treasure? Are these the conditions on which we are to seek conciliation with America?

We have little doubt that the tone assumed by America is encouraged by speeches and writings on this side the water. We every day hear the orders in council stigmatized as illegal, impolitic, and equally injurious to ourselves and America. We hear them represented as inconsistent with the municipal laws of the realm; as contrary to the spirit and practice of the constitution; as violating the great charter, and as infringing the wholesome provisions of the navigation act. With all deference for the wisdom of our ancestors, we conceive that cases and circumstances may arise and have arisen, of which they could entertain no fore-knowledge, and against which they could make no provision. The measures of an uncontrolled despot, who regards no laws human or divine, can only be effectually opposed by retorting on himself the evils of his own injustice.' The wisdom of our ancestors was probably as sound and practical in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, as in any period of our history; and yet, with the advice of her Privy Council, she took precautions for the security of the kingdom, quite as strong, and certainly as unconstitutional, as our orders in council; for instance, when the Spaniards in 1589, the year after the destruction of their famous armada, were meditating a fresh descent upon England, the queen issued a proclamation, and sent monitory letters to her allies and neutrals, forbidding them to supply the enemy with grain and naval provisions, on penalty of forfeiting ships and goods. Notwithstanding this, the Hans towns fitted out sixty sail of vessels laden with corn and naval stores, which passed,' says Camden, on the north of Scotland, by the Orcades, Hebrides and Great Western Ocean, on the back side of Ireland, a long and dangerous passage, to avoid being intercepted in the channel by the queen's ships.' The queen's ships however did intercept them, not before a blockaded port, but on the high seas, and they were confiscated as good and lawful prize; yet the Englishmen of that day applauded the wisdom of the measures, and acknowledged the care and vigilance of the

queen.

6

The best answer to the charge of the impolicy of the orders in council is to look at their practical effects on the commerce of the neutral, the enemy, and on our own. We need no better criterion of the state of American commerce than the receipts of her treasury, because nine-tenths of her revenues are derivable from cus-` tom-house duties. Now it appears from the inaugural speech of Mr. Jefferson, delivered in 1805, that the receipts of the preceding year, ending September, 1804, amounted to 11 millions of dollars. In 1805 the revenues are represented in a flourishing state at 13 mil

lions. In 1806 they rose to 13 millions. In 1807 to 16, and in 1808 they were expected to mount up to 18 millions. We have not before us the receipts of 1809 and 1810, but in the latter of those two years Mr. Madison in his message of 1809, prepares Congress for a diminution; not from the peruicious effects of our orders in council, but from the suspension of exports, and the consequent decrease of importations,' that is to say, from their own embargo, their non-intercourse and non-importation laws. Yet in spite of the operations of these laws and the orders in council, the trade from England to the United States remained almost in the same The amount of our exports to that country in 1807, before the operation of the orders in council, was £7,921,120. In 1810, three years after the operation of the orders, they amounted to £7,813,317. Mr. Madison, after much lamentation of the ruinous effects of the system adopted by the belligerents against the American trade, states the receipts of the year 1811 at 13 millions. If the receipt of 13 millions in 1805 fulfilled the expectations' of Mr. Jefferson, we see no ground for the querulous wailings of Mr. Madison in 1811, with half a million more.

state.

We need not go far out of our way to see what the effects have been of the orders in council on the enemy. We have the testimony of Buonaparte's own ministers in the annual Exposé of the state of France, for the privatious and distress which are felt by all classes of the community on account of the almost total extinction of foreign commerce. In 1808, when the orders in council were in full operation, the Minister of the Interior is obliged to notice 'the almost absolute cessation of the maritime relations, and the many privations for the French merchants, manufacturers, and consumers.' We need not be told, indeed, that the French merchant, the manufacturer, and the agriculturist, are all reduced to the most ruinous and deplorable condition; that the capital of the first is totally unemployed, his ships rotting in port, and his warehouses empty; that the manufacturer has no vent for his goods, nor the farmer for his produce.-How is it possible to persist in asserting that the blockade of the continent has had no effect on the condition of the enemy, when we hear that his custom-house revenues have fallen from 60 millions of livres in 1807, to 18 millions in 1808, and still farther in 1809 to 11 millions, that is to say, to less than one fifth part of their amount before the orders in council took effect?-when we see this hater of all commerce, employed in calculating how many myriagrams of this article, and killograms of that, will pacify the clamours of the merchant, the mechanic, and the labourer? enacting penal statutes to force the cultivator of the soil to employ his land in endeavouring to raise certain products in a climate ungenial to their growth? to plant beet instead of corn,

and

and cotton, and tobacco, and indigo, where nature never intended them to grow?

The inference to be drawn from the statements advanced by the advocates of America, on this side the Atlantic, is nothing more nor less than this-that all the distresses of our manufacturing towns are entirely owing to the orders in council. The increase of the poor in Liverpool, the decrease in the demand for the pottery ware of Staffordshire, the riots at Nottingham, are all to be ascribed to the orders in council. As we profess nothing more than plain matter of fact dealing, we content ourselves with transcribing the return to an order of the House of Commons of the 16th of May, 1811, for the value of all imports into, and all exports from Great Britain, from 1805 to 1810 inclusive, ordered to be printed 18th February, 1812.

