Chapter 37

THE CONTINENTAL SYSTEM AS A WHOLE[39]

[Footnote 39: References. Lüders: Das Continental System, etc.; Kiesselbach: Die Continentalsperre; Rocke: Die Kontinentalsperre; Rose: Napoleonic Studies; Lumbroso: Napoleone e l'Inghilterra. This volume is the most complete treatment of the subject and contains an excellent bibliography. The most of this chapter was published in the Pol. Sci. Quarterly, Vol. XIII, in connection with the appearance of Lumbroso's book.]

The Berlin Decree -- Retort to Trafalgar -- High Protection in France -- A Weapon of Bonaparte -- Fichte's Commercial State -- Protectionist Doctrine in Germany and France -- The Orders in Council -- Responsibility for the Napoleonic Wars -- British Opinion -- The System and the Invasion of England -- The System on the Continent -- Napoleon's Explanation -- Origin of the Idea -- Paper Blockade and the System -- The Orders in Council of 1807 -- Their Justification -- State of British Trade -- New Concepts in Public Law -- The Licensing System -- Its Use by Napoleon -- Effects in France.

This was the Berlin Decree, which Napoleon issued on November twenty-first. It was the capstone to that structure of continental embargo which for four years had occupied the attention of its author. England was the soul of every continental coalition; France could answer only by continued continental conquest. As England could be reached only through her trade, with continental Europe in his hands, Napoleon determined that he would strike his implacable enemy where she was vulnerable. "The British Islands," ran the decree, "are henceforth blockaded; all commerce with them is prohibited; letters and packages with an English address will be confiscated, as also every store of English goods on the Continent within the borders of France and her allies; every piece of English goods, all English vessels, and those laden with staples from English colonies, will be excluded from all European harbors, including those of neutral states."

As early as 1795 the Committee of Public Safety had considered the possibility of excluding English goods from the Continent. The idea of the Berlin Decree was therefore not original with Napoleon, but the time and form of its application were; in particular, the final clause was thoroughly his own. These last words speak volumes. In reply to the principle of Great Britain that on the sea "enemy's ships make enemy's goods," he thereby retorted with "enemy's lands make enemy's goods," ordering all English wares found in countries occupied by his troops to be seized. But he went much farther in his suicidal logic, and virtually declared war to the knife by commanding that every British subject found within the same limits should be held as a prisoner of war, and that all property of individual Englishmen should be regarded as lawful prize. These drastic measures, considered together, were intended as a reply to Trafalgar, and to England's Orders in Council issued on May sixteenth, 1806, which announced a blockade of the Continent from Brest to the Elbe for the purpose of utterly destroying French commerce. The Berlin Decree was also intended to be in the nature of reprisals for the English practice of searching French ships and impressing French sailors. Napoleon had himself been guilty of that discourtesy both to warships and to merchantmen, but he had never been strong enough seriously to annoy or cripple England as England had both annoyed and crippled him by the practice. During the year 1806 three more French agents were despatched into the Orient, and Joseph declared to the (p.~448) Prussian envoy that his brother was contemplating an expedition to India. Many years later the Emperor himself confirmed this statement in a conversation with Dr. O'Meara.

No single scheme of Napoleon's contributed in the end so much to his discredit as the Berlin Decree. Colonial wares had become a necessity of life to the populations of Europe, and to be deprived of them brought irritation into every household, even the poorest; it was an attempt to coerce Russia into adhesion to this ruinous policy which directly initiated his fall. Reviving the commercial policy of the old régime, the republic outran the zeal of the monarchy. Such, according to our best authority, Mollien, was the condition of public opinion when Bonaparte took charge in 1800. It is needless to say that a man like the First Consul, who was a suitor for public favor, made the universal jealousy of England's commercial supremacy in a special and peculiar sense his foremost care. But that Bonaparte did not originate the high-protection temper of France is proved by the remarkable enactment known as the Loi de 10 Brumaire, An V (October thirty-first, 1796). This drastic measure forbade the importation of all manufactured articles, either made in England or passing through the channels of English trade by land or sea, except under certain stringent and exceptional regulations as to transshipment; and ordered the confiscation of such articles, if found in a French port on any vessel whatsoever. The carefully prepared list of the articles of English manufacture thus to be shut out included absolutely everything in the production of which the splendid expansion of English manufactures at the close of the eighteenth century made Great Britain supereminent--products of the loom, the forge, the tannery, the glass house, the sugar refinery, and the potter's kiln. Fourteen concluding articles of the law enacted a system of trade control whereby, to all appearance, the evasion of either the letter or the spirit of the statute was made impossible. Yet for a time the disintegration of the public powers under the Directory was such that, in spite of the exasperation of the national hatred against the English government, the law was simply ignored. On December fourth, 1798, however, there was a sudden change; without warning, strong military detachments were placed at all the gates of Paris and every vehicle was carefully searched; domiciliary visits were commenced by the customs authorities and were continued until all English wares were removed from commerce; and French public opinion supported these proceedings, which the English stigmatized as "legal robbery."

