Transactions growing out of the circumstances above mentioned, became of very grave importance. The rights of different nations to trade on that coast had been contested in war, and settled in peace, for centuries. The long Napoleonic wars had thrown possessions and commerce, all along the coast, into the hands of England; and in restoring forts and factories to different nations, the intention seems to have been, to let every thing, with the exception of the slave-trade, revert to its old fashion. At existing factories, parties were allowed to conduct their trade in their own way, and to exercise whatever competing influence they could gain with the native powers to forward their purposes. Comparatively few of the old establishments were preserved. Everywhere else the coast had become free to all traders; it being understood that no one was entitled to use measures of force to the injury of others. If a private company of merchants in France, for instance, had taken possession of a part of the coast, driven off other traders, or seized and confiscated their goods, because they refused to pay such duties as the company chose to levy, the matter undoubtedly would have led to national complaint, and to correspondence between governments. If France disavowed all concern in these transactions, reparation would have been sought for by force. Governor Buchanan’s zeal therefore sometimes outran his discretion, in the outcry he made against the English Government, for resisting his interferences with their subjects, when these men were acting on practices of very venerable antiquity, or making arrangements with the natives identical with those which he, as the Agent of the American Colonization Society, was making. Edina, in the Bassa country, for instance, had been the resort of vessels of all nations. Private factories, for trading in ivory, palm oil, &c., were there in 1826: such places were assumed to be open ground, on which the same might occur again, or were common property. Such had been the case on almost every point occupied by the Liberian Government: hence the levying of duties and the establishment of monopolies were resisted by English traders. England was bound to defend the property of her subjects, or to compensate them for the loss of it, if this occurred through the neglect of the government. And it no doubt appeared very strange to Great Britain, that an association of Americans should claim a right to profit by duties levied on her vessels, when there was no government responsible for their acts.