The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire 1793-1812, Vol II

Indications of embarrassment now begin to accumulate, but still, in January, 1808, we read: "Several ships from Holland have lately entered our harbors, and brought over large quantities of goods usually imported from Hamburg. This is a proof of the futility of Bonaparte's commercial speculations." [405 - Ibid., vol. xxiv. p. 611.] Russia had by this declared against Great Britain, causing a rise in all Russian produce; and the Embargo Act of the United States had just gone into operation. There is a vast falling off in the Baltic and American trade. In 1805 over eleven thousand ships had passed through the Sound, going and coming; in 1807 barely six thousand, and British ships are excluded from all but Swedish harbors. In August, 1808, the ports of Holland are opened for the export of Dutch butter, and two hundred bales of silk are allowed to be smuggled out, for which a bribe of six thousand guineas was extorted by some person in authority. [406 - Ibid., vol. xxvi. p. 11.] In 1809 a notice again occurs of the ports of Holland being opened by the king; and concurrently, West India produce, which has been for some months dull, is found more in demand and commanding good prices. [407 - Ibid., vol. xxvii. pp. 417, 641.] Malta is doing a famous business at the same time, and has become one of the greatest depots in the Mediterranean. [408 - Ibid., p. 135.]

The year 1809 was marked by a great, though temporary, revival of trade, due to several causes. Napoleon himself was detained during great part of the year in the heart of Austria, absorbed in one of his most doubtful contests with the empire; and in his absence trade with the North Sea ports went on almost as in time of peace. In the United States an eager British minister, of politics opposed to the party in power, had committed himself without due authority to an official statement to the government that the Orders in Council would be rescinded by June 10. The President, without waiting to hear further, removed the restrictions of the Non-Intercourse Act on that date; and accordingly, for some months there was free traffic and a very great interchange of goods between the United States and Great Britain. In South America, the withdrawal of the Portuguese court to Brazil and the uprising of Spain against Napoleon had resulted in throwing open the colonial ports to Great Britain; and an immense wave of speculative shipments, heavily employing the manufactories, was setting in that direction. In the Baltic, the czar was wearying of his engagements with France, and of the emperor's tergiversations; wearying too, of the opposition of his court and subjects. He adhered faithfully, indeed, to the letter of his bargain and refused admission to British ships: but he would not open his eyes to the fact that British commerce was being carried on in his ports by neutrals with British licenses. He had never promised to exclude neutrals, or forbid all export and import; and it was none of his business to pry behind the papers that covered transactions essential to his people. The imports to Great Britain of naval stores, mainly from the Baltic, more than doubled from 1808 to 1809, and were even greater the following year. [409 - Tooke's History of Prices, vol. i. pp. 300, 301.] Wool from Spain and silk from Italy experienced a similar rise. Even West India produce, so vigorously excluded from the Continent, shared the general advance; and there was a great, though feverish and unsound, hope of returning prosperity. It was evident that Napoleon's measures were meeting only partial success, and men were willing to believe that their failure lay in the nature of things,—in the impossibility of his attempt. They had yet to learn that persecution fails only when it is not, or cannot be, thorough and unrelenting.

Among the multiplied impediments to intercourse between nations, due first of all to the narrow ideas of commercial policy prevalent at that epoch, increased by the state of open maritime war or hostile exclusion existing between Great Britain and most of the continental countries, and further complicated by the continental blockade of Napoleon and the retaliatory orders of the British government, there arose an obscure but extensive usage of "licenses;" which served, though but partially, and in a wholly arbitrary manner, to remove some of the difficulties that prevented the exchange of commodities. A license, from its name, implies a prohibition which is intended to be removed in the particular case; and the license practice of the Napoleonic wars was for the most part not so much a system, as an aggregation of individual permissions to carry on a traffic forbidden by the existing laws of the authority granting them. The licenses were issued both by the British government and by Napoleon; and they were addressed, according to the character of the sway borne by one party or the other, either to the police of the seas, the armed cruisers, or to the customs authorities of the continental ports. It was generally admitted in Great Britain that the Board of Trade was actuated only by upright motives in its action, though the practice was vigorously attacked on many grounds,—chiefly in order to impugn the Orders in Council to which alone their origin was attributed; but in France the taint of court corruption, or favoritism, in the issue of licenses was clearly asserted. [410 - Salgues, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de la France, vol. viii. pp. 350-355. Mémoires de Marmont, due de Raguse, vol. iii. p. 365. Mémoires de Savary, due de Rovigo, vol. v. p. 115.]

The "License System," in the peculiar and extensive form to which the phrase was commonly applied, was adopted by the British government in 1808, [411 - Quarterly Review, May, 1811, p. 465.] immediately after the Orders in Council and the alliance of Russia with Napoleon. Licenses did not then first begin to be issued, nor were they then for the first time necessary; [412 - For instance, a license was necessary for a British subject to ship any articles to an enemy's port, though in a neutral vessel. In principle, licenses are essential to trade with an enemy. In 1805 and 1807 Orders in Council dispensed with the necessity of a license in particular instances; but even then merchants preferred to take out a license, because it cut short any questions raised by British cruisers, and especially by privateers. See Cobbett's Parl. Debates, vol. x. p. 924.] but then began the development which carried their numbers from two thousand six hundred and six in 1807, to over fifteen thousand in 1809 and over eighteen thousand in 1810. After the last year there was a rapid falling off, due, not to a change of system, but to the bitter experience that the license, which protected against a British cruiser, did not save the ship and cargo upon arrival in a port under Napoleon's control, when he had at last devoted his indomitable energy to the thorough enforcement of his decrees. During the years in which the practice flourished, it was principally to the Baltic ports that the licensed vessels went, though they also made their way to those of Holland, France, Spain, and other countries on the Continent. The trade to the British East and West Indies was confined to British vessels, as in time of profound peace.

The true origin of the later license trade is to be found in that supremacy and omnipresence of the British navy, which made it impossible for vessels under an enemy's flag to keep the sea. In order to employ their vessels, hostile owners transferred them to a neutral ownership, ordinarily by a fraudulent process which received the name of "neutralization." A neutralized ship remained the property of the hostile merchant; but, for a stipulated price, a neutral firm, who made this their regular business, gave their name as the owners and obtained from the authorities of the neutral country all the requisite papers and attestations by which the British cruisers, on searching, might be deceived. As a regular systematic business, fraudulent from beginning to end, the practice first arose during the war of the American Revolution, in 1780, when Holland became a party to the war, having a large mercantile tonnage with very inadequate means of protecting it. At that time a firm established itself in Embden, on the Prussian side of the Ems, which divides Prussia from Holland, and within the two years that remained of the war "neutralized," under Prussian flags, a hundred thousand tons of foreign shipping, besides cargoes to an immense value for those days. In the wars of Napoleon it was the fate of Holland to be again dragged in the wake of France, and the same practice of neutralization, supported by false oaths and false papers, again sprang up and flourished extensively in the Prussian province of East Friesland,—Prussia carefully maintaining her neutrality from 1795 to the unfortunate Jena campaign of 1806.

In the year 1806 it was asserted that there were upwards of three thousand sail belonging to merchants of Holland, France, and Spain navigating under the Prussian flag; and the practice doubtless was not confined to Prussia. "It is notorious," wrote Lord Howick, the British foreign minister, "that the coasting trade of the enemy is carried on not only by neutral ships but by the shameful misconduct of neutral merchants, who lend their names for a small percentage, not only to cover the goods, but in numberless instances to mask the ships of the enemy." [413 - Cobbett's Parl. Debates, vol. x. p. 406.] The fact becoming known, British cruisers, when meeting a valuable ship with Prussian papers, were apt to take the chance of her being condemned and send her in; but even in British ports and admiralty courts the neutralizing agent was prepared to cover his transaction. The captain and crew of the detained vessel were all carefully instructed and prepared to swear to the falsehoods, which were attested by equally false papers sworn to before Prussian judges. To this trade, it was alleged, France owed the power to obtain naval stores despite the British blockade of her arsenals. The frauds recoiled in a curious way on the head of Prussia; for, in the later stage of the Jena campaign, the neutralized ships supplied French magazines in the Baltic ports, the French hospitals at Lubeck, and the army that besieged Dantzic. The capture of vessels, the character of whose papers was suspected, served to swell the cry against Great Britain for violating neutral rights, induced greater severity in the British naval measures, and so directly contributed to the Berlin Decree and the Orders in Council. [414 - For an interesting account of the neutralizing trade, see Naval Chronicle, vol. xxxi. pp. 288-295, and vol. xxxii. p. 119. On the License System, the Parliamentary Debates (table of contents), and the Quarterly Review of May, 1811, may be consulted.]

Thus had stood the neutralizing trade toward the end of 1805. After Napoleon had finally abandoned all thought of invading England, the victorious campaign of Austerlitz and the peace of Presburg, extending by conquest the boundaries of the empire, extended also the sweep of those municipal regulations, already in force, which excluded British goods from French territory. Early in 1806, beguiling Prussia into hostilities with Great Britain through the occupation of Hanover, the emperor compassed also the closure of the great German rivers. Peace was indeed soon restored; but the Jena campaign, quickly following, delivered Prussia, bound hand and foot, to Napoleon's dictates. In the summer of 1807 the Peace of Tilsit united the empires of the East and West in a common exclusion of British trade, to which Prussia could not but accede. Great Britain thus found herself face to face with no mere municipal regulations of one or two countries, but with a great political combination aiming at her destruction through the commerce which was her life. Nor was this combination merely one of those unfriendly acts which seeks its end by peaceful means, like the Non-Intercourse Acts of America. The British cabinet was perfectly informed that the minor states were to be coerced, by direct military force, into concurrence with the commercial policy of France and Russia,—a concurrence essential to its success.

