I think an error was committed, when, affecting to desire an amicable arrangement with Great Britain, instead of treating with her as a nation not to be intimidated, much less bullied, the non-importation act was passed. For, sir, if she was so proud, so haughty, so imperious, as some gentlemen delight to describe her, then to bring her to justice by assuming an attitude of menace, was evidently impossible. When, therefore, you passed the non-importation act, under a pretence that it would be a successful auxiliary to friendly negotiation, what could you expect but to alarm the pride, and the haughtiness, and imperiousness of that nation? And, doing that, how could you expect an amicable result? No, sir, it was not, and it could not be expected. You obtained a treaty indeed--but it was from a Fox Ministry. Yet such as it was, it was not so good as a Jay's Treaty, and the Executive rejected it without so much as laying it before the Senate. In support of the embargo system, gentlemen say, if we suffer our commerce to go on the ocean, or wherever it goes, it will be crippled either by France or Great Britain. Although this is not true in the extent laid down, yet it will hold tolerably true as respects the European seas. From what gentlemen are pleased to represent as the impossibility of sailing the ocean with safety, result (say they) the propriety and necessity of the embargo system. And they say, it is not the embargo, but the decrees and orders which are the true cause of all we suffer; that the embargo, so far from being the cause of, was advised as a remedy for the evils we endure. Well, sir, for the sake of the argument, be it as they say. Has the embargo answered? Is there any probability, the slightest indication, that it will answer? Has it operated, to any perceptible extent, except upon ourselves, during the twelvemonth it has been in existence? If, then, neither the remembrance of the past, nor the prospect of the future, gives the least encouragement to hope, why will gentlemen persist in the system? And that too, sir, at an expense to their own country so enormous in amount? Will they go on obstinately amid all the discontents, or clamors (as gentlemen in very anti-republican language call the voice of the people) in the Eastern and Northern States? And that from mere obstinacy--an obstinacy not encouraged by the least glimmering of hope? If I could be pointed to a single fact, produced by the operation of the embargo, which would prove that it had any other effect on the disposition of Great Britain than to irritate--or any other on France than to please, than to encourage her to a perseverance in that system of injustice which we pretend to oppose, but to the policy of which we give all our support with an infatuated wilfulness, and which, therefore, increases the hostility Great Britain has felt from the measure--if they could show me, sir, that the embargo will bring either