Jerome, too, was bidden rigorously to enforce the Trianon tariff in Westphalia; and the hint was to be passed on to Prussia and the Rhenish Confederation that, by subjecting colonial goods to these enormous imposts, those States would gain several millions of francs "and the loss would fall partly on English commerce and partly on the smugglers."[229] In fact, all his acts and words at this time reveal the densest ignorance, not only of political economy, but of the elementary facts of commerce, as when he imagined that officials, who were sufficiently hard worked with watching a nimble host of some 100,000 smugglers along an immense frontier, would also be able to distinguish between Syrian and American cottons, and to exact 800 francs from 100 kilogrammes of the latter, as against 400 francs from the former, or that six times as much could ever be levied on Chinese teas as on other teas! Such a tariff called for a highly drilled army of those sufficiently rare individuals, honest douaniers, endowed also with Napoleonic activity and omniscience. But, as Chaptal remarked, the Emperor had never thought much about the needs of commerce, and he despised merchants as persons who had "neither a faith nor a country, whose sole object was gain." His own notion about commerce was that he could "make it manoeuvre like a regiment"; and this military conception of trade led him to entertain the fond hope that exchequers benefited by confiscation and prohibitive tariffs, that a "national commerce" could be speedily built up by cutting off imports, and that the burden of loss in the present commercial war fell on England and not on the continental consumer.
Such was the penalty which the great man paid for scorning all new knowledge as idéalogie. The principles set forth by Quesnay, Turgot, and Adam Smith were to him mere sophistical juggling. He once said to Mollien: "I seek the good that is practical, not the ideal best: the world is very old: we must profit by its experience: it teaches that old practices are worth more than new theories: you are not the only one who knows trade secrets."[230] This was his general attitude towards the exponents of new financial or commercial views. Indeed, we can hardly think of this great champion of external control and state intervention favouring the open-handed methods of laisser faire. Unhappy France, that gave this motto to the world but let her greatest ruler emphasize her recent reaction towards commercial mediævalism! Luckless Emperor, who aspired to found the United States of Europe, but outraged the principle which most surely and lastingly works for international harmony, that of Free Trade!
While the Trianon tariff sought to hinder the import of England's colonial products, or, failing that, to reap a golden harvest from them, Napoleon further endeavoured to terrify continental dealers from accepting any of her manufactures. His Fontainebleau decree of October 18th, 1810, ordered that all such goods should be seized and publicly burnt; and five weeks later special tribunals were instituted for enforcing these ukases and for trying all persons, whether smugglers caught red-handed or shopkeepers who inadvertently offered for sale the cottons of Lancashire or the silks of Bengal.
The canon was now complete. It only remained to convert the world to the new gospel of pacific war. The results were soon clearly visible in a sudden rise of prices throughout France, Germany, and Italy. Raw cotton now fetched 10 to 11 francs, sugar 6 to 7 francs, coffee 8 francs, and indigo 21 francs, per pound, or on the average about ten times the prices then ruling at London.[231] The reason for this advantage to the English consumer and manufacturer is clear. England swayed the tropics and held the seas; and, having a monopoly of colonial produce, she could import it easily and abundantly, while the continental purchaser had ultimately to pay for the risks incurred by his shopkeeper, by British merchants, and by their smugglers, who "ran in" from Heligoland, Jersey, or Sicily. These classes vied in their efforts to prick holes in the continental decrees. Bargees and women, dogs and hearses, were pressed into service against Napoleon. The last-named device was for a time tried with much success near Hamburg, until the French authorities, wondering at the strange increase of funerals in a river-side suburb, peered into the hearses, and found them stuffed full with bales of British merchandise. This gruesome plan failing, others were tried. Large quantities of sand were brought from the seashore, until, unfortunately for the housewives, some inquisitive official found that it hailed from the West Indies.
