[Illustration:  CENTRAL EUROPE AFTER 1810]

Traders were ordered to declare their possession of all colonial wares and to pay the duty, under pain of confiscation.  Depots of such goods within four days’ distance from the frontiers of the Empire were held to be clandestine; and troops were sent forthwith into Germany, Switzerland, and Spain to seize such stores, a proceeding which aroused the men of Stuttgart, Frankfurt, and Berne to almost open resistance.  It is difficult to see the reason for this decree, except on the supposition that the Continental System did not stop British imports, and that all tropical products were British.

Napoleon’s own correspondence shows that he believed this to be so.  At that same time he issued orders that all colonial produce found at Stettin should be confiscated because it was evidently English property brought on American ships.  He further recommended Murat and Eugene to press hard on such wares in order to replenish their exchequers and raise funds for restoring their commerce.  Eugene must, however, be careful to tax American and colonial cotton most heavily, while letting in that of the Levant on favourable terms.

Jerome, too, was bidden rigorously to enforce the Trianon tariff in Westphalia; and the hint was to be passed on to Prussia and the Rhenish Confederation that, by subjecting colonial goods to these enormous imposts, those States would gain several millions of francs “and the loss would fall partly on English commerce and partly on the smugglers."[229] In fact, all his acts and words at this time reveal the densest ignorance, not only of political economy, but of the elementary facts of commerce, as when he imagined that officials, who were sufficiently hard worked with watching a nimble host of some 100,000 smugglers along an immense frontier, would also be able to distinguish between Syrian and American cottons, and to exact 800 francs from 100 kilogrammes of the latter, as against 400 francs from the former, or that six times as much could ever be levied on Chinese teas as on other teas!  Such a tariff called for a highly drilled army of those sufficiently rare individuals, honest douaniers, endowed also with Napoleonic activity and omniscience.  But, as Chaptal remarked, the Emperor had never thought much about the needs of commerce, and he despised merchants as persons who had “neither a faith nor a country, whose sole object was gain.”  His own notion about commerce was that he could “make it manoeuvre like a regiment”; and this military conception of trade led him to entertain the fond hope that exchequers benefited by confiscation and prohibitive tariffs, that a “national commerce” could be speedily built up by cutting off imports, and that the burden of loss in the present commercial war fell on England and not on the continental consumer.