Chapter XVIII: The Warfare Against Commerce, 1806-1812 (3)

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

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

Toward the end of 1810 the results of the various causes of trouble began to be heavily felt. Very scant returns coming from South America, the shippers were unable to discharge their debts to the manufacturers; and the embarrassments of the latter were felt by their workmen. From the West Indies the returns came in tropical produce, which could be realized only on the Continent, long since partly and now effectually closed. A succession of bad seasons had necessitated the importation of large quantities of grain from Holland and France, especially in 1809, when an abundant harvest there, coinciding with a very bad crop in England, induced Napoleon to enter upon his license system, and to authorize an export which in three years drained £10,000,000 in specie from the enemy. The freights to the licensed carriers, mostly neutrals or hostile, at least in name, were also paid in specie, which was thus taken out of the country; and there was a further drain of gold for the maintenance of the fleets in distant parts of the world and for the war in Spain, which now took the place of the former subsidies to allies as a consumer of British treasure. Thus arose a scarcity of specie. In November, 1810, the bankruptcies were two hundred and seventy-three, against one hundred and thirty of the same month a year before. Stoppages and compositions equalled in number half the traders of the kingdom. "The general failures have wonderfully affected manufactures, and want of confidence prevails between manufacturer and merchant." A month later "bankruptcies continue to increase, and confidence is nearly at an end. Neither gold nor silver is often to be seen. The trade of the manufacturing towns is at stand; and houses fail, not every day, but every hour. In the great sea-ports, the king's stores are full of all kinds of colonial produce which find no sale. Despondency is increased by the accounts from the Continent, which represent all the sea-ports and internal depots of trade to be full of French soldiers, who seize and burn every article which can possibly have passed through British hands." As the shadows darkened, murmurs grew louder and louder against the once popular[446] Orders in Council, to which all the evil was now attributed. The press changed its tone upon them, and a gradual agitation for their repeal grew up around the Opposition leaders; who, from the moment they lost power, had never ceased to inveigh against the retaliatory system framed by the ministry.

But while disaster was thus thickening about Great Britain, the case of France was worse. It was quite true, as the emperor said, that the people could live without sugar and coffee, and that necessity would in time find ways to produce many articles the import of which was denied her; but such warped applications of her industry and ingenuity, even when finally realized, could neither replace the loss of her natural channels of effort nor for any length of time cope with a nation, which, however momentarily shaken by unprecedented conditions, yet kept power continually to renew her strength by contact, through the sea, with new sources. That Great Britain would do this, her traditions and the habits of her people were the pledge; and the credit of the government bore witness to it through all. In the early part of 1811 a serious commercial crisis occurred in France, causing great anxiety to Napoleon. It was his particular wish to keep this corner-stone of the empire prosperous and contented under the immense demands made upon it for men, and the bitter sufferings entailed by the conscription. But prosperity was hard to secure with all the sea outlets of her manufactures and agriculture closed, with only a continental market, and that impoverished by the universal cessation of trade and further enfeebled by the exhausting demands made upon the peoples to support the armies quartered upon them. The British blockade of the French, Dutch, and Italian coasts forbade absolutely, except to the limited license trade, the water carriage of raw materials essential to manufactures, and prevented the export of French luxuries. "The state of France as it fell under my observation in 1807," wrote an American traveller, "exhibited a very different perspective" from that of Great Britain. "The effects of the loss of external trade were everywhere visible,—in the commercial cities half-deserted, and reduced to a state of inaction and gloom truly deplorable; in the inland towns, in which the populace is eminently wretched, and where I saw not one indication of improvement, but on the contrary numbers of edifices falling to ruin; on the high roads, where the infrequency of vehicles and travellers denoted but too strongly the decrease of internal consumption, and the languor of internal trade; and among the inhabitants of the country, particularly of the South, whose misery is extreme, in consequence of the exorbitant taxes, and of the want of outlet for their surplus produce. In 1807 the number of mendicants in the inland towns was almost incredible.... The fields were principally cultivated by women."[447]

