The date of the Berlin Decree was November twenty-first, 1806. On July twenty-fifth, 1805, Montgaillard, a clever scoundrel,—of whom, as Napoleon remarked, something could have been made if he had not been fit for hanging,—wrote a memorial[41] which was presented to Napoleon and is claimed to have been the basis of the Continental System. As expanded on March twenty-fourth, 1806, this paper represents that England has in view the sole object of destroying the French marine in order to destroy French commerce, and that, consequently, the imperial idea of Europe is one to which she can never accede even by a temporary peace; that she will never renounce her claim to Hanover or permit the occupation of Holland, her ultimate intention being to establish in Egypt a station to protect her commerce by the Red Sea with India. Portugal, which will always side with England, must, therefore, be incorporated with Spain; while Crete and Egypt must be occupied by both military and commercial posts. The influence of England's deep, fierce hostility, it continues, is seen in the refusal of both Austria and Russia to recognize the newly created vassal kingdom of Italy. England arrogated the tyranny of the seas in 1651 by the Navigation Act passed under the Protector; her very existence is founded in traffic and commerce, and without it there is no movement in her body politic. She is forced to disregard all provisions of international law which tend to diminish her commercial strength. William of Orange created her national debt; and successive sovereigns have in their various continental and American wars increased it to its present dimensions—estimated at about six hundred millions sterling. To carry this enormous obligation and emit the new loans necessary to sustain the respective coalitions, it is essential that her commerce should continuously expand. "It is through her commerce that England must be attacked," says Montgaillard; "to leave her all her gains in Europe, Asia, and America is to leave her all her arms, to render conflicts and wars eternal. To destroy British commerce is to strike England to the heart." He then advances the idea which appears to be the germ of the Continental System: Since Russia seems to favor the plans of England, and since Sweden is destitute of both independence and dignity, France must begin the attack on the maritime legislation of the enemy. She has only to make the navigation acts her own, modify them in favor of the powers which accept them, and adopt a policy of reciprocity.
How far these counsels influenced Napoleon it is impossible to say; but the chronological coincidence has some value in support of the claim that Montgaillard at least gave the final impulse to the Emperor. There seems, however, to have been a fatal flaw in the reasoning of both. There was no symptom in either executive or counselor of any grasp upon the fact that by the amazing development of industry in England the wealth of the entire world had been enormously increased—so enormously that without a corresponding increase in other nations no international rivalry in prosperity and influence was at all possible. This is a new discovery: then and until very recently it was supposed that England had reached her eminence in commerce by a series of flagrant wrongs; and when the successive steps of aggression and reprisal are chronologically arranged, there is a superficial appearance of truth in the charge. The Orders in Council were iniquitous anachronisms, and they gave a color of justification to the equally barbarous decrees of France—decrees in themselves preposterous, and supported, moreover, by a blockade which was as purely fictitious as that by which Great Britain supported her Orders in Council. The original sketch of the Berlin Decree has been recently discovered in the National Archives at Paris, and it is very important to note that it does not contemplate that portion of the completed document which covers the lands either allied to or under the influence of France; this provision seems to have been added after long reflection. The natural complement of a fictitious blockade was a fictitious protective system; the one was as absurd as the other.
In her puzzled uncertainty, and under the stress of necessity for immediate action of some kind, England took the next false step in the same direction and issued the Orders of January seventh, 1807, declaring all the ports, not only of France, but of her colonies, in a state of blockade, and throwing down the gauntlet to the neutral states by forbidding any ship to trade between the ports of France, of her colonies, and of the countries in the French system; while on November eleventh a new decree extended the inhibition to all ports whatsoever from which the English flag was excluded. This extreme position was pronounced by Lord Erskine to be unconstitutional and contrary to the law of nations. That it was not intended to be enforced, but was to be used as a pretext to secure maritime monopoly, is proved by the fact that already, in the month before, Great Britain had inaugurated the policy of evading her own decrees, raising the blockade of both the Elbe and the Weser and winking at the contraband trade which immediately sprang up in consequence. Napoleon was therefore untiring in the system of reprisals; on November twenty-third of the same year he issued the Milan Decree as a retort both to the scheme of contraband trade put into operation at Bremen and Hamburg and to the Orders of November eleventh; and to supplement this, a second and more rigorous decree was promulgated on December twenty-sixth, 1807. Any vessel which had suffered the visitation of English cruisers or had put in at any English port was declared thereby to have become English and consequently subject to confiscation; an embargo was also placed on all neutral ships at that time in French harbors. Prussia, Sweden, and Denmark adhered promptly to the new Continental System. England was terrified at the consequences of its own temerity, and on April twenty-sixth, 1809, modified her orders by limiting the blockade to "all the ports of the so-called Kingdom of Holland, of France and her colonies, and of Southern Italy, from Orbitello to Pesaro inclusive." Yet, for all this, Austria and Switzerland gave in their adhesion somewhat later; while America stuck to the principle of non-intercourse and finally obtained the revocation in her favor of both the Berlin and the Milan Decrees and, in the end, of the Orders in Council. As is well known, public necessity proved to be stronger than theory; Napoleon's very energy in depriving continental Europe of colonial and English-made articles which, once regarded as luxuries, had in time become necessities, together with the consequent exasperation of Great Britain at the diminution of her trade, was one of the influences which combined the most discordant political elements into a union for the destruction of French empire.
