Macon’s bill No. 2 was the last of the annual legislative measures taken by Congress to counteract by commercial interest the encroachments of France and Great Britain. The first was the Partial Non-intercourse Act of April, 1806; the second was the Embargo Act with its supplements, dating from Dec. 22, 1807; the third was the Total Non-intercourse Act of March 1, 1809; and the fourth was Macon’s bill No. 2. Each year produced a new experiment; but the difference could be easily remembered, for after the climax of the embargo each successive annual enactment showed weakening faith in the policy, until Macon’s bill No. 2 marked the last stage toward the admitted failure of commercial restrictions as a substitute for war. Abandoning the pretence of direct resistance to France and England, this measure repealed the Non-intercourse Act of March 1, 1809, leaving commercial relations with all the world as free as ever before, but authorizing the President “in case either Great Britain or France shall, before the 3d day of March next, so revoke or modify her edicts as that they shall cease to violate the neutral commerce of the United States,” to prohibit intercourse with the nation which had not revoked its edicts. The objections to the bill were overpowering, for its effect was equivalent to alliance with England. Had the United States taken active part in the war against France, they could have done Napoleon no greater injury than by the passage of this Act, which invited Great Britain to control American commerce for her military purposes. On the other hand the bill conferred on the President a discretion dangerous, unconstitutional, and unnecessary,--a power once before conferred by the Non-intercourse Act of March 1, 1809, and then resulting in the mistakes of Erskine’s arrangement, which seemed warning enough against repeating the same risk. These objections were well understood and forcibly pointed out, while the arguments in support of the bill were melancholy in their admissions. The records of Congress could hardly parallel the disregard of dignity with which Taylor defended his bill in a tone that could have been endured only by an assembly lost to the habits of self-respect. His denunciation of war expressed party doctrine, and he harmed no one by repeating the time-worn moral drawn from Greece and Rome, the Persian millions, Philip of Macedon, Syracuse and Carthage,--as though the fate of warlike nations proved that they should have submitted to foreign outrage, or as though the world could show either arts or liberty except such as had sprung from the cradle of war; but feeling perhaps that classical authority proved too little or too much, he told the House frankly why those members who like himself opposed war found themselves unable to maintain the pledge of resistance they had given in imposing the embargo:--