It was necessary for Great Britain to meet this threatening conjunction, with such measures as should reduce the proposed injury to an amount possible for her to bear, until the inevitable revulsion came. She found ready to her hand the immense unprincipled system of neutralized vessels, and by means of them and of veritable neutrals she proposed to maintain her trade with the Continent. To do so, without reversing the general lines of her policy, as laid down in the Orders in Council, it was necessary to supply each neutral employed with a clear and unmistakable paper, which would insure beyond peradventure the respect of British cruisers for a class of vessels they had been accustomed to regard with suspicion. It would not do that a ship engaged in maintaining a British trade that was in great danger of extinction should be stopped by their own cruisers. The wording of the licenses was therefore emphatically sweeping and forcible. They protected against detention the vessel carrying one, whatever the flag she flew (the French flag alone being excepted), and directed that "the vessel shall be allowed to proceed, notwithstanding all the documents which accompany the ship and cargo may represent the same to be destined to any neutral or hostile port, or to whomsoever such property may belong." [415 - Quarterly Review, May, 1811, p. 461. Lindsay's History of Merchant Shipping, vol. ii. p 316.] These broad provisions were necessary, for the flags flown, except that of the United States, were those of nations which had, willingly or under duress, entered the Continental System; and the papers, having to undergo the scrutiny of hostile agents at the ports of arrival, had to be falsified, or, as it was euphoniously called, "simulated," to deceive the customs officer, if zealous, or to give him, if lukewarm, fair ground for admitting the goods. The license protected against the British cruiser, which otherwise would have detained the vessel on the ground of her papers, intended to deceive the port officers. "The system of licenses," said an adverse petition, "renders it necessary for the ships employed to be provided with sets of forged, or, as they are termed, simulated papers." [416 - Petition of Hull merchants, 1812; Cobbett's Parl. Debates, vol. xxi. p. 979.] Of these, two sets were commonly carried, the paper, the wax for the seals, and other accompaniments being carefully imitated, and signatures of foreign rulers, as of Napoleon and of the President and Secretary of State of the United States, skilfully forged. [417 - Am. State Papers, vol. iii. p. 341.] The firms conducting this business made themselves known to the mercantile community by circular letters. [418 - Cobbett's Parliamentary Debates, vol. xxi. p. 1113.]

In this way large fleets of licensed vessels under the flags of Prussia, Denmark, Mecklenburg, Oldenburg, Kniphausen, and other almost unknown German principalities, as well as many American merchant ships, went yearly to the Baltic laden with British and colonial produce, and returned with the timber, hemp, tallow, and grain of the North. They entered St. Petersburg and every port in the Baltic, discharged, loaded with the return cargo, and then repaired to a common rendezvous; whence, when collected to the number of about five hundred, they sailed for Great Britain under convoy of ships of war, to protect them against the privateers that swarmed in the Sound and North Sea. [419 - Ross's Life of Admiral Saumarez, vol. ii. pp. 196, 241.] Crushed between England and France, the Danish seamen, who would not come into the licensed service of the former, had lost their livelihood and had turned in a body to privateering, in the practice of which they fell little short of piracy; [420 - In the years 1809 and 1810 one hundred and sixty American vessels alone were seized by Danish privateers. Only a part, however, were condemned. (Am. State Papers, vol. iii. p. 521.)] and French privateers also found the ground profitable for cruising.

It was to this disposition of the north countries, as well as to conciliate the United States, that was probably due the Order in Council of April 26, 1809; which, while preserving the spirit, and probably securing the advantages of those of November, 1807, nevertheless formally and in terms revoked the latter, except so far as expressly stated in the new edict. The constructive, or paper, blockade, which under the former orders extended to every port whence the British flag was excluded, was now narrowed down to the coasts of Holland, France, and so much of Italy as was under Napoleon's immediate dominion. The reasons assigned for this new measure were "the divers events which had taken place since the date of the former orders, affecting the relations between Great Britain and the territories of other powers." The Spanish peninsula, being now in open and general revolt against Napoleon, was of course exempted; and southern Italy, by its nearness to Malta and Sicily, one a possession and the other an ally of England, might more readily be supplied from them than by neutrals coming from a greater distance. The maintenance of the blockade of Holland was particularly favorable to British trade. By that means the great articles of continental consumption could reach Holland and France, direct, only by British license, which meant that they came from England; while, if carried from a neutral country to the German rivers, to the Hanse towns, or to the Baltic, as the new Order allowed them to be, they had to be brought thence to the regions more immediately under Napoleon's government by land carriage, which would so raise their price as not to conflict with the British licensed trade. Thus the condition of the suffering neutral populations was relieved, without loosening the pressure upon France; and some of the offence given to the neutral carriers was removed. Another advantage accrued to Great Britain from thus throwing open the trade to the Baltic to all neutrals; for the great demand and high prices of naval equipment would induce them to bring these to the British market and arsenals, in preference to other countries.

This Order was issued at the moment when the British minister at Washington was assuring the American government that the Orders in Council would be wholly withdrawn on the 10th of June following. [421 - Erskine's note to that effect was dated April 19, 1809.] At the same time the French and Austrians were drawing near to each other on the fields of Germany. On the 6th of April the Archduke Charles issued his address to the Austrian army, and on the 10th crossed the Inn, moving toward Bavaria. On the 12th Napoleon quitted Paris to place himself at the head of his troops, which had already preceded him, but were then scattered in different positions, in sore need of his directing hand. On the 17th he was in their midst. On the same day the first collision occurred with Davout's corps under the walls of Ratisbon. Five days of active manœuvring and hard fighting succeeded, ending with the battle of Eckmuhl; after which the Archduke, outgeneralled and defeated, fell back into Bohemia. On the 12th of May Vienna surrendered, and on the 13th Napoleon entered the Austrian capital for the second time in his career.

In the same eventful week, and on the very day of the battle of Eckmuhl, Sir Arthur Wellesley again landed at Lisbon to begin his memorable four years of command in the Peninsula. Napoleon had relinquished to Soult the pursuit of Sir John Moore, while still in mid-career; and after the embarkation of the British army from Coruña and the surrender of that city, January 16-26, 1809, the marshal was ordered to invade Portugal. After a difficult series of operations, Oporto was reached and stormed on the 29th of March; but Soult lacked the means to push further south. Wellesley, on his arrival, at once decided to march against him, in preference to attacking the French forces in Spain on the line of the Tagus. On the 12th of May, the same day that Vienna surrendered, the British troops crossed the Douro, Soult was forced to evacuate Oporto in haste, retreated to the northward, and re-entered Spain. The British general then returned with his army to the Tagus, and on the 27th of June advanced along that line into Spain. On the 28th of July he fought the battle of Talavera; but, though victorious, the failure of the Spanish troops to support him, their unreliable character as soldiers, and the want of provisions, compelled him to return at the end of August into Portugal, where he took up a position close to the frontier.

The French movements in Spain were rendered indecisive by lack of unity in the direction of the armies, due to the military incapacity of the king and the jealousies of the different marshals. The same early summer months were passed by Napoleon in a desperate struggle on the banks of the Danube, below Vienna. Though the capital had fallen, the Austrian army still remained, chastened but not subdued, and now confronted him on the north side of the stream under a general of a high order of merit, if inferior to the great emperor. To cross from the south to the north bank of the broad river, in the face of such a foe, was no light undertaking even for Napoleon. The first attempt began on the 20th of May; and during the two succeeding days the French army passed slowly across the insufficient bridges which alone could be thrown, for lack of proper material. During the 21st and 22d continued the strife, known in history as the battle of Essling; and on the latter day some sixty thousand French troops were in action with the Austrians, when the great bridge, joining the south shore to the island of Lobau in mid-stream, gave way before a freshet, which had already raised the waters of the Danube by fourteen feet. The supply of ammunition to the engaged troops ceased, and it therefore became impossible to retain the positions already gained. During the night of the 22d the corps on the north side were withdrawn into the island; and for the next six weeks Napoleon was untiringly occupied in providing materials for bridges which would be sure not to fail him. At last, when all was prepared, the army again crossed, and on the 6th of July was fought the memorable battle of Wagram. Terminating in the defeat of the Austrians, it was followed on the 12th by an armistice; and a definitive treaty of peace was ratified at Vienna on the 15th of October. Austria surrendered all her remaining sea-board on the Adriatic, besides portions of her interior territory, and again acceded to the prohibition of British goods of all kinds within her dominions.

A month before, September 17, 1809, peace had been concluded between Russia and Sweden; the latter ceding Finland and engaging to close her ports to all British ships, "with the exception of the importation of salt and colonial productions, which habit had rendered necessary to the people of Sweden." [422 - Annual Register, 1809, p. 726.] On the 6th of January Napoleon, less merciful than the czar, exacted a convention which allowed only the entry of salt, excluding explicitly the colonial produce permitted by the Russian treaty; in return for which he restored Pomerania to Sweden. [423 - Moniteur, Feb. 24, 1810.] Thus were formally closed to Great Britain all the northern ports through which, by the license trade, she had continued to pour her merchandise into the Continent, though in much diminished volume.