The fact was that Napoleon Bonaparte had temporarily taken up the task of administration, and, having correctly read the public temper, was beginning the policy of "thorough." The treaty of Campo Formio had been concluded; and, though he was only commander-in-chief of the French army--and that by construction rather than in form--he was really the arbiter of the government. Whatever the masses thought, the Directory knew that the fate of France was in his hands; and nothing confirmed that opinion more strongly than the ease with which the law enacted two years before was now enforced. Having made what he considered easy terms with Austria, he had determined to destroy the credit of Pitt's government by attacking English industries and commerce, and to defy, if necessary, the neutral carriers of the world. It appears to have been at this time that his mind formed the "Chimera," as a French historian calls it, which in the end proved his ruin--the conception that, if only the conservative administration of Great Britain could be discredited, the Whigs would adhere to "the republican peace."

The time was not ripe for any attack on England more direct than this; and to occupy the interval until it might become so, the well-worn scheme of harassing her at her extremities was revived. The uneasy Bonaparte was temporarily removed from the scene of administration by the Egyptian expedition, intended at least to menace English commerce in those distant parts of the earth, if not to work the complete ruin of her Oriental empire. But if the time was not ripe to engage in active hostilities for the enforcement of an economic doctrine, this fact was not due to the absence of such a doctrine, formulated and avowed. The theory of a closed jural state, which had been evolved in defense of the final stage in the formation of European nationality, was itself undergoing an expansion in the direction of expounding the international relations of states in commercial affairs. In 1801 Fichte published his famous treatise entitled "The Closed Commercial State," his contribution to the literature of Utopias. Defining the jural state as a limited body of men subject to the same laws and to the same coactive sovereignty, he declared that the same body of men ought to be stringently limited to like reciprocity of commerce and industry, and that any one not under the same legislative power and the same coactive force should be excluded from participation in this relation; thus would be formed a closed commercial state parallel to the closed jural state. His treatise was divided into three books, entitled respectively, "Philosophy," "Contemporary History," and "Politics," preceded by an introduction discussing the relation of the rational state to the real, and of pure public law to politics. The first book was merely an elaboration of his idea as to what is just and right within the rational state, in view of trade relations as they are; in the second book he proceeded to discuss the actual condition of commercial intercourse in existing states; and in the third book he considered how the theory of a closed commercial state was to be realized. The vital portion of his argument lay in the statement[40] that if all Christian Europe, with its colonies and factories in other quarters of the globe, was to be considered as a whole, trade must remain free as it once was; if, however, it was to be divided into several wholes, each under its own government, it must likewise be divided into several entirely closed commercial states. Said he: "Those systems which demand free trade, those claims to the right to buy and sell freely in the whole known world, have been handed down to us from among the ideas of our ancestors, for whom they were suited; we took them without examination and adopted them, and it is with trouble that we substitute others for them."

[Footnote 40: Der geschlossene Handelsstaat. Ein philosophischer Entwurf als Anhang zur Rechtslehre und Probe einer künftig zu liefernden Politik (Wien, 1801), p. 109.]

Seven years later the same philosopher declared, in his better-known Address to the German Nation, that the much-vaunted liberty of the seas was a matter entirely indifferent to the Germans. For the preservation of their peculiar genius, he argued, they should be saved from all participation, direct or indirect, in the wealth of other peoples; otherwise the curse of commercialism would overtake them. Thus the "ideologues" of Europe, German and French, held identical opinions. They appear to have had multitudes of supporters in all lands. At any rate, it is idle to charge Bonaparte with being the inventor of the rigid protectionist doctrines that he endeavored to apply to the dominions which, when acquired by conquest, he intended to incorporate in a European empire having its capital and administrative seat at Paris. They were held by the men of the Terror in 1793, by the Directory in 1796, by the overwhelming majority of the French people in 1798, and by a respectable number of Germans and of Americans in the years immediately succeeding; while they are still held by immense numbers of those in whom the idea of nationality is dominant and preponderates over all other political concepts.

