On the other hand, Madison seemed not to resent, as warmly as he might have done, the intimation that he had induced Erskine to violate instructions. The President either affected not to see, or failed fully to grasp at first, the serious scope of this charge: “The stress you have laid on what you have been pleased to state as the substitution of the terms finally agreed on for the terms first proposed, has excited no small degree of surprise. Certain it is that your predecessor did present for my consideration the three conditions which now appear on the printed document; that he was disposed to urge them more than the nature of two of them (both palpably inadmissible, and one more than merely inadmissible) could permit; and that on finding his first proposals unsuccessful, the more reasonable terms ... were adopted. And what, sir, is there in this to countenance the conclusion you have drawn in favor of the right of his Britannic Majesty to disavow the proceeding? Is anything more common in public negotiations than to begin with a higher demand, and that failing, to descend to a lower?” Contenting himself with the remark that he had for the first time learned, from Jackson’s note, the restrictions on Erskine’s authority, the President passed to other points as though unaware that his good faith was in question. The letter of October 19 forced Jackson one step backward, and drove him nearly to the wall. Obliged to choose between the avowal that he had no proposal to make, or the assertion that he had both explanations and proposals, he yielded, somewhat surlily, to the weakness of offering explanations, such as they were, and of inviting proposals eventually to be embodied in a convention. In a note dated October 23 he answered the American note of October 19.[97] If Madison had doubted his own advantage, his doubts must have vanished in reading Jackson’s second note, which shuffled and evaded the issues in a manner peculiar to disconcerted men; but the most convincing proof of Jackson’s weakness appeared in the want of judgment he showed in exposing himself to attack at the moment when he was seeking safety. He committed the blunder of repeating the charge that Madison was responsible for Erskine’s violation of instructions:-- “These instructions ... were at the time, in substance, made known to you.... So far from the terms which he was actually induced to accept having been contemplated in that instruction, he himself states that they were substituted by you in lieu of those originally proposed.”