commodities were cheap and money was dear. The trouble, according to an English writer, was "the ruinously low prices of our manufactures and of our colonial productions under the operation . . . of the 'Continental System' during the last six years of the war. . . . The prices of sugar and coffee, for instance, on the Continent, computed in gold, were four or five times higher than their prices in England, computed in banknotes. I am speaking . . . of the times in which the French chemists discovered sugar in beet-root, and a substitute for coffee in chicory; and when the English grazier tried experiments upon fattening oxen with treacle and molasses—of the times when we took possession of the island of Heligoland, in order to form there a depot of goods to facilitate, if possible, the smuggling of them into the north of Europe; and when the lighter descriptions of British manufactures found their way into Germany through Turkey. . . . Almost all the merchandise of the world accumulated in our warehouses, where they became impounded, except when some small quantity was released by a French License, for which the merchants at Hamburgh and Amsterdam had, perhaps, given Napoleon such a sum as forty or fifty thousand pounds. They must have been strange merchants . . . to have paid so large a sum for liberty to carry a cargo of goods from a dear market to a cheap one. What was the ostensible alternative the merchant had? . . . Either to buy coffee at 6d. a pound in bank-notes, and send it to a place where it would instantly sell at 3s. or 4s. a pound in gold, or to buy gold with bank-notes at £5 an ounce, and send it