All the genius of Napoleon could not create demands when there was not means to gratify them, and the exquisite products of French taste and skill labored under the same disadvantage as coffee and sugar, than which they were even less necessary; men could dispense with them. Production, stimulated by an exaggerated protection, became for a time excessive and then ceased; even the exclusion of British manufactures and the frequent burnings could not secure the continental market to articles, the raw materials for which were made so dear by the sea blockade, or by the long land carriage. Levant cotton made its weary way on horse and mule back, from Turkey, through Illyria, to Trieste, and thence was duly forwarded to France;[448] but even so, when made into stuffs, found itself in competition with British cottons which were landed in Salonica, conveyed on horses and mules through Servia and Hungary into Vienna, and thence distributed over Germany.[449] In the same manner was British colonial produce introduced. Despite all Napoleon's efforts, smuggling continued to compete with and undersell the fair trader, and his own licenses were used to evade his own decrees.[450] Many firms in Holland went out of business altogether, the factories of Lyon closed their doors, and several Paris houses were in distress; although, like the British warehouses, their stores were crowded with goods for which they could find no purchasers. Banks could not recover their advances, internal commerce fell into confusion, and general disaster followed.

At the same time there was in France, as in Great Britain, much suffering from bad harvests, and this was aggravated for the former by the interruption of the coasting trade by the British cruisers, and by the indifferent character of the inland roads, which, except when they served the military plans of the emperor, were neglected from the straitened state of the finances. The government came to the rescue with various measures of relief, necessarily partial and arbitrary; designed rather to stave off immediate trouble than to afford a radical cure for existing difficulties. Yet serious remedies were needed; for the growing distress of the Continent must continue to react upon France, which found therein its only customers. In Holland almost all the former sources of wealth had one by one been cut off; and even money-lending, which survived the others, became a losing business from the wide-spread ruin in Europe.[451] In Russia the ruble had fallen to one third of the value it had before the institution of the Continental System; although the czar had refused to impose upon his people and their commerce the decrees of August 5 and October 19, which Napoleon had forced upon other states. With growing poverty in Europe, the empire must grow poorer, and in proportion to its loss of wealth must be the diminution of the revenue. Yet already the revenue was insufficient to the wants of the state, despite all the extraordinary resources which had been called up during the past year, and which could not again be expected. It was not to be hoped that many American ships would again place themselves within reach of the emperor's confiscations. The enormous seizures of colonial produce, made by surprise in the previous August, could not, to any similar extent, be repeated. The duty of fifty per cent, levied throughout the states occupied by his troops, on the coffee and sugar which was declared by the owners, had fallen upon accumulations made during the years of lax blockade and had brought in large sums; but it now served only as an inducement to smuggling. Great ingenuity had been shown in devising extraordinary means for extracting money from the subject peoples, but every year saw these supplies diminishing. Like slavery, like bad farming, Napoleon's administration, and especially his army, required continually new soil[452] and did little to renew or develop the powers which it taxed; beneficent plans were formed, multitudinous orders issued, but they received rare fulfilment except when they conduced to the military efficiency of the state.

There remained two resources. One was economy; and the correspondence of Napoleon at this period teems with exhortations to his lieutenants, with denials of money, and with precepts to get all they can out of the annexed territories, and ask as little as possible from him.[453] The emperor held in reserve, subject only to his own orders, a great military treasure which had begun with war contributions, and into which poured the results of the extraordinary transactions just mentioned. Five wars had brought into this chest 805,000,000 francs; but in 1810 there remained but 354,000,000, and he was unwilling to trench further upon it, unless some grave emergency arose. He hoped to spare, if not to add to it, by the confiscation of the property of Spanish nobles who had resisted his change of dynasty, as well as by the seizure of "false neutrals." Evidently, however, such resources are precarious, and cannot be compared to those of a commercial state. Contrasted with Great Britain, the financial expedients of Napoleon resembled those of a mediæval prince or an Oriental potentate; and in a strain of endurance, in a question of time, the very artificial, not to say unnatural, framework of power which he had built could not hope to outlast the highly organized, essentially modern, and above all consistently developed society which confronted him. A state of long standing and fixed traditions may endure the evils of a bad system, disadvantaged by it, but not ruined; but when the system is new and rests upon a single man, it asks in vain for the confidence inspired by a closely knit, yet wide-spreading, body politic whose established character guarantees the future.

