CHAPTER XIII.

THE CONTINENTAL SYSTEM.

The promulgation of the Berlin Decree against British commerce was one of those dramatic strokes by which Napoleon sought to double the effect of his actions. The popular imagination was awed by the suddenness with which the conqueror turned aside from the task of completing the ruin of Prussia in order to launch his thunderbolt against the hitherto unassailable islanders, and to launch it, too, from the capital of Frederick the Great. In Napoleon’s career the element of the melodramatic frequently obtrudes itself; but those who have observed the workings of his statecraft over a long term of years know that the stage thunder is but the climax in a carefully prepared situation, when the minds of all observers are in a state of tense expectancy. It is no exaggeration to say that the Berlin Decree of November, 1806, was the climax towards which Napoleon’s policy had long been working on one of its best-marked lines. His power as a statesman lay in his skill in adapting to present needs the most practical among the ideas and theories woven by the brains of the former generation; and the events already described enabled him now to apply them to a large part of the Continent of Europe. The Berlin Decree constitutes, perhaps, the highest example of a union of the practical and theatrical in statecraft. Overwhelmed by the suddenness of the blow, contemporaries could not see that it was but the outcome of thoughts and efforts, whose beginnings had long been observable. Briefly stated, the idea which took form in the Berlin Decree was to subject Great Britain to complete commercial isolation from the Continent in order to compel her to surrender at discretion. But this idea was by no means new. It had its beginning in the Mercantilist theory of commerce, in the teachings of Rousseau on national solidarity, and in the speculations of the Physiocrats.

It is impossible here to trace in detail the development of these ideas from the time of their inception down to the revolutionary era, when some, at least, became political actualities. Some general remarks only can be made. French statesmen who thought about the wider interests of commerce belonged with scarcely an exception to the Mercantilist school. From the time of Colbert to that of Vergennes, the greatest statesman was he who could increase the internal resources of France, and set her free from all dependence on the foreigner. Turgot alone swerved aside of set purpose in the direction of freer trade with foreigner; and his action was speedily reversed. In concluding a treaty of commerce with Great Britain in 1786, Calonne and Vergennes were probably influenced solely by the belief that moderate duties would bring in a larger rename than the prohibitive duties formerly imposed; and that treaty cannot be looked on as a triumph of Free Trade principles in France. The rebound towards the older fiscal methods in and after 1792 was overpoweringly strong; and, after the outbreak of war in February, 1793, public men of all shades of thought were ready to adopt any conceivable means in order to ruin British commerce.

The political theories of the age previous to the Revolution also served to convince the thinkers of France that the struggle with Great Britain would be easily won. The perfect State, according to Rousseau, was one that sufficed for all its needs and could do without foreign trade. The ideal commonwealth was “that which can subsist without other nations, and without which every other nation can subsist”. Subsequent events emphasised the contrast here implied between the life of a self-sufficing agricultural community and that of a commercial State such as Britain or Holland. The agrarian reforms of the French Revolution tended to make France more self-sufficing, while Great Britain, under Pitt’s able guidance, was fast becoming the purveyor of the world.

The lesson taught by Rousseau in regard to ethics and legislation had also been set forth by the Physiocrats in the sphere of economic theory. The teachings of Quesnay and of his followers rested on the assumption that the only true source of national wealth was the land, and that States would prosper in proportion as they developed agriculture and raw materials. Manufactures might be productive of refinement and utility, but could not add to the stock of national wealth, inasmuch as they did but change the form of existing material. Agriculture alone, therefore, was capable of producing a clear gain to the community; manufactures could not yield it, for they were “sterile”. These views had no small influence on the leaders of thought in France before the Revolution.

As a result of these three diverse influences, there was a general tendency in 1789-93 to exalt agriculture and depreciate commerce. It was helped on by the cult of Lycurgus, to which Saint-Just gave so much vogue. It was probably the appeals to the legendary life of Sparta that were most effective among the militant Jacobins who came to power in 1793 ; but the speeches of members of the Convention contain many passages which show that England was not only hated as the abode of corrupting commerce, but also despised on the ground of economic and political unsoundness. Some even of the Girondins took this view. Thus, on January 13, 1793, Kersaint, in presenting the official report of the Committee of Defence, used these words:— “The credit of England rests upon fictitious wealth; the real riches of that people are scattered everywhere... Asia, Portugal, and Spain are the most advantageous markets for the productions of English industry; we should shut those markets to the English by opening them to all the world. We must attack Lisbon and the Brazils, and carry an auxiliary army to Tippoo Sultan. The Republics of Italy offer you maritime prizes, the loss of which will fall on English commerce”. In pursuance of this policy, the Convention, on September 21, 1793, excluded from French ports all goods that were not brought by French ships or the ships of neutrals; and on October 9 and 10 all merchandise produced in Great Britain or her colonies was proscribed throughout the French Republic. At the same time Clootz declared that the possession of the mouths of the Rhine was essential to the success of France in her new enterprise.

The Decree of October 31, 1796, carried the policy of commercial war to still greater lengths. The preamble stated that it was the duty of French legislators to encourage French industry, and to exclude every product manufactured by the enemy. The Act carried this into effect, and further declared that any ship laden either in whole or in part with British goods might be seized in any French port. A large number of goods were to be considered as British, namely, cotton, woollen, and muslin stuffs, “English” carpets, buttons, cutlery, hardware, saddlery, tanned leather, refined sugar, pottery, etc. None of these might be exposed for sale, under pain of seizure. The same prohibition applied to the products of India unless accompanied by certificates of the Dutch and Danish companies, duly visés by the French consuls.

Thus, the beginnings of the Continental System are clearly traceable in the thought and politics of France long before the advent of Bonaparte to power. He was in turn the pupil, the agent, and the master of the men who had long cried, in impotent wrath, “Delenda est Carthago”; and no small part of his political influence resulted from his ability to give effect to their views. At the close of his early campaigns, he scanned the horizon for further means of carrying out the grandiose designs sketched in outline to the Convention on the threshold of the war. On February 23, 1798, he reported to the Directory that four courses were possible in the war against Britain—first, to attempt an invasion; secondly, to seize Hanover and Hamburg; thirdly, to make an expedition to the Levant; lastly, failing all of these, to make peace. In that year he attempted the third of these schemes. Its failure served only to popularise the methods of commercial war; and, according to his future minister, Mollien, the mania for the prohibition of English trade was never greater than at the beginning of the Consulate.

The Peace of Amiens brought about no resumption of friendly trading relations. On the renewal of war in 1803 the First Consul seized Hanover, and sought to control Hamburg. After the failure of his schemes for the invasion of England and his triumph over Austria at Austerlitz, he reeurred to the plan of controlling northern Germany. By skilfully offering Hanover to the Court of Berlin, he sought to range Prussia under what he now termed his “coast-system.” The experiment of bribing Prussia to take his side having failed, he used force against her in order to ensure the same result. As a victor he launched from Berlin the famous Decree soon to be described in detail. The reappear­ance of Russia in the field afforded him still wider opportunities; and the Peace of Tilsit gave him the prospect of arraying against the mistress of the seas forces vaster by far than had ever entered into the conceptions of the men of 1793. Yet, in reality, the Continental System existed in embryo in the minds of the Anglophobes of the Convention; and the Napoleonic Empire of the years 1810-12 was, in a sense, only an index of the strength of the ideas which have been briefly set forth.

The political and military events of the years 1805-6, which led up to the Berlin Decree, having been already described in previous chapters of this volume, it is needful only to glance at a few of the accompanying incidents which show the trend of Napoleon’s policy. The importance which he attached to the coasts of the North Sea is seen in his determination to control Holland at all costs, in the speed with which, after the outbreak of war, he overran Hanover, and in the means that he adopted for the coercion of the Hanse Towns. On every occasion when Prussia put in a claim for those cities during the bargainings of the years 1805-6, it was set aside. The conditions which he attached to his offer of Hanover to that Power at the time of the discussions at Schonbrunn (December, 1805) point in the same direction. He insisted that, if Prussia acquired that electorate, she must exclude British commerce from all her lands. In vain did Frederick William III seek to escape from the cruel alternative of war with Napoleon or war with England. On April 1, 1806, he reluctantly issued an ordinance which excluded British ships from the ports of Prussia and Hanover.

