University of Virginia Library

On Article VIII, IX, and X.

These are articles which are known to have been long
wished and contemplated on the part of Great Britain, and
together with the justice and in many views the expediency to
Great Britain herself of the articles desired on our part, may
induce her to accede to the whole. The articles are in substance
the same with a project offered to the American administration
in the year 1800 by Mr. Liston, who appears to have
borrowed it from corresponding stipulations in the Convention

between the United States and France in the year—. The
project was at that time dropped, owing perhaps in part to
the change in the head of the Department of State, between
whom and Mr. Liston it had been discussed, and principally,
to the difficulty of combining with it proper stipulations
against British impressments on the high seas. Without
such an equivalent, the project had little to recommend it to
the United States. Considered by itself it was too the less
admissible as one of its articles, under some obscurity of expression,
was thought to favor the British pretension to impress
British seamen from American vessels on the high seas.

A copy of this document is inclosed, as it may be not
without use in shewing the ideas of the British Government at
that time; so far at least as its Minister here was an organ of
them.

The terms in which these articles are to be proposed, differ
but slightly from those in which they may be admitted. In
the former the delivery of deserters is confined to soldiers
and seamen, without requiring a delivery of officers, whose
desertion will not be from the service of their country; but
on account of offences for which it might sometimes be more
agreeable to the United States to be unbound to give them up
for trial and punishment. At the same time this consideration
ought not to be a bar to an arrangement, which in its
general character will be so important to the interests of the
United States.