The Berlin Decree, which is generally considered to have inaugurated the Continental System in form, is, in fact, antedated by the Orders in Council of Great Britain. During 1801 English commerce was considerably greater than it was during 1802, the year of nominal peace; and this was due, of course, to the fact that the commercial welfare was not even nominally discontinued. The real trouble felt by Lord Whitworth, the British ambassador at Paris, was that the existing commercial situation of his country was intolerable, and that he must find some _casus belli_ in order to end it. We have explained how he fixed on a very trivial pretext, the conduct of Bonaparte at a public reception in the Tuileries, and that Great Britain had much difficulty in making the flimsy excuse appear important. The fact was that the First Consul was using the peace to extend the protective system of France over all the lands which he had conquered in northern and central Italy and to force Holland and Switzerland into his customs union. In consequence English commerce was suffering, and the mission of Sebastiani into the Orient made it seem highly probable to English merchants that the process of further diminishing their trade was already under way in those distant parts. The publication of Sebastiani's report was the last straw in the burden of the British merchants, and they refused to carry the load any longer. Bonaparte said that the independence of a nation carried with it the absolute control of its trade, and that if Great Britain intended to keep both Gibraltar and Malta, she virtually announced by that fact her determination to unite the commerce of the Indies, the Mediterranean, and the Baltic in a single system controlled by herself, which would create a situation intolerable and impossible.

The Peace of Amiens was merely a truce, and the only question as to its duration was one of reciprocal forbearance and endurance. As soon as it became clear that neither England nor France would abandon the idea of commercial supremacy, the vital matter of policy on both sides was how to reopen the war. To do this was to assume a fearful burden of responsibility. History is still striving to determine who gave the immediate impulse; for whoever did give it is held responsible for the appalling bloodshed of the Napoleonic as distinguished from the republican wars. To-day even the English historians of the most enlightened sort admit that France was tricked into the declaration of war. The coalition was in process of formation within a few days after the ink was dry on the treaty of Campo Formio; it was in readiness when hostilities broke out; and the fuel necessary to make the intermittent flickering flames burst forth anew was supplied by the successive Orders in Council.

In 1805 there was printed in London and published anonymously a book which is now believed to have been officially inspired. It was actually written by James Stephen, and the title was "War in Disguise, or the Frauds of the Neutral Flag." Its argument was the need of the destruction of France to prevent the ruin of England. The immediate dilemma considered was the sacrifice of Great Britain's maritime rights or a quarrel with the neutral powers. The author thought that the system of licenses--"salt-water indulgences," he called them--was shaking England's supremacy exactly as the papal indulgences of the fifteenth century had shaken the Roman supremacy. In attacking neutral trade, he thought, there was little danger of provoking hostilities or evoking reprisals. As to America, particularly, a non-importation policy on her part would injure herself alone. She was far too honorable to confiscate the property of English merchants within her borders and far too shrewd to expose to retributive seizure the enormous commerce which she herself had afloat. Suppose, however, he continued, that neither the sacrifice of maritime rights nor the quarrel with neutral powers be accepted, there remains still a third possibility--to admit the pretension that "free ships make free goods," to suspend the navigation laws and then to seize all the benefits of neutral carriers. "Let brooms be put at the mastheads of all our merchantmen, and their seamen be sent to the fleets." This, he argued, would be a less evil than that under which English commerce was suffering, unless, indeed, all parties, including the enemy, would abjure the right of capturing merchant ships or private effects of an enemy--a visionary means of reconciling naval war with commercial peace. Such general abjuration was impossible, and there remained no remedy for England's ills save peace with Bonaparte. But the mere suggestion of this action was preposterous. The insuperable barrier was the British constitution. Austria and Russia might make peace with a military despot; but with a man who employed the leisure of peace for no other purpose than to enslave the smaller powers of the Continent no peace was possible for a free country like England, except such a one as would be equivalent to absolute surrender. As might have been expected, the Englishman who wrote "War in Disguise" concluded his argument with a pious appeal to the Almighty, obedience to whose righteous laws is the soundest political wisdom, and who wills not only the end, but the means--in this case "volunteers, navy and maritime rights." This temper for war to the bitter end was quite as strong in France as in England; and while the English appealed to God and righteousness, it was equally characteristic that the French were at the same time exploiting a parallel drawn from classical history--that of Rome and Carthage.