It now became Napoleon's great object to enforce the restrictions, which had thus been wrested from vanquished opponents in support of his continental policy, by increased personal vigilance and by urgently reiterated demands, for which he had an undeniable ground in the express terms of his treaties with the sea-board powers. Upon the Continent, except in the Spanish peninsula, the treaty of Vienna was followed by a peace of exhaustion, which lasted nearly three years. The emperor returned to Fontainebleau on the 26th of October, and at once began the dispositions from which he hoped the reduction of Great Britain, but which irresistibly led, step by step, to his own final overthrow. The French army was withdrawn from southern Germany, but gradually; remaining long enough in the various conquered or allied countries to ease the imperial treasury from the expense of their support, according to Napoleon's invariable policy. The evacuation was not completed until the first of June, 1810. A hundred thousand men, chiefly new levies, were directed on Spain, together with the Imperial Guard, the supposed precursor of the emperor himself; but the best of the troops, the hardened corps of Davout and Masséna, were reserved for northern Germany and the Dutch frontiers, to enforce the submission of the people to the continental blockade. Napoleon himself did not go to Spain, and that tedious war dragged wearily on, with greater or less vigor here or there, according to the qualities of the different leaders; but lacking the unity of aim, the concert of action, which nothing but the presence of a master spirit could insure among so many generals of equal rank, imbued with mutual jealousy, and each taxed with a burden that demanded his utmost strength. Around Lisbon, Wellington was preparing the lines of Torres Vedras, and thus striking deep into the soil of the Peninsula a grip from which all the armies of France could not shake him, so long as the navy of Great Britain stood at his back, securing his communications and his line of retreat; but of this Napoleon knew nothing.

It was above all things necessary to bring the Spanish war to an end, and the emperor was heartily weary of it; but still the Continental System constrained him. "Duroc assured me," writes Bourrienne, [424 - Mémoires, vol. ix. pp. 21-24.] "that the emperor had more than once shown regret at being engaged in the Spanish war; but since he had the English to fight there, no consideration could have induced him to abandon it, the more so as all that he was then doing was to defend the honor of the Continental System.... He said to Duroc one day, 'I no longer hold to Joseph being king of Spain, and he himself cares little about it. I would place there the first comer, if he could close his ports to the English.'" The military situation in Spain imperatively demanded his own presence; without it the war was interminable. The Spanish ulcer, as he himself aptly termed it, was draining away both men and money; and the seat of the trouble was at Lisbon, where the British sea power had at last found the place to set its fangs in his side and gnaw unceasingly. But Napoleon could not resolve either to withdraw from the contest or to superintend it in person. The Spaniards and Portuguese, in the prevailing anarchy, could contribute little, as consumers, to British commerce; whereas the north of Europe, from Holland to St. Petersburg, while yielding a nominal acquiescence, everywhere evaded the blockades with the connivance of their governments. Here, then, in his opinion, was the quarter to strike Great Britain; the Peninsula was to her but a drain of men and money, which the custom of northern and central Europe alone enabled her to endure. The emperor therefore decided to sustain both efforts, the peninsular war and the northern continental blockade; to divide his strength between the two, instead of combining it upon either; and to give his immediate attention to the North. Thus it was that the Sea Power of Great Britain, defying his efforts otherwise, forced him into the field of its own choosing, lured him, the great exemplar of concentrated effort, to scatter his forces, and led him along a path which at last gave no choice except retreat in discomfiture or advance to certain ruin.

Napoleon advanced. Since the Jena campaign he had occupied with French and Polish troops the fortresses of Glogau, Custrin, Stettin, and Dantzic. By these he controlled the Oder and the Vistula, and kept a constant rein upon Prussia, so as to exact the war indemnities she still owed, to check any movement upon her part, and to enforce the demands of his policy. Davout, the most severe and thorough of the French marshals, took command of these fortresses, as also of Hanover and of the Hanse towns, on which likewise imperial troops were quartered. At the mouth of the Ems his corps was in touch with that of Marshal Oudinot, which stretched thence along the frontiers of Holland to Belgium and Boulogne. Thus the whole sea-board from Boulogne to the Baltic was gripped by French divisions, which in any dispute or doubt powerfully supported the emperor's arguments and sustained the Continental System, both by actual interference and by the constant threat contained in their presence. These measures "were necessary," says M. Thiers [425 - Cons. et Empire (Forbes's Trans.), xii. 15.] "in order to compel the Hanse towns to renounce commercial intercourse with Great Britain, and to coerce Holland, which paid no more attention to the commercial blockade than if it had been governed by an English or a German prince. Even when the governments attempted to keep good faith the communities were little affected, and pursued a contraband trade which the most vigorous measures failed to prevent. Napoleon determined to conduct in person this kind of warfare."

Holland was the first victim. As has before been said, Louis Bonaparte strove continually to thwart the operation of the system. Napoleon now demanded a strict execution of the blockade, and for that purpose that the guard of the Dutch coasts and of the mouths of the rivers should be entrusted to French custom-house officers. [426 - Corr. de Nap., vol. xx. p. 235.] He also required that the American vessels which had entered Dutch ports under the king's permission should be confiscated. Louis, though willing to concede the former conditions and to exclude Americans and other neutrals thenceforward, could not bring himself to give up those that had entered under his own authority; but, having been induced to visit his brother in Paris in November, 1809, he was by threats and persuasion brought to yield every point demanded. It was during these interviews that Napoleon, giving way to one of those transports of passion which increased with him as years went by, again betrayed the fatal compulsion under which England held him, and the purposes already forming in his mind. "It is the English," he cried, "who have forced me to aggrandize myself unceasingly. [427 - Compare Metternich's Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 188.] But for them I would not have united Naples, Spain, Portugal to my empire. I have willed to struggle and to extend my coasts, in order to increase my resources. If they keep on, they will oblige me to join Holland to my shore lines, then the Hanse towns, finally Pomerania, and perhaps even Dantzic." Then he suggested that Louis should, by indirect means, convey to the British cabinet the impending danger of Napoleon's proceeding to these extremities, in the hopes that apprehension might induce it to offer terms of peace, in order to avert the union of Holland to the empire.

A Dutch banker, M. Labouchère, who had extensive relations with prominent houses, was accordingly dispatched, though without formal credentials, and opened the matter to the ministers; but the latter showed little interest. Whatever the nominal state of Holland, they said, it is really only a French dependency; and as for the extension of the Continental System, they expected no less than an increase of tyranny with the increase of the emperor's sway. Louis was then sent back to Holland, having further agreed to cede to France all his provinces west of the Rhine, and to line the coasts of the remainder with an army partly Dutch, partly French, but commanded by a French general. Overwhelmed with mortification, he cherished at times impotent thoughts of resistance, which issued only in insults to the French Chargé and in impediments thrown in the way of the French army of occupation and the customs officers. Finally, in June, 1810, a body of French troops having presented themselves before Harlem were denied entrance; and at about the same time a servant of the French embassy was mobbed at the Hague. Napoleon at once ordered Oudinot to enter, not only Harlem, but Amsterdam, with drums beating and colors flying, while the French corps to the north and south of Holland crossed the frontiers to support the army of occupation. On the first of July Louis signed his abdication, which was published on the 3d; by which time he had secretly left the kingdom for an unknown destination. On the 9th Holland was united to the empire by an imperial decree. The coveted American ships with their cargoes were sequestrated, and the large accumulations of colonial produce formed under Louis's lax blockade were made to contribute to the imperial treasury, by being admitted into France upon payment of a duty of fifty per cent. But, for this immediate benefit, the thrifty Hollanders were to pay by an unrelenting exclusion of trade, by the quartering of foreign troops, and by the conscription, both land and naval.

The empire now extended to the Ems; but still, with persevering cunning, smugglers and neutrals contrived to introduce tropical produce and British manufactures to some extent. Owing to the restrictions, indeed, the goods rose from fifty to a hundred per cent over the London prices, but still they came; and, in consequence at once of the British blockade of the French coast and of the emperor's jealous support of that blockade by his own decrees, the people of France had to pay far dearer than the other continental nations. [428 - Thiers, Cons. et Emp., Book xxxviii. p. 182.] Thus were Napoleon's objects doubly thwarted; for, while he aimed at breaking down Great Britain by exclusion from the rest of Europe, he also meant to make France, as the corner stone of his power, the most prosperous nation, and to secure for her the continental market which her rival was to lose. [429 - Corr. de Nap., vol. xxi. p. 70: "Mon principe est, La France avant tout." (Letter to viceroy of Italy.)] All foreign articles decreased in price in proportion as the distance from Paris increased. Before the union, coffee and sugar cost in his capital three and four times what they did in Holland. He now became unremitting and threatening in his representations to the Northern states. Exacting the last farthing of Prussia at one breath, with the next he offered to deduct from the debt the value of all licensed cargoes seized by her. He menaced Sweden with the reoccupation of Pomerania, if the great fleets under British license were admitted to Stralsund. It was indeed to the Northern and Baltic ports that four fifths of the licensed vessels went; only a small proportion sailed to the blockaded ports of France and Holland. [430 - Parl. Debates, vol. xxi. p. 1050; xxiii. p. 540.] By dint of urgent representations and the presence of the French troops, he contrived to have seized the greater part of a convoy of six hundred sail, which entered the Baltic in the summer of 1810; but which, being delayed by head winds, had not reached their ports in time to escape the movements of his troops. The Northern trade had taken on immense dimensions in 1809, when Napoleon was battling about Vienna and the governments were not under his eye; but this year he could make himself felt, and some forty million dollars' worth of British property was seized in the northern ports. [431 - Cobbett's Parl. Debates, vol. xxi. pp. 1056, 1117.] The blow seriously affected the already overstrained commercial system of Great Britain, and its results were shown by the fall in the number of licenses issued, from eighteen thousand in 1810 to seventy-five hundred in 1811.

