At the news of the awful tragedy at Copenhagen, Europe, gorged as for fifteen years she had been with varied horrors, shuddered from St. Petersburg to Cadiz. A long wail of pity and despair rose on the Continent, was echoed back from America, and found noble expression in the British Parliament. The attack upon the “Chesapeake” was a caress of affection compared with this bloody and brutal deed. As in 1804 Bonaparte--then only First Consul, but about to make himself a bastard Emperor--flung before the feet of Europe the bloody corpse of the Duc d’Enghien, so George Canning in 1807, about to meet Bonaparte on his own field with his own weapons, called the world to gaze at his handiwork in Copenhagen; and the world then contained but a single nation to which the fate of Copenhagen spoke in accents of direct and instant menace. The annihilation of Denmark left America almost the only neutral, as she had long been the only Republican State. In both characters her offences against Canning and Perceval, Castlereagh and Eldon, had been more serious than those of Denmark, and had roused to exasperation the temper of England. A single ship of the line, supported by one or two frigates, could without a moment’s notice repeat at New York the tragedy which had required a vast armament at Copenhagen; and the assault on the “Chesapeake” had given warning of what the British navy stood ready to do. Other emphatic omens were not wanting. About July 27--the day after Lord Gambier’s fleet sailed from the Downs, and the day when Monroe first saw in the newspapers an account of the “Leopard’s” attack on the “Chesapeake”--the American minister might have read a report made by a committee of the House of Commons on the commercial state of the West Indian Islands. The main evil, said the committee,[45] was the very unfavorable state of the foreign market, in which the British merchant formerly enjoyed nearly a monopoly. “The result of all their inquiries on this most important part of the subject has brought before their eyes one grand and primary evil from which all the others are easily to be deduced; namely, the facility of intercourse between the hostile colonies and Europe under the American neutral flag, by means of which not only the whole of their produce is carried to a market, but at charges little exceeding those of peace, while the British planter is burdened with all the inconvenience, risk, and expense resulting from a state of war.” To correct this evil, a blockade of the enemies’ colonies had been suggested; “and such a measure, if it could be strictly enforced, would undoubtedly afford relief to our export trade. But a measure of more permanent and certain advantage would be the enforcement of those restrictions on the trade between neutrals and the enemies’ colonies which were formerly maintained by Great Britain, and from the relaxation of which the enemies’ colonies obtain indirectly, during war, all the advantages of peace.”