“If nothing more had been required from Great Britain than the repeal of our Orders in Council,” he said, “I should not have hesitated to declare the perfect readiness of this Government to fulfil that condition. On these terms the Government has always been sincerely disposed to repeal the Orders in Council. It appears, however, not only by the letter of the French minister, but by your explanation, that the repeal of the Orders in Council will not satisfy either the French or the American government. The British government is further required by the letter of the French minister to renounce those principles of blockade which the French government alleges to be new.... On the part of the American government, I understand you to require that Great Britain shall revoke her Order of Blockade of May, 1806.” Wellesley declined to entertain this demand. He appealed to the justice of America not to force an issue on such ground, and he protested that the Government retained an anxious solicitude to revoke the Orders in Council as soon as the Berlin and Milan Decrees should be effectually repealed, without conditions injurious to the maritime rights of Great Britain. To this declaration Pinkney replied, Jan. 14, 1811, in a letter[10] defending his own position and attacking the good faith of the British government. He began by defending the temper of his late remonstrances:-- “It would not have been very surprising nor very culpable, perhaps, if I had wholly forgotten to address myself to a spirit of conciliation which had met the most equitable claims with steady and unceasing repulsion; which had yielded nothing that could be denied, and had answered complaints of injury by multiplying their causes. With this forgetfulness, however, I am not chargeable; for against all the discouragements suggested by the past, I have acted still upon a presumption that the disposition to conciliate, so often professed, would finally be proved by some better evidence than a perseverance in oppressive novelties, as obviously incompatible with such a disposition in those who enforce them as in those whose patience they continue to exercise.” America, continued Pinkney, was not a party, either openly or covertly, to the French requisition. “What I have to request of your Lordship is that you will take our views and principles from our own mouths.” The rejoinder was not so convincing as it would have been had Pinkney wholly discarded French views; but on the point of Fox’s blockade, the American and the French demand was the same. Pinkney was obliged to show that the two identical conditions rested on different grounds. At some length he laid down the law as the United States understood it.