The emperor went further. Deciding, after long consideration, that fifty per cent on the London prices represented the profits of smugglers of colonial goods, he determined to allow the introduction of the latter upon payment of duty to that extent. Characteristically unwilling to appear to take a step backward, he extended this permission only to produce not coming from British colonies; but it was understood, and officially intimated to the customs authorities, that the inquiry should not be rigorous. In this subterfuge, says M. Thiers, consisted the whole combination. [432 - The decree was also shrouded in secrecy, and its existence denied in the Moniteur (Cobbett's Pol. Register, xviii. p. 701). Napoleon wrote to the viceroy of Italy, Aug. 6, 1810: "You will receive a decree which I have just issued to regulate duties on colonial produce.... It is to be executed in Italy; it is secret and to be kept in your hands. You will therefore give orders in pursuance of this decree only by ministerial letters." (Corr., vol. xxi. p. 28.)] Having thus constituted a lawful variety of colonial products in the empire and in the subject countries, the emperor felt at liberty to execute one of those vast confiscations, which contributed so materially to his military chest. All collections of these goods existing within his reach were to be seized at the same time, and, if they had not been declared, should be condemned; if they had, should pay half their value, in money or in kind. "Thus it was hoped to seize everywhere at the same time, and to take for the treasury of Napoleon, or for that of his allies, the half in case of declaration, the whole in case of dissimulation. It can be conceived what terror would be caused to the numerous accomplices of British commerce." [433 - Thiers, Cons. et Empire, Book xxxviii. pp. 181-189.] This measure was established by a decree of August 5, 1810, and accepted by all the continental states, except Russia. The latter refused to go beyond her obligations by the treaty of Tilsit, and took the occasion to express her uneasiness at seeing the French troops gradually extending along the northern seas, and even as close to her own borders as Dantzic. The impossibility of cordial co-operation in the immense sacrifices demanded by the Continental System was clearly shown by this refusal; but by no less vigorous means could Great Britain be reached, and Napoleon could not recede. The decree was extended outside the boundaries of the empire, to any depot of colonial goods within four days' march of the frontiers, in Switzerland, in Germany, in Prussia, in the Hanse towns. Large sums of money were realized, and the government became a dealer in groceries when the payments were made in kind. The pressure of the French troops extended everywhere, and French flotillas cruised along the coasts of the North Sea, whether within the limits of the empire or not, in the mouths and along the course of the great rivers, to seal them more completely.

The decree of August 5 was carried out by the armed hand. "Wherever my troops are," wrote Napoleon to Prussia, "I suffer no English smuggling." On this ground French authorities executed the mandate in the Prussian port of Stettin, which was in the military occupation only of his troops. "All the ports of this once potent kingdom," says a contemporary magazine, "are filled with French soldiers, who seize and burn every article which can possibly have passed through British hands. Prussia is described as in a deplorable state, almost disorganized and no employment for industry." [434 - Monthly Magazine, Feb. 1811, vol. xxxi. p. 67.] Similar action was taken in the Hanse towns with no other justification. The king of Westphalia was ordered to withdraw his army from the northern part of the kingdom, that French soldiers might enter for the same purpose. In Switzerland the native authorities were permitted to act, but a French customs officer supervised. On the 18th of August the emperor directed the military occupation of the territory of Lubeck, Lauenburg, Hamburg, and all the west bank of the Elbe, for a length of fifty miles from its mouth; thence the line extended, at about the same distance from the sea, to Bremen, and thence to the frontiers of Holland, taking in the little states of Arenberg and Oldenburg. This military occupation was but the precursor of the annexation of these countries a few months later, which led to the first overt act of displeasure on the part of the czar. In justification of the step, one of a series which alienated Alexander and led up to the Russian war, was alleged the purpose of sustaining the continental blockade as the only means of destroying Great Britain. "General Morand," so read the orders, "is charged to take all necessary measures for the prevention of smuggling. For this purpose he will establish a first line of troops from Holstein to East-Frisia, and a second line in rear of the first." [435 - Corr. de Nap., vol. xxi. p. 58.]

On the 6th of October the viceroy of Italy was directed to occupy with Italian troops all the Italian cantons of Switzerland, and to sequestrate at once all colonial or other contraband merchandise. The order was accompanied with Napoleon's usual formula: "This ought to bring in several millions." Eugene was to explain that this was only a step similar to the occupation of northern Germany, that it did not invade the neutrality of Switzerland; and he was to be particularly careful that the emperor's hand did not appear. "That there should be a quarrel between you and Switzerland will do no harm." [436 - Corr. de Nap., vol. xxi. p. 224.] On the 19th of October Prussia was notified that, if she did not efficiently preclude the passage of British and colonial merchandise through her states, the French army would enter them; and the French minister was directed to leave Berlin if satisfaction was not given. [437 - Ibid., p. 268.]

Coincidently with these principal measures, the correspondence of Napoleon teems with orders, complaints, remonstrances, reprimands, queries, all showing how bent his mind was on the one purpose. Having turned over the command of the army in Portugal, directed against the British, to his ablest marshal, Masséna, he was concentrating his own energies on the blockade. At the same time, he occupied himself with stringent measures for protecting the industries of France in the European market. No man ever held more thoroughly than the emperor that element of the theory of protection, that the government can manage the business of the people better than themselves. His kingdom of Italy should not use Swiss nor German cottons; such goods must come only from France. [438 - Ibid., p. 77.] Italian raw silks shall go nowhere but to France, [439 - Ibid., pp. 70, 71.] and then only to Lyon. The whole export trade is in his hands by a system of licenses, [440 - Ibid., pp. 61, 62.] apparently borrowed from Great Britain, and which at this time he greatly extended. On the 25th of July an order was given that no ship could clear from a port of the empire for abroad without a license, signed by the emperor himself. On September 15 another decree was issued, [441 - Cobbett's Pol. Register, vol. xviii. pp. 704, 722.] allowing licensed vessels to sail from Hamburg, Bremen, and Lubeck for French ports. The license was to cost twelve dollars per ton, and was good only for the return voyage; but the vessel upon arriving in France was exempt from all question as to search by British cruisers, and might even land all her cargo in a British port,—in other words, she was excepted from the Berlin and Milan decrees. She could not, however, enter France with any British goods. Returning, she was to load with wines or other French produce, except grain or flour. Under the rival license systems new and curious methods of evasion grew up. Compelled to take French articles which were not wanted in Great Britain, as well as those that were, the former were put on board of so inferior a quality that they could be thrown into the sea without loss. At either end smuggling boats met the licensed vessel before entering port, and took from her forbidden articles. Ships of either nation, with foreign flag, and simulated papers, were to be seen in each other's ports. [442 - At Bordeaux licensed vessels were known to take on board wines and brandies for the British army in Portugal. (Mémoires du duc de Rovigo, vol. v. p. 60.)] The British, as a commercial people, were naturally willing to give a larger extension to this evasive trade; but the emperor would not grant anything that he thought could help his enemy, even though it benefited his own people. He believed, and rightly, that Great Britain was receiving more harm than France; he did not realize that, from her immense wealth and commercial aptitudes, she could endure the process longer.

The decree of August 5 admitted colonial goods, but excluded British manufactures. On the 19th of October was issued another edict, directing that all such manufactured goods, wherever found in the emperor's dominions, or even in countries in the mere military occupation of his troops, should be publicly burned. This was remorselessly done. "Persons who at this epoch were living in the interior of France can form no idea of the desolation which so savage a measure spread through countries accustomed to live by commerce. What a spectacle offered to peoples impoverished and lacking everything, to see the burning of articles the distribution of which would have been an alleviation to their sufferings!… What a means of attacking conquered peoples, to irritate their privations by the destruction of a number of articles of the first necessity!" [443 - Bourrienne, Mémoires, vol. viii. p. 261.] "The tampering with the mails," says Savary, the Minister of Police, "caused me to make some very sad reflections, and forced me to admit that we were not advancing toward tranquillity; and that, if the party against us were not yet formed, at least all sentiments were agreed, and that a single reverse would be enough to ruin us.... The more we disturbed the relations of Europe with England, the more, on all sides, men sought to draw together; and we remained with the odious epithets given to us by all those whom our measures thwarted." [444 - Mémoires du duc de Rovigo, vol. v. p. 66.] "There was already an understanding from one end of Europe to the other; every cabinet earnestly wished the overthrow of Napoleon, as the people also wished, with at least equal ardor, a state of things less stifling for their industry and trade. Despite the terror inspired by Napoleon's name, there was, side by side with that terror, that damnable Continental System which settled the question; it was necessary either to fight or to succumb. The people of the North were under an imperious necessity to break that yoke of lead, which made the custom house the prime agent of the governments of Europe." [445 - Mémoires de Bourrienne, vol. ix. p. 60.]

