Virginia Argus

Washington City, Aug. 20.

We have seen, in several prints, surprise expressed at the remoteness of the period of which Congress has been convoked. If, it is said, it was indispensably necessary to call Congress, why not sooner? If not so indispensably necessary, why call them at all?

The objection is plausible: Our ideas on the subject are these: It is known to all that an intimation is held out by the British government of an intention to retaliate on our non-intercourse act, if we should not have thought proper to construe our laws so as to require at the hands of France a revocation of the French decrees as they affect Britain as well as ourselves. We know not of what nature those retaliatory measures, if adopted, are to be; but the magnitude of the maritime force of Great Britain, and the preponderancy of its influence in the British Councils, suggest the probability of its being by a maritime war, or equivalent restrictions on our commerce. Who knows but a blockade of the whole coast of the United States may be resorted to? True, such a blockade was never yet heard of: but after what we have seen, there is no saying what we may not expect. If any such measures are to flow from our refusal to wage the war for Britain by requiring such a qualification for French edicts or commercial regulations as she desires, ought we not to be prepared to resist them, or retaliate on land? The Executive has no power, restricted (and properly restricted) as that department of our government is, to adopt any such course; it therefore has appeared to us very reasonable that Congress, the great and almost sole depositary of the power of the nation, should be on the spot about the time when the result of the deliberations of the British government on Mr. Foster's despatch narrating the result of his communications with our government: may have come to hand. Whether or not it was the object, it will be the effect of the President's proclamation, to convene Congress at this place within a few days of the date at which we may expect, if at all, to learn the nature of the threatened retaliation.—Nat. Intelligencer.