In point of fact this, rather than the Berlin Decree, was the event which definitely inaugurated the Continental System. It is true that Napoleon had already compelled neutral States to exclude British commerce—for instance, in the Treaty of Florence with the kingdom of Naples (March 28, 1801) ; but the present was the first occasion on which a great Power bent beneath the pressure of his commercial policy. The consequences were immediate and far-reaching. The Grenville-Fox Ministry at once placed an embargo on some 400 Prussian ships then in British harbours, declared the coasts from the Elbe to the Ems to be in a state of blockade (April 8, 1806), and thirteen days later launched a declaration of war against Prussia. An Order in Council of May 16, however, declared that the ports of the north-west of Germany and of Holland would not be closed to neutral ships, provided that they had not come from, or were not sailing to, one of the enemy’s ports, and carried none of his goods and no contraband of war. Only on the coast between Ostend and the mouth of the Seine would the blockade be strictly enforced. On May 21 the British Government further declared that it would stop no ship in the Baltic Sea; and on September 25 it threw open the navigation between the Ems and the Elbe. Evidently it was the intention of the British Government, while upholding its rights, to subject neutrals to as little inconvenience as possible. The causes of friction between the United States and France and England having been discussed in a previous volume of this work, they need not be further referred to here.

Such was the state of affairs when, on November 21, 1806, Napoleon launched his Berlin Decree. The preamble stated that, whereas Great Britain did not recognise International Law as observed by civilised nations, but extended her hostilities to ships engaged in commerce, to peaceful individuals, and to their property on board merchant ships, and declared coasts to be blockaded on which she had not a single warship—measures which aimed at ruining the world’s commerce to the advantage of her own—therefore Napoleon had resolved to apply against her the measures of her own maritime code. Accordingly he declared the British Isles to be in a state of blockade, and prohibited all commerce and correspondence with them. All British subjects found in any country occupied by French or allied troops were liable to imprisonment, their merchandise and property being also considered lawful prize. Half the proceeds of such acts of confiscation were to be used to indemnify merchants for losses sustained through captures made by British cruisers. The Decree further declared that no ship coming from Great Britain or her colonies would be received in French or allied ports, and ordered the confiscation of ship and cargo whenever false statements were made on this head. The Decree was communicated at once to the Governments of Spain, Naples, Holland, and Etruria, and its adoption was expected as a sign of friendship to Napoleon; while every Government that made peace with him was thenceforth expected to comply with this and the later-enactments of his Continental System.

The British Government, seeing in this Decree a deliberate attempt to cut off British trade with the Continent, retaliated by the Order in Council of January 7, 1807. The preamble stated that, whereas the French Government, in violation of the usages of war, sought to prohibit the commerce of all neutral nations with Great Britain and the aeceptance of her merchandise by them, His Majesty would be justified in enforcing a similar prohibition of all commerce with France. He would, however, restrict the retaliation, and accordingly ordered that no vessel should be permitted to trade between two ports whence British ships were excluded; any ship so trading would be warned to discontinue her voyage, and, if she persisted, would be captured and become lawful prize. Napoleon replied to this Order in Council by a Decree, dated Warsaw, January 25, 1807, which ordered the confiscation of all British merchandise and British colonial products seized in the Hanseatic cities—an action which led to the renewal of the British blockade of the coast between the mouths of the Elbe and the Ems.

The provisions of the Treaty of Tilsit (July 7, 1807) having brought Prussia, Russia, and Denmark into collision with Great Britain, the King’s Government adopted severer measures against the States that were included in the hostile league. An Order in Council of November 11, 1807, declared that, whereas the Order in Council of January 7, 1807, had not had the desired effect of compelling the enemy to withdraw the decrees against British trade or of inducing neutral nations to interpose to procure their withdrawal, but they were being enforced with increased rigour, His Majesty therefore ordered that, with certain exceptions, all ports whence British ships and goods were excluded should thenceforth be subject to the same restrictions in regard to trade and navigation as if they were actually blockaded by a British naval force. That is to say, the Order reasserted the legal validity of a blockade which in most cases would be merely fictitious. All trade in articles produced by countries excluding British ships and goods, or by their colonies, was to be considered unlawful; and all ships trading to or from the said countries or their colonies, together with all merchandise and produce belonging thereto, were thenceforth to be lawful prize. Neutral ships that, prior to receiving notice of the present Order, had set sail from any port excluding British goods, and were destined for another port hostile to Great Britain, were to be warned by His Majesty’s ships or privateers to discontinue such voyage and to proceed to a British port; if they disregarded such warning, they might be seized and confiscated. The same Order in Council granted certain exceptions in favour of neutral ships; but, in a later clause, it threatened the penalty of confiscation against any ship on which were found French “certificates of origin”, that is, whose papers declared the cargo to be non-British. This clause must be pronounced harsh and overbearing.

A second Order in Council, also of November 11, 1807, held out certain inducements to neutral ships to trade with Great Britain. It relaxed the stringency of the old Navigation Acts in a way that had been foreshadowed by the statute 43 George III, “for permitting certain goods imported into Great Britain to be secured in warehouses without payment of duty”; it also allowed (but did not compel) neutral ships, which, owing to the operation of the foregoing Order in Council, had been obliged to put in at a British harbour, to discharge goods from an enemy’s country on the usual conditions, so far as concerned duties and “drawbacks”. Merchandise thus imported might also be bonded and thereafter re-exported on the receipt of an official certificate. A third Order in Council of the same date declared the sale of ships by a belligerent to a neutral to be null and void at law. Orders in Council of November 25, 1807, extended trading facilities to neutral ships plying between British ports and hostile ports in the West Indies or America, also between the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man, Gibraltar, or Malta, and any hostile port not actually blockaded by British ships. It was further decreed on the same date that the ships of Prussia, Lubeck, and Portugal, which had been captured or were liable to capture, owing to their compliance with French demands, should be released or held to be not subject to detention or seizure.

An examination of the text of these Orders in Council, which differ widely from the travesties of fact too often presented in histories, suffices to show that the British Government, while pressing severely on all States which freely placed their resources at the disposal of Napoleon, yet sought to lessen the hardships of those on which the Continental System was imposed by force. The facilities granted to neutrals were clearly of such a kind as to disprove the charge that George Ill’s Government deliberately sought to ruin neutral commerce. On the contrary, it sought to attract neutral ships to British harbours, but only on conditions which contravened Napoleon’s decrees. The aim clearly was not to ruin neutral commerce, but to make the Continental System odious to neutrals.

Information touching the Orders in Council of November 11, 1807, reached Napoleon at Milan on December 16. During his tour in Italy he had received news of the triumphant entry of his troops into Lisbon, the arrival of the Russian squadron in the Tagus, Alexander’s declaration of war against Great Britain, and the departure of the greater part of the British force from Sicily. His letters and his actions of December 7-17 show that he expected the speedy collapse of England’s power. The second Milan Decree, that of December 17 (the first is unimportant), must be read in the light of this belief. The preamble stated that the British Order in Council of November 11 subjected all neutral ships, not only to the right of search exercised by British cruisers, but also to a forced stay in a British port and a compulsory impost on the cargo; and that such conduct would “denationalise” the ships of every neutral Power and cover with infamy every nation that allowed it. Napoleon therefore decreed that every ship undergoing such search or compulsory voyage to a British port was thereby denationalised, and would be considered lawful prize if captured by French or allied vessels; any ship, of whatever nation, sailing from any British port or from countries occupied by British troops, would count as good prize if taken by a French war-ship or privateer. The Decree asserted that these measures, being designed as a just retaliation for the barbarous code adopted in London, would not apply to nations that caused their flags to be respected at sea, but would otherwise be valid until England returned to the principles of International Law. Napoleon’s reference to the first Order in Council of November 11 can only be described as a deliberate misrepresentation. That Order did not seek to compel all neutral ships to put in at British ports and pay a tonnage duty. The clause now travestied by the Emperor merely declared that neutral ships w’hich, at the time of setting sail, had not received notice of that Order in Council, should be warned not to continue their voyage to a port hostile to Great Britain, but to proceed to some British port. Obviously this could apply only to a few ships, and for a limited time. The second Order in Council of that date, however, granted facilities to neutrals trading with England; and it is clear that this proceeding annoyed Napoleon. An earlier letter shows his anxiety on this head. On October 13 he wrote to Gaudin, his Finance Minister, stating that the British had just raised the blockade of the Elbe and the Weser, evidently because they were using neutral ships for their export trade and wished to avail themselves of that coast. He charged Gaudin to take advice as to the adoption of measures to “prevent this contraband in the Elbe, which is so advantageous to the English.” The result was seen in the French Decree of November 13, ordering the seizure on that coast of any ship that had touched at a British port.

The Milan Decree of December 17, 1807, was an extension of this policy of putting an end to the export of British produce on neutral vessels; and it was the events of November and December which encouraged Napoleon to couch his orders in the arrogant language of that edict. In view of the aggrandisement of his power, which then extended over all harbours from Memel to Ragusa, the Decree was by no means a piece of schoolboy declamation, as Lanfrey has termed it. The year 1807 had seen the balance turn decidedly in favour of Napoleon. The only successes of importance gained by England were the capture of Curacao and Heligoland (January and September), and the withdrawal of the Danish and Portuguese fleets from Napoleon’s sphere of control. On the other hand, the British expeditions to the Dardanelles, Alexandria, Montevideo, and Stralsund had all failed. The Spanish rising was not then foreseen; and Napoleon might well imagine that the pressure exerted by the Milan Decree on the harbours of nearly the whole Continent must be fatal to the power of England.

