L. 1807. 28. Vast ulti mate effects of the Con CHAP. state necessity, led men to commit many actions foreign alike to their usual principles and their previous conduct. Long as the preceding disquisition on the Continental System and the Orders in Council has been, it will not, to those who consider the importance of the subject, appear misplaced. It relates to the ruling principle, the grand object of Napoleon's life; one which he pursued with a degree of perseverance with which no other object was followed, and which, by imposing on him the necessity of general obedience, left him no other alternative but universal empire or total ruin. As such it is closely tinental System. linked with the attack on Spain and Portugal, and the long-continued carnage of the Peninsular war; the seizure of the Roman states, and incorporation of the Ecclesiastical dominions with his own by the successor of Charlemagne; the incorporation of the ephemeral kingdom of Holland with the great empire; in fine, the grand invasion of Russia in 1812, and the unspeakable horrors of the Moscow campaign. In the history of Napoleon, more perhaps than that of any other man that ever existed, the close connection between one criminal act and another, and the irresistible force of the moral law by which the audacious in wickedness are impelled from one deed of darkness to those which succeed it, till a just retribution awaits them in the natural consequences of their own iniquities, is clearly evinced. The lustre of his actions, the bright effulgence of his glory, has shed an imperishable light over every step of his eventful career; and that mysterious connection between crime and punishment, which in most men is concealed by the obscurity of their lives, and can only be guessed at from the result, or believed from the moral laws of the universe, is there set forth, link by link, in the brightest and most luminous colours. The grandeur of his views, the capacity of his *"Quanto vita illius præclarior ita socordia flagitiosior est. Et profecto ita se res habet, majorum gloria posteris lumen est, neque bona neque mala eorum in occulto patitur."-SALLUST, Bell. Jugurth. L. intellect, preclude the idea of any cause having co-oper- CHAP. ated in his fall but the universal and irresistible laws of nature; and the first genius and greatest captain of 1807. modern times was subjected to the most memorable reverse, as if to demonstrate the utter inability of the greatest human strength to combat the simple law which brings upon the impassioned prodigal the consequence of his actions. 29. tion of the licenses. It is observed by Dr Johnson, that no man ever rose to supreme power among men, in whom great qualities Introduc were not combined with certain meannesses which would system of be deemed inconceivable in ordinary men. Never was the truth of this singular but just remark more clearly evinced than by Napoleon on this great subject of the Continental System. While the humbling of England was the first object of his life from this period-while it was the secret key to all his negotiations, all his wars, and all his conquests-while, to enforce its rigorous execution, he put all the forces of Christendom in motion, and hurled the strength of the South in desperate fury against the power of the North, he himself was the first to set the example of the evasion of his own decrees, and, for a temporary profit to himself, to establish a system which in a great degree subverted the whole objects for which these mighty risks and sacrifices were undergone. Many months had not elapsed after the publication of the Berlin decree, before it was discovered that a lucrative source of revenue might be opened up by granting, at exorbitant prices, licenses to import British colonial produce and manufactures; and though this was done under the obligation of exporting French or Continental produce to an equal amount, this condition soon became elusory. Old silks, satins, and velvets, which had completely gone out of fashion, were bought up at fictitious prices; and, when the vessels which took them on board were clear of the French coasts, they were thrown into the sea, and rich cargoes of English goods brought back in return., L. 1807. CHAP. Such was the exorbitant rates at which these were sold, that they yielded a very handsome profit to the merchants, after paying an enormous ransom to the Emperor for the licenses, and defraying the cost of all the French goods which were lost to give a colour to the transaction. British manufactures and colonial produce rose to an extravagant price; and, as a natural consequence, they became the fashion, and the object of universal desire. A pair of cotton stockings were sold for six or seven shillings, and worn by ladies, and in dress, in preference to the finest silk; sugar was soon five shillings, coffee ten shillings a-pound. These enormous prices excited the cupidity alike of those who were engaged in promoting, and those whose duty it was to repress the contraband traffic; the vast profits of such cargoes as could be sold on any terms, compensated the loss of several in the perilous undertaking; and fiscal corruption, taking example from the open sale of licenses at the Tuileries, seized every opportunity of realising a temporary profit from the sufferings of the people.1 * 1 Bour. vii. 232, 237. 