Or again, devious routes were resorted to. Sugar was smuggled from London into Germany by way of Salonica, that being now almost the only neutral port open to British commerce. Thence it was borne in panniers on the backs of mules over the Balkans to Belgrade, where it was transferred to barges and carried up the Danube. Another illicit trade route was from the desolate shores of Dalmatia through Hungary. The writer of a pamphlet, "England, Ireland, and America," states that his firm then employed 500 horses on and near that coast in carrying British goods into Central Europe, and that the cost of getting them into France was "about £28 per cwt., or more than fifty times the present freight to Calcutta." In fact, the result of the Emperor's economic experiments may be summed up in the statement of Chaptal that the general run of prices in France was higher by one-third than it was before 1789.
Now the merest tyro might see that the difference in price above the normal level was paid by the consumer. The colonial producer, the British merchant and shipper were certainly harassed, and trade was dislocated; but, as Mollien observed, commerce soon adapted itself to altered conditions; and merchants never parted with their wares without getting hard cash or resorting to the primitive method of barter. Money was also frequently melted down in France and Germany so as to effect bargains with England in bars of metal. And so, in one way or another, trade was carried on, with infinite discomfort and friction, it is true; but it never wholly ceased even between England and France direct.
In fact, Napoleon so clung to the old mercantilist craze of stimulating exports in order that they might greatly exceed the imports, as to favour the sending of agricultural produce to England, provided that such cargoes comprised manufactured goods. He allowed this privilege not only to his Empire but also to the Kingdom of Italy.[232] The difficulty was that England would not receive the manufactured goods of her enemies; and, as corn and cheese could not be exported to England, unless a certain proportion of silk and cloths went with them, the latter were got up so as to satisfy the French customs officers and then cast into the sea. It is needless to add that this export of manufactures to England, on which Napoleon prided himself, was limited to showy but worthless articles, which were made solely ad usum delphinorum.
It was fortunate for us that Napoleon entertained these crude ideas on political economy; for his action opened for us a loophole of escape from a very serious difficulty. At that time our fast growing population was barely fed by our own wheat even after good seasons; and Providence afflicted us in 1809 and 1810 with very poor harvests. In 1810 the average price was 103 shillings the quarter, the highest ever known except in 1800 and 1801; and as commerce was dislocated by the Continental System and hand-labour was being largely replaced by the new power-looms and improved spinning machinery, the outlook would have been hopeless, had not our great enemy allowed us to import continental corn. This device, which he imagined would impoverish us to enrich his own States, was the greatest aid that he could have rendered to our hard-pressed social system; and readers of Charlotte Brontë's realistic sketches of the Luddite rioting in Yorkshire may imagine what would have befallen England if, besides lack of work and low wages, there had been the added horrors of a bread famine. But fortunately the curious commercial notions harboured by our foe enabled us in the winter of 1810-11 to get supplies of corn not only from Prussia and Poland but even from Italy and France.
In one sense this incident has been misunderstood. It has been referred to by Porter[233] and other hopeful persons as proof positive that as long as we can buy corn we shall get it, even from our enemies. It proves nothing of the sort. Napoleon's correspondence and his whole policy with regard to licences, which we shall presently examine, shows clearly that he believed he would greatly benefit his own States and impoverish our people by selling us large stores of corn at a very high price. There is no hint in any of his letters that he ever framed the notion of starving us into surrender. All that he looked to was the draining away of our wealth by cutting off our exports, and by allowing imports to enter our harbours much as usual. As long as he prevented us selling our produce, he heeded little how much we bought from his States: in fact, the more we bought, the sooner we should be bankrupt—such was his notion.
It is strange that he never sought to cut off our corn-supplies. They were then drawn almost entirely from the Baltic ports. The United States and Canada had as yet only sent us a few driblets of corn. La Plata and the Cape of Good Hope were quite undeveloped; and our settlements in New South Wales were at that time often troubled by dearth. The plan of sealing up the cornfields of Europe from Riga to Trieste would have been feasible, at least for a few weeks; French troops held Danzig and Stettin; Russia, Prussia, and Denmark were at his beck and call; and an imperial decree forbidding the export of corn from France and her allied States to the United Kingdom could hardly have failed to reduce us to starvation and surrender in the very critical winter of 1810-11. But that strange mental defect of clinging with ever increasing tenacity to preconceived notions led Napoleon to allow and even to favour exports of corn to us in the time of our utmost need; and Britain survived the strain.[234]