We must always recollect that the Grand Army of England was a two-edged weapon. Napoleon told Metternich that he always intended to use it against Austria, as he actually did use it; but he told the captain of the _Northumberland_, on August fifteenth, 1815, that he had intended the invasion seriously, expecting to land as near London as possible. Although these antipodal statements were clearly intended to flatter the national pride of the respective dignitaries to whom they were addressed, yet, paradoxical as the assertion seems, when taken together they express the exact truth: successful invasion would have involved the immediate overthrow of British power; while protective exclusion and the destruction of the coalition was the slower, perhaps, but the more certain of the two ways. The latter was probably the intention toward which Napoleon leaned most seriously. By compelling the British to maintain a costly war establishment, the great schemer would exhaust their by no means bottomless purse; and thus would be able to cripple the equipment of the coalition, to expand by victory the territorial empire of France, and to open the way for her enterprise to the eastward. Finally, Napoleon made no serious effort toward the "Descent," using the notion to extort war funds from the French exactly as the Jacobins and the Directory had done; and the actual fact of the magnificent countermarch toward Vienna and the results of Austerlitz ought to convince us that, while at times he did contemplate invading England, his mind was on the whole directed toward the course he actually pursued--that of striking at the coalition through Austria.

The extension of the protective system beyond France and the countries immediately under her control began in 1803, when Spain was admonished to observe it or to take the consequences; immediately after Austerlitz, Istria and Dalmatia were included in the system. When, thereupon, Prussia was requested to include the North Sea coasts in its operation, as the price for the occupation of Hanover, Great Britain retorted by her Orders in Council, declaring the shore line from the mouth of the Elbe all the way around as far as Brest to be in a state of blockade. Prussia chose to accept neither the terms of Great Britain nor those of France, and struggled to remain neutral--a sheer impossibility; the Czar of Russia then repudiated the treaty into which his ambassador, Oubril, had been drawn by the wiles of Talleyrand; in due course of time followed Jena and Friedland; and at last the way was clear for turning a protective system hitherto more or less local into one which could be more or less continental. The Berlin Decree was the longest step possible after Jena; while the Milan Decree was the natural sequence of the enlarged opportunity which the Peace of Tilsit gave for pursuing the same old economic policy.

In justification of his course, Napoleon pleaded the moderation he had shown in dealing with the enemy after the first three coalitions, and declared in his message to the senate that he desired such a general European peace as would guarantee the prosperity, not of England alone, but of all the continental powers; but as the attitude of the enemy rendered this impossible, nothing remained but to adopt measures "which were repugnant to his heart." The Berlin Decree set forth in its preamble that England paid no respect to international law; that she considered as enemies, not alone the organized war power of hostile states, but the persons and vessels of their citizens engaged in commerce, taking the persons prisoners of war and the ships as prizes; that she extended the principle of blockade to unfortified towns, harbors, and river mouths, declaring places to be blockaded before which there were no forces sufficient to enforce the blockade, and extending this absurdity to the coast lines of entire empires; that, finally, since this conduct had no other intention than the ruin of all Europe to the advantage of English trade, "We have resolved to apply to England the usages which she has sanctioned in her maritime legislation." The principles of the decree were asserted to be valid just as long as England should not admit the validity in maritime war of the principles which control war by land: the laws of war "cannot be applied either to private property, whatever it may be, or to the persons of those who are not belligerents, and the right of blockade must be confined in its application to strong places really invested by sufficient forces." The British Isles were then declared in a state of blockade and all the rigors of the English system were ordered to be carried out in detail. Finally, notification in due form was given to the Kings of Spain, Naples, Holland, and Etruria, and to all Napoleon's allies whose citizens were suffering from the "barbarities of English maritime legislation."

