The instructions to Jackson[82]--five in number--were dated July 1, and require careful attention if the train of events which brought the United States to the level of war with England is to be understood. The first instruction began by complaint of Erskine’s conduct, passing quickly to a charge of bad faith against the American government, founded on “the publicity so unwarrantably given” to Erskine’s arrangement:-- “The premature publication of the correspondence by the American government so effectually precluded any middle course of explanation and accommodation that it is hardly possible to suppose that it must not have been resorted to in a great measure with that view. “The American government cannot have believed that such an arrangement as Mr. Erskine consented to accept was conformable to his instructions. If Mr. Erskine availed himself of the liberty allowed to him of communicating those instructions on the affair of the Orders in Council, they must have known that it was not so; but even without such communication they cannot by possibility have believed that without any new motive, and without any apparent change in the dispositions of the enemy, the British government could have been disposed at once and unconditionally to give up the system on which they have been acting, and which they had so recently refused to relinquish, even in return for considerations which though far from being satisfactory were yet infinitely more so than anything which can be supposed to have been gained by Mr. Erskine’s arrangement.” Canning attributed this conduct to a hope held by President Madison that the British government would feel itself compelled, however reluctantly, to sanction an agreement which it had not authorized. In this case the American government had only itself to blame for the consequences:-- “So far, therefore, from the American government having any reason to complain of the non-ratification of Mr. Erskine’s unauthorized agreement, his Majesty has on his part just ground of complaint for that share of the inconvenience from the publication which may have fallen upon his Majesty’s subjects, so far as their interests may have been involved in the renewed speculations of their American correspondents; and his Majesty cannot but think any complaint, if any should be made on this occasion in America, the more unreasonable, as the government of the United States is that government which perhaps of all others has most freely exercised the right of withholding its ratification from even the authorized acts of its own diplomatic agents.”