Precisely on the Orders in Council Foster could offer no hope of concession or compromise. So far from withdrawing the orders, he was instructed to require that the United States should withdraw the Non-intercourse Act, under threat of retaliation; and he carried out his instructions to the letter. After protesting, July 2, against the seizure of West Florida, he wrote, July 3, a long protest against the non-importation.[40] His demand savored of Canning’s and Jackson’s diplomacy; but his arguments in its support were better calculated for effect, and his cry for justice claimed no little sympathy among men who shared in the opinion of Europe that France was the true object of attack, and that Napoleon’s overthrow, not the overthrow of England, was the necessary condition of restoring public order. Foster’s protest against including Fox’s blockade among the admittedly illegal Orders in Council, brought the argument to a delicate issue of law and fact. “In point of date,” he said, “the blockade of May, 1806, preceded the Berlin Decree; but it was a just and legal blockade, according to the established law of nations, because it was intended to be maintained, and was actually maintained, by an adequate force appointed to guard the whole coast described in the notification, and consequently to enforce the blockade.” In effect this argument conceded Madison’s principle; for the further difference between blockading a coast and blockading by name the several ports on a coast, was hardly worth a war; and the question whether an estuary, like the British Channel, the Baltic Sea, or Chesapeake Bay, could be best blockaded by a cruising or by a stationary squadron, or by both, called rather for naval than for legal opinion. Foster repudiated the principle of paper-blockades; and after showing that Fox’s blockade was defended only as far as it was meant to be legal, he made the further concession of admitting that since it had been merged in the Orders in Council, it existed only as a part of the orders; so that if the orders were repealed, England must either make Fox’s blockade effective, or abandon it. By this expedient, the issue was narrowed to the Orders in Council retaliatory on Bonaparte’s decrees, and intended to last only as long as those decrees lasted. Foster appealed to Napoleon’s public and official language to prove that those decrees were still in force, and therefore that the United States government could not, without making itself a party to Napoleon’s acts and principles, demand a withdrawal of the British Orders. If the orders were not to be withdrawn because they were illegal, they ought not to be withdrawn on the false excuse that Napoleon had withdrawn his decrees. Against such a demand England might reasonably protest:--