This was clearly shown in the ability of either government to use the other resource—borrowing—as a means to supplement its deficient income. Napoleon steadfastly refused to resort to this, alleging that it was an unjustifiable draft upon the future, and could have but one result—bankruptcy. He proved easily that Great Britain could not go on borrowing indefinitely at her present rate. A better reason for his own abstinence was to be found in the condition of his credit. The public debt of France under his rule was small, and, as he did not add to it, it stood at a good figure in the market.[454] His military genius, the wide flight of his arms, the war contributions, the iniquitous plan by which he quartered his troops on foreign countries, not merely in war but in peace, and made them responsible for their maintenance,—measures such as these, facilitated by frequently recurrent wars and combined with exactions like those narrated in this chapter, enabled him to meet his expenditures, accumulate the large reserve fund mentioned, and at the same time distribute in France an amount of coin which greatly aided the circulation. But his success imposed upon no one. Everybody understood that such expedients were essentially transient, that to renew them meant renewed wars, invasions growing ever wider and wider, and results dependent always upon military prestige, which a single lost battle might overthrow. Compared with insecurity such as this, the fast growing debt of Great Britain possessed a relative solidity; which even exceeded the absolute confidence felt that the interest would be regularly paid. Behind her stood the history and the prestige of a Sea Power which men knew had met many a heavy reverse, yet had never failed; and which stood before Napoleon more mighty than ever. Far and wide, through many a sea and in many a land, stretched the roots of her strength; never more glorious, because never more sorely tried than by the great emperor. She had credit, he had none.

Savary, one of the most devoted of Napoleon's followers, quotes with conviction the following words to him of a Parisian banker, in the early part of 1811: "A humiliating fact, and one which gives the key to many others, is the state of credit in France and in England. The English debt amounts to about $3,500,000,000, ours only to $250,000,000; and yet the English could borrow at need sums much more considerable than we ourselves could, and above all at an infinitely more favorable rate. Why this difference? Why is the credit of the State, in France, lower than the credit of the leading merchants and bankers; while the reverse is the permanent condition in England? A word suffices to explain it: To restore one's credit in England, you have only to work with the government; while to lose one's credit in France it is only necessary _not_ to keep out of government transactions. All England is, so to say, a single commercial house, of which ministers are the directors, the laws the contract, which power itself cannot infringe. Here the Council of State usurps the powers of the tribunals, and I could almost say that nothing useful is done, because _nothing is really guaranteed_."[455] A competent American witness, before quoted, who had spent two years in France, wrote, in 1809: "The French rulers, whatever may be their power, are unable to obtain supplies at home except by _sacrifices equivalent to the risk which is incurred by contracting with them_. Their credit abroad may be estimated by the fact, which is so well known to us all, that no intelligent merchant in this country can be induced, by any consideration, to make advances in their favor, or to accept a bill on their treasury, from their highest accredited agent."[456]

While the public credit, that touchstone of prosperity, stood thus in the two states, the same eye-witness thus describes the relative condition of the two peoples: "In France the extinction of all public spirit and of the influence of public opinion, the depopulation and decay of the great towns, the stern dominion of a military police, incessantly checked the exultation, natural to the mind, on viewing the profusion of the bounties bestowed by nature. The pressure of the taxes was aggravated by the most oppressive rigor in the collection. The condition of the peasantry as to their food, clothing, and habitations bore no comparison with the state of the same class in England.... In England, whatever may be the representations of those who, with little knowledge of the facts, affect to deplore her condition, it is nevertheless true that there does not exist, and never has existed elsewhere, so beautiful and perfect a model of public and private prosperity.... I pay this just tribute of admiration with the more pleasure, as it is to me in the light of an atonement for the errors and prejudices under which I labored on this subject, before I enjoyed the advantage of a personal experience. A residence of nearly two years in that country—during which period I visited and studied nearly every part of it, with no other view or purpose than that of obtaining correct information, and I may add, with previous studies well fitted to promote my object—convinced me I had been egregiously deceived."[457]

