Embarrassing as this despatch was to President Madison, it was not all, or the worst; but Serurier himself described the other annoyance in terms as lively as his feelings:[169]-- “The ‘Hornet’ has at last arrived. On the rumor of this news, the avenues of the State Department were thronged by a crowd of members of both Houses of Congress, as well as by strangers and citizens, impatient to know what this long-expected vessel had brought. Soon it was learned that the ‘Hornet’ had brought nothing favorable, and that Mr. Barlow had as yet concluded nothing with your Excellency. On this news, the furious declamations of the Federalists, of the commercial interests, and of the numerous friends of England were redoubled; the Republicans, deceived in their hopes, joined in the outcry, and for three days nothing was heard but a general cry for war against France and England at once.... I met Mr. Monroe at the Speaker’s house; he came to me with an air of affliction and discouragement; addressed me with his old reproach that decidedly we abandoned the Administration, and that he did not know henceforward how they could extricate themselves from the difficult position into which their confidence in our friendship had drawn them.” Serurier had no reason for uneasiness on his own account. The President and his party could not go backward in their path; yet no enemy could have devised a worse issue than that on which the President had placed the intended war with England. Every Act of Congress and every official expression of Madison’s policy had been founded on the withdrawal of the French Decrees as they affected American commerce. This withdrawal could no longer be maintained, and Madison merely shook confidence in his own good faith by asserting it; yet he could do nothing else. “It is understood,” he wrote to Jefferson at this crisis,[170] “that the Berlin and Milan Decrees are not in force against the United States, and no contravention of them can be established against her. On the contrary, positive cases rebut the allegation.” Yet he said that “the business has become more than ever puzzling;” he was withheld only by political and military expediency from favoring war with France. He wrote to Joel Barlow,[171] after full knowledge of Napoleon’s conduct, that “in the event of a pacification with Great Britain the full tide of indignation with which the public mind here is boiling will be directed against France, if not obviated by a due reparation of her wrongs; war will be called for by the nation almost _unâ voce_.”