It is true that the American traders sought every opportunity of evading these orders and decrees and continuing the most profitable trade America had ever known. For instance, Britain forbade all trading directly between France, Holland, Spain, and their colonies in order to cut off supplies. In order to evade this, an American captain would take a cargo in these colonies, sail to some American port, enter his cargo, and immediately clear with the same, without really unloading. He was entitled to a drawback of the duties he had paid. Having now broken his voyage, as he claimed, he sailed to a French or Spanish port without danger of violating the British orders. The British admiralty courts soon declared that this was an evasion; that there had been in reality no "broken voyage." Then American traders began the practice of really landing the goods in some American port, while the vessel was overhauled and repaired, then continuing the voyage, after reloading. The British courts conceded this to be a broken voyage. In 1805, so ample were the supplies furnished France and Spain by this method of evading the law, that the British court reversed its former opinion. A large number of seizures followed. To cover the entire continental coast, a paper blockade was declared by Britain about the same time. The Administration could no longer continue its policy of forbearance. Negotiation had failed. Retaliation was the only method left. Jefferson, the father of his people, was a warrior neither by nature nor practice. A foreign war meant to him the disarrangement of domestic affairs, interference with domestic development, and the accumulation of a debt which must fall in the last analysis upon the common people, the least able to bear it. To a correspondent he expressed his desire to avoid war until the national debt was discharged, when the regular income would meet the expense of a war and so prevent a new debt and increased taxes. His policy of retrenchment, dictated by his love of the people, had reduced the army and navy and left the land without adequate means of defence. He further realised that war might bring undue national aggrandisement. The common defence must be undertaken by the Central Government. In the haste and the necessities of war, measures might be taken oppressive to the people and destructive of their individual rights, which would never be passed in the calm contemplations of peace. Reluctantly he was compelled to advise Congress to enter upon a system of total embargo on foreign trade, which might possibly avoid war and preserve the pattern of neutrality which had been set by the first President.