ingenuity Canning would defend a threatened vote against those Orders in Council of which he had been so long the champion.[219] “For these Orders in Council,” he said, “so far as he had been connected with their adoption, he was ready to take his full share of responsibility. What orders were truly meant? Why, they were the Orders in Council which, until he had heard the speech of the right honorable gentleman (Mr. Rose), he had always looked upon as retaliatory upon the enemy; which had been so understood in every instance, until the Vice-President of the Board of Trade, in contradiction to every statement which had hitherto been given to the public on the subject,--in contradiction to every document in office respecting these Orders,--in contradiction to every communication which he (Mr. Canning) had made, and every despatch written in his official character explanatory of their nature and spirit,--in contradiction to every speech which had been made in Parliament in defence of them,--had thought proper to represent them not as measures retaliatory upon the enemy, but as measures of self-defence. Self-defence, but not retaliatory!... If they were to be in no larger a sense retaliatory than as self-defensive,--if they were not to retaliate directly against the enemy, but to be defensive against a rival in trade,--if they were not to be belligerent measures, but purely defensive,--then all the arguments by which they had hitherto been supported would fail to apply.” Again and again Canning returned to this slip of the tongue by which Rose had given him pretext for turning against the Administration. “If at any time it should appear that these orders did not retort his aggression upon the enemy, but operated solely to the injury of the neutrals; if even the British government should appear to have interfered to relieve their pressure upon the enemy,--they would stand upon far different principles than those upon which he had supported them, and would in his opinion be very proper objects for examination and revision.... Were he called upon to state his opinion of what he conceived the Orders in Council should be, he could not do it more fully than by saying that they were most perfect as they approached toward a belligerent measure and receded from a commercial one. Let them have for their object the pressure and distress of the enemy, for the purpose of compelling him to listen to terms of accommodation, and not for the narrow policy of wringing temporary concessions from him with which they might go to his own market.”