The English side of the secular controversy which has raged over the right and wrong of the Continental System has been presented by various writers with great ingenuity and acumen. The seizure of private persons and property on the high seas, runs their argument, was simply the retort to the French decree of 1798 which ordered the execution of all neutral sailors found on English ships; the French had been the first to disregard the law of nations in seizing the property of English merchants on terra firma at Leghorn, and from times immemorial the usage of Europe had authorized the seizure of private property on the high seas; the paper blockade, though illegal and absurd, was resorted to under great provocation, because Prussia had occupied Hanover, a territory which belonged, if not to England, at least to the holder of the English crown. It follows, therefore, that every measure taken by England was strictly in the nature of a reprisal. This legal plea is a question to be considered by jurisprudence, partly in the light of the changing identity of France and partly in that of variations of obligation due to the incidents of warfare—such, for example, as the conduct of England at Copenhagen, which was only the culmination of a series of similar acts in the treatment of all neutrals. It seems very doubtful whether any legal argument can avail much in explaining the inconsistencies incident to such struggles as the wars which were waged during the Napoleonic epoch. The real and paramount plea of England is self-defense; the arguments based on the political and economic emergencies in which she was involved, in consequence of her amazing constitutional and industrial preëminence, have a validity far beyond any which inheres in pleas that are purely technical—and confined, at that, to the field of international law.
Certain facts recently noted throw a flood of light on the miraculous development of English and Scotch industry during the Napoleonic epoch. Robert Owen stated, and in all sobriety, that in 1816 his two thousand operatives at New Lanark accomplished with the aid of the new machinery as much as had been accomplished by all the operatives in Scotland without it! In his autobiography Owen further emphasizes the extent of the industrial revolution by estimating—and the estimate is conservative—that the work done by the manufacturing population of Great Britain with machinery could not be done without it by a people numbering less than two hundred millions. There was no corresponding development of manufactures on the Continent—not even in France; thus, it was not until 1812 that steam spinning was introduced into Mulhouse, the great industrial capital of Alsace. Similar comparisons could be drawn in many other respects between Great Britain and her continental neighbors, but this single contrast is enough to render very striking the fact that no other power could vie with her in supplying the world with cheap and useful wares of such a sort as to become after a first trial indispensable to the masses of mankind. She found herself, therefore, in the position of being required for the sake of peace to discard all her commercial advantages, all that she had gained in her industrial evolution—all the preëminence, in short, which she held by exertions and sacrifices that had been unexampled elsewhere and continuous for centuries.
Does such a situation create no moral obligation? Is it supposable that a nation could consider for an instant the possibility of destroying itself and its inheritance, for the sake of a peace which would surrender all its advantages to an active and irreconcilable enemy? If there were no alternative except war or suicide, is Great Britain to be blamed for choosing war, however desperate? Moreover, there is another consideration of the first importance, which has a moral quality universally recognized in other spheres. By common consent no occupation of discovered land holds good if it be not permanent and beneficent; and likewise the closed economic state cannot be permanent unless it prove to be universally beneficent. Such a state now appears to be as uncertain in its operations as the closed jural state has proved to be under the operation of international agreements which assist one nation to enforce its municipal law, by the sanction of another. Extradition treaties and other equally pregnant innovations in international law are now generally admitted to have a jural validity, in many of the most important relations of men, that is both higher and stronger than that of the municipal law of the various states which compose the present federation of civilized powers. In the same way—tacitly, perhaps, but none the less really—it is coming to be widely conceded that the markets of the world cannot be closed to wares so good and so cheap as to be necessary for the ever-rising standard of comfortable living demanded by wage-earners in every land, except on condition that such wares can be produced sooner or later as well and as cheaply in the land which protects itself against others of its own class.