The writer saw England before her sorest trial came. Since 1807, and especially after 1809, the condition of both nations had grown sensibly worse. The commercial embarrassments of Great Britain under the dislocation of her trade and the loss of her markets, occasioned partly by the Continental System and partly by the American Non-Intercourse Act, and aggravated by the wild speculations that followed the year 1808, resulted in 1811 in wide-spread disaster,—merchants failing, manufactories closing, workmen out of employment and starving. In France the commercial crisis of the same year, extending over the Continent, soon became a chaos of firms crashing one upon the other and dragging down, each the other, in its fall.[458] Soon great numbers of workmen in all the provinces found themselves, like their English brethren, deprived of occupation. Council upon council was held by the emperor to ascertain how, by government interference, to remedy the ills for which governmental interference was immediately responsible. But, underneath the apparently similar conditions of distress in the two countries, lay the real difference between a nation shut in, and thrown back upon itself, and one that kept open its communications with the world at large. In 1811 Great Britain had already begun to react through her natural channels; the energies of her people under the load upon them had been like a strong spring, whose tension remains, though compressed. The South American trade revived; the Spanish Main took off the accumulations in the West India Islands, and the latter in turn began to call for supplies from home; Russia was visibly relenting; in the Peninsula, Masséna, whose progress had been stopped at the lines of Torres Vedras, was forced to retreat into Spain in the month of March, and through a liberated Portugal were found new openings for British commerce. For France there could be no return of prosperity until the sea was again free to her, either through her own or through neutral ships; but the latter could not safely repair to her ports until her rival revoked the still existing Order in Council, blockading the whole French and Dutch coast, and this she would not do before the emperor recalled the decrees upon which rested his Continental System. And while Great Britain was making appalling drafts upon the future in her ever-mounting debt, France was exhausting a capital which no forcing power could replace, by her anticipated conscriptions, which led to a revolt far more menacing than the riots of English workmen. Sixty thousand "refractory" conscripts were scattered through the departments, and among the forests of western, central, and southern France, refusing to join their regiments and defying the authorities. They were pursued by flying columns of old soldiers; who, often long strangers to their own countrymen, took with their property the same liberties they had practised in foreign parts. In January, 1811, the whole conscription for the year was called out, and in midsummer that for 1812; but no legal measures could make men of the boys sent to die before the virile age,[459] more often of exposure than by the hands of the enemy, in the gloomy mountains and parched plains of Spain.

The great struggle of endurance, "of the highest individual genius against the resources and institutions of a great nation"[460] who stayed its power on the sea, was now drawing near its close; the battle between the sea and the land was about to terminate in one of the most impressive and gigantic military catastrophes recorded by history. But the inevitable end was already clearly indicated before Napoleon started for Russia, although the dim vision of weary eyes in England, strained by long watching, saw not that which the apprehensions of Frenchmen, troubled with the anguish of France, tremblingly felt. The credit of France was gone; nor could her people bear any added burdens, until the sea, over which Great Britain still moved unresisted, was open to them. The people of the Continent had become bitterly hostile through the sufferings caused by the blockade, and the imperial power could only be maintained by an army which was itself filled by borrowing upon the future; its capital, its reserve, was fast being exhausted.[461] The question of physical endurance was settled; the only point really left in doubt was that of moral endurance. Would Great Britain and the British government have the nerve to hold out till the emperor was exhausted?[462] Already the agitation for the repeal of the Orders in Council, with which the existing ministry was identified, was becoming ominous. The leaders of the Opposition were opposed to the Peninsular war; and Napier has vividly shown the doubts and hesitations of the ministry as to sustaining that great enterprise which compelled Napoleon to such waste of life, to such a fatal division of his force. Time was not allowed to test to the utmost British tenacity; the darkest hour was fast passing away, the clouds began to break and the day to dawn.

