But this flattering prospect was soon to be overcast. England and France had long been at war; and, at the period of which we are treating, France had become the ruthless bandit of the land, and England the wanton pirate of the sea. Each desired the cooperation of the United States in the war--and each determined, in the event of our refusal to take part in the controversy in its favor, to cripple our commerce by all means within its reach. That commerce, fostered by our accidental position as neutrals when the two great commercial nations of the world were at war, had reached a marvellous height. Its keels vexed every sea. Its flag was now seen in the frozen circles; and now it reflected from its waving folds the fervors of the southern cross. Our merchants, springing, as it were, in a single night from the station of ordinary dealers and dependents on foreign countries to that of arbiters and rulers of the commerce of the globe, were equal to their new position; and our sailors, responsive to their will, gathered with their Briarean arms the wealth of every realm. Foreign statesmen in the recesses of the cabinet, and economists in the closet, beheld with amazement the rapid growth of our marine. They saw a nation, which had not then attained its seventeenth year, enjoying a commerce which nearly equalled in tonnage that which England had been gradually forming from the date of the Norman Conquest to that hour--a period of near eight hundred years. At such an epoch a strict neutrality in respect of the contending powers was the dictate alike of duty and interest. But such a policy was distasteful to England and France; and the result was the issuing of his successive decrees by Napoleon from Berlin and Milan, and the promulgation of the successive British orders in council. These iniquitous measures, the last mentioned of which, the British orders in council, have been since pronounced illegal by the courts of England herself, declared our ships with their cargoes forfeitable to England if they touched a French port, and to France if they touched a port in England or her dependencies.