Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 4.djvu/342

332 thanks to the slanders of Pickering and the Federalists, stood before England in the attitude of a foiled cutthroat, at the moment when by his order the American minister in London came to the British Foreign Office with a request that the Orders in Council should be withdrawn.

"That the Orders in Council did not produce the embargo, that they were not substantially known in America when the embargo took place," was the burden of Canning's and Castlereagh's constant charge against the United States government. Canning was one of six or eight men in the world who might with truth have said that they knew the orders to have produced the embargo. He alone could have proved it by publishing Erskine's official evidence; but he preferred to support Timothy Pickering and Barent Gardenier in persuading the world that Jefferson's acts were dictated from Paris, and that their only motive was the assassination of England. "Nor, sir, do I think," continued Canning before the whole House of Commons, "that the Orders in Council themselves could have produced any irritation in America. . . . Since the return of Mr. Rose no communication has been made by the American government in the form of complaint, or remonstrance, or irritation, or of any description whatever." With infinite industry the assertions of Pickering and