The concession was immense, not only in its effect on legitimate American commerce and shipping, but also on the national character. America possessed certainly the right, which England had always exercised, of naturalizing foreign seamen in her service, and still more of employing such seamen without naturalization. In denying herself the practice she made a sacrifice much greater in material cost, and certainly not less in national character, than she ever made by tolerating impressments under protest. The impressments cost her about five hundred seamen a year, of whom only a fraction were citizens; of these such as were natives could in most cases obtain release on giving evidence of their citizenship, while five times the number of native British seamen annually deserted the British service for the American. Thus England was much the greater sufferer from the situation; and America preserved her rights by never for an instant admitting the British doctrine of impressment, and by retaining the ability to enforce at any moment her protest by war. All these advantages were lost by Monroe’s new scheme. Under the Act of 1813 America would save her citizens to whatever number they amounted, but she would do so by sacrificing her shipping, by abandoning the practice if not the right of employing and naturalizing British seamen, and by tacitly admitting the right of impressment so far as to surrender the use of undoubted national rights as an equivalent for it. Numbers of leading Republicans denounced the measure as feeble, mischievous, and unconstitutional. Only as an electioneering argument against the extreme Federalists, and as a means of satisfying discontented Republicans, was it likely to serve any good purpose; but the dangers of discord and the general apathy toward the war had become so evident as to make some concession necessary,--and thus it happened that with general approval the law received the President’s signature, and the next day the Twelfth Congress expired. With it expired President Madison’s first term of office, leaving the country more than ever distracted, and as little able to negotiate as to conquer. INDEX TO VOLS. I. AND II.