s to the United States the celebrated Orders of January 7,
1807, and April 26, 1809. "I am to request you," ran his letter, "that
you will acquaint your Government that the Prince Regent's ministers
have taken _the earliest opportunity, after the resumption of the
Government_, to advise his Royal Highness to the adoption of a measure
grounded upon the document communicated by you to this office on the
20th ultimo;"[381] that is upon the Decree of April 28. No one
affected to believe that this had been framed at the date it bore.
"There was something so very much like fraud on the face of it," wrote
Russell, "that in several conversations which I have since had with
Lord Castlereagh, particularly at a dinner at the Lord Mayor's, when I
was placed next his lordship, I have taken care not to commit the
honor of my Government by attempting its vindication. When his
lordship called it a strange proceeding, a new specimen of French
diplomacy, a trick unworthy of a civilized government, I have merely
replied that the motives or good faith of the Government which issued
it, or the real time when it was issued, were of little importance as
to the effect which it ought to have here; that it was sufficient that
it contained a most precise and formal declaration that the Berlin and
Milan Decrees were revoked, in relation to America, from November 1,
1810."[382]

This was true; but the contention of the British Government had been
that the system of the Decrees was one whole; that its effect upon
America could not be dissociated from that upon continental neutral
states, where it was enforced under the guise of municipal
regulations; and that it must be revoked as a whole, in order to
impose the repeal of the Orders in Council. This position had been
reaffirmed in the recent Order of April 21. Opinion will therefore
differ as to the ministry's success in escaping, under the cover of
the new Decree, from the dilemma in which they were placed by the
irresistible agitation against the Orders in Council spreading through
the nation, and the necessity of avoiding war with the United States,
if possible, because of the affairs of the Peninsula. They made the
best of it by alleging, as it were, the spirit of the Order of April
21; the disposition "to take such measures as may tend to re-establish
the intercourse between neutral and belligerent nations upon its
accustomed principles." For this reason, while avowing explicitly that
the teno