For a long period, and among most of the maritime nations of Europe, the right of inhibiting a supply of provisions to an enemy, was tacitly acquiesced in, or expressly admitted. This practice existed even so long ago as the Mithridatic war, and has probably been followed up, without an interval at any one time of fifty years, from the commencement of the Christian era to the present day. This attempt, therefore, of Great Britain to injure France, formed no excuse for France to attempt to injure Great Britain by violating the commerce of the United States. On the 31st of December, 1806, the British Government formally notified the American Government, that Great Britain would consider an acquiescence in the Berlin Decree on the part of neutral nations, as giving to her (Great Britain) the right to retaliate in the same way against France. Had the American Government, at this period, manfully and explicitly made known its determination to support our rights at all hazards, I have no belief that our present difficulties would ever have existed. In May succeeding, advices were received of French privateers, under this decree, depredating upon American vessels in the West Indies; and during the same month the ship Horizon, in distress, was thrown by the act of God on the French coast, and was seized under the same authority. In November, 1807, the British, in conformity with their notice, issued their retaliating order. A prior Order in Council of January, 1807, had been issued, but this only affected vessels trading between different ports of France, or between ports of France and her allies; a trade always obnoxious to suspicion, and one which during war must ever be expected in a great degree to be restricted, and which is also interdicted by a standing law of the French Government, passed in 1778, and confirmed by the present Emperor. Then followed in succession, on the part of France, the Milan and Bayonne decrees. The last of which dooms an American vessel to condemnation from the exercise of a right universally acknowledged to belong to belligerents, and one which the neutral has no possibility of preventing, that of being spoken with by an enemy cruiser, which from her superior sailing there was no possibility of avoiding. In point of principle, this is the most outrageous violation of neutral rights ever known, and this, too, took place under the existence of a treaty made within a few years by the same person who issued these very decrees. While with Great Britain we have no treaty, and whose orders are expressly bottomed upon and limited in duration by the French decrees, and issued after having given twelve months' notice of her intention to oppose them in this way, and the Orders in Council are even as yet not co-extensive in principle with the French decrees.