“He began by complaining to me of what, for that matter, I knew already,--that a considerable number of new American ships, going to Spain and Portugal and returning, had been very recently burned by our frigates, and that others had been destroyed on the voyage even to England. The Secretary of State on this occasion, and with bitterness, renewed to me his complaints and those of the Government and of Congress, whose discontent he represented as having reached its height. I am, Monseigneur, as weary of hearing these eternal grumblings as of having to trouble you with them; but I think myself obliged to transmit to you whatever is said of an official character. Mr. Monroe averred that for his part, as Secretary of State, since he had never ceased down to this moment to maintain the repeal of our decrees, he found himself suddenly compromised in the face of his friends and of the public, and he must admit he had almost lost the hope of an arrangement with us. Such were, Monseigneur, his expressions; after which he retraced to me the system that the Administration had never ceased pursuing with constancy and firmness for eighteen months, and the last act of which had at length been what I had seen, a formal declaration of war against England by the republic,--‘at a moment,’ he added, ‘when it feels ill-assured of France, and is so ill-treated by her.’ He finished at last by saying to me, with a sort of political coquetry, that he was among his friends obliged to admit that they had been too weak toward France, and that perhaps they had been too quick in regard to England.” Serurier wrote that the bitterness against France was really such as would have caused a declaration of war against her as well as against England, if the Administration had not stopped the movement in Congress; nothing prevented the double war except the military difficulties in its way. At the moment when, June 23, the French minister was writing in these terms to the Duc de Bassano, the House of Representatives was considering the action he feared. Cheves had proposed to modify the non-importation,--the Federalists moved to repeal it altogether; and although they were defeated that day in committee, when Cheves’s bill came before the House no less a champion than Calhoun rose to advocate the reopening of trade.