Chapter XVI: The Trafalgar Campaign—concluded (3)

An event so striking as the battle of Trafalgar becomes, however, to mankind the symbol of all the circumstances—more important, perhaps, but less obvious—which culminate in it. In this sense it may be said that Trafalgar was the cause—as it certainly marked the period—of Napoleon's resolution to crush Great Britain by excluding her commerce from the Continent. Here, therefore, the story of the influence of Sea Power upon this great conflict ceases to follow the strictly naval events, and becomes concerned simply with commerce-destroying, ordinarily a secondary operation of maritime war, but exalted in the later years of Napoleon's reign to be the principal, if not the sole, means of action.

To this the two next chapters are devoted. Of these, the first deals with commerce-destroying in the ordinary sense of the words, directed against enemies' property on the high seas; beginning with the outbreak of war in 1793, and narrating the series of measures by which the republic sought to break down British commerce and foreshadowed the policy of Napoleon's Berlin and Milan decrees. The second begins with the Berlin decree, in 1806; and, tracing one by one the steps which carried the emperor from violence to violence, seeks to show how these found their necessary outcome in the Russian expedition and the fall of the Empire. Detached thus, as far as may be, from the maze of contemporary history in which they are commonly lost, these successive acts of the French government are seen to form a logical sequence, connected by one motive and dominated by one necessity. The motive is the destruction of Great Britain, the necessity that of self-preservation. Each nation, unassailable on its own element, stood like an impregnable fortress that can be brought to surrender only by the exhaustion of its resources. In this struggle of endurance Napoleon fell.