Russia had refused to accede to any steps beyond her engagements of Tilsit; but nowhere was discontent more profound, nowhere opposition more to be dreaded. While Napoleon was indisputably leading Great Britain into greater and greater embarrassment, by the depreciation of her manufactures and by the accumulations of unsalable sugars and coffees in her warehouses, he was also ruining the agriculture of Russia and the revenues of her nobles. Despite the relief afforded by the great licensed fleets, the Tilsit agreements so embarrassed trade, that hemp, which in 1802 was worth £32 the ton in London, had reached, in 1809, £118; [446 - Porter's Progress of the Nation, sect. iii. p. 205. In 1815, after Napoleon's overthrow, the price fell to £34.] and other products of the North rose in the same proportion. At the same time sixty thousand tons of coffee lay in the London warehouses, unsalable at sixpence the pound, while the price on the Continent was from four to five shillings, and in places even seven shillings. [447 - Tooke's Hist. of Prices, vol. i. p. 354.] No better proof of the efficacious co-working of Napoleon's system and of the British Orders can be offered; but the question was one of endurance. Which could stand such a strain longer? In Russia matters were fast approaching a climax. The czar felt the ground trembling under his feet; [448 - Souvenirs du duc de Vicence, vol. i. p. 88.] and, while he renewed his protestations of fidelity to Tilsit and Erfurt, he had to see Napoleon, by his licenses, evading the restrictions which he at the same time was pressing his ally to enforce more rigorously. In vain was the explanation offered that these licenses were but in furtherance of the restrictive system; that France was unloading her surplus products upon England, while refusing to receive aught but specie in return; and that in consequence the exchange was going more and more against Great Britain. The czar knew better; and the repeated and urgent letters of the emperor, becoming, as was the wont of Napoleon's requests, rather peremptory than entreating, to seize and confiscate all neutral ships entering Russian ports, fell on deaf ears. Alexander feared war; but he remembered his father's fate, and feared assassination more.

On the 10th of December, 1810, the emperor sent a message to the Senate announcing that he had annexed to the empire the Hanse towns, together with the region on the North Sea intervening between them and Holland, which had been as yet only in military occupation. In the same paper he expressed his intention of making a canal from the Elbe to Lubeck, by which the empire should be brought into direct water communication with the Baltic. This assurance was not calculated to ease the anxiety of the czar as to the eastward progress of France; but the measure was accompanied by a circumstance of personal affront, peculiarly dangerous to an alliance which depended chiefly upon the personal relations of two absolute sovereigns. The Grand Duke of Oldenburg, one of the countries thus unceremoniously annexed, was uncle to the czar; and though Napoleon proposed to indemnify him for the material loss, by territory taken in the interior of Germany, Alexander would not accept such satisfaction nor name any compensation that he would think adequate. He did not threaten war, but he refused to surrender his grievance, and reserved his right to retaliate an injury.

Meantime very serious results were developing, both in Great Britain and France, from the strained and abnormal conditions of commerce and the shocks caused by Napoleon's sudden and tremendous blows at credit, by his wide-spread confiscations, and by the Baltic seizures. The triple array of French troops that lined the shores of the Continent, re-enforced by the belt of British cruisers girding the coasts from the Ems to Bayonne, and from the Pyrenees to Orbitello, created a barrier which neither mercantile ingenuity nor popular want could longer evade to a degree that afforded any real measure of relief. The stolid, though as yet peaceable, measures of resistance taken by the United States had added seriously to the embarrassments of Great Britain, while rather furthering the policy of Napoleon, however contrary this was to the interests of France. During the years 1808 and 1809, the continuance of the embargo and of the non-intercourse acts, closing the North American market, coincided with the opening of the South American; and a great rush was made by the British mercantile community for the latter, although it was not, by the number of the inhabitants, nor by their wealth, nor by their habits of life, at all able to take the place of the consumers lost in Europe and North America. The goods sent out in great quantities were injudiciously chosen, as well as far in excess of the possible requirements; so they remained unsold, and for the most part uncared for and unhoused, on the beach in South American ports. The judgment of men seemed to become unhinged amid the gloom and perplexity of the time, and the frantic desire of each to save himself increased the confusion. Mere movement, however aimless or dangerous, is less intolerable than passive waiting.

The years 1809 and 1810 were consequently marked by an extensive movement in trade, which carried with it an appearance of prosperity in great part delusive. Immense imports were made from the Baltic, and from Italy, at the moment that Napoleon's coils were tightening around them; large shipments also to the North, to South America, and to the West Indies. In the United States only was there a transient period of solid transactions; for in May, 1810, the Non-Intercourse Act expired by its own limitations. A proviso, however, was immediately enacted that if, before the 3d of March, 1811, either Great Britain or France should recall their decrees so far as they affected the United States, the Act should, within three months of the revocation, revive against the power that maintained its edicts. Napoleon contrived to satisfy President Madison that his Berlin and Milan decrees were so recalled on the first of November; but Great Britain refused to consider the terms of the withdrawal satisfactory, as in truth they were not. The Order in Council of April 26, 1809, remained in force; and non-intercourse between the United States and Great Britain again obtained in February, 1811, and continued to the outbreak of the war in 1812.

Toward the end of 1810 the results of the various causes of trouble began to be heavily felt. Very scant returns coming from South America, the shippers were unable to discharge their debts to the manufacturers; and the embarrassments of the latter were felt by their workmen. From the West Indies the returns came in tropical produce, which could be realized only on the Continent, long since partly and now effectually closed. A succession of bad seasons had necessitated the importation of large quantities of grain from Holland and France, especially in 1809, when an abundant harvest there, coinciding with a very bad crop in England, induced Napoleon to enter upon his license system, and to authorize an export which in three years drained £10,000,000 in specie from the enemy. The freights to the licensed carriers, mostly neutrals or hostile, at least in name, were also paid in specie, which was thus taken out of the country; and there was a further drain of gold for the maintenance of the fleets in distant parts of the world and for the war in Spain, which now took the place of the former subsidies to allies as a consumer of British treasure. Thus arose a scarcity of specie. In November, 1810, the bankruptcies were two hundred and seventy-three, against one hundred and thirty of the same month a year before. Stoppages and compositions equalled in number half the traders of the kingdom. "The general failures have wonderfully affected manufactures, and want of confidence prevails between manufacturer and merchant." A month later "bankruptcies continue to increase, and confidence is nearly at an end. Neither gold nor silver is often to be seen. The trade of the manufacturing towns is at stand; and houses fail, not every day, but every hour. In the great sea-ports, the king's stores are full of all kinds of colonial produce which find no sale. Despondency is increased by the accounts from the Continent, which represent all the sea-ports and internal depots of trade to be full of French soldiers, who seize and burn every article which can possibly have passed through British hands." As the shadows darkened, murmurs grew louder and louder against the once popular [449 - Both Monroe and Pinkney, while ministers in London, informed the United States government that the extreme measures taken were popular. (Am. State Papers, vol. iii. pp. 188, 206.)] Orders in Council, to which all the evil was now attributed. The press changed its tone upon them, and a gradual agitation for their repeal grew up around the Opposition leaders; who, from the moment they lost power, had never ceased to inveigh against the retaliatory system framed by the ministry.

But while disaster was thus thickening about Great Britain, the case of France was worse. It was quite true, as the emperor said, that the people could live without sugar and coffee, and that necessity would in time find ways to produce many articles the import of which was denied her; but such warped applications of her industry and ingenuity, even when finally realized, could neither replace the loss of her natural channels of effort nor for any length of time cope with a nation, which, however momentarily shaken by unprecedented conditions, yet kept power continually to renew her strength by contact, through the sea, with new sources. That Great Britain would do this, her traditions and the habits of her people were the pledge; and the credit of the government bore witness to it through all. In the early part of 1811 a serious commercial crisis occurred in France, causing great anxiety to Napoleon. It was his particular wish to keep this corner-stone of the empire prosperous and contented under the immense demands made upon it for men, and the bitter sufferings entailed by the conscription. But prosperity was hard to secure with all the sea outlets of her manufactures and agriculture closed, with only a continental market, and that impoverished by the universal cessation of trade and further enfeebled by the exhausting demands made upon the peoples to support the armies quartered upon them. The British blockade of the French, Dutch, and Italian coasts forbade absolutely, except to the limited license trade, the water carriage of raw materials essential to manufactures, and prevented the export of French luxuries. "The state of France as it fell under my observation in 1807," wrote an American traveller, "exhibited a very different perspective" from that of Great Britain. "The effects of the loss of external trade were everywhere visible,—in the commercial cities half-deserted, and reduced to a state of inaction and gloom truly deplorable; in the inland towns, in which the populace is eminently wretched, and where I saw not one indication of improvement, but on the contrary numbers of edifices falling to ruin; on the high roads, where the infrequency of vehicles and travellers denoted but too strongly the decrease of internal consumption, and the languor of internal trade; and among the inhabitants of the country, particularly of the South, whose misery is extreme, in consequence of the exorbitant taxes, and of the want of outlet for their surplus produce. In 1807 the number of mendicants in the inland towns was almost incredible.... The fields were principally cultivated by women." [450 - Letter on the Genius and Disposition of the French Government; by an American lately returned from Europe, pp. 189-192. Baltimore, 1810. See also Metternich's Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 476, for the unhappiness of France.]

