Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 4.djvu/329

1808. words. The more vehement they became, the more obstinately their opponents persevered in holding them to this single point.

Yet the issue the Whigs wished to make was fairly met. Government showed remarkable candor in avowing the commercial object of the so-called retaliation. Admitting that even if Napoleon had issued no decrees England might have been obliged to enforce the Rule of 1756, Spencer Perceval declared that after the Berlin Decree a much stronger measure was necessary in order to protect British commerce. Lord Bathurst, Lord Hawkesbury, and Lord Castlereagh took the same tone. Their argument, carried to its ultimate conclusion, implied that Great Britain might lawfully forbid every other nation to trade with any country that imposed a prohibitive duty on British manufactures. Not even a state of war seemed essential to the soundness of the principle.

Already Lord Grenville had declared that "this principle of forcing trade into our markets would have disgraced the darkest ages of monopoly," when March 8 Lord Erskine spoke in support of a series of resolutions condemning the orders as contrary to the Constitution, the laws of the realm, and the rights of nations, and a violation of Magna Charta. With especial energy he declaimed against Perceval's favorite doctrine of retaliation as applied to the protection of British commerce. Lord Erskine, like Lord Grenville, never spared epithets.