an efficient force on every
mile of it, and which outbreak, therefore, neither may be able to
suppress in a day, may take vengeance into its own hands, and without
even a remonstrance, and in the absence of any pressing or overruling
necessity may invade the territory of the other, would inevitably lead
to results equally to be deplored by both. When border collisions come
to receive the sanction or to be made on the authority of either
Government general war must be the inevitable result. While it is the
ardent desire of the United States to cultivate the relations of peace
with all nations and to fulfill all the duties of good neighborhood
toward those who possess territories adjoining their own, that very
desire would lead them to deny the right of any foreign power to invade
their boundary with an armed force. The correspondence between the two
Governments on this subject will at a future day of your session be
submitted to your consideration; and in the meantime I can not but
indulge the hope that the British Government will see the propriety of
renouncing as a rule of future action the precedent which has been set
in the affair at Schlosser.

I herewith submit the correspondence which has recently taken place
between the American minister at the Court of St. James, Mr. Stevenson,
and the minister of foreign affairs of that Government on the right
claimed by that Government to visit and detain vessels sailing under
the American flag and engaged in prosecuting lawful commerce in the
African seas. Our commercial interests in that region have experienced
considerable increase and have become an object of much importance, and
it is the duty of this Government to protect them against all improper
and vexatious interruption. However desirous the United States may
be for the suppression of the slave trade, they can not consent to
interpolations into the maritime code at the mere will and pleasure of
other governments. We deny the right of any such interpolation to any
one or all the nations of the earth without our consent. We claim to
have a voice in all amendments or alterations of that code, and when we
are given to understand, as in this instance, by a foreign government
that its treaties with other nations can not be executed without the
establishment and enforcement of new principles of maritime police, to
be applied without our consent, we must employ a language neither of
equivocal import or susceptible of miscon