No man of common-sense could charge England with want of courage, for if ever a nation had fought its way, England had a right to claim whatever credit such a career bestowed; but England lived in war, she knew its exact cost, and at that moment she could not afford it. The most bigoted Tory could see that if Napoleon succeeded in his coming attack on Russia, as he had hitherto succeeded in every war he had undertaken in Europe even when circumstances were less favorable, he would need only the aid of America to ruin beyond redemption the trade and finances of Great Britain. Little as Englishmen believed in the military capacity of the United States, they needed too much the markets and products of America to challenge war.
The gradual decline of the domineering tone which Canning had made fashionable offered a curious study in politics. In 1807 the affair of the “Little Belt” would have caused violent anger; in 1812 it created hardly a flurry. The Tory “Courier” talked wildly, but the “Times” took the matter with calmness; the Ministry showed no offence, and within a few weeks the affair was forgotten. Even after this irritation, the British public seemed pleased rather than angered to learn that Lord Wellesley had yielded complete apology and redress to America for the “Chesapeake” outrage. The commercial class for many months expected energetic retaliation by their government against the American Non-importation Act; but in September this idea was laid aside, and no one complained. Little by little the press took a defensive tone. In the place of threats the newspapers were filled with complaints. America was unfair, unreasonable, unjust; she called on England to admit that the French Decrees were repealed when in fact they were still in force; she threatened war; she hectored and bullied,—but the more dignified course required England to be temperate though firm.
Parliament met Jan. 7, 1812, and the Prince Regent’s speech was studiously moderate in its reference to the United States. In the Commons, January 8, Whitbread attacked ministers for their failure to conciliate America; and Spencer Perceval replied in a manner that could hardly have satisfied himself.
“He would allow,” he said,[214] “that a war with America would be an evil to Great Britain, but he also knew that such a war would be a greater evil to America. As an evil to America he was anxious to avert it; he looked upon America as accessory to the prosperity and welfare of Great Britain, and would be sorry to see her impoverished, crushed, or destroyed.... Sure he was that no one could construe those truly conciliatory dispositions of England into fear; but he was of the opinion that England, conscious of her own dignity, could bear more from America for peace’s sake than from any other Power on earth.”
This sentiment was the more significant because the latest news showed that England in the immediate future would be obliged to bear a great deal from America. The news became every day more and more alarming, and was reinforced by steadily increasing outcry from Birmingham, Liverpool, Nottingham, Hull, ending in a general agitation organized by active radicals, with Brougham at their head. So rapidly was one attack followed by another, that Perceval and his lieutenants—George Rose and James Stephen—could no longer carry their points by mere weight of office. The Marquess Wellesley, refusing to serve longer under Perceval, resigned from the Cabinet January 16, and no one felt confident that Perceval could supply his place. During more than a month negotiations continued without result, until, February 22, Lord Castlereagh received the appointment of Foreign Secretary.
During this interval the movement against the Orders in Council gained strength. In the Commons, February 13, another debate occurred when Whitbread, in a strong American speech, moved for the diplomatic correspondence with the United States, and was answered with some temper by Stephen and Perceval. Stephen went so far as to declare,—and whatever he declared he certainly believed,—that “nothing but the utmost aversion to a quarrel with America would have enabled this country to have borne so much. So far from having done anything to provoke a rupture with America, the strongest, most persevering, and almost even humiliating means had been employed to avoid it;”[215] but he would not surrender to her the carrying and coasting trade of Europe even to prevent a war. Perceval spoke more evasively than usual, defending his commercial system as one that had been begun by his Whig predecessors, and throwing the blame for its irregularities on Napoleon’s decrees; but although that day he was supposed to be in extreme peril of losing his majority, he closed his speech by declaring that sooner than yield to the repeal of the Orders in Council he would refuse share in any Administration. Alexander Baring answered that in this case war could hardly be avoided, and made an earnest appeal, founded on the distress of the manufacturing towns, in favor of the direct interference of Parliament to overrule the minister. Even William Wilberforce, whose speeches sometimes recalled those of Polonius, and whose hesitations generally marked the decline rather than the rise of a Ministry in power, felt himself constrained to say that “there was not at all times a sufficient attention in this country to the spirit of conciliation toward other countries, and particularly toward America. It would be well if persons in high situations in government had been more abundant in their civilities to that nation.”