The date of the Berlin Decree was November twenty-first, 1806. On July twenty-fifth, 1805, Montgaillard, a clever scoundrel,--of whom, as Napoleon remarked, something could have been made if he had not been fit for hanging,--wrote a memorial[41] which was presented to Napoleon and is claimed to have been the basis of the Continental System. As expanded on March twenty-fourth, 1806, this paper represents that England has in view the sole object of destroying the French marine in order to destroy French commerce, and that, consequently, the imperial idea of Europe is one to which she can never accede even by a temporary peace; that she will never renounce her claim to Hanover or permit the occupation of Holland, her ultimate intention being to establish in Egypt a station to protect her commerce by the Red Sea with India. Portugal, which will always side with England, must, therefore, be incorporated with Spain; while Crete and Egypt must be occupied by both military and commercial posts. The influence of England's deep, fierce hostility, it continues, is seen in the refusal of both Austria and Russia to recognize the newly created vassal kingdom of Italy. England arrogated the tyranny of the seas in 1651 by the Navigation Act passed under the Protector; her very existence is founded in traffic and commerce, and without it there is no movement in her body politic. She is forced to disregard all provisions of international law which tend to diminish her commercial strength. William of Orange created her national debt; and successive sovereigns have in their various continental and American wars increased it to its present dimensions--estimated at about six hundred millions sterling. To carry this enormous obligation and emit the new loans necessary to sustain the respective coalitions, it is essential that her commerce should continuously expand. "It is through her commerce that England must be attacked," says Montgaillard; "to leave her all her gains in Europe, Asia, and America is to leave her all her arms, to render conflicts and wars eternal. To destroy British commerce is to strike England to the heart." He then advances the idea which appears to be the germ of the Continental System: Since Russia seems to favor the plans of England, and since Sweden is destitute of both independence and dignity, France must begin the attack on the maritime legislation of the enemy. She has only to make the navigation acts her own, modify them in favor of the powers which accept them, and adopt a policy of reciprocity.

[Footnote 41: Only discovered and edited by C. La Croix in 1896. Montgaillard, Mémoires diplomatiques, 1805-19.]

How far these counsels influenced Napoleon it is impossible to say; but the chronological coincidence has some value in support of the claim that Montgaillard at least gave the final impulse to the Emperor. There seems, however, to have been a fatal flaw in the reasoning of both. There was no symptom in either executive or counselor of any grasp upon the fact that by the amazing development of industry in England the wealth of the entire world had been enormously increased--so enormously that without a corresponding increase in other nations no international rivalry in prosperity and influence was at all possible. This is a new discovery: then and until very recently it was supposed that England had reached her eminence in commerce by a series of flagrant wrongs; and when the successive steps of aggression and reprisal are chronologically arranged, there is a superficial appearance of truth in the charge. The Orders in Council were iniquitous anachronisms, and they gave a color of justification to the equally barbarous decrees of France--decrees in themselves preposterous, and supported, moreover, by a blockade which was as purely fictitious as that by which Great Britain supported her Orders in Council. The original sketch of the Berlin Decree has been recently discovered in the National Archives at Paris, and it is very important to note that it does not contemplate that portion of the completed document which covers the lands either allied to or under the influence of France; this provision seems to have been added after long reflection. The natural complement of a fictitious blockade was a fictitious protective system; the one was as absurd as the other.

In her puzzled uncertainty, and under the stress of necessity for immediate action of some kind, England took the next false step in the same direction and issued the Orders of January seventh, 1807, declaring all the ports, not only of France, but of her colonies, in a state of blockade, and throwing down the gauntlet to the neutral states by forbidding any ship to trade between the ports of France, of her colonies, and of the countries in the French system; while on November eleventh a new decree extended the inhibition to all ports whatsoever from which the English flag was excluded. This extreme position was pronounced by Lord Erskine to be unconstitutional and contrary to the law of nations. That it was not intended to be enforced, but was to be used as a pretext to secure maritime monopoly, is proved by the fact that already, in the month before, Great Britain had inaugurated the policy of evading her own decrees, raising the blockade of both the Elbe and the Weser and winking at the contraband trade which immediately sprang up in consequence. Napoleon was therefore untiring in the system of reprisals; on November twenty-third of the same year he issued the Milan Decree as a retort both to the scheme of contraband trade put into operation at Bremen and Hamburg and to the Orders of November eleventh; and to supplement this, a second and more rigorous decree was promulgated on December twenty-sixth, 1807. Any vessel which had suffered the visitation of English cruisers or had put in at any English port was declared thereby to have become English and consequently subject to confiscation; an embargo was also placed on all neutral ships at that time in French harbors. Prussia, Sweden, and Denmark adhered promptly to the new Continental System. England was terrified at the consequences of its own temerity, and on April twenty-sixth, 1809, modified her orders by limiting the blockade to "all the ports of the so-called Kingdom of Holland, of France and her colonies, and of Southern Italy, from Orbitello to Pesaro inclusive." Yet, for all this, Austria and Switzerland gave in their adhesion somewhat later; while America stuck to the principle of non-intercourse and finally obtained the revocation in her favor of both the Berlin and the Milan Decrees and, in the end, of the Orders in Council. As is well known, public necessity proved to be stronger than theory; Napoleon's very energy in depriving continental Europe of colonial and English-made articles which, once regarded as luxuries, had in time become necessities, together with the consequent exasperation of Great Britain at the diminution of her trade, was one of the influences which combined the most discordant political elements into a union for the destruction of French empire.