Apart from the Order in Council of April 26, 1809, which restricted the limits of the British blockade to Holland, France, and Italy, the belligerents did little to alter their rules in the years 1808 and 1809. They bent themselves to the task of extending, or secretly modifying, the operation of the existing decrees. As has been stated above, Napoleon had forced Austria to accede to the Continental System (February 28, 1808), had annexed Etruria and the Papal Legations (January and April), and had occupied a large part of Spain with French troops. The colonial conquests achieved by Great Britain served in part to redress the balance between the Land Power and the Sea Power; but the latter was in great danger until the Spanish rising of 1808 opened the way for an alliance with Spain.

That great event also served to consolidate public opinion in Great Britain. Latterly it had begun to incline towards peace, as appeared in the petitions from Leeds, Bolton, and other manufacturing towns, where the distress was very great. Such petitions ceased when the alliance with the Spanish patriots revived the national hopes. The struggle now became a struggle on behalf of the national freedom of the Spaniards; it also promised to open up markets that had hitherto been closed, for it concerned not Spain alone but also her colonies. Every victory of the patriots and of Wellesley widened the area within which British goods were accepted in the Peninsula; and the news of these successes soon decided the Governments of central and southern America to open their ports to British trade. Unfortunately the Spanish Regency and Cortes, or the governors whom they sent out, sought to impose the old restraints on foreign trade; and this embittered the disputes and civil strifes which arose. For a time, however, the opening of the ports of central and southern America enabled British merchants to withstand the otherwise unendurable strain caused by Napoleon’s policy. Those markets were, however, glutted with British goods in the course of the year 1810; and many firms that had counted on a continuance of the South American trade were ruined. “Speculative exports to South America are the rock upon which these houses have split.” Such is the gist of the commercial report of August, 1810, describing the cause and the growth of the grave financial crisis of that year. The value even of Bank of England notes fell sharply; and the loss on exchange with foreign countries, averaged 30 per cent.

Several causes conspired to bring about this result. The disgraceful failure of the Walcheren expedition in the previous year, Napoleon’s triumph over Austria, and his marriage with Marie-Louise of Austria in April, 1810, the seeming inability of Wellesley and the Spanish patriots to make head against the French in the Peninsula, and finally the annex­ation of Holland, served to produce a general feeling of despondency.

It had always been a fundamental axiom of Napoleon’s political belief that French influence must be paramount in Holland. Every accession to his power was marked by some change in Franco-Dutch relations more and more prejudicial to the freedom of the little State. The Franco-Dutch treaty of May 24, 1806, guaranteed to Holland (then assigned to Louis Bonaparte) its independence and integrity; yet the hand of the Emperor soon pressed heavily upon it. In theory the monarchy was constitutional, but the attribution of all executive power to the King made it practically absolute. Louis however resolved to rule in the interests of the Dutch. By his care of the dykes, the canals, and the commercial interests of his people, and by his mitigation of the conscription, he succeeded in earning the gratitude of his subjects and the rebukes of the Emperor. His chief difficulty lay in the finances, the public expenditure being three times as great as the revenue ; and his appeals to Napoleon for financial relief met with ironical replies or recommendations to effect a reduction of the state debt.

But the chief cause of friction lay in the application of the Con­tinental System to an essentially maritime State. Louis had to bear many bitter reproaches for his failure to seal up the Dutch coasts against British merchandise. “You attach too high a price to popularity in Holland”, wrote Napoleon on December 3, 1806. “Before being kind, you must be the master. You have seen by my message to the Senate and by my Decree that I mean to conquer the sea by the land. You must follow this system”. During his sojourn at Erfurt in October, 1808, the Emperor threatened to close the mouths of the Rhine and the Scheldt unless Louis put an end to all trade with England; at present, wrote Napoleon, a hundred ships a month left the Dutch shores for those of the enemy.

By the end of the campaign of 1809 Napoleon had resolved to annex the kingdom outright; and in November of that year he wrote to Champagny to that effect. In his declaration of policy to the Legislative Body, he stated that Holland was crushed between France and England, and that she formed a necessary outlet to one of the great arteries of the Empire. On December 21, 1809, Louis (then at Paris) received an acrid communication (omitted from the official Correspond mice) to the effect that he might retain his crown if he would prohibit British commerce, maintain a fleet of fourteen sail of the line and seven frigates, and an army of 25,000 men. The letter warned him, however, of the probability of the annexation of Holland as the most fatal blow that could be dealt to England. In order to double the force of this threat, Napoleon on January 3, 1810, annexed the island of Walcheren, ordered his troops to invade Holland, and forcibly occupied Breda and Bergen-op-Zoom. The Dutch prepared to resist; but Louis, prostrate with illness, bent before his brother’s demands, thus staving off for a moment the inevitable blow.

Meanwhile Napoleon, being desirous of using his hold on Holland in order to browbeat the British Government, urged Louis to set on foot negotiations through the medium of a Dutch banker, Labouchere, son-in-law of the banker Baring, with a view to intimidating England by the prospect of the entire annexation of Holland. Louis returned to his kingdom on April 11, 1810; and the negotiations began. Labouchere had some interviews with the Marquis Wellesley, Canning’s successor, who saw through the design. Nevertheless he allowed the negotiation to proceed, even though Labouchere had no official credentials. The affair was rendered memorable by the intrigue secretly carried on by Fouché, the French Minister of Police, who sent over an agent named Fagan, and afterwards sought, through the medium of a financier, Ouvrard, to sound the British Ministry on the subject of a possible accommodation. Napoleon was enraged when, at the end of May, he discovered the un­paralleled effrontery of his Minister. He disgraced him and ordered him to live in retirement in his sénatorerie of Provence.

These negotiations delayed but did not avert the doom of Louis and of his kingdom. Even while they were still on foot, Napoleon insisted on the cession of the lands south of the Rhine, the observance of a more stringent fiscal decree, which had been promulgated on May 13, and the confiscation of several American ships which Louis had allowed to enter his harbours. Under these provocations, the patience of Louis and of his subjects gave way. Disturbances took place, in the course of which an insult was offered to the coachman of the French ambassador in Amsterdam. At once Napoleon withdrew his ambassador, instructed the chargé d'affaires who remained to “keep the quarrel open”, and sent his troops into Holland. For a brief space Louis thought of calling his people to arms; but, on his counsellors pointing out the hopelessness of such an effort, he resolved to abdicate. After drawing up the deed of abdication in favour of his son (the elder brother of the future Napoleon III) and writing a touching farewell to his counsellors, he set out secretly on the night of July 1, and fled to Toplitz in Bohemia. An Imperial edict of July 9, 1810, decreed the annexation of Holland to the French Empire. The French commercial decrees were at once put in force, and colonial produce was confiscated.

The annexation of Holland and the consequent cessation of Anglo-Dutch commerce added to the depression everywhere felt in Great Britain. To increase the trials of the people, the harvest of the year 1810 was a nearly total failure; that of 1809 having been deficient, there were no reserves of corn; and in August, the price of wheat averaged 116 shillings the quarter. Most fortunately, Napoleon did not adopt the device of stopping the export of grain. As is shown by his letters of February 8, July 16, and August 6, 1810, he suspended its exportation from his States only when he feared the approach of dearth; when reassured on this point, he sought to increase his revenue by allowing the export of corn, subject to a considerable duty, even to England. He confined his hostility almost entirely to the exports from England. Ships that received his licenses to export French, Polish, or Italian corn or other produce were not allowed to bring back goods from England, except such as were needed for the French and allied navies.

As a result of these curious arrangements, England survived the time of dearth, which might otherwise have become actual famine. Owing to the onesidedness of Napoleon’s commercial system, the command of tropical lands which Great Britain enjoyed, and the policy embodied in the Order in Council of November 11, 1807, vast stores of goods accumulated in bonded warehouses at her ports. Ultimately this cir­cumstance was destined to tell favourably on the nation’s industries, but for the present it embarrassed the mercantile interest. The official report, dated March 7, 1811, of the parliamentary committee appointed to enquire into the distress of the autumn and winter of 1810-1, traced it partly to the excessive amount of goods thus imported, which had helped to bring about a sharp fall in prices, ranging from 40 to 50 per cent, in Lancashire goods. It further stated that the opening of new docks and the granting of facilities for placing goods in bond had attracted neutral commerce to an unexampled extent; and that the produce of Santo Domingo and of the newly conquered colonies came almost wholly to British harbours. “From Europe the importations from places from which the British flag is excluded have been immense.”

