their flag, as they did in later years, secretly intrigued with Napoleon to obtain a special immunity from his decrees for their shipping trade with England.
Napoleon infringes his own decrees. But while Napoleon was vainly fulminating his decrees against England, and putting into motion his whole power in Europe to carry them out, he himself first set the example of their evasion, and for a temporary profit established a system which tended to neutralise the very object he was making so many efforts to accomplish. Scarcely had a few months elapsed after the publication of the Berlin Decree, before it was discovered that a large source of revenue might be opened by granting, at exorbitant prices, licences to import British colonial produce and manufactures.[1]
Moniteur, Nov. 18, 1810.
Rise in the price of produce and freights,
These licences were granted ostensibly to benefit
French manufacture, under the obligation of exporting
French or continental produce to an equal
amount, a condition, however, which was easily and
frequently evaded. In this manner a most lucrative
trade was carried on, notwithstanding the exorbitant
rates of the licences, and the great additional charges
to which the whole transaction was subjected.
British manufactures and colonial produce rose to
an extravagant price in France, while foreign pro-*
- ↑ Moniteur, 18th Nov., 1810. At Hamburg, in 1811, under the bloody government of Davoust, an unhappy father was shot for having introduced into his house a small sugar-loaf, of which his family stood in need: yet at that very moment Napoleon was probably signing a licence for the importation of a million of such loaves. Smuggling on a small scale was punished with death; but the government carried it on upon the greatest scale. The same regulations filled the prisons with victims and the imperial coffers with revenue. Note by Alison, vol. xi. p. 173, from Bourrienne, vol. vii. p. 233.
