nfiscation. 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 benef