In the Lords, February 28, the Marquess of Lansdowne moved for a committee to consider the subject of the Orders in Council. Like all that Lord Lansdowne did, his speech was temperate and able; but his arguments were the same that have been so often repeated. Lord Bathurst, President of the Board of Trade, replied. Bathurst’s argument was singularly free from the faults of Perceval and Rose; and he went to the verge of destroying his own case by avowing that in the clamor raised about the Orders in Council no one could say what those orders were, or what would be the consequences of yielding to American demands. He was sure that France had suffered from the effect of the system, but he was not so certain that England had been also a sufferer, while he maintained that the licenses tended to diminish the spirit of perjury, and that the abandonment of licenses would only place an additional obstacle in the way of trade. “Were they to put restraints on the freedom of British commerce for the simple purpose of giving the trade of Europe to the Americans?” This avowal, like those made by Perceval and Stephen, seemed to concede the justice of American complaints; but perhaps it admitted only the reply made by Lord Holland, who said in plain words that the choice lay between the orders and war, and that he could not suppose the orders to be their Lordships’ preference. Lansdowne’s motion was rejected by a vote of one hundred and thirty-five to seventy-one. In the Commons the great debate took place March 3, when Henry Brougham repeated Lansdowne’s motion for a committee, after a speech showing as much self-restraint as clearness and force. In reply, George Rose offered a general denial of the facts which Brougham alleged. He denied that the orders injured the British export trade; that the license system injured British shipping or increased perjury; or that the orders caused manufacturing distress. On all these points he arrayed statistics in his support; but toward the close of his speech he made a remark--such as had been made many times by every defender of the system--surrendering in effect the point in diplomatic dispute between England and the United States. “The honorable gentleman,” he said,[218] “had not been correct in calling these orders a system of retaliation; they were rather a system of self-defence, a plan to prevent the whole trade of the world from being snatched away from her.” He was followed by Alexander Baring, who condemned the policy which built up the shipping of France at the cost of American shipping, and manufactures in Massachusetts at the cost of British manufactures; and after Baring came James Stephen, who repeated his old arguments without essential change. Then toward midnight, after these four long, serious, statistical speeches, such as usually emptied the House, George Canning rose; and so keen was the interest and anxiety of the moment that more than four hundred members crowded in, curious to learn by what