Three weeks after Napoleon's annexation of the Hanse towns and of the Duchy of Oldenburg, on the last day of the year 1810, Alexander put forth a commercial ukase which under all the circumstances had the appearance of retaliatory action; and at the least drew a sharp line between his commercial policy and the Continental System as inculcated by Napoleon. The decree expressly permitted the entrance of colonial produce under neutral flags; and many articles of French manufacture were virtually denied admission, by not being included in a list of goods which could be introduced on payment of duty. In vain did the czar assert that his object was to develop, by protection, Russian manufactures of the excluded articles. Napoleon rejected the explanation. "The last ukase," he wrote in a personal letter to Alexander, "is at bottom, but yet more in form, specially directed against France."[463] But while the exclusion of French products was the most open, the admission of neutral ships with colonial produce was the most significant, feature of the edict. This was the point upon which the emperor had been most importunate; here was the leak which, in his judgment, was sinking the ship. "Six hundred English merchant ships," he had written in a previous letter, October 23, 1810,[464] "wandering in the Baltic, have been refused admission to Prussian ports and those of Mecklenburg, and have steered for your Majesty's states. If you admit them the war still lasts.... Your Majesty knows that if you confiscate them we shall have peace. Whatever their papers, under whatever names they are masked, French, German, Spanish, Danish, Russian, your Majesty may be sure they are English."

Later, on the 4th of November,[465] Napoleon wrote through the ordinary ministerial channels: "There are no neutrals. Whatever the papers produced, they are false. Not a single ship enters Russia with so-called American papers but comes really from England.[466] Peace or war is in the hands of Russia. Let her confiscate all ships brought in by the English, and join France in demanding of Sweden the seizure of the immense quantity of merchandise the English have landed at Gottenburg under various flags. If Russia wishes peace with England, she has here the means. But Russia has followed opposite principles, and of this but one proof need be given: that is, that the colonial merchandise which appeared at the last Leipzig fair was brought there by seven hundred wagons coming from Russia; that to-day all the traffic in that merchandise is done through Russia; finally, that the twelve hundred ships which the English have convoyed by twenty ships of war, disguised under Swedish, Portuguese, Spanish, American flags, have in part landed their cargoes in Russia." To these complaints Alexander had replied that he had adhered, and would adhere, to his engagements and exclude British ships; but that he would not, and could not, go beyond them and forbid neutrals. The ukase of December 31 took the matter out of diplomatic discussion, and, coming so immediately upon the annexation of Oldenburg, had the appearance of defiance. As such Napoleon accepted it. "This seems," he wrote in the personal letter of February 28 above quoted, "a change of system. All Europe so regards it; and already our alliance no longer exists, in the opinion of England and of Europe.... If your Majesty abandons the alliance and burns the conventions of Tilsit, it would be evident that war would follow a few months sooner or later. The result must be, on either side, to strain the resources of our empires in preparations.... If your Majesty has not the purpose of reconciliation with England, you will see the necessity, for yourself and for me, of dissipating all these clouds." From that time both sovereigns prepared for war.

The turn of affairs in the North at this time, and during the succeeding critical twelvemonth, was powerfully influenced by the presence of a great British fleet in the Baltic and by the extreme discretion of its admiral. Napoleon had compelled Sweden to follow up her exclusion of British ships by a formal declaration of war, which was issued November 17, 1810. The British minister had to leave Stockholm; and, after his departure, the political as well as military direction of affairs on the spot was under the conduct of Sir James Saumarez. That most distinguished and admirable officer had thoroughly appreciated, during his three summers in the Baltic, the feelings of the Swedish rulers and people; and it was chiefly owing to his representations to his own government, and to his steadily conciliatory action, that the formal war never became actual. He resisted with dignity and firmness every attempt on the part of the Swedish authorities to carry out Napoleon's orders to confiscate; but he did not allow himself to be moved, by such occasional yielding on their part, to any act of retaliation. Good feeling between the two nations centred around his attractive personality, and facilitated the essential, but difficult, conciliation between Sweden and Russia. The entire license trade was under the protection of his fleet, which had charge also of the suppression of privateering, of the police of the hostile coasts, and of the interruption of communications between Denmark and Norway.[467] Its presence virtually insured the independence of Sweden against France and Russia, except during the winter months, when compelled to leave the Baltic; and its numbers and character gave the Swedish government a sufficient excuse for not proceeding to the extremities demanded by Napoleon. During the summer of 1811 the flag-ship was the centre of the secret consultations which went on between the two states, to which Russia also, having finally rejected Napoleon's terms, soon became a party; and towards the end of the season the negotiation, practically completed by the admiral, was formally concluded with a British plenipotentiary. It was determined to keep up the appearance of war, but with the understanding that Sweden would join the alliance of Great Britain and Russia. The czar had then no cause to fear that, in the approaching contest with the great conqueror, he should find a hostile Sweden on his flank and rear.[468]

