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 Bronte’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]