Meanwhile negotiations were opened on our side particularly with Great Britain. These seem for a time to have had the sanction not only of the Executive, but of Congress, or at least of the House of Representatives. Messages from the President, calling attention to the slave-trade, were answered by reports from special committees of the House of Representatives. One of these, made February 9, 1821, concluded with a resolution, “That the President of the United States be requested to enter into such arrangements as he may deem suitable and proper with one or more of the maritime powers of Europe for the effectual abolition of the African slave-trade.” The report, while declaring that “to efface this reproachful stain from the character of civilized mankind would be the proudest triumph that could be achieved in the cause of humanity,” proceeds to announce, in words applicable to the present moment, that “this happy result, experience has demonstrated, cannot be realized by any system, except a concession by the maritime powers to each other’s ships of war of a qualified right of search.”[295] Another report, by a select committee of the House, April 12, 1822, adopted the resolution of the previous committee, and also the recommendation of a mutual right of search, adding, that it could not be doubted “that the people of America have the intelligence to distinguish between the right of searching a neutral on the high seas in time of war, claimed by some belligerents, and that mutual, restricted, and peaceful concession by treaty, suggested by your Committee, and which is demanded in the name of suffering humanity.”[296] Then came the devoted efforts of Charles Fenton Mercer, an admirable representative of Virginia, who exposed this terrible traffic with a pathos not to be forgotten. On his motion, another resolution was adopted, February 28, 1823, by a vote of one hundred and thirty-one yeas to only nine nays, calling upon the President to enter into negotiations “for the effectual abolition of the African slave-trade, and its ultimate denunciation as piracy, under the Law of Nations, by the consent of the civilized world.”[297] The character of this resolution was impaired by the rejection of an amendment, “and that we agree to a qualified right of search,”[298] which was a falling off from the recommendations of the two committees.