that they were necessary to the complete triumph of his Continental System.  He himself, with a flash of almost uncanny insight, once remarked to Roederer that his ambition was different from that of other men:  for they were slaves to it, whereas it was so interwoven with the whole texture of his being as to interfere with no single process of thought and will.  Whether that is possible is a question for psychologists and casuists; but every open-minded student of Napoleon’s career must at times pause in utter doubt, whether this or that act was prompted by mad ambition, or followed naturally, perhaps inevitably, from that world-embracing postulate, the Continental System.

England also derived some secondary advantages from this war of the elements.  In order to stalemate her mighty foe, she pushed on her colonial conquests so as to control the resources of the tropics, and thus prevent that deadly tilting of the balance landwards which Napoleon strove to effect.  And fate decreed that the conquests of English seamen and settlers were to be more enduring than those of Napoleon’s legions.  While the French were gaining barren victories beyond the Vistula and Ebro, our seamen seized French and Dutch colonies and our pioneers opened up the interior of Australia and South Africa.

We also used our maritime monopoly to depress neutral commerce.  We have not space to discuss the complex question of the rights of neutrals in time of war, which would involve an examination of the “rule of 1756” and the compromises arrived at after the two Armed Neutrality Leagues.  Suffice it to say that our merchants had recently been indignant at the comparative immunity enjoyed by neutral ships, and had pressed for more vigorous action against such as traded to French ports.[117] Yet the statement that our Orders in Council were determined by the clamour of the mercantile class is an exaggeration:  they were reprisals against Napoleon’s acts, following them in almost geometrical gradations.  To his domination over the industrial resources of the Continent we had nothing to oppose but our manufacturing skill, our supremacy in the tropics, and our control of the sea.  The methods used on both sides were alike brutal, and, when carried to their logical conclusion at the close of the year, crushed the neutrals between the upper and the nether millstone.  But it is difficult to see what other alternative was open to an insular State that was all-powerful at sea and weak on land.  Our very existence was bound up with maritime commerce; and an abandonment of the carrying trade to neutrals would have been the tamest of surrenders, at a time when surrender meant political extinction.

We turn now to follow the chief steps in Napoleon’s onward march, which enabled him to impose his system on nearly the whole of the Continent.  While encamped in the Prussian capital he decreed the deposition of the Elector of Hesse-Cassel, and French and Dutch troops forthwith occupied that Electorate.  Towards Saxony he acted with politic clemency; and on December 11th, 1806, the Elector accepted the French alliance, entered the Confederation of the Rhine, and received the title of King.[118]