This objection was light in comparison with others. The law required the President to proclaim a fact,--that France had revoked or modified her decrees so that they ceased to violate the commerce of America. Of this fact Cadore’s letter was the only proof; but evidently Cadore’s letter pledged the Emperor to nothing. “I am authorized to declare to you,” wrote Cadore, “that the Decrees of Berlin and Milan are revoked, and that after November 1 they will cease to have effect, on the understanding that in consequence of this declaration ... the United States, conformably to the Act you have just communicated, shall cause their rights to be respected by the English.” Napoleon not only reserved to himself the right of judging whether the measures to be taken by the United States should “cause their rights to be respected,” but in doing so he reversed the process prescribed by the Act, and required the President to enforce his rights before the Emperor should withdraw his decrees. From the standpoint of morality, perhaps the most serious objection of all was the danger of sacrificing national and personal self-respect by affecting to regard as honest a promise evidently framed to deceive, and made by a man whom Madison habitually characterized in terms that implied, to speak mildly, entire want of confidence. If America would consent to assert her rights against England in no way more straightforward than this, she might perhaps recover her neutral profits, but hardly her national self-respect. A few months afterward, when Robert Smith gave to the world the amusing but not wholly new spectacle of a Secretary of State attacking his own President for measures signed by his own name, Joel Barlow wrote for the “National Intelligencer” a defence of the President’s course, in which he gave reasons supplied by Madison himself for holding that Cadore’s letter satisfied the conditions of Macon’s Act.