THE CONTINENTAL SYSTEM AS A WHOLE[39]
[Footnote 39: References. Lueders: 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
regime, 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 kuenftig 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, Memoires 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 preeminence, 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 preeminence, 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 preeminence 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