ome addresses which
some Chambers of Commerce sent up, he knew that his seaports were in
the depths of distress, and that French cotton manufacturers could not
hope to compete with those of Lancashire now that his own tariff had
doubled the price of raw cotton and dyes in France. He therefore hit
upon the curious device of allowing continental merchants to buy
licences for the privilege of secretly evading his own decrees. The
English Government seems to have been the first to issue similar
secret permits; but Napoleon had scarcely signed his Berlin Decree for
the blockade of England before he connived at its infraction. When
sugar, coffee, and other comforts became scarce, they were secretly
imported from perfidious Albion for the imperial table. The final
stage was reached in July, 1810, when licences to import forbidden
goods were secretly sold to favoured merchants, and many
officials--among them Bourrienne--reaped a rich harvest from the sale
of these imperial indulgences. Merchants were so eager to evade the
hated laws that they offered high prices to the treasury and
_douceurs_ to officials for the coveted boon; and as much as L40,000
is said to have been paid for a single licence.

On both sides of the Channel this device was abhorred, but its results
were specially odious in Napoleon's States, where the burdens to be
evaded were far heavier than those entailed by the Orders in Council.
In fact, the Continental System was now seen to be an organized
hypocrisy, which, in order to ruin the mistress of the seas, exposed
the peoples to burdens more grievous than those borne by England, and
left all but the wealthiest merchants a prey to a grinding fiscal
tyranny. And the sting of it all was its social injustice; for while
the poor were severely punished, sometimes with death, for smuggling
sugar or tobacco, Napoleon and the favoured few who could buy licences
often imported these articles in large quantities. What wonder, then,
that Russia and Sweden should decline long to endure these gratuitous
hardships, and should seek to evade the behests of the imperial
smuggler of the Tuileries!

Nevertheless, as no inventive people can ever be thrown wholly on its
own resources without deriving some benefit, we find that France met
the crisis with the cheery patience and unflagging ingenuity which she
has ever evinced. In a great Empire which embraced all the lands
between Hamburg, Bayonne, and Rome, not to mention Illyria