If the honourable gentleman (M. Whitbread) appeared ready to make greater sacrifices, it was because he appeared to set a less value on things to be given un. The honourable gentleman was ready to part with diamonds, but when parting with them, it was because he considered them as counterfeits and pebbles. Feeling, therefore, as much disposition as the honourable gentleman to make eyery possible sacrifice for peace and friendship, he yet differed materially from him in the value of those objects that were to be sacrificed. He thought the right honourable secretary (Mr. Canning) stood upon advantage ground, as we have now tried what America can do against our trade: it was not yet destroyed, notwithstanding the many predictions of this sort which had been made. He agreed with the honourable gentleman, that of the three important questions which had been lately dis cussed, this was beyond comparison the most important; but he thought it surprising that when it was recollected that the determination of the House last session was taken in consequence of a most patient and laborious investiga tion for many weeks of an immense mass of evidence, yet the honourable gentleman had not quoted a single tittle of that evidence in support of his case. He had amused the House with a recapitulation of prophecies on one side of the House which he supposed to have been falsified, and of predictions on the other which he conceived to have been accomplished; but yet he had not said a single word about the evidence. If the honourable gentleman supposed that any member of that House had undertaken to predict that the effect of the orders in council would be to bring France at the feet of England, to raise our revenues, and to increase our commerce, he must say that such predictions must have been made before he had the honour of a seat in that House, for he was sure he had never heard such a language sincero But when the honourable gentleman stated that the predictions of others respecting our commerce had been falsified, he should have stated what was the situation of our commerce at the time those orders were issued, and what it was at present. The honourable gentleman had assumed as a fact, that our commerce flou rished under the operation of the Berlin decree, and that it was only affected by our own orders in council. If he could have found any evidence to support that assumpVOL. II.-1809. ? Q.

tion, he should have pointed it out, for there was no point that so much engaged the attention of the House when this subject was under investigation, as what was the actual state of our commerce at the time, and how it had been affected by the Berlin decree. As the honourable gentleman had not read any evidence upon these points, he should be obliged to trouble the House, at some length, to shew them from the evidence, that it was not the orders in council, but it was the Berlin decree, which, from the moment it began to be acted on, affected more sensibly the commerce of this country. He then read the evidence of Mr. Hall, which the total stoppage of shipments from America, as soon as the news arrived of the capture and condemnation of the Horizon, in consequence of the Berlin decree having been begun to be acted upon. There was also evidence that in a very short time afterwards fortythree vessels were condemned in Holland, and that nearly at the same time similar captures and condemnations took place at all the ports on the Continent under the dominion of France. The honourable member, after collating and analysing the evidence respecting the order in council, drew this inference, that the enormous rise in the price of insurance in 1807 was to be solely attributed to the Berlin decrees. So notorious was their influence upon our trade, that many ships that were freighted for the continental ports were obliged to return and land their cargoes. The honourable member then read several passages from a periodical ork (The Edinburgh Review) to prove how industriously the intent of the orders in council had been misrepresented, and that the interruptions to our trade were very falsely charged upon these, when they were almost entirely owing to the principles of restriction and exclusion contained in the Berlin decrees. He deprecated this bold and flagitious imitation of the press of France. It resembled the bold impostures of the tyrant at the head of that empire-who could impudently assert, after the battle of Trafalgar, that the English had lost eighteen sail of the line-that the illustrious Palafox, of the noblest house of Arragon, was a coward and an upstart,—and, that instead of gaining a victory, the British troops were defeated by one third of their numbers at Corunna! Deeply did he regret that such a spirit should prevail among any class of men, and particularly persons not ordinarily gifted in this happy country. The effect of the order in council,

