Such was the penalty which the great man paid for scorning all new knowledge as idealogie.  The principles set forth by Quesnay, Turgot, and Adam Smith were to him mere sophistical juggling.  He once said to Mollien:  “I seek the good that is practical, not the ideal best:  the world is very old:  we must profit by its experience:  it teaches that old practices are worth more than new theories:  you are not the only one who knows trade secrets."[230] This was his general attitude towards the exponents of new financial or commercial views.  Indeed, we can hardly think of this great champion of external control and state intervention favouring the open-handed methods of laisser faire.  Unhappy France, that gave this motto to the world but let her greatest ruler emphasize her recent reaction towards commercial mediaevalism!  Luckless Emperor, who aspired to found the United States of Europe, but outraged the principle which most surely and lastingly works for international harmony, that of Free Trade!

While the Trianon tariff sought to hinder the import of England’s colonial products, or, failing that, to reap a golden harvest from them, Napoleon further endeavoured to terrify continental dealers from accepting any of her manufactures.  His Fontainebleau decree of October 18th, 1810, ordered that all such goods should be seized and publicly burnt; and five weeks later special tribunals were instituted for enforcing these ukases and for trying all persons, whether smugglers caught red-handed or shopkeepers who inadvertently offered for sale the cottons of Lancashire or the silks of Bengal.

The canon was now complete.  It only remained to convert the world to the new gospel of pacific war.  The results were soon clearly visible in a sudden rise of prices throughout France, Germany, and Italy.  Raw cotton now fetched 10 to 11 francs, sugar 6 to 7 francs, coffee 8 francs, and indigo 21 francs, per pound, or on the average about ten times the prices then ruling at London.[231] The reason for this advantage to the English consumer and manufacturer is clear.  England swayed the tropics and held the seas; and, having a monopoly of colonial produce, she could import it easily and abundantly, while the continental purchaser had ultimately to pay for the risks incurred by his shopkeeper, by British merchants, and by their smugglers, who “ran in” from Heligoland, Jersey, or Sicily.  These classes vied in their efforts to prick holes in the continental decrees.  Bargees and women, dogs and hearses, were pressed into service against Napoleon.  The last-named device was for a time tried with much success near Hamburg, until the French authorities, wondering at the strange increase of funerals in a river-side suburb, peered into the hearses, and found them stuffed full with bales of British merchandise.  This gruesome plan failing, others were tried.  Large quantities of sand were brought from the seashore, until, unfortunately for the housewives, some inquisitive official found that it hailed from the West Indies.