Two days after this letter was despatched, Robert Smith sent a civil message that there had been no intention to stop personal intercourse; “he should be most happy to see me whenever I would call upon him; we might converse upon indifferent subjects; but that his memory was so incorrect that it was on his account necessary that in making his reports to the President he should have some written document to assist him.”[96] With this excuse for the secretary’s sudden withdrawal from the field the British minister contented himself until October 19, when he received an official letter, signed as usual by Robert Smith, but written with ability such as that good-natured but illiterate Secretary of State never imagined himself to possess. The American note of October 19, far too long to quote or even to abridge, was perhaps the best and keenest paper Madison ever wrote. His faults of style and vagueness of thought almost wholly disappeared in the heat of controversy; his defence was cool, his attack keen, as though his sixty years weighed lightly the day when he first got his young antagonist at his mercy. He dealt Jackson a fatal blow at the outset, by reminding him that in July, 1808, only the previous year, Canning had put an end to oral communication after two interviews with Pinkney on the subjects under negotiation. He then made three points, well stated and easily remembered: (1) That when a government refuses to fulfil a pledge, it owes a formal and frank disclosure of its reasons. (2) That, in the actual situation, Mr. Erskine’s successor was the proper channel for that disclosure. (3) That since Mr. Jackson disclaimed authority to make either explanations or proposals, the President could do no more than express his willingness to favor any honorable mode of settling the matters in dispute. In enlarging on the subjects touched by Jackson’s letter, the President made more than one remark of the kind that most exasperated the British minister. Since no settlement of the dispute was possible or even desired by Jackson, such flashes of Madison’s temper were neither harmful nor inappropriate, yet they were certainly on the verge of insult. He told Jackson plainly that Great Britain, by retaining her so-called retaliation after admitting that it no longer retaliated, was guilty of deception:-- “You cannot but be sensible that a perseverance under such circumstances in a system which cannot longer be explained by its avowed object would force an explanation by some object not avowed. What object might be considered as best explaining it is an inquiry into which I do not permit myself to enter, further than to remark that in relation to the United States it must be an illegitimate object.”