All the genius of Napoleon could not create demands when there was not means to gratify them, and the exquisite products of French taste and skill labored under the same disadvantage as coffee and sugar, than which they were even less necessary; men could dispense with them. Production, stimulated by an exaggerated protection, became for a time excessive and then ceased; even the exclusion of British manufactures and the frequent burnings could not secure the continental market to articles, the raw materials for which were made so dear by the sea blockade, or by the long land carriage. Levant cotton made its weary way on horse and mule back, from Turkey, through Illyria, to Trieste, and thence was duly forwarded to France; [451 - Mémoires du due de Raguse, vol. iii. p. 423. Marmont adds: "This was a powerful help to French industry during that time of suffering and misery."] but even so, when made into stuffs, found itself in competition with British cottons which were landed in Salonica, conveyed on horses and mules through Servia and Hungary into Vienna, and thence distributed over Germany. [452 - Tooke's History of Prices, vol. i. p. 311.] In the same manner was British colonial produce introduced. Despite all Napoleon's efforts, smuggling continued to compete with and undersell the fair trader, and his own licenses were used to evade his own decrees. [453 - In like manner, vessels with British licenses frequently slipped into French ports, especially with naval stores from the Baltic.] Many firms in Holland went out of business altogether, the factories of Lyon closed their doors, and several Paris houses were in distress; although, like the British warehouses, their stores were crowded with goods for which they could find no purchasers. Banks could not recover their advances, internal commerce fell into confusion, and general disaster followed.

At the same time there was in France, as in Great Britain, much suffering from bad harvests, and this was aggravated for the former by the interruption of the coasting trade by the British cruisers, and by the indifferent character of the inland roads, which, except when they served the military plans of the emperor, were neglected from the straitened state of the finances. The government came to the rescue with various measures of relief, necessarily partial and arbitrary; designed rather to stave off immediate trouble than to afford a radical cure for existing difficulties. Yet serious remedies were needed; for the growing distress of the Continent must continue to react upon France, which found therein its only customers. In Holland almost all the former sources of wealth had one by one been cut off; and even money-lending, which survived the others, became a losing business from the wide-spread ruin in Europe. [454 - "There was not a Dutchman," says M. Thiers, "who had not lost fifty per cent by foreign loans." (Cons. et Empire (Forbes's trans.), xii. 47.)] In Russia the ruble had fallen to one third of the value it had before the institution of the Continental System; although the czar had refused to impose upon his people and their commerce the decrees of August 5 and October 19, which Napoleon had forced upon other states. With growing poverty in Europe, the empire must grow poorer, and in proportion to its loss of wealth must be the diminution of the revenue. Yet already the revenue was insufficient to the wants of the state, despite all the extraordinary resources which had been called up during the past year, and which could not again be expected. It was not to be hoped that many American ships would again place themselves within reach of the emperor's confiscations. The enormous seizures of colonial produce, made by surprise in the previous August, could not, to any similar extent, be repeated. The duty of fifty per cent, levied throughout the states occupied by his troops, on the coffee and sugar which was declared by the owners, had fallen upon accumulations made during the years of lax blockade and had brought in large sums; but it now served only as an inducement to smuggling. Great ingenuity had been shown in devising extraordinary means for extracting money from the subject peoples, but every year saw these supplies diminishing. Like slavery, like bad farming, Napoleon's administration, and especially his army, required continually new soil[455 - "The emperor does desire war, because he needs more or less virgin soil to explore, because he has need to occupy his armies and to entertain them at the expense of others.... M. Romanzow has repeated to me a long conversation he had had with the emperor. 'He wants money,' said he,—'he does not hide it; he wishes war against Austria to procure it.'" (Metternich to Stadion, Feb. 17, 1809; Memoirs, ii. 329.) The Austrian war of 1809 brought $34,000,000 into Napoleon's military chest. (Thiers, Cons. et Emp., Book xxxviii. p. 34.)] and did little to renew or develop the powers which it taxed; beneficent plans were formed, multitudinous orders issued, but they received rare fulfilment except when they conduced to the military efficiency of the state.

There remained two resources. One was economy; and the correspondence of Napoleon at this period teems with exhortations to his lieutenants, with denials of money, and with precepts to get all they can out of the annexed territories, and ask as little as possible from him. [456 - Thus to Davout, commanding the Army of Germany: "I shall need much money, which should make you feel the importance of obtaining for me as much as you can, and asking of me as little as possible." (Corr., March 24, 1811.)] The emperor held in reserve, subject only to his own orders, a great military treasure which had begun with war contributions, and into which poured the results of the extraordinary transactions just mentioned. Five wars had brought into this chest 805,000,000 francs; but in 1810 there remained but 354,000,000, and he was unwilling to trench further upon it, unless some grave emergency arose. He hoped to spare, if not to add to it, by the confiscation of the property of Spanish nobles who had resisted his change of dynasty, as well as by the seizure of "false neutrals." Evidently, however, such resources are precarious, and cannot be compared to those of a commercial state. Contrasted with Great Britain, the financial expedients of Napoleon resembled those of a mediæval prince or an Oriental potentate; and in a strain of endurance, in a question of time, the very artificial, not to say unnatural, framework of power which he had built could not hope to outlast the highly organized, essentially modern, and above all consistently developed society which confronted him. A state of long standing and fixed traditions may endure the evils of a bad system, disadvantaged by it, but not ruined; but when the system is new and rests upon a single man, it asks in vain for the confidence inspired by a closely knit, yet wide-spreading, body politic whose established character guarantees the future.

This was clearly shown in the ability of either government to use the other resource—borrowing—as a means to supplement its deficient income. Napoleon steadfastly refused to resort to this, alleging that it was an unjustifiable draft upon the future, and could have but one result—bankruptcy. He proved easily that Great Britain could not go on borrowing indefinitely at her present rate. A better reason for his own abstinence was to be found in the condition of his credit. The public debt of France under his rule was small, and, as he did not add to it, it stood at a good figure in the market. [457 - This condition of the debt was partly factitious, Napoleon maintaining the public funds at eighty, by the secret intervention of the military chest. (Thiers, Cons. et Emp., Book xli. p. 18.)] His military genius, the wide flight of his arms, the war contributions, the iniquitous plan by which he quartered his troops on foreign countries, not merely in war but in peace, and made them responsible for their maintenance,—measures such as these, facilitated by frequently recurrent wars and combined with exactions like those narrated in this chapter, enabled him to meet his expenditures, accumulate the large reserve fund mentioned, and at the same time distribute in France an amount of coin which greatly aided the circulation. But his success imposed upon no one. Everybody understood that such expedients were essentially transient, that to renew them meant renewed wars, invasions growing ever wider and wider, and results dependent always upon military prestige, which a single lost battle might overthrow. Compared with insecurity such as this, the fast growing debt of Great Britain possessed a relative solidity; which even exceeded the absolute confidence felt that the interest would be regularly paid. Behind her stood the history and the prestige of a Sea Power which men knew had met many a heavy reverse, yet had never failed; and which stood before Napoleon more mighty than ever. Far and wide, through many a sea and in many a land, stretched the roots of her strength; never more glorious, because never more sorely tried than by the great emperor. She had credit, he had none.

Savary, one of the most devoted of Napoleon's followers, quotes with conviction the following words to him of a Parisian banker, in the early part of 1811: "A humiliating fact, and one which gives the key to many others, is the state of credit in France and in England. The English debt amounts to about $3,500,000,000, ours only to $250,000,000; and yet the English could borrow at need sums much more considerable than we ourselves could, and above all at an infinitely more favorable rate. Why this difference? Why is the credit of the State, in France, lower than the credit of the leading merchants and bankers; while the reverse is the permanent condition in England? A word suffices to explain it: To restore one's credit in England, you have only to work with the government; while to lose one's credit in France it is only necessary not to keep out of government transactions. All England is, so to say, a single commercial house, of which ministers are the directors, the laws the contract, which power itself cannot infringe. Here the Council of State usurps the powers of the tribunals, and I could almost say that nothing useful is done, because nothing is really guaranteed." [458 - Mémoires du duc de Rovigo, vol. v. p. 116.] A competent American witness, before quoted, who had spent two years in France, wrote, in 1809: "The French rulers, whatever may be their power, are unable to obtain supplies at home except by sacrifices equivalent to the risk which is incurred by contracting with them. Their credit abroad may be estimated by the fact, which is so well known to us all, that no intelligent merchant in this country can be induced, by any consideration, to make advances in their favor, or to accept a bill on their treasury, from their highest accredited agent." [459 - Genius and Disposition of French Govt., p. 166. Baltimore, 1810.]

While the public credit, that touchstone of prosperity, stood thus in the two states, the same eye-witness thus describes the relative condition of the two peoples: "In France the extinction of all public spirit and of the influence of public opinion, the depopulation and decay of the great towns, the stern dominion of a military police, incessantly checked the exultation, natural to the mind, on viewing the profusion of the bounties bestowed by nature. The pressure of the taxes was aggravated by the most oppressive rigor in the collection. The condition of the peasantry as to their food, clothing, and habitations bore no comparison with the state of the same class in England.... In England, whatever may be the representations of those who, with little knowledge of the facts, affect to deplore her condition, it is nevertheless true that there does not exist, and never has existed elsewhere, so beautiful and perfect a model of public and private prosperity.... I pay this just tribute of admiration with the more pleasure, as it is to me in the light of an atonement for the errors and prejudices under which I labored on this subject, before I enjoyed the advantage of a personal experience. A residence of nearly two years in that country—during which period I visited and studied nearly every part of it, with no other view or purpose than that of obtaining correct information, and I may add, with previous studies well fitted to promote my object—convinced me I had been egregiously deceived." [460 - Genius and Disposition of French Govt., pp. 181-192.]