This return, in our opinion, speaks sufficiently for itself. The diminution in 1807, and particularly in the exports, was in no degree whatever owing to the orders in council, whose operation had not then taken effect; but is sufficiently explained, as Lord Sheffield observes, by the hostile proceedings of the United States in consequence of the President's violent proclamation, interdicting British ships of war from their ports, and the distrust which such a proceeding occasioned among our merchants here; to the peace of Tilsit, which concluded the disastrous campaign of the North; to the rupture with Denmark; the Russian declaration of war; the declaration of Prussia; the irruption of the French into Portugalall of which occurred in the course of the year 1807-yet with all these disasters, and the Berlin and Milan decrees to boot, interdicting the introduction of British commerce and manufactures from the shores of the Adriatic to the White Sea, the diminution in the real value of the exports scarcely exceeded £500,000. But we are told that the custom-house books are false and unworthy the least attention; that nobody is interested in their being correct; none re

sponsible

sponsible for any errors they may contain. Let us then turn to the amount of the customs actually received at the Treasury. The gross amount of those receipts in the five consecutive years was as under, exclusive of the war taxes:

So that the calamitous year of 1807 occasioned in the receipts of the customs of 1808 a diminution only of £358,929, while in the two following years an increase of more than a million each year took place.

We mean not to assert that the extraordinary increase of the value of imports and exports in the years 1809 and 1810 was owing to the orders in council; but we think that we shall be borne out in assuming that the orders in council have at least had no tendency to ruin our commerce or distress our manufacturers. That our manufacturers suffer distress is deeply to be lamented; but those who lead them to suppose that their distress arises from the orders in council grossly deceive them. So long as Buonaparte decrees that British produce and British manufactures,' wheresoever found and to whomsoever belonging,' shall be seized and confiscated, it would answer no good purpose to ourselves to revoke our Orders and remove every restriction. The orders in council might be right or wrong in point of belligerent policy; they might be right or wrong in point of inter-national justice: but it is utterly absurd, it is mere perverseness to contend that our passive acquiescence under the blockade decreed against our trade and manufactures would have been less injurious to them than even an imperfect, or otherwise questionable measure of retaliation.

Among other evils attributed to the orders in council, is the mass of fraud, forgery, and perjury connected with the licence trade. On. the subject of that trade we have had occasion, in a former number, to deliver a free opinion: and we must here repeat the objection we then stated to the filiation by which that trade is represented as the offspring of the orders in council. They have no ne cessary connection with each other. The licence trade may exist, and has existed, and does exist, wholly independent of those orders. The fraud and perjury with which it is accompanied existed in as great a degree or perhaps greater before the birth of these calumniated orders, and among the same class of men to which we be-lieve it is still principally confined, then known by the name of' neutralizing agents,' or as an indignant American calls them, No

nation scoundrels.' It is now principally carried on in the Baltic, where the orders have no operation.-Wherever it co-exists with the orders in council, it is not as a consequence of them; but in derogation to them. It complicates the process, obscures the principle, and brings into doubt the justice of the original orders: while it shares, in common with the other relaxations of those orders, and we think more justly than any of them, the fate of being thanklessly accepted by those for whose benefit it is professedly intended. If no relaxation had taken place in the orders in council of November, 1807, and no licences whatever had been granted, the effect of the naval power of Great Britain would have been felt by the enemy more severely, and might even have given a different turn to the war. We cannot but regret that the experiment was not tried upon the northern powers, by hermetically sealing the Baltic, and not suffering a single vessel of any description to pass or repass the Sleeve, which could effectually be done by a small squadron of frigates. A single season of such complete exclusion, would have brought Russia and Sweden to sue for our alliance; whereas, by the licence system, they have enjoyed all the advantages of carrying on, without restriction and without risk, a trade which to us has been a trade of mere necessity, discouraging to the increase of British shipping and to the growth of British seamen. Had the orders in council been rigidly carried into execution, had the licence system never existed, and had America, instead of thwarting, seconded the views of Great Britain, we believe indeed that 'the evils of his own injustice' would have been retorted on the enemy; and that neutral commerce would long ere this have been restored to its ancient footing.

2. We now proceed to the right of search. Grotius, Puffendorff, Vattel, and others, on whose opinions the practice of all the foreign courts of Europe has been founded, condemn, as lawful prize, any neutral ship resisting search, on the ground that such resistance alone affords a presumption of her being employed in an unfair trade. If a neutral were permitted to supply one of the belligerents with the means of carrying on the war, he would become to all intents and purposes a party in that war, and could have no just ground of complaint if treated as au enemy by the other party. But the fact of merchant vessels carrying articles contraband of war, can only be ascertained by visiting them. The inconvenience arising to any vessel, so searched, is no more than a momentary detention on her voyage; it extends only to an inspection of her papers, unless strong suspicions of fraud should appear.

The right of search for seamen is precisely of the same nature as that for goods contraband of war. It is an instruction, as ancient as the navy itself, to the commanders of his Majesty's ships, to search

VOL. VII. NO. XIII.

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