The tone of the report is clearly optimistic. It sought to minimise the present distress, and omitted to state that in November, 1810, the number of bankruptcies had been 273, nearly three times the average number. Nevertheless, in the main, its contentions were justified by events. The facts which it adduced as to the increase in the value of the exports of cotton goods (from £9,846,889 in 1808 to £18,616,723 in 1810) showed that this industry was successfully grappling with the strange conditions of the time, and had found in the new colonial markets a recompense for the partial loss of those of Europe. Indeed all clear­sighted observers could see that the stores of colonial and tropical merchandise brought to British harbours would enable manufacturers, with the recent inventions of Watt, Crompton, and Cartwright at their disposal, to produce goods whose abundance, excellence, and cheapness would more than counteract the effect of the Napoleonic Decrees.

Napoleon failed to notice the operation of these wider causes that made for the triumph of England in the commercial war; he saw only her present difficulties. In the English newspapers he read of the misery and discontent of a large part of her operatives, the spread of insolvency, and the rapid growth of taxation and of the National Debt. Mollien, Minister of the French Treasury, states that nearly all the Emperor’s advisers pointed jubilantly to the fact that British merchants lost 30 per cent, on exchange in their trade with the Continent, as a sure sign of the forthcoming collapse of that Power. This consideration probably furnished Napoleon with another inducement in favour of allowing corn and some other products to enter her ports. His great aim was to deplete the stores of bullion in London, lower the rate of exchange, and in every way undermine British credit. Finally, the old Jacobin illusion as to the inherent artificiality of England’s position induced him, in the latter half of the year 1810, to adopt in succession three measures, which, it appeared, must humble his rival in the dust. These were the Trianon Tariff of August 5, the Fontainebleau Decrees of October 18 and 25, and the annexation of the north-west coast of Germany at the close of 1810.

The first of these devices arose, apparently, from a growing conviction that, despite his efforts to keep neutrals from trading with his enemy, all colonial products brought to Europe came from British colonies, being fraudulently sent by British merchants under cover of neutral flags. In his curious letter of August 20 to Lebrun, Napoleon states that in reality there are no neutral ships, for they all “pay ransom” to the English and transgress his rules. He also admits, in a letter of September 2, to Davout, that the “certificates of origin” mean nothing; they are all forgeries. Accordingly, he determined to tax all colonial imports. On the annexation of Holland and the confiscation of British goods, he had allowed Dutch merchants to send their colonial products into France on payment of a duty of 50 per cent, ad valorem; and they availed themselves of these terms. This seems to have convinced him that that class of goods could everywhere bear the same high duty, and that its imposition would serve to check smuggling on the coasts and frontiers, benefit the revenue, and equalise prices. Therefore, while staying at the Trianon, he devised the tariff of August 5; but its existence was kept secret and for a short time disavowed. It subjected every kilogramme of these articles to the following duties—American cotton 8 frs.; Levant cotton 4 frs. if imported by sea, and 2 frs. if imported by land; other cottons 6 frs.; cane-sugar 3 frs.; refined sugar 4 frs.; China tea 9 frs.; green tea 6 frs.; other teas 1 fr. 50 e.; coffee 4 frs.; indigo 9 frs.; etc. The average duty was about 50 per cent, ad valorem. In order to impose this tariff on his subject States, he sent secret agents to watch the chief trading centres of Germany and Poland, and to prepare for the seizure of illicit goods. He also sought to induce Prussia and Russia to adopt the same tariff, urging the great benefits that must accrue to their treasuries, solely at the expense of British merchants and smugglers. Frederick William obeyed his behest; but the Tsar refused to go beyond the terms agreed on at Tilsit. Napoleon further announced that all depots con­taining such wares and situated within four days’ distance of the frontiers of the Empire were liable to seizure; and he accordingly confiscated great stores of merchandise at Stuttgart, Frankfort, Bern, and elsewhere.

Fortune placed a great prize in his power during the autumn. A large convoy of ships, which were nominally neutral but were laden with British goods, had sailed for the Baltic, in the hope of gaining the admission to Russian, Swedish, and Prussian ports that was still usually accorded. A long spell of easterly winds and the political uncertainties of the time kept them for some weeks near the Sound; whereupon Napoleon urged the Baltic Powers to confiscate the ships and cargoes. On October 19 he threatened to march against Prussia if she did not comply; and four days later he wrote to the Tsar in terms almost equally urgent, stating that England was in extremities, that her 600 merchant­men, now wandering about the Baltic, had been refused admission by Prussia, and that similar action on the part of Russia would help to end the war. Alexander yielded to the insistence of his ally, and confiscated many of the ships; Prussia and Sweden acted in the same way. A memorial sent by British merchants to the Tsar, and dated May 8, 1816, states that the cargoes then confiscated in Russia were valued at £1,500,000, and that this was the first occasion on which commerce between the two States had suffered serious loss.

On October 18 and 25, 1810, Napoleon issued the famous Fontainebleau Decrees. The first ordered that all British manufactured goods found in the Napoleonic States should be seized and publicly burnt; the second established forty-one tribunals for the trial of persons guilty of introducing illicit wares and for the reward of informers and others who helped in their seizure. These Decrees provoked great discontent. At Frankfort the French garrison held the chief points of the city while the seizure and burning of goods went on; and everywhere men prepared to do without colonial goods rather than pay the exorbitant prices which the harassed dealers were compelled to charge. Hitherto the Continental System had not brought actual privations to the trading classes and their patrons. Indeed, some towns near the coast of the North Sea had even benefited from the contraband trade in British goods. Stuve, an eminent citizen of Osnabruck in the kingdom of Westphalia, states in his memoirs that in the years 1808-9 long trains of waggons used to bring these wares from the coast through that city on their way into central Europe and France, and that King Jerome himself connived at this profitable contraband trade. But the seizures and burnings of British produce in the autumn of 1810 ushered in an era of terrorism and want, which reached its climax for all true patriots when the north-west of that kingdom was annexed to the French Empire, along with the whole of the north-west coast of Germany, including the free city of Lübeck (Dec. 10, 1810).

This event, together with the absorption of the Republic of Valais, resulted from Napoleon’s determination absolutely to control the trade centres of northern Germany and the Simplon road into Italy. He found from the reports of Davout at Hamburg that British and colonial merchandise came in from Heligoland and other small islands; while the coast of Oldenburg was a favourite resort of smugglers. The Emperor now pushed the policy of “Thorough” against Great Britain to its logical conclusion, in the manner described. The official statement accompanying the decree of annexation averred that that measure was “commanded by circumstances. The immense stores at Heligoland threatened ever to flow into the Continent, if a single point remained open to English trade on the coasts of the North Sea, and if the mouths of the Jahde, Weser, and Elbe were not closed against it for ever”. None of the Emperor’s acts caused more alarm than this. By the same reasoning, any coast-line of Europe where British goods were smuggled in could be annexed forthwith. Prussia was in no position to offer a protest; but the Tsar soon manifested his annoyance at the summary dethronement of his brother-in-law, the Grand Duke of Oldenburg. As will appear later, the Oldenburg affair, coming at a time when Alexander was beset by the complaints of his mercantile classes at the stoppage of all trade with England, paved the way for the war of 1812.

The growth and completion of the Continental System having been traced, it remains to advert, as fully as limits of space will permit, to the relaxations of their fiscal and maritime codes which both combatants permitted themselves to make under the guise of licenses. These were first granted by the British Government, which in the year 1806 began to allow neutrals to trade in a manner ostensibly forbidden by the Orders in Council. The practice being found to be convenient for the export of British merchandise, as many as 2606 licenses were granted in the year 1807; in the year 1809 the number exceeded 15,000, and in the following year, 18,000. The greater number were allotted to neutrals or merely nominal enemies, as Sweden, Prussia, and Russia, which were thereby freed from search and detention by British cruisers at sea. On arriving at their destination, the masters could produce their other papers, which freed ship and cargo from confiscation under Napoleon’s edicts. This soon led to the practice of having two complete sets of papers, those only being produced which procured immunity from confiscation whether at sea or in harbour. A judge in the British Court of Admiralty stated in 1809 that the whole carrying trade of the world was being carried on under licenses, chiefly in hostile bottoms. The protests of British shipowners against this system and the capture of nearly 600 fraudulent neutrals in the Baltic in the autumn of 1810 led to its decline after that time. Justice Phillimore, a severe critic of the system, blamed it as being contrary to the British Navigation Laws and unjust to honest neutrals, especially the United States, and as tending to foster bad faith and to place dangerously wide powers in the hands of officials. He states that licenses were often sold by British importers to their clients abroad, as much as 700 rix-dollars being paid for one by a merchant at Amsterdam. The merchants of Hull, in a memorial to Parliament (1812), also complained that licenses granted to our enemies had been the means of transferring to them a great part of the trade of that port. The only defence for the practice was that the Orders in Council could not be carried out rigidly, and that licenses facilitated British trade with the Continent, though at the cost of severe loss to British shipowners.