The writer saw England before her sorest trial came. Since 1807, and especially after 1809, the condition of both nations had grown sensibly worse. The commercial embarrassments of Great Britain under the dislocation of her trade and the loss of her markets, occasioned partly by the Continental System and partly by the American Non-Intercourse Act, and aggravated by the wild speculations that followed the year 1808, resulted in 1811 in wide-spread disaster,—merchants failing, manufactories closing, workmen out of employment and starving. In France the commercial crisis of the same year, extending over the Continent, soon became a chaos of firms crashing one upon the other and dragging down, each the other, in its fall. [461 - Thiers, Cons. et Emp., Book xli. p. 22.] Soon great numbers of workmen in all the provinces found themselves, like their English brethren, deprived of occupation. Council upon council was held by the emperor to ascertain how, by government interference, to remedy the ills for which governmental interference was immediately responsible. But, underneath the apparently similar conditions of distress in the two countries, lay the real difference between a nation shut in, and thrown back upon itself, and one that kept open its communications with the world at large. In 1811 Great Britain had already begun to react through her natural channels; the energies of her people under the load upon them had been like a strong spring, whose tension remains, though compressed. The South American trade revived; the Spanish Main took off the accumulations in the West India Islands, and the latter in turn began to call for supplies from home; Russia was visibly relenting; in the Peninsula, Masséna, whose progress had been stopped at the lines of Torres Vedras, was forced to retreat into Spain in the month of March, and through a liberated Portugal were found new openings for British commerce. For France there could be no return of prosperity until the sea was again free to her, either through her own or through neutral ships; but the latter could not safely repair to her ports until her rival revoked the still existing Order in Council, blockading the whole French and Dutch coast, and this she would not do before the emperor recalled the decrees upon which rested his Continental System. And while Great Britain was making appalling drafts upon the future in her ever-mounting debt, France was exhausting a capital which no forcing power could replace, by her anticipated conscriptions, which led to a revolt far more menacing than the riots of English workmen. Sixty thousand "refractory" conscripts were scattered through the departments, and among the forests of western, central, and southern France, refusing to join their regiments and defying the authorities. They were pursued by flying columns of old soldiers; who, often long strangers to their own countrymen, took with their property the same liberties they had practised in foreign parts. In January, 1811, the whole conscription for the year was called out, and in midsummer that for 1812; but no legal measures could make men of the boys sent to die before the virile age, [462 - Thiers, Cons. et Emp., Book xli. p. 11.] more often of exposure than by the hands of the enemy, in the gloomy mountains and parched plains of Spain.

The great struggle of endurance, "of the highest individual genius against the resources and institutions of a great nation" [463 - Arnold's History of Rome, opening of chap. xliii.] who stayed its power on the sea, was now drawing near its close; the battle between the sea and the land was about to terminate in one of the most impressive and gigantic military catastrophes recorded by history. But the inevitable end was already clearly indicated before Napoleon started for Russia, although the dim vision of weary eyes in England, strained by long watching, saw not that which the apprehensions of Frenchmen, troubled with the anguish of France, tremblingly felt. The credit of France was gone; nor could her people bear any added burdens, until the sea, over which Great Britain still moved unresisted, was open to them. The people of the Continent had become bitterly hostile through the sufferings caused by the blockade, and the imperial power could only be maintained by an army which was itself filled by borrowing upon the future; its capital, its reserve, was fast being exhausted. [464 - It is interesting to observe in Metternich's letters, while ambassador at Paris, how he counts upon this exhausting of the capital of French soldiers as the ultimate solution of the subjection of Austria. "For some time Napoleon has lived on anticipations. The reserves are destroyed." (April 11, 1809.) Compare also his exclamation to the emperor in 1813: "Is not your present army anticipated by a generation? I have seen your soldiers; they are mere children." (Memoirs, vol. i. p. 189).] The question of physical endurance was settled; the only point really left in doubt was that of moral endurance. Would Great Britain and the British government have the nerve to hold out till the emperor was exhausted?" [465 - See Metternich's Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 477.] Already the agitation for the repeal of the Orders in Council, with which the existing ministry was identified, was becoming ominous. The leaders of the Opposition were opposed to the Peninsular war; and Napier has vividly shown the doubts and hesitations of the ministry as to sustaining that great enterprise which compelled Napoleon to such waste of life, to such a fatal division of his force. Time was not allowed to test to the utmost British tenacity; the darkest hour was fast passing away, the clouds began to break and the day to dawn.

Three weeks after Napoleon's annexation of the Hanse towns and of the Duchy of Oldenburg, on the last day of the year 1810, Alexander put forth a commercial ukase which under all the circumstances had the appearance of retaliatory action; and at the least drew a sharp line between his commercial policy and the Continental System as inculcated by Napoleon. The decree expressly permitted the entrance of colonial produce under neutral flags; and many articles of French manufacture were virtually denied admission, by not being included in a list of goods which could be introduced on payment of duty. In vain did the czar assert that his object was to develop, by protection, Russian manufactures of the excluded articles. Napoleon rejected the explanation. "The last ukase," he wrote in a personal letter to Alexander, "is at bottom, but yet more in form, specially directed against France." [466 - Corr. de Nap., vol. xxi. p. 497 (Feb. 28, 1811).] But while the exclusion of French products was the most open, the admission of neutral ships with colonial produce was the most significant, feature of the edict. This was the point upon which the emperor had been most importunate; here was the leak which, in his judgment, was sinking the ship. "Six hundred English merchant ships," he had written in a previous letter, October 23, 1810, [467 - Ibid., p. 275.] "wandering in the Baltic, have been refused admission to Prussian ports and those of Mecklenburg, and have steered for your Majesty's states. If you admit them the war still lasts.... Your Majesty knows that if you confiscate them we shall have peace. Whatever their papers, under whatever names they are masked, French, German, Spanish, Danish, Russian, your Majesty may be sure they are English."

Later, on the 4th of November, [468 - Ibid., p. 296.] Napoleon wrote through the ordinary ministerial channels: "There are no neutrals. Whatever the papers produced, they are false. Not a single ship enters Russia with so-called American papers but comes really from England.[469 - These contentions of Napoleon were for the most part perfectly correct. Some interesting facts, bearing upon the true character of the so-called neutral trade in the Baltic, may be gathered from Ross's Life of Saumarez, vol. ii. chaps. ix.-xiii. See also representations made by a number of American ship-captains, Am. State Papers, vol. iii. pp. 329-333. On the other hand, the scrupulously upright John Quincy Adams, U. S. minister to Russia, affirmed that he positively knew some of the American ships to be direct from the United States. The facts, however, only show the dependence of the world at that time upon the Sea Power of Great Britain, which made Napoleon's Continental System impossible; yet, on the other hand, it was his only means of reaching his enemy. If he advanced, he was ruined; if he receded, he failed.] Peace or war is in the hands of Russia. Let her confiscate all ships brought in by the English, and join France in demanding of Sweden the seizure of the immense quantity of merchandise the English have landed at Gottenburg under various flags. If Russia wishes peace with England, she has here the means. But Russia has followed opposite principles, and of this but one proof need be given: that is, that the colonial merchandise which appeared at the last Leipzig fair was brought there by seven hundred wagons coming from Russia; that to-day all the traffic in that merchandise is done through Russia; finally, that the twelve hundred ships which the English have convoyed by twenty ships of war, disguised under Swedish, Portuguese, Spanish, American flags, have in part landed their cargoes in Russia." To these complaints Alexander had replied that he had adhered, and would adhere, to his engagements and exclude British ships; but that he would not, and could not, go beyond them and forbid neutrals. The ukase of December 31 took the matter out of diplomatic discussion, and, coming so immediately upon the annexation of Oldenburg, had the appearance of defiance. As such Napoleon accepted it. "This seems," he wrote in the personal letter of February 28 above quoted, "a change of system. All Europe so regards it; and already our alliance no longer exists, in the opinion of England and of Europe.... If your Majesty abandons the alliance and burns the conventions of Tilsit, it would be evident that war would follow a few months sooner or later. The result must be, on either side, to strain the resources of our empires in preparations.... If your Majesty has not the purpose of reconciliation with England, you will see the necessity, for yourself and for me, of dissipating all these clouds." From that time both sovereigns prepared for war.

