“The temper here toward us is professedly friendly, but unfortunately it is not well proved to be so in practice. It is my conviction, as I before wrote you, that the great object of the actual policy is to entangle us in a war with England. They abstain therefore from doing anything which would furnish clear and unequivocal testimony of the revocation of their decrees, lest it should induce the extinction of the British orders and thereby appease our irritation against their enemy. Hence, of all the captured vessels since November 1, the three which were liberated are precisely those which had not violated the decrees. On the other hand, they take care, by not executing these decrees against us, to divert our resentment from themselves. I have very frankly told the Duke of Bassano that we are not sufficiently dull to be deceived by this kind of management. He indeed pretends that they are influenced by no such motive; and whenever I speak to him on the subject, he reiterates the professions of friendship, and promises to endeavor to obtain the release of the remainder of our vessels captured since November 1. I fear, however, that he will not succeed.” Even in case of war with England, Russell warned the President to look for no better treatment from Napoleon, who might then consider America as “chained to the imperial car, and obliged to follow whithersoever it leads.” He pointed out that concessions had never produced any return from the Emperor except new exactions and new pretensions. If war with England became inevitable, care must be taken to guard against the danger that France should profit by it. French trade was not worth pursuing. The tariff on imports, reinforced by the restrictions on exports, created a practical non-intercourse. Napoleon’s writings furnish evidence that the Emperor’s chief object was not so much to entangle America in war with England as to maintain the decrees which he literally overturned the world to enforce. When he suspended their enforcement against American ships in his own ports, he did so only because his new customs’ regulations had been invented to attain by other means the object of the decrees. When he affirmed and reaffirmed that these decrees were the fundamental law of his empire, he told a truth which neither England nor America believed, but to which he clung with energy that cost him his empire.