Again, five days afterward, Baring attacked Perceval by an embarrassing motion on the subject of licenses. No such scandal as the license system had been known in England since the monopolies of the Tudors and Stuarts. Most of the trade between Great Britain and the Continent was conducted by the Board of Trade on one side and Napoleon on the other, under special licenses issued for the carriage of specified articles. In 1807 the number of such licenses amounted to sixteen hundred; in 1810 they reached eighteen thousand. Owing to practical difficulties and to Napoleon’s dislike, American vessels took few licenses. A nondescript class of so-called neutrals under the flags of Pappenberg, Kniphausen, and Varel, carrying double licenses and double sets of papers, served as the agents for this curious commerce which reeked with fraud and perjury. In the case of the “Æolus,” Aug. 8, 1810, the Court said: “It is a matter perfectly notorious that we are carrying on the trade of the whole world under simulated and disguised papers. The commerce of the world unavoidably assumes a disguise; these disguises we ourselves are under the necessity of employing, with simulation and dissimulation.” Dr. Joseph Phillimore, perhaps the highest authority on civil law in England, in two strong pamphlets[216] declared that ancient rules and practices had been rendered obsolete, so that the Admiralty Courts were no longer occupied with the law of nations, but only with the interpretation of licenses; and while the property of enemies was as invariably restored as formerly it had been condemned, the condemnation of true neutral property had become as much a matter of course as had been its restitution a few years before. No one, even among the sternest supporters of the Orders in Council, ventured to defend the licenses on any other ground than that of their necessity.
Baring’s motion called up Perceval again. “The only principle on which Government acted,” said he,[217] “was to secure to the natives of England that trade by means of licenses, the profits of which without them would devolve to the hands of aliens.” This admission, or avowal, seemed to yield the whole ground of complaint which America had taken; neither Perceval nor Rose ventured to defend the licenses as in themselves deserving support; they stood only by the system. Their attitude led to another and more famous debate, which added an interesting chapter to the history of England.
In the Lords, February 28, the Marquess of Lansdowne moved for a committee to consider the subject of the Orders in Council. Like all that Lord Lansdowne did, his speech was temperate and able; but his arguments were the same that have been so often repeated. Lord Bathurst, President of the Board of Trade, replied. Bathurst’s argument was singularly free from the faults of Perceval and Rose; and he went to the verge of destroying his own case by avowing that in the clamor raised about the Orders in Council no one could say what those orders were, or what would be the consequences of yielding to American demands. He was sure that France had suffered from the effect of the system, but he was not so certain that England had been also a sufferer, while he maintained that the licenses tended to diminish the spirit of perjury, and that the abandonment of licenses would only place an additional obstacle in the way of trade. “Were they to put restraints on the freedom of British commerce for the simple purpose of giving the trade of Europe to the Americans?” This avowal, like those made by Perceval and Stephen, seemed to concede the justice of American complaints; but perhaps it admitted only the reply made by Lord Holland, who said in plain words that the choice lay between the orders and war, and that he could not suppose the orders to be their Lordships’ preference. Lansdowne’s motion was rejected by a vote of one hundred and thirty-five to seventy-one.
In the Commons the great debate took place March 3, when Henry Brougham repeated Lansdowne’s motion for a committee, after a speech showing as much self-restraint as clearness and force. In reply, George Rose offered a general denial of the facts which Brougham alleged. He denied that the orders injured the British export trade; that the license system injured British shipping or increased perjury; or that the orders caused manufacturing distress. On all these points he arrayed statistics in his support; but toward the close of his speech he made a remark—such as had been made many times by every defender of the system—surrendering in effect the point in diplomatic dispute between England and the United States. “The honorable gentleman,” he said,[218] “had not been correct in calling these orders a system of retaliation; they were rather a system of self-defence, a plan to prevent the whole trade of the world from being snatched away from her.” He was followed by Alexander Baring, who condemned the policy which built up the shipping of France at the cost of American shipping, and manufactures in Massachusetts at the cost of British manufactures; and after Baring came James Stephen, who repeated his old arguments without essential change. Then toward midnight, after these four long, serious, statistical speeches, such as usually emptied the House, George Canning rose; and so keen was the interest and anxiety of the moment that more than four hundred members crowded in, curious to learn by what ingenuity Canning would defend a threatened vote against those Orders in Council of which he had been so long the champion.[219]