The impression of weakness in the ministry was increased by the energy with which the authors of the orders stood at bay in their defence. When Whitbread in the House of Commons renewed the attack, and the House, March 6, entered on the debate, James Stephen came forward as the champion of his own cause. Stephen’s speech,[53] published afterward as a pamphlet, was intended to be an official as well as a final answer to attacks against the orders, and was conclusive in regard to the scope and motives of Perceval’s scheme. Neither Canning nor Liverpool spoke with personal knowledge to be compared with that of Stephen. Canning in particular had nothing to do with the orders except as a subject of diplomatic evasion. Stephen, Perceval, and George Rose were the parents of commercial restriction, and knew best their own objects. With frankness creditable to him, but contrasting with the double-toned language of Perceval and Canning, Stephen always placed in the foreground the commercial objects he wanted and expected to attain. His speech of March 6, 1809, once more asserted, in language as positive as possible, that the orders had no other purpose than to stop the American trade with France because it threatened to supplant British trade. The doctrine of retaliation, or the object of retorting evils on France, had nothing to do with Stephen’s scheme. His words were clear, for like a true enthusiast he was wholly intent on the idea in which he thought safety depended. Canning also planted himself on advanced ground. The question, he said, was between England and France; not between England and America. On the principles of international law he had no defence to offer for the Orders in Council as between England and America. “He was willing to admit that it was not upon the poor pretence of the existing law of nations, but upon the extension of that law (an extension just and necessary), that his Majesty’s ministers were to rely, in the present instance, for justification.” This extension rested on the excuse that France had first discarded the law of nations; and America, in attempting to give to Great Britain the priority in wrong, had incurred this censure,--“that she had brought a false charge, and persisted in it.” In his opinion, the American offer to withdraw the embargo in favor of England and to enforce it against France, “was illusory; he might add, in the language of Mr. Madison, ‘it was insulting.’” Those who accused ministers of a disinclination to adopt pacific measures respecting America had lost sight of the facts. “We had rather gone too far than done too little. We twice offered to negotiate; yet the Non-importation Act was not revoked.”