On the 11th of November, 1807, were published the great retaliatory measures of Great Britain, which for the moment filled the cup of neutrals. Setting forth the Berlin Decree as the justifying ground for their action, the Orders in Council of that date [380] proclaimed a paper blockade, of the barest form and most extensive scope, of all enemies' ports. "All ports and places of France and her allies, or of any other country at war with his Majesty, and all other ports or places in Europe from which, although not at war with his Majesty, the British flag is excluded, and all ports in the colonies of his Majesty's enemies, shall from henceforth be subject to the same restrictions, in point of trade and navigation, as if the same were actually blockaded in the most strict and rigorous manner." All trade in hostile colonial produce was likewise declared unlawful for neutrals.
An actual blockade, such as is here mentioned, requires the presence off the blockaded port of a force sufficient to make entrance or departure manifestly dangerous; in which case a vessel attempting to pass in either direction is, by that common consent of nations called International Law, justly liable to capture. To place such a force before each of the many and widely scattered harbors embraced by these Orders, was evidently beyond the power of even the vast numbers of the British navy. The object which could not be attained by the use of means acknowledged to be lawful, the British ministry determined to compass by sheer force, by that maritime supremacy which they unquestionably wielded, and which they could make effectual to the ends they had in view, namely: to maintain the commerce and shipping of Great Britain, upon which her naval strength depended, to force the enemy's trade to pass through her ports, and thus to raise her revenues to the point necessary to her salvation in the life and death struggle in which she was embarked. [381]
The entire suppression of trade with the restricted coasts, whether by neutral carriers or in the articles of import or export the world needed, was in no sense whatever the object of the British ministers. To retaliate on their enemy was the first aim, to make him suffer as he had meant to make them; but, withal, to turn his own measures against him, so that while he was straitened, Great Britain should reap some amelioration for her own troubles. Throughout this stormy and woeful period, the instinct of the British nation recognized that the hearts of the continental peoples were with them rather than with Napoleon,—and for much the same reason that the United States, contrary alike to the general interests of mankind and to her own, sided upon the whole, though by no means unanimously, against Great Britain. In either case the immediate oppressor was the object of hatred. Throughout the five years or more that the Continental blockade was in force, the Continental nations saw the British trying everywhere, with more or less success, to come to their relief,—to break through the iron barrier which Napoleon had established. During great part of that time a considerable intercourse did prevail; and the mutual intelligence thus maintained made clear to all parties the community of interests that bound them together, notwithstanding the political hostilities. Nothing appears more clearly, between the lines of the British diplomatic correspondence, than the conviction that the people were ready to further their efforts to circumvent the measures of Napoleon.
Keeping in view the purpose of making the United Kingdom the centre and warehouse of the world's commerce, it was evident that, provided this end—the chief object of the Orders in Council—were attained, the greater the commerce of the outside world was, the greater would be the advantage, or toll, resulting to Great Britain. The Orders therefore contained, besides the general principle of blockade, certain exceptions, narrow in wording but wide in application. By the first, neutrals were permitted to trade directly between their own country and the hostile colonies. They were also allowed to trade direct between the latter and the free ports of the British colonies, which were thus enabled, in their degree, to become the centres of local commerce, as Britain herself was to be the entrepôt of European and general commerce.
The second exception, which was particularly odious to neutrals, permitted the latter to go direct from a port of the United Kingdom to a restricted hostile port, although they might not start from their own country for the same, nor for any other place in Europe from which the British flag was excluded. Conversely, neutrals were at liberty to sail from any port of his Majesty's enemies forbidden to them by the Orders, provided they went direct to some port in Europe belonging to Great Britain; [382] but they might not return to their own land without first stopping at a British port.
Such, stripped of their verbiage, appears to be the gist of the Orders in Council of November 11, 1807. Neutrals might not trade directly with any ports in Europe not open to British ships; but they might trade with them by going first to a British port, there landing their cargo, reshipping it subject to certain duties, [383] and thence proceeding to a hostile port. The same process was to be observed on the return voyage; it might not be direct home, but must first be to Great Britain. The commerce of the Continent thus paid toll, going and coming; or, to repeat the words of the ministry, there was for the enemy "no trade except through Great Britain." British cruisers were "instructed to warn any vessel which shall have commenced her voyage prior to any notice of this Order, to discontinue it; and to proceed instead to some port in this kingdom, or to Gibraltar or Malta; and any vessel which, after being so warned, shall be found in the prosecution of a forbidden voyage, shall be captured." Vessels which in obedience to the warning came into a British port were to be permitted, after landing their cargo, to "report it for exportation, and allowed to proceed to their original port of destination, or to any other port at amity with his Majesty, upon receiving a certificate from the collector of the port" setting forth these facts; but from this general permission to "report," were specially excepted "sugar, coffee, wine, brandy, snuff, and tobacco," which could be exported to a restricted port only "under such conditions as his Majesty, by any license to be granted for that purpose, may direct." Licenses were generally necessary for export of any foreign produce or manufacture; while goods of British origin could be taken to a hostile country without such license. In the end, the export of cotton to the Continent was wholly forbidden, the object being to cripple the foreign manufactures. Upon the license requirements was soon built up the extraordinary licensed traffic, which played so important a subordinate part in the workings both of the Orders and of the Continental System.