Napoleon adopted somewhat analogous expedients in the years 1809-10; but his licenses were granted mainly for the export of French, Italian, German, or Prussian merchandise on ships of those countries. In August, 1810, at the time of the Trianon Tariff, he extended the system, allowing the importation of sugar, coffee, etc., into French harbours, on condition that French manufactures of at least equal value were exported. Thenceforth he and his officials strove to stimulate trade by these means; large bribes were given by merchants for the grant of licenses on favourable terms, and the silk trade derived some benefit from these expedients; but the whole system speedily became a synonym for misplaced activity, favouritism, and corruption.

The warping influence exerted by the license system of the two combatants on their maritime and fiscal policy makes it difficult to come to any clear judgment on the efficacy of that policy in either case. The facts as to the internal economy of the French Empire at the crisis of the struggle (1810-1) are even more difficult of interpretation. The working of the Fiscal Decrees varied greatly at different times and places, according to the deviations allowed by the Emperor and the corruptibility of officials. The official statistics respecting commerce and industry are also open to suspicion. Freedom of the press did not exist; and few persons ventured openly to complain, or to petition against grievances.

There is another disturbing factor that makes it difficult to form a conclusion as to the causes of French prosperity in the years 1806-10. In a land where the absurdities of the old agrarian system and the iniquities of taxation had crippled the working classes at every turn, prosperity was certain to increase as soon as the revolutionary legislation had time to take effect. For various reasons this did not take place until the time of the Consulate. The Napoleonic Empire therefore garnered the harvest sown by the men of 1789. The vastness of the area now thrown open to the operations of commerce, contrasting strongly with the restricted provincial areas existing before 1789, was another condition highly favourable to national prosperity; but it might be argued that the remarkable vitality of France during the Empire was due not so much to the Emperor as to the members of the Constituent Assembly, who struck the shackles from agriculture, industry, and commerce. In and after the year 1806 Napoleon imposed unheard-of restraints on foreign commerce, even on the operations of the corn trade, the supervision of which he held to be “the most important and the most delicate” duty for a ruler. The whole fabric of the Continental System rested on his conviction that, in the words of his Minister, Chaptal, he could make commerce “manoeuvre like a regiment.” The history of modern nations tends to show that such a policy is harmful in the main, however much it may stimulate particular industries.

The impact of Napoleon’s forceful intelligence upon the industries of his 45,000,000 subjects led unquestionably to some beneficial results. When his Decrees practically excluded colonial wares, he sought to make the Empire entirely independent of them. Most characteristic and memorable was his action in regard to sugar. When it seemed that sugar must become an expensive luxury (it sold at six francs the pound in Paris in 1810) he charged his chemists to devise a substitute. The result is well known. A slight success was achieved in the making of grape-sugar by the chemist Proust; but the experiments of Barruel, Isnard, Delessert, Chaptal, and others led to a noteworthy triumph in the perfecting of the somewhat defective processes of manufacturing sugar from beetroot already attempted by Aehard in Germany. As soon as the new methods were known to be practically successful, Napoleon issued a decree (March 25, 1811), whereby 32,000 hectares (about 80,000 acres) were to be planted with beetroot for this purpose, six experimental schools being also founded for the instruction of scholars in the details of culture and manufacture. The most suggestive clause of the decree, however, is that in which he ordained the entire prohibition of cane-sugar coming from “the two Indies” on and after January 1, 1813, because it might be assumed to be of British origin. Similar success having attended the production of a kind of indigo from woad, the same decree ordered the cultivation of woad on a large scale, the founding of four experimental schools in connexion with that industry, and the entire exclusion of the indigo of the two Indies after the above-mentioned date. Other efforts, more or less successful, were made to thrust upon manufacturers throughout the whole of the Empire the use of certain Italian products.

Some districts benefited by these Procrustean methods; and their gratitude was loudly proclaimed through the official press. The attempt, however, to force the produce of the Mediterranean by way of the Alpine passes to Mainz and Frankfort and thence throughout central Europe was clearly foredoomed to failure. A German, Eilers, who travelled down the Rhine in 1812, describes the stagnation of trade owing to the irritating trade regulations that prevailed; and from other sources it appears that the districts which now form the Rhine Province persisted in clinging to trade with Germany and reaped little benefit from the opening up of commerce with the French Empire. Baron Pasquier well sums up the result of Napoleon’s experiment in the statement that genius, even in its vagaries, produces memorable results; and that French industry and perseverance, supported by a million bayonets and an auxiliary force of douaniers, and thanks to the relief now and again afforded by the Imperial licenses, succeeded in meeting the needs of an enormous consumption.

The success of the Continental System and with it the fortunes of Napoleon depended, however, not so much on France as on her subject lands and allies. Unless every one of them consented to endure the hardships which it imposed until Great Britain surrendered, the whole experiment was doomed to failure. Napoleon, with his usual discernment, had always assigned the first importance to a complete control of the coasts of the North Sea, and secondly to those of the Baltic, a fact which determined the general trend of his diplomacy after the renewal of war with England. Even down to the close of the campaign of 1813 he clung tenaciously to Hamburg, as being the natural inlet for British goods into central Europe. It will be well, then, briefly to review the condition of that free city while under his control. At first the trade of Hamburg suffered little from the French occupation, which began in 1806. The French Minister, Bourrenne, was found to be open to bribes; and the compilers of the memoirs bearing his name assert that he did good service to his countrymen campaigning in Poland in 1807, by granting permission to German merchants secretly to procure 50,000 cloaks from England. He is said to have received altogether the sum of 558,000 francs from the city, besides a million more from merchants for immunities and licenses granted by him. Moreover, the proximity of the Danish port of Altona presented facilities for the smuggling of goods into Hamburg; and the sympathy of the whole population with the smugglers rendered the Berlin and Milan Decrees almost inoperative down to the year 1810. Lloyd, a British resident, states that most of the imports came in from Altona and other parts of the coast in waggons. Women also smuggled silks, lace, and coffee.

The advent of Davout as commander of the French army in that part of Germany, and the Napoleonic Decrees of the summer and autumn of the year 1810, subjected the city to the severest hardships. In the following year more than 300 ships lay dismantled in the harbour; out of 428 sugar refineries only one remained at work; and all the cotton­printing works were closed. The more rapacious of the French officials seized goods which seemed to be of English make, even when satisfactory certificates of origin were forthcoming. Where all honest means of livelihood languished, informers plied a brisk trade. Employees, in order to spite their masters, were known to mix British goods with others in order to procure the condemnation of all. In short, all the conditions that clog the operations of trade reigned supreme in Hamburg. The extortions of the conquerors completed its misery. French officials seized the Treasury bonds, and confiscated a fund containing the savings of the old and the poor. The fate of the great free city was one of unequalled severity; but everywhere throughout Germany the Continental System produced feelings of exasperation and fear, which had no small share in bringing about the War of Liberation.

The northern States naturally suffered most from the exclusion of colonial goods. Italy and France could supply several of the articles prohibited by Napoleon s Decrees; but the north Germans, Swedes, and Russians found no palatable substitutes for tobacco, coffee, and sugar. The influence of this fact on the formation of political opinion may readily be imagined. The resentment of those peoples was directed, not against the British merchants, whose ships or smuggling sloops occasionally hovered off the coasts, but against the Emperor who forbade the importation of the comforts of life or placed them beyond the reach of all but the most wealthy. Further, it must be noted that the export trade of those lands had consisted mainly of bulky articles such as timber, pitch, hemp, iron, corn, etc., sent to England. These were not adapted to contraband trade, as were the silks and muslins of southern climes. Consequently the export trade all but vanished, except when Napoleon, for revenue purposes, allowed occasional shipments from Danzig.

Several circumstances served to make Sweden the centre of important political questions resulting from these economic facts. As has been already mentioned, Marshal Bernadotte became Prince Royal of Sweden and heir-apparent to the throne in August, 1810. The illness of the King speedily assured to him the chief place in the Government. It soon became clear that he was indisposed to support the policy of the Continental System, which had been forced on Sweden in the spring of that year. War ensued between England and Sweden in November; but in both countries there was no desire to resort to hostilities which were to the interest of Napoleon alone. Thanks to the combined tact and firmness shown by Sir James Saumarez, the British commander in the Baltic, little harm was done to Swedish commerce; and the way was left open for reconciliation. Napoleon, on the other hand, frequently showed his distrust of the Swedish Government, probably because Bernadotte was already aiming at the conquest of Norway from Denmark. The Emperor warned the King of Denmark of overtures in this connexion, and pressed his commercial decrees rigidly on Sweden. On March 25, 1811 (a date which marked the adoption of the harshest measures towards all the Baltic States), he asserted that, if a single cargo of colonial goods were landed in Swedish Pomerania, French troops would march in and establish the Imperial douanes.

