A few weeks afterward Perceval and Castlereagh took office. One of their first acts set on foot a parliamentary inquiry into the state of West Indian commerce. The report of this committee, presented to the House July 27, was ordered to be printed August 8. August 10 the House voted to take it into consideration early in the next session; and four days afterward Parliament was prorogued, leaving ministers to deal at their leisure with the “Chesapeake” affair, the Danish fleet, and Napoleon’s attempts to exclude English manufactures and commerce from Europe. Napoleon’s Berlin Decree of Nov. 21, 1806, had remained till then almost a dead letter. The underwriters at Lloyds, alarmed at first by the seizures made under that decree, recovered courage between April and August, 1807, so far as to insure at low rates neutral vessels bound to Holland and Hamburg. This commerce attracted Napoleon’s notice. August 19 he threatened his brother Louis, King of Holland, to send thirty thousand troops into his kingdom if the ports were not shut;[58] August 24 he sent positive orders[59] that his decree of Berlin should be executed in Holland; and in the last days of August news reached London that a general seizure of neutral vessels had taken place at Amsterdam.[60] From that moment no ship could obtain insurance, and trade with the Continent ceased. Soon afterward the American ship “Horizon” was condemned by the French courts under the Berlin Decree, and no one could longer doubt that the favor hitherto extended to American commerce had also ceased. These dates were important, because upon them hung the popular defence of Perceval’s subsequent Orders in Council. No argument in favor of these orders carried so much weight in England as the assertion that America had acquiesced in Napoleon’s Berlin Decree. The President had in fact submitted to the announcement of Napoleon’s blockade, as he had submitted to Sir William Scott’s decisions, Lord Howick’s Order in Council, the blockade of New York, and the custom of impressment, without effectual protest; but the Berlin Decree was not enforced against American commerce until about Sept. 1, 1807, and no one in America knew of the enforcement, or could have acted upon it, before the British government took the law into its own hands. The month of September passed, and the British ministry was sufficiently busy with the bombardment of Copenhagen and the assault on the “Chesapeake,” without touching neutral trade; but October 1 Lord Castlereagh wrote a letter[61] to Perceval, urging retaliation upon France in order to make her feel that Napoleon’s anti-commercial system was useless, and in order to assert for future guidance the general principle that England would reject any peace which did not bring commerce with it. The idea presented by Castlereagh was clear and straightforward,--the double-or-quits of a gambler; and however open to the charge of ignorance or violence, it was not mean or dishonest.