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,”[262] 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. “It is indeed quite astonishing,” he said,[263] “to hear the word ‘retaliation’ twisted and perverted in a manner equally repugnant to grammar and common-sense.... It is a new application of the term, that if A strikes me, I may retaliate by striking B.... I cannot, my Lords, conceive anything more preposterous and senseless than the idea of retaliation upon a neutral on whom the decree has never been executed, because it is only by its execution on him that we can be injured.” Erskine supported his positions by a long professional argument. Lord Chancellor Eldon replied by developing international law in a direction till then unexplored.[264] “I would beg the House to consider what is meant by the law of nations,” he began. “It is formed of an accumulation of the dicta of wise men in different ages, and applying to different circumstances, but none resembling in any respect such a state of things as at present exists in the face of the world. Indeed, none of the writers upon the subject of this law appear to have such a state in their contemplation. But yet nothing is to be found in their writings which does not fully warrant the right of self-defence and retaliation. Upon that right the present ministers acted in advising those Orders in Council, and upon the same right their predecessors issued the order of the 7th of January.”