Benns: British West India Carrying-Trade 167 
waived, or because it had failed seasonably to accept an offer 
which it had afterwards been willing to embrace/^ 
Armed with these instructions, McLane began a series of 
personal conferences with Lord Aberdeen on November 13, 
1829, in the course of which he discovered that Great Britain 
considered it a serious ground of complaint that Adams' ad- 
ministration, after failing to embrace the terms offered to the 
United States in common with other nations, had resented a 
measure occasioned by its own wrong by a heavy and unparal- 
leled retaliation upon British colonial trade. The chief objec- 
tion, therefore, to a reopening of the colonial trade to the 
United States upon the terms of the British act of 1825 ap- 
peared to be the impracticability of a change in British policy 
at that time, without a previous alteration in the state of 
things in the United States. McLane's final conclusion was 
that no adjustment of the question could then be made which 
did not remove or obviate the British objection.^^ 
This desired result might be accomplished, he believed, by 
reverting to the state of things, in so far as respected Ameri- 
can colonial regulations, which had existed at the date of the 
British act of 1825, and by then doing by legislation what 
ought to have been done at that time.^® Accordingly, after 
informing the British Government that the claims advanced 
in justification of the omission of the United States to embrace 
the offers of Great Britain had been abandoned by those who 
held them and had received no sanction from the* American 
people, he announced the readiness and desire of the American 
Government under Jackson to comply with the conditions of 
the act of 1825.^^ He signified to Lord Aberdeen his willing- 
ness to recommend that steps be taken to that end by the 
United States provided he could be assured that such measures 
would be immediately followed by a revocation of the British 
order in council and the extension to the United States of the 
advantages of the act of Parliament of 1825. On this question 
Lord Aberdeen declined to commit himself until the proposi- 
tion had been submitted to the British Cabinet.^^ 
At the end of a month of verbal conferences the American 
Letter from Jackson to Republican members of the New York legislature, in 
Niles" Register, XLII, 88, 39. 
Senate Docs., 22 Cong., 1 Sess., Ill, No. 118, p. 2. 
^^Ihid., 3 . 
Ibid., 21 Cong., 2 Sess., I, No. 20, p. 50. 
^^Ihid., 22 Cong., 1 Sess., Ill, No. 118, p. 3. 