The English side of the secular controversy which has raged over the right and wrong of the Continental System has been presented by various writers with great ingenuity and acumen. The seizure of private persons and property on the high seas, runs their argument, was simply the retort to the French decree of 1798 which ordered the execution of all neutral sailors found on English ships; the French had been the first to disregard the law of nations in seizing the property of English merchants on _terra firma_ at Leghorn, and from times immemorial the usage of Europe had authorized the seizure of private property on the high seas; the paper blockade, though illegal and absurd, was resorted to under great provocation, because Prussia had occupied Hanover, a territory which belonged, if not to England, at least to the holder of the English crown. It follows, therefore, that every measure taken by England was strictly in the nature of a reprisal. This legal plea is a question to be considered by jurisprudence, partly in the light of the changing identity of France and partly in that of variations of obligation due to the incidents of warfare--such, for example, as the conduct of England at Copenhagen, which was only the culmination of a series of similar acts in the treatment of all neutrals. It seems very doubtful whether any legal argument can avail much in explaining the inconsistencies incident to such struggles as the wars which were waged during the Napoleonic epoch. The real and paramount plea of England is self-defense; the arguments based on the political and economic emergencies in which she was involved, in consequence of her amazing constitutional and industrial preëminence, have a validity far beyond any which inheres in pleas that are purely technical--and confined, at that, to the field of international law.

Certain facts recently noted throw a flood of light on the miraculous development of English and Scotch industry during the Napoleonic epoch. Robert Owen stated, and in all sobriety, that in 1816 his two thousand operatives at New Lanark accomplished with the aid of the new machinery as much as had been accomplished by all the operatives in Scotland without it! In his autobiography Owen further emphasizes the extent of the industrial revolution by estimating--and the estimate is conservative--that the work done by the manufacturing population of Great Britain with machinery could not be done without it by a people numbering less than two hundred millions. There was no corresponding development of manufactures on the Continent--not even in France; thus, it was not until 1812 that steam spinning was introduced into Mulhouse, the great industrial capital of Alsace. Similar comparisons could be drawn in many other respects between Great Britain and her continental neighbors, but this single contrast is enough to render very striking the fact that no other power could vie with her in supplying the world with cheap and useful wares of such a sort as to become after a first trial indispensable to the masses of mankind. She found herself, therefore, in the position of being required for the sake of peace to discard all her commercial advantages, all that she had gained in her industrial evolution--all the preëminence, in short, which she held by exertions and sacrifices that had been unexampled elsewhere and continuous for centuries.

Does such a situation create no moral obligation? Is it supposable that a nation could consider for an instant the possibility of destroying itself and its inheritance, for the sake of a peace which would surrender all its advantages to an active and irreconcilable enemy? If there were no alternative except war or suicide, is Great Britain to be blamed for choosing war, however desperate? Moreover, there is another consideration of the first importance, which has a moral quality universally recognized in other spheres. By common consent no occupation of discovered land holds good if it be not permanent and beneficent; and likewise the closed economic state cannot be permanent unless it prove to be universally beneficent. Such a state now appears to be as uncertain in its operations as the closed jural state has proved to be under the operation of international agreements which assist one nation to enforce its municipal law, by the sanction of another. Extradition treaties and other equally pregnant innovations in international law are now generally admitted to have a jural validity, in many of the most important relations of men, that is both higher and stronger than that of the municipal law of the various states which compose the present federation of civilized powers. In the same way--tacitly, perhaps, but none the less really--it is coming to be widely conceded that the markets of the world cannot be closed to wares so good and so cheap as to be necessary for the ever-rising standard of comfortable living demanded by wage-earners in every land, except on condition that such wares can be produced sooner or later as well and as cheaply in the land which protects itself against others of its own class.