he contended, was not to prohibit the trade between America and Great Britain: that was completely done; first, by the non-importation act, next by the embargo. It would be in the recollection of the House, that the opponents of the orders in council represented this last measure as the consequence of our restrictions, but he believed that question was now pretty well settled. If the orders in council had not been carried into execution, we should have been rapidly supplanted in the American market. Such would have been the effect of the Berlin decree. He agreed with the honourable member that the greatness of this country was, in some measure, factitious; he disliked the word, and he would, therefore, rather say, that it depended on our commerce and manufactures. He could conceive no system better calculated to uphold it than that contained in the orders in council. He shewed, from history, that in the reign of Philip the Third of Spain, a decree, tantamount to our orders in council, had been issued by the States of Holland, and was then acquiesced in by all the neutral powers of Europe. He requested the honourable gentleman would not carry his liberality so far as to suppose, for the sake of his argument, that his country was in the wrong. The proposal offered by the United States was illusory and inoperative. On a former occasion their legislature prohibited all intercourse with France or her colonies, and yet nothing was more common than for vessels to clear out for the Spanish ports in Cuba or the island of St. Bartholomew, and under colour of these to proceed to the French Leeward Islands. If the orders in council were repealed, we should see vessels of America carry the productions of the Levant, and of the French colonies to France, and the countries under her influence. He maintained that there was nothing in the proposal of the American government to induce us to depart from the principle of our orders. It did not appear from it, that it was the wish of the American government to procure the complete revocation of the Berlin decree, but just so much of it as affected her own commerce. If France will act upon principles contrary to the received notions of free commerce, she has a right to expect that her orders will be eluded or opposed. The object of these was to destroy the maritime ascendency of England, and he lamented that America should have concurred, or at least acquiesced, in this design. The speech of the president to

the American legislature, he considered as an omen of a better disposition in the councils of that government. It went much further than the proposal contained in the instructions either to Mr. Pinkney or to Mr. Armstrong. He defended the letter of Mr. Canning to the first of those gentlemen. It did not, he was assured, produce that sen sation in the United States, that the honourable member represented. He would not, however, say that it might not, when the strictures passed upon it in this House should find their way to America. With respect to the assertion so often made, that the American embargo was the result of our orders in council, that was completely disproved by the letter of a distinguished member (Mr. Pickering), of the American legislature, which states, that in the course of the three days' debate on the subject, the fact had never been once mentioned. On the 17th of De cember our orders in council were unknown in America, and yet on the following day the president sent a message to Congress, recommending the imposition of the em bargo. The motion went in substance to repeal the orders in council, and he must therefore oppose it. He would frustrate the very object which the honourable member seemed so anxious to obtain.

Mr. A. Baring spoke in favour of the motion, but in a voice so very inaudible that it was with difficulty we could catch here and there a sentence which renders it impossible to give more than a few detached parts of his speech. The first circumstance that we were enabled to lay hold of was the loss this country had last year sustained in her exports and imports from and to America, and we understood him to state that in exports England alone had lost six millions and upwards; in imports, five millions; and if for Ireland and Scotland together were allowed two millions and a half, which he did not suppose to be an unreasonable estimate, the whole amount would be but little short of 14 millions. This loss, he said, had undoubtedly been felt more or less in every corner of the empire, but it had fallen with dreadful weight on our manufacturers in particular. Thousands of those unfortunate persons must inevitably have been in a state of starvation, had it not been for the generosity and humanity of their employers, who at the time they were deprived of their best market, gave them half employment rather than suffer them to be wholly, without

the means of subsistence, and thereby to become so many burthens on their several parishes. But even this liberal· conduct of the master manufacturers was in a great measure checked, for whilst they by the loss of our exports were deprived of a market for the manufactures they had on hand, they suffered in almost an equal proportion from the deficiency in our imports from America, for the raw material had become so scarce, and in consequence so high in price, that in many places it was not to be procured. This had been felt with peculiar hardship and severity in Manchester, where there had been during the last year, or the greatest part of it, only nine cotton mills in full employment-about thirty-one had half workand forty-four had been without any at all, and totally useless either to their owners or those dependent on them for bread. The honourable gentleman, from what we oc casionally heard, combated a great many of the arguments of the last speaker, relative to the effects which the orders in conncil had produced upon our commercial interests, upon most of which he appeared to differ completely from the deductions he had drawn. He (Mr. Baring), contended, that with respect to our trade, the Berlin decree had been a mere dead letter, and he would not allow the honourable gentleman who had just sat down, was warranted in the results which he had inferred from such parts of the evidence as he had then read, and which were unquestionably selected from the mass that had been laid before the House last session, for the purpose of diverting its attention from the chief point of the case which was this night intended to be submitted to the consideration of the House. The honourable gentleman who spoke last, had strenuously contended that the embargo had not taken place in consequence of the orders in council, because it appeard from the message of the president, Mr. Jefferson, to the Congress, that the orders in eouncil were not at all mentioned or alluded to. He thought, however, that honourable gentleman and others might be misled, by not attending to the dif ference between official communications and those which were not. The president of America might not have received official notice of the issuing the orders in council, but it was well known that an American newspaper had actually published the substance of those orders, before the meeting of congress, and that, notwithstanding there