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

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

Thus opened the fatal year 1812. The clouds breaking away, though scarce yet perceptibly, for Great Britain, were gathering in threatening masses on the horizon of Napoleon. A painful picture is drawn by his eulogist, M. Thiers, of the internal state of the empire at this time. An excessively dry season had caused very short crops throughout Europe, and want had produced bread riots in England, as well as in France and elsewhere. But such demonstrations of popular fury were far more dangerous and significant, in a country where all expression of opinion had been so rigorously controlled as in the empire, and in a capital which concentrates and leads, as only Paris does, the feelings of a nation. The discontent was heightened and deepened by the miseries of the conscription, which ate ever deeper and deeper, wringing the heart of every family, and becoming more and more extreme as each succeeding enterprise became vaster than those before it, and as the excessive demands, by reducing the quality of the individual victims, required ever growing numbers. Six hundred thousand men had been poured into Spain, three hundred thousand of whom had died there.[469] Besides the immense masses carried forward to the confines of Poland, and those destined for the Peninsula, there was to be a powerful reserve between the Elbe and the Rhine, another behind the Rhine in France itself, and to these Napoleon now proposed to add yet a third, of one hundred and twenty thousand so-called national guards, taken from the conscription of the four last years and legally not liable to the call. Throughout the great cities there was growing irritation, rising frequently to mutiny, with loud popular outcries, and again the number of refractory conscripts, of whom forty thousand had been arrested the year before, rose to fifty thousand; again flying columns pursued them through all the departments. Caught, shut up in the islands off the coasts, whence they could not escape, and, when drilled, marched under strong guard to the ends of Europe, they none the less contrived often to desert; and everywhere the people, hating the emperor, received them with open arms and passed them back, from hand to hand, to their homes. Thus amid starvation, misery, weeping, and violence, the time drew near for Napoleon to complete his great military undertaking of conquering the sea by the land.

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

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

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

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

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

As the combined tendency of the two policies, fully carried out, was to destroy neutral trade in Europe, the preponderance of injury must fall upon the nation which most needed the concurrence of the neutral carrier. That nation unquestionably was France.[470] Even in peace, as before stated, much more than half her trade was done in neutral bottoms; the war left her wholly dependent upon them. Alike to export and to import she must have free admission of neutral ships to her ports. Prior to the Berlin decree the British made no pretence to stop this; but they did, by reviving in 1804 the Rule of 1756, and by Fox's decree of May, 1806, blockading the coast from Brest to the Elbe, betray an apprehension of the result to themselves of the neutral trade with France. This should have put the emperor upon his guard. The very anxieties shown by a people of such mercantile aptitudes should have been most seriously regarded, as betraying where their immediate danger lay. The American market was a most important benefit to them, but American merchant ships threatened to be a yet more important injury. These having, under the circumstances of the war, a practical monopoly of carrying West India produce which exceeded in quality and quantity that of the British Islands, were underselling the latter on the Continent. The ill effect of this was partially obviated by the Rule of 1756; but there remained the fear that they would absorb, and be absorbed by, the commerce of the Continent; that to it, and to it alone, they would carry both articles of consumption and raw materials for manufacture; and that from it, and from it alone, they would take away manufactured articles with which Great Britain up to the present time had supplied them,—and, through them, large tracts of Spanish America.

Up to 1804 the course of trade had been for American ships to load for continental ports, receive there the greater part of the payment for their cargoes in bills of exchange on the Continent, and with these to go to British ports and pay for British manufactures, with which they completed their lading. If, on the other hand, they went from home direct to Great Britain, the cargoes they carried were in excess of British consumption, and so far were profitable to Great Britain chiefly as to a middleman, who re-exported them to the Continent. But, when Pitt returned to power, this course of trade was being sensibly modified. American ships were going more and more direct to the Continent, there completing their cargoes and sailing direct for home. Continental manufactures were supplanting British, though not in all kinds, because the American carrier found it more profitable to take them as his return freight; just as the produce of continental colonies was, through the same medium, cutting under British coffees, sugars, and other tropical products. British merchants were alarmed because, not only their merchant shipping, but the trade it carried was being taken away; and British statesmen saw, in the decay of their commerce, the fall of the British navy which depended upon it.

