[Footnote 55:  Afterwards sixth Earl of Carlisle.]

CHAPTER XXI

The Decrees of Berlin—­Napoleon renews the campaign—­Warsaw taken—­Enthusiasm of the Poles—­Retreat of the Russians—­Battle of Pultusk—­The French go into winter quarters—­Battle of Preuss-Eylau—­Taking of Dantzick—­Battle of Friedland—­Armistice—­Expeditions of the English to Calabria, Constantinople, Egypt, and Buenos Ayres—­Peace of Tilsit.

Napoleon had achieved the total humiliation of the Prussian monarchy in a campaign of a week’s duration:  yet severe as the exertions of his army had been, and splendid his success, and late as the season was now advanced, there ensued no pause of inaction:  the Emperor himself remained but a few days in Berlin.

This brief residence, however, was distinguished by the issue of the famous decrees of Berlin; those extraordinary edicts by which Buonaparte hoped to sap the foundations of the power of England—­the one power which he had no means of assailing by his apparently irresistible arms.

Napoleon declared the British Islands to be in a state of blockade:  any intercourse with that country was henceforth to be a crime; all her citizens found in any country in alliance with France to be prisoners; every article of English produce or manufacture, wherever discovered, to be confiscated.  In a word, wherever France had power, the slightest communication with England was henceforth to be treason against the majesty of Napoleon; and every coast of Europe was to be lined with new armies of douaniers and gens-d’armes, for the purpose of carrying into effect what he called “the continental system.”

He had long meditated the organisation of this system, and embraced, as a favourable opportunity for its promulgation, the moment which saw him at length predominant in the North of Germany, and thus, in effect, master of the whole coasts of Europe from the mouth of the Oder round to the Adriatic Gulf.  The system, however, could not be carried into effect, because from long habit the manufactured goods and colonial produce of Britain had come to be necessaries of life among every civilised people of the world; and consequently every private citizen found his own domestic comforts invaded by the decree, which avowedly aimed only at the revenues of the English crown.  Every man, therefore, was under continual temptation, each in his own sphere and method, to violate the decrees of Berlin.  The custom-house officers were exposed to bribes which their virtue could not resist.  Even the most attached of Napoleon’s own functionaries connived at the universal spirit of evasion—­his brothers themselves, in their respective dominions, could not help sympathising with their subjects, and winking at the methods of relief to which they were led by necessity, the mother of invention.  The severe police, however, which was formed everywhere