The effort of Great Britain to establish a monopoly of ocean commerce was accompanied by one immoral incident of the most far-reaching importance—the inauguration of a licensing system whereby, with simulated papers, vessels of any origin successfully evaded the provisions of both the British orders and the French decrees. This procedure for a time debauched the commerce of the world, and was a fit supplement to the acts of violence severely reprobated both then and since. In the main, fraud and violence brought greater profit to France than to Great Britain. The relaxation in 1798 of the rule of 1756 had accrued to the advantage of the only strictly neutral power of the world, viz., the United States; the orders and the decrees so hampered and exasperated our merchants that we first passed the Embargo Act and then took refuge in non-intercourse. By that time English commerce had so seriously declined under the working of the Continental System that violent agitation against the orders was inaugurated in Great Britain itself. Almost at that very moment, however, Napoleon drove the reigning house of Portugal to Brazil, and thus opened the most important ports of South America to British importations. The glut of the English storehouses was thus momentarily relieved; and, while the merchants suffered serious loss from the low prices they received, they were saved from absolute bankruptcy. For two years longer the struggle on both sides was continued with desperation; and would probably have resulted in the despair of Great Britain, had not the improved methods of agriculture, introduced along with the improved methods in manufacturing, made it possible to feed for some time longer the still comparatively small population by means of home production.
This was the interval which brought matters to a crisis on the Continent. Great Britain could get on very well without the silks and other luxuries produced in France, substituting for them woolens and cottons; but English cruisers made almost impossible the importation into Europe, not only of colonial necessities, but also of the raw materials necessary for indispensable manufactures. By the system of licenses alone was it possible to maintain the French army; cloth and leather wherewith to outfit Napoleon's soldiers were brought from England into the Hanseatic ports in open contempt of the Continental System. Since Great Britain also held the monopoly of coffee, tea, and sugar, without which the not more than half-hearted Germans of the Rhine Confederation would not live, and which Napoleon did not dare to cut off entirely from even the French and Italians, it was thought that the only possible reprisals against her not already instituted would be in the line of further restrictions on her manufactures. During the late summer and early autumn of 1810 were promulgated the three decrees of Trianon, St. Cloud, and Fontainebleau; and not only were enormous duties imposed on all colonial products, wherever found, but all English goods discovered in the lands of the French system were to be burned. Neutral ships, including those of the United States, were at the same time utterly shut out from all the harbors of these lands.
This was the beginning of the end; for in the effort to destroy the English sea power by condemning it to inanition, Napoleon deprived the manufacturers in his own lands of all their raw materials. Even if this had not been a sufficient cause, their manufacturing plants were not modern enough to supply the markets open to them. Russia endured the miseries of privation for but a single year, and in 1811 opened her ports; while smuggling on her boundary lines at once assumed dimensions which rendered anything approaching an administration of the Continental System the work of an army of customs officers, so that after 1812 the effort to enforce it was necessarily abandoned. Our declaration of war with England came too late to exert any influence, one way or the other, on the final solution of the question whether sea power or land power was the stronger in the civilized world at the opening of the nineteenth century. The death throes of Napoleon's imperial system were primarily caused by the exhaustion of France and of himself; when he made himself a dynastic ruler, his prestige and his inherent strength were dissipated as rapidly as were those of the popes when they joined the ranks of the petty princes of Italy. Possibly an empire of United Europe based on the liberal ideas of the day might have had some chance for life, but a single dynastic power pitted against all the dynasties of the Continent, and also against the moral strength of British preëminence in politics and industry, had none at all. It is a mistake to regard the Continental System as an influential cause of Napoleon's overthrow, except in so far as it displayed the folly of attempting to apply what is at best a temporary national expedient as a permanent principle in a world system. The effort did cripple the resources of France and alienate much Continental sympathy from the Emperor, and it embittered Great Britain to the point of desperation; but the result of the struggle to found a Napoleonic hierarchy of two degrees on the states of the Continent was otherwise determined.
END OF VOLUME II