Contempt, mingled with vague alarm, was at the bottom of England’s conduct toward America; and whatever the swarm of newspaper statesmen might say or think, the element of alarm was so great that the Tory ministers, although they might expect war, did not want it, and hoped to prevent it by the very boldness of their policy. Even Canning was cautious enough to prefer not to give America occasion for learning her strength. He meant to clip her wings only so far as she would submit to have her wings clipped; and he not only astonished but disgusted the over-zealous politicians who applauded Admiral Berkeley, by disavowing the admiral’s doctrines of international law and recalling the admiral himself. The war faction broke into a paroxysm of rage[53] when this decision became known, and for a time Canning seemed likely to be devoured by his own hounds, so vociferous was their outcry. Monroe and Pinkney were loud in praise of Canning’s and Perceval’s temperate and candid behavior.[54] Canning was obliged to defend himself, and under his promptings a long reply to his critics was written for the “Morning Post,”[55]--a newspaper version of the instructions carried by his special minister to Washington. He excused his treatment of Admiral Berkeley on the ground that lawyers recognized no right of search in national ships. The excuse was evidently feeble. The law, or at least the lawyers, of England had hitherto justified every act which the government had chosen to commit,--the seizure of the Spanish treasure-ships in 1804, accompanied by the unnecessary destruction of hundreds of lives; the secret seizure of the larger part of American commerce in 1805, by collusion with the Admiralty judges; the paper blockade of Charles James Fox in 1806; the Order in Council of January, 1807, by which Lord Howick cut off another main branch of neutral commerce with which England had no legal right to interfere; finally, the lawyers justified the bombardment of Copenhagen as an act of necessary defence, and were about to justify a general control of all neutral commerce as an act of retaliation. To suppose that law so elastic, or lawyers with minds so fertile, could discover no warrant for Berkeley’s act was preposterous. To neutral commerce England had no legal right; yet she took it, and her lawyers invented a title. To her citizens and seamen she actually had a legal right, recognized by every court in Christendom; and if after a fair demand on the neutral government she found that her right could be satisfied only by violating neutral jurisdiction, the lawyers, in view of all their other decisions, must hold that such violation was a matter of expediency and not of law. Canning’s critics in reply to his assertion that the lawyers would recognize no right of search in national ships, could fairly say that he was alone to blame,--he should have ordered them to find it. George Canning could not seriously