The four districts west of the Pearl River were organized by Claiborne as a part of the territory of Orleans, in which shape, the President’s proclamation had said, “it will not cease to be a subject of fair and friendly negotiation and adjustment” with Spain. Within a few weeks the President announced to Congress in his Annual Message that “the legality and necessity of the course pursued” required from the Legislature “whatever provisions may be due to the essential rights and equitable interests of the people thus brought into the bosom of the American family.” The difficulty of reconciling two such assertions perplexed many persons who in the interests of law and of society wished to understand how a people already brought into the bosom of the American family could remain a subject of fair negotiation with a foreign Power. The point became further complicated by the admission of Louisiana as a State into the Union, with the four districts which were “to be a subject of fair and friendly negotiation.” The first result of these tortuous proceedings was to call a protest from Morier, the British chargé at Washington, who wrote to the Secretary of State, December 15, a letter[267] containing one paragraph worth noting:-- “Would it not have been worthy of the generosity of a free nation like this, bearing, as it doubtless does, a respect for the rights of a gallant people at this moment engaged in a noble struggle for its liberty,--would it not have been an act on the part of this country dictated by the sacred ties of good neighborhood and friendship which exist between it and Spain, to have simply offered its assistance to crush the common enemy of both, rather than to have made such interference the pretext for wresting a province from a friendly Power, and that at the time of her adversity?” Spain had little reason to draw distinctions between friends, allies, and enemies. She could hardly stop to remember that the United States were filching a petty sand-heap in a remote corner of the world, at a time when England was “wresting” not one but all the splendid American provinces from their parent country, and when France was kneeling on the victim’s breast and aiming stab after stab at her heart. CHAPTER XV.