Meanwhile Alexander I had offended Napoleon by issuing the ukase of December 31, 1810, which virtually allowed the entry of colonial goods into Russia and prohibited the import of certain articles of luxury. When Napoleon upbraided his ally with this breach of the Treaty of Tilsit and sent troops eastwards, Russia and Sweden naturally drew closer together and laid the basis of that agreement which took definite form in the alliance of 1812. During the year 1811 the Tsar gradually abandoned the system prohibiting the entry of British goods: and the conclusion of peace between England and Russia in July, 1812 (as also between England and Sweden), virtually put an end to the Continental System. Already the British Government had repealed the Orders in Council, but too late to avert war with the United States. Commerce, however, began to follow its normal course in Europe, the downfall of the Continental System being assured by the campaigns of 1812 and 1813. The great commercial experiment broke down where failure might have been expected, namely, in Russia, Sweden, and northern Germany.

If we may judge from the spoken and written utterances of Napoleon, he could never bring himself even to consider the possibility of failure. With his love of control and his passion for the handling of vast masses of details, he faced the problem of rearranging the commerce and industries of Europe as hopefully as he confronted its stupendous corollary, the expedition to Moscow. Very characteristic was his reply, on March 24, 1811, to a deputation from the General Councils of Commerce and Manufactures in France, on the occasion of the birth of the King of Rome. After twitting the deputation with its lugubrious opinions, he proceeded to justify the Continental System and stated that in about six months his sword would pierce England to the heart. As for his tariff, it would remain unchanged, for it did the utmost harm to British trade. The French Empire would soon produce enough sugar, indigo, and, perhaps, cotton, to do without imports of those articles; and Europe would no longer need trade with England and the colonies. Then, turning to the manufacturers, he blamed them for making too many goods and at too high a price. They had France, Italy, Germany, and a part of Spain open to them; that ought to satisfy their wants if they paid attention to the demand. As for England, she would soon be bankrupt. Austria was actually insolvent, and Russia was following her in that path. France alone had stores of bullion in the Bank. The whole address illustrates his proneness to illusions on the subject of commerce. That wise counsellor, Mollien, often noted that his master had failed to grasp some of its essential facts; and the Emperor’s letters yield proof that he believed the extreme dearness of colonial wares in Europe to be more harmful to the English vendor than to the continental consumer—a notion as mistaken as his suggestion that the confiscation of those products would be a good way of replenishing the coffers of Prussia, Westphalia, and Naples.

The course of events was to prove that nothing could shake his belief in the efficacy of these suicidal devices. State after State was flung into the crucible of his mighty experiment; yet the looked-for result never came. Finally, in his constant straining after the one filial expedient that must assure the ruin of England, he came to the death­grapple with Russia. It is difficult to believe that this was the man who, in other domains of thought, sneered at ideologues. He himself was the chief ideologue, the supreme dupe, of the age. As he looked round on the Europe of his day, he took no count of the mighty forces of the industrial revolution that then were girding England with the strength of youth and were connecting all parts of the world by indissoluble ties; what he beheld was a mirage conjured up by his vivid fancy and boundless egotism.

Having reviewed the causes that determined the final hostility of the peoples of the north and centre of Europe to Napoleon’s policy, we may now glance briefly at the influence exerted by the combatants on certain points on the fringe of the Napoleonic system. While the French Emperor had the advantage of the central position in his commercial warfare with England, her efforts were necessarily confined to the seaboard and to certain outlying parts of Europe. She acted from Heligoland, from one or two of the Danish and Frisian islets, the Channel Isles, Lisbon, Gibraltar, Sicily, Malta, Corfu, and certain parts of the Turkish Empire. These were, so to speak, sword-points constantly held out against the central mass; and, according to the laws of supply and demand, their power to wound increased automatically as the master of the Continent strengthened the barriel’s separating it from the outer world. The occupation by the Sea Power of these points of vantage produced, in most cases, few if any noteworthy results of a political character. But the peoples of Sicily and Turkey were affected by the great conflict in several ways. This chapter will therefore conclude with a brief notice of their history during this period.

The British occupation of Sicily was destined to exercise on the Italian people a far more abiding influence than that resulting from the long-continued presence of our forces in the Iberian peninsula. For this fact the two following reasons may be assigned. The Sicilians felt towards their royal House, that of the Spanish Bourbons, none of the sentiments which the Spaniards and Portuguese felt for their respective dynasties; and the political instincts of the townsfolk of Palermo and Messina were more akin to those of the British people than to the traditional policy of Ferdinand IV of Naples and his spirited Queen, Maria Carolina. The characters and careers of that ill-matched pair having been already described in a previous volume, it is needless to describe again the causes which dulled the affections of their subjects. Like other islanders, the Sicilians had always been remarkable for their clinging to ancient liberties. The preservation of their Parliament was to them far more precious than that of the dynasty. The Queen naively expressed the contrast between Naples and Palermo in a letter from the latter place to her daughter: “This is a different country; people are constitutional; the King has net a sou without the consent of Parliament; everything, including justice, is under dissimilar regulations and stands on a totally different footing; but we must put up with it.” The Parliament, it is true, was of a feudal rather than a democratic type. It consisted of three Chambers, barons, clergy, and tenants of the Crown, the last-named to some extent representing the chief towns. The Chambers met and voted separately; in the House of Peers the greater barons had several votes apiece. Parliament had the right of assembling at least once every four years; and during the vacations a committee of three from each Chamber supervised national expenditure and the carrying out of laws.

Such was the framework of government in which Ferdinand IV and Maria Carolina found themselves placed by the events of the year 1806, which deprived them of the mainland. The efforts which Joseph Bonaparte put forth to gain Sicily would doubtless have been crowned with success, but for the presence of British forces at and near Messina. The danger to the Bourbon cause increased when Joachim Murat came to the throne in place of Joseph Bonaparte. The “beau sabreur” signalised his accession by a vigorous effort to retake Capri; with superior forces he succeeded in overpowering Colonel Hudson Lowe’s small garrison and compelling it to surrender (October, 1808). This and other adverse events failed to damp the ardour of the Queen for the recovery of the mainland. The volcanic passions of her earlier years had now sunk into a dully glowing hatred, the outcome of opium, of her many disappointments, and of her resentment at the clownish indifference of the King. She spent large sums in stirring up revolts in Calabria; she maintained a small army of spies to watch every event on the mainland; she secretly helped to equip the privateers that preyed on Neapolitan merchantmen, and was subsequently proved to have had no small interest in the spoils. In her growing rage at her impotence, she sent a brigand chief with 300 galley slaves to overthrow a sovereign who had Napoleon’s legions at his back; and there are grounds for suspecting her of complicity in attempts at political assassination at Naples. Above all she fumed ceaselessly at the prudence that held back Sir John Stuart, commander of the British force in Sicily, from supporting these mad enterprises. Variable in all else, she showed unvarying dislike to the British commanders who succeeded Sir Sidney Smith on that station; in fact, hostility to England on points of detail tended to become as strong a motive at the Bourbon Court as hatred to Napoleon had been on the ground of principle. The efforts of an Anglo-Sicilian expedition against the Neapolitan coast in the year 1809 having ended in failure, the Queen was reported to have set on foot intrigues with Murat’s agents with a view to the eventual restoration of the mainland to Ferdinand IV, Murat receiving compensation elsewhere.

The truth on this matter will perhaps never be cleared up. That either Napoleon or Murat and his consort seriously entertained the thought of restoring Naples to the Spanish Bourbons is incredible. The Emperor’s correspondence shows that he never lost sight of the need of conquering Sicily; and, if King Joachim ever entertained the overtures of Maria Carolina, it was assuredly only with the aim of weakening the Anglo-Sicilian alliance. That Queen, however, with her usual proneness to self-delusion and intrigue, kept up secret communications with Naples and the Court of Vienna through the years 1810-1, in a way that aroused the gravest suspicions of the British Government. The United Kingdom had acquired the right to some measure of control over the policy of the Court of Palermo, firstly by providing the naval and military support which alone enabled that Court to exist, and secondly by the terms of the treaty of alliance signed at Palermo on March 30, 1808. These prescribed the furnishing of all possible means of mutual support by both parties in the present war, the maintenance by Great Britain of a force of not less than 10,000 men in Sicily, and the payment of a yearly sum of £300,000 to its Court, as well as the conclusion at an early date of a treaty of commerce on conditions favourable to British trade. The Sicilian Government also promised not to make a separate peace with Napoleon; while Great Britain covenanted not to come to terms with him unless the interests of His Sicilian Majesty were safe­guarded. Obviously the protecting Power had the right to insist on the due observance of this treaty; and, when the Queen was believed to be intriguing with her nominal enemies, when further her privateers captured a British merchantman and great difficulty was experienced in obtaining its release, friction between the parties was inevitable.