The turn of affairs in the North at this time, and during the succeeding critical twelvemonth, was powerfully influenced by the presence of a great British fleet in the Baltic and by the extreme discretion of its admiral. Napoleon had compelled Sweden to follow up her exclusion of British ships by a formal declaration of war, which was issued November 17, 1810. The British minister had to leave Stockholm; and, after his departure, the political as well as military direction of affairs on the spot was under the conduct of Sir James Saumarez. That most distinguished and admirable officer had thoroughly appreciated, during his three summers in the Baltic, the feelings of the Swedish rulers and people; and it was chiefly owing to his representations to his own government, and to his steadily conciliatory action, that the formal war never became actual. He resisted with dignity and firmness every attempt on the part of the Swedish authorities to carry out Napoleon's orders to confiscate; but he did not allow himself to be moved, by such occasional yielding on their part, to any act of retaliation. Good feeling between the two nations centred around his attractive personality, and facilitated the essential, but difficult, conciliation between Sweden and Russia. The entire license trade was under the protection of his fleet, which had charge also of the suppression of privateering, of the police of the hostile coasts, and of the interruption of communications between Denmark and Norway.[470 - During one year, 1809, this fleet captured 430 vessels, averaging sixty tons each, of which 340 were Danes. Among these were between thirty and forty armed cutters and schooners, of which Denmark had to employ a great many to supply Norway with grain. The remaining ninety vessels were Russian. (Naval Chronicle, vol. xxii. p. 517.)] Its presence virtually insured the independence of Sweden against France and Russia, except during the winter months, when compelled to leave the Baltic; and its numbers and character gave the Swedish government a sufficient excuse for not proceeding to the extremities demanded by Napoleon. During the summer of 1811 the flag-ship was the centre of the secret consultations which went on between the two states, to which Russia also, having finally rejected Napoleon's terms, soon became a party; and towards the end of the season the negotiation, practically completed by the admiral, was formally concluded with a British plenipotentiary. It was determined to keep up the appearance of war, but with the understanding that Sweden would join the alliance of Great Britain and Russia. The czar had then no cause to fear that, in the approaching contest with the great conqueror, he should find a hostile Sweden on his flank and rear.[471 - "Once more I must tell you," wrote a Swedish statesman to Saumarez, "that you were the first cause that Russia dared to make war against France. Had you fired one shot when we declared war against England, all had been ended and Europe would have been enslaved." (Ross's Saumarez, vol. ii. p. 294.)]

The preparations of Napoleon for the great Russian campaign occupied the year 1811. It was his intention to carry on a vigorous warfare in the Spanish peninsula, while collecting the immense forces of every kind needed in the north of Germany. But the unsatisfactory character of many of the soldiers gathering on the Elbe, among them being tens of thousands of refractory conscripts and foreign nationalities, compelled him to withdraw from Spain in the latter part of 1811 some forty thousand veterans, whose place was to be filled by levies of an inferior character, which, moreover, did not at once appear. The fortune of war in the Peninsula during the year had varied in different quarters. On the east coast General Suchet had brought Tortosa to capitulate on the 1st of January. Thence advancing to the south he reduced Tarragona by siege and assault on the 28th of June,—an exploit which obtained for him his grade of Marshal of France. Still moving forward, according to Napoleon's general plan and instructions to him, the end of the year found him before the city of Valencia, which surrendered on the 9th of January, 1812. But to obtain these later successes, at the time that so many hardened warriors were removed from the Peninsula, it had been necessary to support Suchet with divisions taken from the centre and west, to abandon the hope entertained of combining another great attempt against Lisbon, and also to withdraw Marmont's corps from the valley of the Tagus to a more northern position, around Salamanca and Valladolid. At this time Wellington occupied a line on the frontiers of Portugal, north of the Tagus, resting on the city of Almeida and facing Ciudad Rodrigo. The latter, with Badajoz, on the Guadiana, constituted the two supports to the strong barrier by which the emperor proposed to check any offensive movements of the enemy upon Spain.

The year had been passed by the British general in patient contention with the innumerable difficulties, political and military, of his situation. Masséna had indeed been forced to withdraw from Portugal in April, but since that time Wellington had been balked, in every attempt, by superior numbers and by the strength of the positions opposed to him. His reward was now near at hand. On the 8th of January, 1812, he suddenly appeared before Ciudad Rodrigo, favored in his movements by the pre-occupation of Marmont, who was engaged in the reorganization and arrangements necessitated by the withdrawal of so many troops for the Russian war, and also deceived by the apparent inactivity in the British lines. The siege was pushed with a vigor that disregarded the ordinary rules of war, and the place was successfully stormed on the 19th of January. As rapidly as the nature of the country, the season, and other difficulties would permit, Wellington moved to the south, intending to attack Badajoz. On the 16th of March the place was invested, and though most ably defended by a governor of unusual ability, it was snatched out of the hands of Marshal Soult by the same audacity and disregard of ordinary methods that had bereft Marmont of the sister fortress. Badajoz was stormed on the night of the 6th of April; and the Spanish frontier then lay open to the British, to be crossed as soon as their numbers, or the mistakes of the enemy, should justify the attempt.

Thus opened the fatal year 1812. The clouds breaking away, though scarce yet perceptibly, for Great Britain, were gathering in threatening masses on the horizon of Napoleon. A painful picture is drawn by his eulogist, M. Thiers, of the internal state of the empire at this time. An excessively dry season had caused very short crops throughout Europe, and want had produced bread riots in England, as well as in France and elsewhere. But such demonstrations of popular fury were far more dangerous and significant, in a country where all expression of opinion had been so rigorously controlled as in the empire, and in a capital which concentrates and leads, as only Paris does, the feelings of a nation. The discontent was heightened and deepened by the miseries of the conscription, which ate ever deeper and deeper, wringing the heart of every family, and becoming more and more extreme as each succeeding enterprise became vaster than those before it, and as the excessive demands, by reducing the quality of the individual victims, required ever growing numbers. Six hundred thousand men had been poured into Spain, three hundred thousand of whom had died there. [472 - Thiers, Cons. et Emp., Book xlii. p. 383.] Besides the immense masses carried forward to the confines of Poland, and those destined for the Peninsula, there was to be a powerful reserve between the Elbe and the Rhine, another behind the Rhine in France itself, and to these Napoleon now proposed to add yet a third, of one hundred and twenty thousand so-called national guards, taken from the conscription of the four last years and legally not liable to the call. Throughout the great cities there was growing irritation, rising frequently to mutiny, with loud popular outcries, and again the number of refractory conscripts, of whom forty thousand had been arrested the year before, rose to fifty thousand; again flying columns pursued them through all the departments. Caught, shut up in the islands off the coasts, whence they could not escape, and, when drilled, marched under strong guard to the ends of Europe, they none the less contrived often to desert; and everywhere the people, hating the emperor, received them with open arms and passed them back, from hand to hand, to their homes. Thus amid starvation, misery, weeping, and violence, the time drew near for Napoleon to complete his great military undertaking of conquering the sea by the land.

In the North the situation had finally developed according to the wishes of Great Britain. The secret understanding of 1811 had resulted in January, 1812, in another commercial ukase, allowing many British manufactures to be introduced into Russia. On the 5th of April a secret treaty was concluded with Sweden, ceding Finland to Russia, but assuring to the former power Norway, of which Denmark was to be deprived. Relieved now on her northern flank, Russia soon after made peace with Turkey under the mediation of Great Britain. Thus with both hands freed she awaited the oncoming of Napoleon.

On the 9th of May, 1812, the emperor left Paris to take command of his forces in Poland; and on the 24th of June the imperial army, to the number of four hundred thousand men, crossed the Niemen and entered Russia. Two hundred thousand more followed close behind. The preceding day, June 23, the British Orders in Council of 1807 and 1809 were revoked, as to the United States of America. It was too late. War had been declared by Congress, and the declaration approved by the President, five days before, on the 18th of June, 1812.

In narrating the extraordinary, and indeed unparalleled, series of events which reach their climax in the Berlin and Milan Decrees and the Orders in Council, the aim has been to compress the story within the closest limits consistent with clearness, and at the same time to indicate the mutual connection of the links in the chain; how one step led to another; and how throughout the whole, amid apparent inconsistencies, there is an identity of characteristics, not impossible to trace, from the outbreak of the Revolution to the downfall of Napoleon. To do this it has been thought expedient to suppress a mass of details, much of a very interesting character, bearing upon the working of the two opposing systems. The influence of the military element of Sea Power, the function of the British navy, after Trafalgar, has also been passed over in silence. When that great disaster wrecked Napoleon's naval hopes, and convinced him that not for many years could he possibly gather the ships and train the seamen necessary to meet his enemy in battle upon the ocean, he seized with his usual sagacity the one only remaining means of ruining her, and upon that concentrated his great energies. The history of Europe and of the civilized world, after 1805, turned upon this determination to destroy Great Britain through her commerce; and the decision was forced upon the mighty emperor by the power of the British navy, and the wise resolve of the government not to expose her land forces to his blows, until peculiarly favorable circumstances should justify so doing. The opportunity came with the Spanish uprising; and, by one of those coincidences not uncommon in history, with the hour came the man. The situation was indeed of the most favorable for Great Britain. The theatre of war, surrounded on three sides by water, was for the French a salient thrust far out into the enemy's domain on the sea, while its interior features and the political character of the people, incapable of cohesion and organized effort, made the struggle one eminently alien to the emperor's genius; for it gave no opportunity for those brilliant combinations and lightning-like blows in which he delighted. To the British the Peninsula offered the advantage that the whole coast line was a base of operations; while every friendly port was a bridge-head by which to penetrate, or upon which, in case of reverse, to retire, with a sure retreat in the sea beyond.

The course pursued by each of the two governments, in this great enterprise of commerce-destroying, may be looked at from the two points of view, of policy and of rightfulness.

In the matter of policy, both Napoleon's decrees and the Orders in Council have been fiercely assailed and extensively argued. In so broad and complicated a subject, a probable conclusion can only be reached by disregarding the mass of details, of statistics, with which the disputants have rather obscured than elucidated the subject, and by seeking the underlying principle which guided, or should have guided, either government. It is possible to form a very strong argument, for or against either, by fastening upon the inevitable inconveniences entailed upon each nation by the measures of its adversary and by its own course. It is by impressions received from these incidents—or accidents—the accompaniments rather than the essentials of the two systems, that the debates of Parliament and the conclusions of historians have been colored.