“Your Majesty’s last ukase,” said this letter, “in substance, but particularly in form, is directed specially against France. In other times, before taking such a measure against my commerce, your Majesty would have let me know it, and perhaps I might have suggested means which, while accomplishing your chief object, might still have prevented it from appearing a change of system in the eyes of France. All Europe has so regarded it; and already, in the opinion of England and of Europe, our alliance exists no longer. If it were as entire in your Majesty’s heart as in mine, this general impression would be none the less a great evil.... For myself, I am always the same; but I am struck by the evidence of these facts, and by the thought that your Majesty is wholly disposed, as soon as circumstances permit it, to make an arrangement with England, which is the same thing as to kindle a war between the two empires.” Adams’s diplomatic victory was Napoleonic in its magnitude and completeness. Even Caulaincourt, whom he overthrew, good-naturedly congratulated him after he had succeeded, against Caulaincourt’s utmost efforts, in saving all the American ships. “It seems you are great favorites here; you have found powerful protection,” said the defeated ambassador.[334] The American minister felt but one drawback,--he could not wholly believe that his victory was sure. Anxious by temperament, with little confidence in his own good fortune,--fighting his battles with energy, but rather with that of despair than of hope,--the younger Adams never allowed himself to enjoy the full relish of a triumph before it staled, while he never failed to taste with its fullest flavor, as though it were a precious wine, every drop in the bitter cup of his defeats. In this, the most brilliant success of his diplomatic career, he could not be blamed for doubting whether such fortune could last. That the Czar of Russia should persist in braving almost sure destruction in order to defend American rights which America herself proclaimed to be unassailed, passed the bounds of fiction. Yet of all the facts with which Monroe, April 1, 1811, had to deal, this was the most important,--that Russia expected to fight France in order to protect neutral commerce. Already, Dec. 27, 1810, Adams notified his Government that Russia had determined to resist to the last, and that France had shown a spirit of hostility that proved an intention to make war. A few weeks later he wrote that military movements on both sides had begun on such a scale that the rumor of war was universal.[335] Napoleon’s harangue of March 24, 1811, to the Paris Chamber of Commerce was accepted in Russia as the announcement of a coming declaration, and the Russians waited uneasily for the blow to be struck which the Czar would not himself strike.