Despite the increase of the British subsidy to £400,000 in answer to the unceasing appeals of the Queen, her extravagance was such as to provoke a serious conflict with the Sicilian Parliament. That body met at Palermo on January 25, 1810; and Ferdinand, the mouthpiece of the Queen’s desires, proposed that it should increase the subsidy to the Crown from 250,000 ounces to 300,000 ounces (the ounce was then equal to 13s. 4d.), besides making further donations to the Queen and to the infant daughter of the Crown Prince. To these demands the Parliament, especially the Chamber of Barons, demurred; they had long been incensed by the favour shown to Neapolitan courtiers and by the exclusion of Sicilians from the Government, and now evinced their annoyance at the many abuses of the State by granting only one-half of the required sum. Like Charles 1 of England in similar circum­stances, Ferdinand dissolved Parliament, only to find its successor still more refractory. Thereupon the Queen urged him to adopt various illegal expedients, including even the sale of monastic lands through the medium of lottery tickets. To these measures Parliament opposed an unswerving resistance, with the result that on July 19, 1811, Ferdinand arrested five of the baronial leaders, including the able and determined Prince of Belmonte. A deadlock now ensued, fatal to industry and commerce, and jeopardising the very existence of the State.

It was in these circumstances that the British ambassador, Lord Amherst, retired in favour of Lord William Bentinck, who was to combine with his diplomatic duties those of commander of the British troops. The urgency of the crisis called for some such concentration of power in the hands of a strong man. Great skill and tact, however, were needed to disabuse the Queen of the notion that the English were about to seize Sicily and either keep it themselves or use it as a piece in some diplomatic game of exchange. Unfortunately Bentinck lacked the qualities of charm and graciousness that were needed to win over the Queen to a true view of the situation. Stiff' and unsympathetic in manner, he offended Maria Carolina from the outset, as later he offended her subjects. Meeting with firm resistance at Court, he sailed for London, and came back in December, 1811, armed with yet wider powers, which enabled him to stop the British subsidy until the terms of the treaty of 1808 were sincerely carried out. Financial needs and a threat that Palermo would he occupied by British troops finally induced the King and Queen to capitulate, Ferdinand agreeing, on the pretext of illness, to hand over the government to his son, whom he named his alter ego (January 16, 1812). The Crown Prince at once restored the barons to favour, repealed the illegal taxes, and appointed more popular Ministers. Yet Bentinck’s suspicions of the Queen remained unabated; and when, in the month of March, he acquired further proofs of her correspondence with the French, he insisted on her removal into the interior of the island.

Meanwhile Castlereagh, who had succeeded Wellesley as Foreign Minister in Downing Street, deemed the time to be ripe for the applica­tion of British institutions to Sicily as an antidote to the Napoleonic reforms which were beginning to take root in the Peninsula. Reluctant as the Crown Prince was to introduce a foreign Constitution, yet his desire for cordial relations with England, in order to attempt the conquest of Naples while Murat was absent in Russia, brought him to acquiesce in Bentinck’s suggestions. Accordingly the Parliament which met at Palermo in June, 1812, proceeded to discuss and finally to adopt a Constitution which was modelled closely on that of Great Britain.

Had this Constitution been promulgated under more favourable conditions, it would probably have taken firm root; but this was im­possible amidst the disputes and miseries of the year 1812. The abolition of feudal privileges annoyed many of the leading families; and their discontent enabled the Queen to make one more bid for power. She spurred on the King to give up the amusements of his country-seat and to resume his authority. Ferdinand obeyed. On March 9, 1813, he suddenly appeared at the palace at Palermo, and announced that, having recovered his health, he intended to resume the government. Again Bentinck intervened, and threatened that, unless the Constitution were respected, the British alliance would cease forthwith. The Prince of Belmonte and Ruggiero Settimo also resigned their offices. Under severe pressure from both sides, Ferdinand listened to the advice of his son-in-law, the Duke of Orleans, and promised to withdraw to the country. Bentinck, however, now insisted on the departure of the Queen from the island, an expedient which had already been more than once discussed. After long and painful disputes, she left Sicily with her son and a few attendants, proceeding to Constantinople, Odessa, and finally to Vienna. Even there fate frowned upon this unhappy woman, great only in her misfortunes. As she was about to return to Palermo and triumph at the fall of her many enemies, the hand of death inter­vened and laid her low at the castle of Hetzendorf (September 7, 1814).

In the meantime the overthrow of Napoleon led to the resumption by Ferdinand of his old governing powers (July 6, 1814). There being now no reason for the former strict control of Sicilian affairs, Bentinck was unable to prevent the ultra-loyalists from working havoc in the Constitution of 1812. It soon became little more than a memory. But, as the tide of reaction rolled over Italy, that memory was held dear; and, when the Sicilians in 1848 lit the torch of revolution that was rapidly to be passed on from capital to capital, their veteran leader, Ruggiero Settimo, summed up their experience of the past and their hopes for the future in the cry “Separation from Naples, or our English Constitution of 1812.”

The mighty forces of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era, which shattered some of the greatest States of Europe, led to strange shifts of fortune in the Ottoman Empire. That corner of the Continent formed as it were a great side-eddy which changed according to the volume and direction of the main current of events. The survival of Turkish rule in Europe never seemed more hopeless than in the years 1789-91 and 1798-1801, and again in the period after the Treaty of Tilsit. Yet Turkey emerged from this cataclysmic epoch almost un­changed, perhaps even stronger than at its beginning.

The accession to power of Selim III in 1789 occurred at a time of unequalled calamity, brought on by the persistent attacks of Catharine II of Russia and Joseph II of Austria. In vain did the young Sultan set an example of austerity and vigour, and call his whole people to arms against the infidels. The Moslems were several times defeated by Suvoroff and Laudon. Only the death of Joseph II (1790) and the conclusion of a timely Prusso-Turkish alliance saved Turkey from overwhelming disaster. The new Habsburg ruler, Leopold II, came to equitable terms with her at Sistova (1791); but Catharine II insisted oil heavy sacrifices in the Treaty of Jassy (1792), namely, the. cession of all the Turkish lands east of the river Dniester, the Sultan also virtually acknowledging the suzerainty of Russia over Georgia, Imeritia, and Mingrelia. Even this success seemed to the ambitions Tsarina merely a stepping-stone to the longed-for conquest of Constantinople; but the crises in the affairs of Poland and France drew off her attention towards central Europe almost down to the time of her death in 1796. Her son, Paul I, at first adopted a peaceful policy, thus affording to Selim a time of respite for the many reforms which were most urgently called for.

It is difficult to conceive the disorder of the Sultan's dominions at that time. His authority over the Moslem States of northern Africa, was of the slightest. The rise of the Mameluke power in Egypt left, only the shadow of authority in the hands of the Turkish Pacha at Cairo. The Wahabites were masters of nearly the whole of Arabia. The Druses and other tribes of the Lebanon district were virtually independent; at Acre the savage Gezzar put to death the Sultan’s messengers with impunity; and taxes were generally withheld by the Pachas of Bagdad, Trebizond, and Akhalzik. In Europe the Pacha of Widdin long defied the Sultan’s authority; and the notorious Ali Pacha had made good his independence in Albania. The Suliotes and Greeks felt the pressure of their pacha’s rule, but rarely that of the Sultan. Worst of all, Russia accorded her protection to the hospodars of Moldavia and Wallachia; and the Treaty of Kutchuk Kainardji (1774) had given her the light to champion the claims of all the Christian subjects of the Porte. As the custom of farming out the taxes placed immense powers in the hands of the local pachas, beys, and agas, as well as of the money-lenders whom they employed, the Sultan’s authority was liable to be thwarted in every conceivable way. The armed forces of Turkey, paid and unpaid, were a source of weakness rather than strength. By far the most important among them was the privileged Order of the Janissaries, comprising some 150,000 members, though many of these were not liable to service in the field. They considered their membership as hereditary, generally appeared in the ranks only on pay-days, and exercised authority in the towns where they were settled. They had long possessed valuable trading rights, and, in fact, claimed to represent and enjoy the rights of the old Moslem conquerors, especially against the Christian rayahs.

