The next morning, January 19, Parliament met, and American affairs were instantly made the subject of attack on ministers. In the Lords, Grenville declared that “the insulting and sophistical answer” returned by Canning to the American offer, persuaded him “that the intention of the King’s government is to drive things to extremity with America.” Lord Hawkesbury the Home Secretary, who had succeeded his father as Earl of Liverpool, replied in the old tone that ministers felt no disposition to irritate America, but that national dignity and importance were not to be sacrificed “at the very moment when America seemed so blind to her own interest, and betrayed so decided a partiality in favor of France.”[42] In the Commons, Whitbread and the other leaders of opposition echoed the attack, but Canning did not echo the reply. “The same infatuation,” said Whitbread,[43] “seems now to prevail that existed in the time of the late American war. There were the same taunts, the same sarcasms, and the same assertions that America cannot do without us.” Only a few weeks earlier or later, Canning would have met such criticisms in his loftiest tone, and with more reason than in 1807 or in 1808. In his desk were Erskine’s latest despatches, announcing impending war in every accent of defiance and in many varieties of italics and capital letters; fresh in his memory was his own official pledge that “no step which could even mistakenly be construed into concession should be taken” while a doubt existed whether America had wholly abandoned her attempt at commercial restriction. Yet instead of maintaining England’s authority at the moment when for the first time it was threatened by the United States, Canning became apologetic and yielding. Repeating the commonplaces of the newspapers that America had sided with France, and even going so far as to assert, what he best knew to be an error, that the Orders in Council had not been the cause of the embargo, and “it was now a notorious fact that no such ground had been laid for the embargo;” after declaring the exclusion of British war-vessels from American harbors to have been the chief obstacle to the compromise offered by America,--treading, with what seemed a very uncertain foot, among these slippery and ill-balanced stepping-stones, he reached the point where he meant to rest. The “Chesapeake” Proclamation, which excluded British war-ships from American harbors, being his chief grievance, any settlement which removed that grievance would be so far satisfactory; and for this reason the measures proposed in Campbell’s Report, though clothed in hostile language, might, if made known to the British government in amicable terms, have led to the acceptance of the compromise proposed, since they excluded French as well as English ships of war from American ports.