act of singular simplicity.  Nor does Napoleon seem to have expected it.  He wrote to his Foreign Minister, Champagny, on March 20th, 1810:  “From not having made peace sooner, England has lost Naples, Spain, Portugal, and the market of Trieste.  If she delays much longer, she will lose Holland, the Hanse Towns, and Sicily.”  And surely this Sibylline conduct of his required that he should annex these lands and all Europe in order to exact a suitable price from the exhausted islanders.  Such was the corollary of the Continental System.

Meanwhile Louis, nettled by the inquisitions of the French douaniers, and by the order of his brother to seize all American ships in Dutch ports, was drawing on himself further reproaches and threats:  “Louis, you are incorrigible ... you do not want to reign for any length of time.  States are governed by reason and policy, and not by acrimony and weakness.”  Twenty thousand French troops were approaching Amsterdam to bring him to reason, when the young ruler decided to be rid of this royal mummery.  On the night of July 1st he fled from Haarlem, and travelled swiftly and secretly eastwards until he reached Teplitz, in Bohemia.  The ignominy of this flight rested on the brother who had made kingship a mockery.  The refugee left behind him the reputation of a man who, lovable by nature but soured by domestic discords, sought to shield his subjects from the ruin into which the rigid application of the Continental System was certain to plunge them.  That fate now befell the unhappy little land.  On July 9th it was annexed to the French Empire, and all the commercial decrees were carried out as rigidly at Rotterdam as at Havre.

At the close of the year, Napoleon’s coast system was extended to the borders of Holstein by the annexation of Oldenburg, the northern parts of Berg, Westphalia, and Hanover, along with Lauenburg and the Hanse Towns, Bremen, Hamburg, and Luebeck.  The little Swiss Republic of Valais was also absorbed in the Empire.

This change in North Germany, which carried the French flag to the shores of the Baltic, was his final expedient for assuring England’s commercial ruin.  As far back as February, 1798, he had recommended the extension of French influence over the Hanse Towns as a means of reducing his most redoubtable foe to surrender, and now there were two special reasons for this annexation.  First, the ships of Oldenburg had been largely used for conveying British produce into North Germany;[228] and secondly, the French commercial code was so rigorous that no officials with even the semblance of independence could be trusted with its execution.  On August 5th a decree had been promulgated at the Trianon, near Versailles, which imposed enormous duties on every important colonial product.  Cotton—­especially that from America—­sugar, tea, coffee, cocoa, and other articles were subjected to dues, generally of half their value and irrespective of their place of production.