convention of the benefit of its provisions;” but although consenting to take what Spain was willing to give, he spoke with contempt of the Spanish argument against the Franco-Spanish claims, and insisted that these should be pressed without relaxation. He even complained that Yrujo, in taking the opinion of American lawyers, had failed in respect to the United States government and his own.[168] Madison seemed unconscious that Yrujo could have any just cause of complaint, or that his Government could resent the tone and temper of President and Congress. The passage of the Bill which made Mobile a collection district and a part of the Mississippi territory gave Yrujo the chance to retaliate. About a fortnight after the President had signed this law, Yrujo one morning entered the State Department with the printed Act in his hand, and overwhelmed Madison with reproaches, which he immediately afterward supported by a note[169] so severe as to require punishment, and so able as to admit of none. He had at first, he said, regarded as “an atrocious libel” on the United States government the assertion that it had made a law which usurped the rights of Spanish sovereignty; yet such was the case. He gave a short and clear abstract of the evidence which refuted the claim to West Florida, and closed by requesting that the law be annulled. Madison could neither maintain the law nor annul it; he could not even explain it away. Gallatin told the President six months afterward,[170] that “the public mind is altogether unprepared for a declaration that the terms and object of the Mobile Act had been misunderstood by Spain; for every writer, without a single exception, who has written on the subject seems to have understood the Act as Spain did; it has been justified by our friends on that ground.” Yet Jefferson was not prepared to maintain and defend the Act in its full assertions of authority, after accepting Louisiana without asking for West Florida. Madison wrote a letter of complaint to Livingston at Paris,[171] explaining, as already quoted, the reasons which had induced the President to make no demand for West Florida before ascertaining the views and claiming the interposition of the French government. “In this state of things,” said he, “it was deemed proper by Congress, in making the regulations necessary for the collection of revenue in the ceded territory, and guarding against the new danger of smuggling into the United States through the channels opened by it, to include a provision for the case of West Florida by vesting in the President a power which his discretion might accommodate to events.” This interpretation of the law was not in harmony with the law itself or with Randolph’s speeches; but Madison hastened to turn from this delicate subject in order to bring another complaint against Yrujo.