What folly, however, to refer to the action of this man of one economic idea as being likely to determine the conduct of continental statesmen in some future naval war with England.  In truth, the urgency of the problem of our national food-supply in time of a great war can only be fully understood by those who have studied the Napoleonic era.  England then grew nearly enough corn for her needs; her fleets swept the seas; and Napoleon’s economic hobby left her foreign food-supply unhampered at the severest crisis.  Yet, even so, the price of the quartern loaf rose to more than fifteenpence, and we were brought to the verge of civil war.  A comparison of that time with the conditions that now prevail must yield food for reflection to all but the case-hardened optimists.

But already Napoleon was convinced that the Continental System must be secretly relaxed in special cases.  Despite the fulsome addresses which some Chambers of Commerce sent up, he knew that his seaports were in the depths of distress, and that French cotton manufacturers could not hope to compete with those of Lancashire now that his own tariff had doubled the price of raw cotton and dyes in France.  He therefore hit upon the curious device of allowing continental merchants to buy licences for the privilege of secretly evading his own decrees.  The English Government seems to have been the first to issue similar secret permits; but Napoleon had scarcely signed his Berlin Decree for the blockade of England before he connived at its infraction.  When sugar, coffee, and other comforts became scarce, they were secretly imported from perfidious Albion for the imperial table.  The final stage was reached in July, 1810, when licences to import forbidden goods were secretly sold to favoured merchants, and many officials—­among them Bourrienne—­reaped a rich harvest from the sale of these imperial indulgences.  Merchants were so eager to evade the hated laws that they offered high prices to the treasury and douceurs to officials for the coveted boon; and as much as L40,000 is said to have been paid for a single licence.

On both sides of the Channel this device was abhorred, but its results were specially odious in Napoleon’s States, where the burdens to be evaded were far heavier than those entailed by the Orders in Council.  In fact, the Continental System was now seen to be an organized hypocrisy, which, in order to ruin the mistress of the seas, exposed the peoples to burdens more grievous than those borne by England, and left all but the wealthiest merchants a prey to a grinding fiscal tyranny.  And the sting of it all was its social injustice; for while the poor were severely punished, sometimes with death, for smuggling sugar or tobacco, Napoleon and the favoured few who could buy licences often imported these articles in large quantities.  What wonder, then, that Russia and Sweden should decline long to endure these gratuitous hardships, and should seek to evade the behests of the imperial smuggler of the Tuileries!