Anything more humiliating and vexatious to neutrals than these Orders can scarcely be conceived. They trampled upon all previously received law, upon men's inbred ideas of their rights; and that by sheer uncontrolled force, the law of the strongest. There was also not only denial of right, but positive injury and loss, direct and indirect. Yet it must not be forgotten that they were a very real and severe measure of retaliation upon Napoleon's government; of which a contemporary German writer had truly said it was already wound up so tight the springs could almost be heard to crack. It must be remembered, too, that Great Britain was fighting for her life. The additional expense entailed upon every cargo which reached the Continent after passing through her ports, the expenses of delay, of unloading and reloading, wharfage, licenses, maintenance, fell chiefly upon the continental consumer; upon the subjects of Napoleon, or upon those whom he was holding in military bondage. Nor was this all. Although Great Britain was not able to blockade all the individual French or continental ports,—an inability due more to the dangers of the sea than to the number of the harbors,—she was able to make the approach to the French coast exceedingly dangerous, so much so that it was more to the interest of the ordinary trader to submit to the Orders than to attempt to evade them; especially as, upon arriving at a port under Napoleon's control, he found the emperor possessed with every disposition to confiscate his cargo, if a plausible pretext could be made. In the English Channel Great Britain controlled the approaches from the Atlantic to all the northern continental ports; and at Gibraltar those to the Mediterranean. The Orders were therefore by no means an empty threat. They could not but exercise a very serious influence upon the imports to the Continent, and especially upon those exotic objects of consumption, sugar, coffee, and other tropical growths, which had become so essential to the comfort of people; and upon certain raw materials, such as cotton, dye-woods and indigo. Naval stores from the Baltic for England passed so near the French coast that they might be slipped in by a lucky chance; but the neutral from the Atlantic, who was found near the coast of France or Spain, had to account for the appearances which were against him. These obstacles to direct import tended therefore to increase prices by diminishing supplies, and combined with the duties laid by Great Britain, upon the cargoes forced into her ports, to raise the cost of living throughout the Continent. The embarrassments of its unfortunate inhabitants were further augmented by the difficulty of exporting their own products; and nowhere was this more keenly felt than in Russia, where the revenues of the nobility depended largely on the British demand for naval stores, and where the French alliance and the Continental System were proportionately detested.
The object of the Orders in Council was therefore twofold: to embarrass France and Napoleon by the prohibition of direct import and export trade, of all external commerce, which for them could only be carried on by neutrals; and at the same time to force into the Continent all the British products or manufactures that it could take. A preference was secured for the latter over foreign products by the license practice, which left the course of traffic to the constant manipulation of the Board of Trade. The whole system was then, and has since been, roundly abused as being in no sense a military measure, but merely a gigantic exhibition of commercial greed; but this simply begs the question. To win her fight Great Britain was obliged not only to weaken Napoleon, but to increase her own strength. The battle between the sea and the land was to be fought out on Commerce. England had no army wherewith to meet Napoleon; Napoleon had no navy to cope with that of his enemy. As in the case of an impregnable fortress, the only alternative for either of these contestants was to reduce the other by starvation. On the common frontier, the coast line, they met in a deadly strife in which no weapon was drawn. The imperial soldiers were turned into coast-guards-men to shut out Great Britain from her markets; the British ships became revenue cutters to prohibit the trade of France. The neutral carrier, pocketing his pride, offered his service to either for pay, and the other then regarded him as taking part in hostilities. The ministry, in the exigencies of debate, betrayed some lack of definite conviction as to their precise aim. Sometimes the Orders were justified as a military measure of retaliation; sometimes the need of supporting British commerce as essential to her life and to her naval strength was alleged; and their opponents in either case taunted them with inconsistency. [384] Napoleon, with despotic simplicity, announced clearly his purpose of ruining England through her trade, and the ministry really needed no other arguments than his avowals. Salus civitatis suprema lex. To call the measures of either not military, is as inaccurate as it would be to call the ancient practice of circumvallation unmilitary, because the only weapon used for it was the spade.
Napoleon was not the man to accept silently the Orders in Council. On the 27th of October he had signed the treaty of Fontainebleau with Spain, arranging the partition of Portugal and taking thus the first step in the invasion of the Peninsula. On November 16 he left Fontainebleau to visit his kingdom of Italy. From the capital, Milan, he issued the decree which bears its name, on the 17th of December, 1807. Alleging the Orders as its motive, the Milan Decree declared that any ship which submitted to search by a British cruiser was thereby "denationalized;" a word for which, at sea, "outlaw" is the only equivalent. It lost the character of its own country, so far as French cruisers were concerned, and was liable to arrest as a vagrant. The decree further declared that all vessels going to, or sailing from, Great Britain, were for that fact alone good prize,—a point which, under the Berlin decree, had as yet been left open. French privateers were still sufficiently numerous to make these regulations a great additional danger to ships at sea; and the decree went on to say that, when coming under the previous provisions, they should be seized whenever they entered a French port.
The two belligerents had now laid down the general lines of policy on which they intended to act. The Orders in Council received various modifications, due largely to the importance to Great Britain of the American market, which absorbed a great part of her manufactures; but these modifications, though sensibly lightening the burden upon neutrals and introducing some changes of form, in no sense departed from the spirit of the originals. The entire series was finally withdrawn in June, 1812, but too late to avert the war with the United States, which was declared in the same month. Napoleon never revoked his Berlin and Milan decrees, although by a trick he induced an over-eager President of the United States to believe that he had done so.