This at last produced some effect, and the French Government revoked the Berlin and Milan decrees, the revocation to take effect on the 1st of November, 1810; the letter of the French Minister communicating the fact to the American Minister adding that it was "clearly understood that the English orders in council were to be revoked at the same time." In August of that year, Hon. William Pinkney, United States Minister at London, laid this before the British Government, but was told that the English decrees would be revoked "after the French revocation should have actually taken place." This was a most palpable evasion, since it {015}is very common for treaties and governmental orders to contain clauses which render them operative only in certain contingencies, and it was the easiest thing in the world for England to give her revocation precisely the same form as that of France, when each would have put the other in force on the date named. If any further proof had been wanted that the British Government was determined to suppress American commerce, at least till her own ships could resume the carrying trade of the world, it was supplied when in 1812 Lord Castlereagh, Minister for Foreign Affairs, declared officially that "the decrees of Berlin and Milan must not be repealed singly and specially, in relation to the United States, but must be repealed also as to all other neutral nations; and that in no less extent of a repeal of the French decrees had the British Government pledged itself to repeal the orders in council." That is, the rights of the United States as a neutral nation were not to be regarded by England, unless the United States could induce or compel France to regard not only these rights but those of all other neutral nations! With this tangle of orders, decrees, and proclamations, with an important part of the Treaty of 1783 unfulfilled, with unlawful impressments daily taking place on the high seas, and with no disposition on the part of the chief aggressor to right these wrongs, {016}it is difficult to see how negotiations could have been continued longer, or the alternative of war avoided. On the first day of June, 1812, President Madison sent a message to Congress, in which he set forth the facts that necessitated war; Congress accordingly declared war on the 18th, and the next day the President proclaimed it. On the 23d, before this news was received, England revoked her orders in council, thus removing one of the grievances, but still leaving those which amply justified the declaration. It thus appears that the immediate and specific causes of the war of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain were complex; but the general cause, the philosophic reason, was simply the determined purpose manifested by England to nullify and render valueless the political independence gained by the American colonies in the Revolution.