September 23 Canning replied.[287] Beginning with a refusal to admit the President’s advance, his note went on to discuss its propriety. “His Majesty,” it said, “cannot consent to buy off that hostility which America ought not to have extended to him, at the expense of a concession made, not to America, but to France.” Canning was a master of innuendo; and every sentence of his note hinted that he believed Jefferson to be a tool of Napoleon; but in one passage he passed the bounds of official propriety:-- “The Government of the United States is not to be informed that the Berlin Decree of Nov. 21, 1806, was the practical commencement of an attempt, not merely to check or impair the prosperity of Great Britain, but utterly to annihilate her political existence through the ruin of her commercial prosperity; that in this attempt almost all the Powers of the European continent have been compelled more or less to co-operate; and that the American embargo, though most assuredly not intended to that end,--for America can have no real interest in the subversion of the British power, and her rulers are too enlightened to act from any impulse against the real interests of their country,--but by some unfortunate concurrence of circumstances, without any hostile intention, the American embargo did come in aid of the ‘blockade of the European continent’ precisely at the very moment when if that blockade could have succeeded at all, this interposition of the American government would most effectually have contributed to its success.” Like his colleague Lord Castlereagh, Canning deliberately tried to “lower and degrade” the American government in the eyes of its own people. His defiance was even more emphatic than his sarcasm. “To this universal combination,” he continued, “his Majesty has opposed a temperate but a determined retaliation upon the enemy,--trusting that a firm resistance would defeat this project, but knowing that the smallest concession would infallibly encourage a perseverance in it.