The effort of Great Britain to establish a monopoly of ocean commerce was accompanied by one immoral incident of the most far-reaching importance--the inauguration of a licensing system whereby, with simulated papers, vessels of any origin successfully evaded the provisions of both the British orders and the French decrees. This procedure for a time debauched the commerce of the world, and was a fit supplement to the acts of violence severely reprobated both then and since. In the main, fraud and violence brought greater profit to France than to Great Britain. The relaxation in 1798 of the rule of 1756 had accrued to the advantage of the only strictly neutral power of the world, viz., the United States; the orders and the decrees so hampered and exasperated our merchants that we first passed the Embargo Act and then took refuge in non-intercourse. By that time English commerce had so seriously declined under the working of the Continental System that violent agitation against the orders was inaugurated in Great Britain itself. Almost at that very moment, however, Napoleon drove the reigning house of Portugal to Brazil, and thus opened the most important ports of South America to British importations. The glut of the English storehouses was thus momentarily relieved; and, while the merchants suffered serious loss from the low prices they received, they were saved from absolute bankruptcy. For two years longer the struggle on both sides was continued with desperation; and would probably have resulted in the despair of Great Britain, had not the improved methods of agriculture, introduced along with the improved methods in manufacturing, made it possible to feed for some time longer the still comparatively small population by means of home production.

This was the interval which brought matters to a crisis on the Continent. Great Britain could get on very well without the silks and other luxuries produced in France, substituting for them woolens and cottons; but English cruisers made almost impossible the importation into Europe, not only of colonial necessities, but also of the raw materials necessary for indispensable manufactures. By the system of licenses alone was it possible to maintain the French army; cloth and leather wherewith to outfit Napoleon's soldiers were brought from England into the Hanseatic ports in open contempt of the Continental System. Since Great Britain also held the monopoly of coffee, tea, and sugar, without which the not more than half-hearted Germans of the Rhine Confederation would not live, and which Napoleon did not dare to cut off entirely from even the French and Italians, it was thought that the only possible reprisals against her not already instituted would be in the line of further restrictions on her manufactures. During the late summer and early autumn of 1810 were promulgated the three decrees of Trianon, St. Cloud, and Fontainebleau; and not only were enormous duties imposed on all colonial products, wherever found, but all English goods discovered in the lands of the French system were to be burned. Neutral ships, including those of the United States, were at the same time utterly shut out from all the harbors of these lands.

This was the beginning of the end; for in the effort to destroy the English sea power by condemning it to inanition, Napoleon deprived the manufacturers in his own lands of all their raw materials. Even if this had not been a sufficient cause, their manufacturing plants were not modern enough to supply the markets open to them. Russia endured the miseries of privation for but a single year, and in 1811 opened her ports; while smuggling on her boundary lines at once assumed dimensions which rendered anything approaching an administration of the Continental System the work of an army of customs officers, so that after 1812 the effort to enforce it was necessarily abandoned. Our declaration of war with England came too late to exert any influence, one way or the other, on the final solution of the question whether sea power or land power was the stronger in the civilized world at the opening of the nineteenth century. The death throes of Napoleon's imperial system were primarily caused by the exhaustion of France and of himself; when he made himself a dynastic ruler, his prestige and his inherent strength were dissipated as rapidly as were those of the popes when they joined the ranks of the petty princes of Italy. Possibly an empire of United Europe based on the liberal ideas of the day might have had some chance for life, but a single dynastic power pitted against all the dynasties of the Continent, and also against the moral strength of British preëminence in politics and industry, had none at all. It is a mistake to regard the Continental System as an influential cause of Napoleon's overthrow, except in so far as it displayed the folly of attempting to apply what is at best a temporary national expedient as a permanent principle in a world system. The effort did cripple the resources of France and alienate much Continental sympathy from the Emperor, and it embittered Great Britain to the point of desperation; but the result of the struggle to found a Napoleonic hierarchy of two degrees on the states of the Continent was otherwise determined.

END OF VOLUME II