It was plainly the policy of Napoleon to further a change which of itself was naturally growing, and which yet depended wholly upon the neutral carrier. The latter was the key of the position; he was, while war lasted, essentially the enemy of Great Britain, who needed him little, and the friend of France, who needed him much. Truth would have justified England in saying, as she felt, that every neutral was more or less serving France. But in so doing the neutral was protected by the conventions of international law and precedent, which the British mind instinctively reveres, and for violating which it must have an excuse. This the emperor, whose genius inclined essentially to aggressive and violent action, promptly afforded. Overlooking the evident tendency of events, unmindful of the experience of 1798, he chose to regard the order of blockade of May, 1806, as a challenge, and issued the Berlin decree, which he was powerless to carry out unless the neutral ship came into a port under his control. He thus drove the latter away, lost its services, and gave Great Britain the excuse she was seeking for still further limiting its sphere of action, under the plea of retaliation upon France and her associates. And a most real retaliation it was. Opposition orators might harp on the definition of the word, and carp at the method as striking neutrals and not the enemy. Like Napoleon, they blinked at the fundamental fact that, while Great Britain ruled the sea, the neutral was the ally of her enemy.

The same simple principle vindicates the policy of the British ministry. Folios of argument and oratory have been produced to show the harm suffered by Great Britain in this battle over Commerce. Undoubtedly she suffered,—perhaps it would not be an exaggeration to say she nearly died; but when two combatants enter the lists, not for a chivalric parade but for life and death, it is not the incidental injuries, but the preponderance of harm done and the relative endurance, which determine the issue. To the same test of principle must be referred the mistakes in details charged against British ministries. Military writers say that, when the right strategic line of effort is chosen, mistakes of detail are comparatively harmless, and even a lost battle is not fatal. When France decided, practically, to suppress the concurrence of the neutral carrier, she made a strategic blunder; and when Great Britain took advantage of the mistake, she achieved a strategic success, which became a triumph.

As regards the rightfulness of the action of the two parties, viewed separately from their policy, opinions will probably always differ, according to the authority attributed by individuals to the _dicta_ of International Law. It may be admitted at once that neither Napoleon's decrees nor the British orders can be justified at that bar, except by the simple plea of self-preservation,—the first law of states even more than of men; for no government is empowered to assent to that last sacrifice, which the individual may make for the noblest motives. The beneficent influence of the mass of conventions known as International Law is indisputable, nor should its authority be lightly undermined; but it cannot prevent the interests of belligerents and neutrals from clashing, nor speak with perfect clearness in all cases where they do. Of this the Rule of 1756 offered, in its day, a conspicuous instance. The belligerent claimed that the neutral, by covering with his flag a trade previously the monopoly of the enemy, not only inflicted a grave injury by snatching from him a lawful prey, but was guilty likewise of a breach of neutrality; the neutral contended that the enemy had a right to change his commercial regulations, in war as well as in peace. To the author, though an American, the belligerent argument seems the stronger; nor was the laudable desire of the neutral for gain a nobler motive than the solicitude, about their national resources, of men who rightly believed themselves engaged in a struggle for national existence. The measure meted to Austria and Prussia was an ominous indication of the fate Great Britain might expect, if her strength failed her. But, whatever the decision of our older and milder civilization on the merits of the particular question, there can be no doubt of the passionate earnestness of the two disputants in their day, nor of the conviction of right held by either. In such a dilemma, the last answer of International Law has to be that every state is the final judge as to whether it should or should not make war; to its own self alone is it responsible for the rightfulness of this action. If, however, the condition of injury entailed by the neutral's course is such as to justify war, it justifies all lesser means of control. The question of the rightfulness of these disappears, and that of policy alone remains.

It is the business of the neutral, by his prepared condition, to make impolitic that which he claims is also wrong. The neutral which fails to do so, which leaves its ports defenceless and its navy stunted until the emergency comes, will then find, as the United States found in the early years of this century, an admirable opportunity to write State Papers.