Braving the opposition which the Janissaries were certain to offer, Selim now began to reorganise his armed forces on the European model, and introduced some uniformity in regard to arms, drill, and discipline. The opening of closer diplomatic relations with France in 1796, when, for the first time, the Porte despatched an ambassador to reside at Paris, enabled the French ambassador, Aubert Dubayet, to take with him to Constantinople several officers, together with well-mounted pieces of artillery. But little progress was made. The Janissaries refused to make any change in their traditional methods; and the rupture with France, brought about in 1798 by Bonaparte’s Egyptian expedition, stopped all progress, except in the organisation of the Turkish artillery. Greater success attended Selim’s efforts to improve the civil administration. By curtailing the powers of the Grand Vizier and the pachas who governed provinces, he somewhat strengthened the fabric of government and the productiveness of the revenue; but his efforts to abolish the farming of taxes led to no general result. He established regular embassies not only at Paris, but also at London, Vienna, and Berlin.

Despite Selim’s efforts, Turkey was wholly unprepared to meet the dangers resulting from Bonaparte’s expedition; and without the aid of Nelson she would probably have lost both Egypt and Syria. Scarcely freed from that danger, she was on the verge of others equally serious at the beginning of the year 1801, when Bonaparte and the Tsar Paul prepared for an invasion of Asia Minor preparatory to the conquest of India. Once again, however, the restoration of the balance of power in Europe served to avert the projected partition of the Ottoman realm. Peace was concluded with France at Amiens (March 25, 1802), when the Republic recognised the integrity of the Turkish Empire, procured the renewal of the former “capitulations” between the two Powers, and gained the right of sending French ships into the Black Sea. In one quarter the war had not been unfavourable to the Sultan’s power. The fall of the Mamelukes (an event furthered by the perfidious massacre of several of their chiefs by the Turks) paved the way for the gradual advancement of Turkish authority in Egypt. The death of Gezzar Pacha at Acre in 1804 also had a similar effect on Syrian affairs. On the other hand, the successes of the Wahabites in Arabia and their capture of Mecca and Medina in 1804 spread abroad the belief that the innovations of the Sultan were displeasing to Allah. Nevertheless Selim proceeded with his military reforms. In the year 1804 he organised the artillery, and placed it on a footing of privilege superior to that of the Janissaries; and in March, 1805, he decreed that the finest youth of the Empire should be taken, even from the Janissaries themselves, and enrolled among the Nizams or regular infantry. The privileged corps flatly refused to obey this decree, and in some cases killed those who strove to put it in force.

Selim’s difficulties at this time were increased by a formidable rising of the Servians. Galled by the oppressions of the Janissaries and encouraged by promises of help from Russia, the distressed rayahs rose under the lead of Kara George and Milosch Obrenovitch, foiled a plot of the Janissaries for a general massacre, and captured some of the strongholds of Turkish tyranny in their land. Their revolt was directed firstly against the turbulent Janissaries of Belgrade; and they sought to prove that it tended to strengthen the Sultan’s authority in the province. Selim, however, could not side with Christians against the faithful; he arrested their deputies, and ordered Afiz, the Pacha of Nissa, to disarm the whole population. The Christians scorned all thoughts of surrender, now that the Sultan was threatened by hostilities from Russia and by a general mutiny of the Janissaries. Kara George defeated the pacha; and in the campaigns of 1806-7 the Servians not only drove back other Turkish forces but finally succeeded in capturing Belgrade and the remaining Turkish strongholds. At the close of this War of Liberation, military and governing powers were allotted to military chiefs, or voivodes, among whom Kara George enjoyed a preeminence corresponding to his prowess and masterful will. A Skupshtina, or General Assembly of warriors, formed the ultimate source of authority; it deputed administrative and legislative powers to a Senate of twelve members; and by degrees a civil magistracy was established for each district. The suddenness with which a formerly down-trodden people cast off its yoke and established its own institutions stands in marked contrast to the helplessness of the Sultan’s Government and the brutish opposition of his privileged classes to all reform.

In the midst of these troubles, the subtle French diplomatist, General Sebastiani, arrived at Constantinople (August 9, 1806). Napoleon’s instructions (dated June 20, 1806) directed the envoy to form a Franco-Perso-Turkish alliance against Russia, and to urge the Sultan to keep a firm grasp on Moldavia and Wallachia. Sebastiani soon succeeded in touching Turkish pride on the latter question; and, despite the threats and protests of the Russian and British envoys, Selim deposed the hospodars of these provinces (August 24). This amounted to a declaration of war against the Tsar, who speedily sent an army across the Pruth and reduced Bucharest (December 27). In February, 1807, a British fleet under Admiral Duckworth forced the passage of the Dardanelles but failed before Constantinople. Equally unfortunate results attended a British expedition to Egypt. Meanwhile the cam­paign in the valley of the Danube languished. The main forces of the Russians were always directed against Napoleon; and Selim’s efforts were thwarted at the outset by the selfish obstinacy of the Janissaries, who intercepted and routed a force of Nizams. Elated at this success, the reactionaries determined to rid themselves of the reforming Sultan. With the help of a fawning traitor, the Kaimakam Mousa Pacha, the Janissaries of the capital marched to the seraglio, which was undefended, deposed their master, and placed on the throne Mustapha IV, the son of Abdul Hamid I (May 29, 1807). His tenure of power was short. A truce with the Russians in August having set free the forces of Bairactar, the Pacha of Rustchuk, that officer marched to the capital with the intention of restoring Selim, only to be foiled at the last moment by the murder of the deposed ruler at the hand of Mustapha’s eunuchs. After wreaking vengeance for this crime, Bairactar raised to power Selim’s young cousin, Mahmoud II (July 28, 1808), whose firmness and ability enabled him ultimately to carry out many of Selim’s reforms.

His difficulties seemed overwhelming at the outset. The news of Selim’s deposition, which arrived during the conferences at Tilsit, furnished Napoleon with an excuse for a complete change of front; the Franco-Russian compact aimed at the spoliation of the Turkish Empire. Motives of policy alone led Napoleon to defer this undertaking to a time when France should be firmly established on the Albanian coast, in Sicily, and in Spain. As has been already shown, the Emperor’s aim of using the naval resources of Spain for the further­ance of his Eastern schemes set in motion the great events of the Spanish rising, which brought salvation to Turkey. The Emperor’s policy at the Congress of Erfurt also served to prolong the time of respite ; while, on the other hand, the Tsar’s growing fear of his western rival held him back from the prosecution of vigorous measures against the Turks. Great Britain, also, after coming into collision with Russia, had no interest in pressing hostilities against the Turks, and, thanks partly to the friendly services of Austria, came to terms with the Porte in the Peace of the Dardanelles (January, 1809).

While, however, the diplomatic situation underwent an almost miraculous change in favour of the new Sultan, he failed to cope with the internal disorders. Sir Robert Adair, British Minister at Constan­tinople, reported the utter disorganisation of the government, of the finances, and of the armed forces, whose fierce brawls were not stayed even in presence of the enemy. At the close of the war with Austria, Alexander sent larger forces to the Danube; and the end of the campaign of 1809-10 saw him master of the strongholds on that river. In the following year the prospect of war with Napoleon imposed prudence on the Russians; but no considerations of patriotism put an end to the feuds of rival pachas and the exasperating pretensions of the Janissaries. On both sides, therefore, there was a readiness to come to terms; and, after lengthy negotiations, the Treaty of Bucharest was signed (May 28, 1812). The Sultan thereby ceded to Russia the Moldavian lands to the east of the Pruth, and promised to grant an amnesty to the Servians. He insisted, however, that the Servian fortresses should once more be garrisoned by Turkish troops; and to this the Tsar consented. The Servians, who had put forth great efforts on behalf of their co-religionists, thus saw one great result of their War of Liberation bargained away by their avowed champion.

Thus, by a singular concurrence of events, Turkey more than once during this period escaped a doom which seemed inevitable. Alone among the great Powers of the Continent, she escaped the grinding pressure of events which compelled them to reorganise their governments, their armies, and even their polities. Whether, in the like case, she would have been driven to employ the same healing process, is very question­able. What is certain is that she alone of the great States drew no new sources of strength from the strains and calamities of the time. Even the peculiarities of the Continental System, which might have given a great impulse to the trade of Turkey, as the only neutral State in Europe, led to no noteworthy result. The passage of stores of contraband goods through Salonica and the Albanian ports into central Europe served to invigorate the maritime instincts of the Greeks and Albanians; it breathed no new life into the torpid frame of Turkish industry. Above all, the Ottomans themselves felt none of those longings for reform which were implanted by the events of the Napoleonic era among the peoples of Germany, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, and were destined to triumph over the reactionary forces of the succeeding age. Barren in regard to legislative achievements, the life of Turkey was barren also of those popular impulses, which, under wise guidance, strengthen the fabric of the State and invigorate the whole nation.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE FRENCH DEPENDENCIES, AND SWITZERLAND.