e 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 as a necessary part
of the machinery for carrying these edicts into execution--the insolence
of the innumerable spies and informers whom they set in motion--and the
actual deprivation of usual comforts, in so far as it existed--all these
circumstances conspired to render the name of the Berlin decrees odious
throughout Europe and in France itself. It may be added that the
original conception of Napoleon was grounded on a mistaken opinion, to
which, however, he always clung--namely, that England derives all her
strength from her foreign commerce. Great as that commerce was, and
great as, in spite of him, it continued to be, it never was anything but
a trifle when compared with the internal traffic and resources of Great
Britain--a country not less distinguished above other nations for its
agricultural industry, than for its commercial.

Napoleon received at Berlin a deputation of his Senate, sent from Paris
to congratulate him on the successes of his campaign. To them he
announced these celebrated decrees: he made them the bearers of the
trophies of his recent victories, and, moreover, of a demand for the
immediate levying of 80,000 men, being the _first_ conscription for the
year 1808--that for the year 1807 having been already anticipated. The
subservient Senate recorded and granted whatever their master pleased to
dictate; but the cost of human life which Napoleon's ambition demanded
had begun, ere this time, to be seriously thought of in France. He,
meanwhile, prepared, without further delay, to extinguish the feeble
spark of resistance which still lingered in a few garrisons of the
Prussian Monarchy, beyond the Oder: and to meet, before they could
reach the soil of Germany, those Russian legions which were now
advancing, too late,