30. the decrees England was not slow in following the example thus Evasion of set by the French Emperor. Even more dependent than on both sides her great antagonist on the disposal of the national proextension of duce, the British government gladly availed themselves this system. of a system which promised to mitigate, in so important a particular, the severity of the Continental blockade, and by the vast *The following instance will illustrate the mode in which the love of gain, in all the imperial functionaries, from the highest to the lowest, counteracted all the state objects of the Berlin Decree. The English, in the summer of 1807, had made themselves masters of Heligoland, from whence enormous quantities of British produce were smuggled into Holstein, whence again they were conveyed, at a charge of from 33 to 40 per cent, within the French custom house line. This regular traffic being well known to the imperial authorities, and probably secretly connived at by them for a share of its enormous profits, Bourrienne, then the French resident at Hamburg, represented to Napoleon that he had much better at once authorise the trade on these terms, and realise for himself this contraband profit. Napoleon adopted the proposal, and in consequence 60,000,000 francs' worth of English produce (£2,400,000) was in 1811 imported openly into that town alone, at a profit of 33 per cent to the Emperor! The same system was soon after adopted in Prussia: but notwithstanding this relaxation, the legions of douaniers and coast-guards who were quartered on the country were so prodigious that they were of necessity in part lodged in the L. 1807. 1810. 1810. restore, under the safeguard of imperial licenses, the CHAP. wonted encouragement of European wealth to British industry. Thence arose a system on both sides, the most extraordinary and inconsistent that ever existed upon earth. While the two governments were daily carrying on their commercial warfare with increased virulence; Nov. 18, while Napoleon was denouncing the punishment of death against every government functionary who should connive in any way at the introduction of British merchandise,* and consigning to the flames all the bales of English Aug. 27, manufactures that could be discovered by fiscal cupidity in all the extensive dominions subjected to his control; while these terrible severities were carried into rigorous execution wherever his influence reached, and piles of British goods were frequently burnt in the public marketplaces of all the chief Continental cities, and unhappy wretches shot for conniving at the lucrative contraband traffic in the forbidden articles; while the English Court of Admiralty was daily condemning merchant vessels which had contravened the Orders in Council, and issuing the strictest injunctions to its cruisers to carry them into full execution; both governments were the first to set the example of the open and undisguised violation of the very decrees to which they required such implicit obedience in others. British licenses were openly sold at the public offices in London, and became the vehicles of an immense public prisons and hospitals, and the unhappy captives and patients crowded into confined and unhealthy corners.-See BOURRIENNE, vii. 237, 238, 240. * The Imperial Decree, November 18, 1810, created provost-marshals for the summary punishment of all customhouse officers, carriers, coach-guards, tidewaiters, and others engaged in repressing illicit commerce, and authorised them pronounce and carry into instant execution the most severe and infamous punishments, including death, without appeal or respite of any kind.-Moniteur, 18th Nov. 1810, and MONTGAILLARD, vii. 54. to +At Hamburg, in 1811, under the government of Davoust, an unhappy father of a family was shot for having introduced into his house a little sugar-loaf, of which his family stood in need; and at that very moment, perhaps, Napoleon was signing a license for the importation of a million such loaves. Smuggling on a small scale was punished with death, and the government carried it on upon the greatest scale; the same regulations filled the European prisons with victims and the imperial coffers with riches.-BOURRIENNE, vii. 233, 234. L. 1807. July 25, 1810. 1 Mart. Sup. i. 512. 31. : commerce with the Continent and Napoleon at length carried the system of authorising this illicit traffic to such a height, that by a decree issued from Antwerp in July 1810, it was expressly declared, "Subsequent to the 1st August no vessel shall issue from any of our ports, bound for any foreign port, without being furnished with a license signed with our own hand." Thus the Continental System, and the retaliatory measure of the Orders in Council, were mutually abandoned by the governments on both sides, though obedience to them was rigorously exacted as the first of public duties from their subjects. The whole prohibitions of the Orders in Council disappeared before the magic of a writing from Downing Street; and the boasted grande pensée of Napoleon degenerated into a mere pretext for exacting, under the name of licenses, an immense annual profit for the behoof of the great Imperial Smuggler in the Tuileries. To such a height was this practice carried by the French Great effects Emperor, that it opened up new channels of commerce to tem in open- British industry, quite equal, on the continent of Europe, markets for to those his decree had destroyed; and the suffering of this sys ing up new British in dustry. experienced in England during the continuance of the Continental System was almost entirely owing, not to this Berlin decree, but to the loss of the great North American market, which the Orders in Council ultimately closed against British industry. Thus, in this the greatest measure of his life, on which he staked his influence, his fame, his throne, the mighty intellect of Napoleon was governed by the same regard to inferior interests which prompted the Dutch, in former times, to sell ammunition and provisions at an exorbitant rate to the inhabitants of a town besieged by their armies: resolved, at all events, to make gain by their hostilities, and if they could not reduce their enemies to subjection, at least realise a usurious profit from their necessities. To such a length did the license system proceed under the Imperial government, that it constituted a principal source |