comprehended in the orders in council, the United States
were compelled so to regard it in their subsequent proceedings.
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