s belief that it would be found possible
to devise some middle course, by which the commercial interests of
France and Russia might be reconciled. His meaning probably was, that,
if their other differences could be arranged, this part of the dispute
might be settled by admitting the Czar to adopt, to a certain extent, in
the north of Europe, a device which he himself had already had recourse
to on a large scale, for counteracting the baneful effects of his own
favourite system, in his own immediate territories. Napoleon had soon
discovered that, to exclude English goods and colonial produce entirely,
was actually impossible; and seeing that, either with or without his
assent, the decrees of Berlin and Milan would, in one way or other,
continue to be violated, it occurred to him that he might at least
engross the greater part of the profits of the forbidden traffic
himself. This he accomplished by the establishment of a system of
custom-house regulations, under which persons desirous to import English
produce into France might purchase the imperial licence for so doing. A
very considerable relaxation in the pernicious influence of the Berlin
code was the result of this device; and a proportional increase of the
Emperor's revenue attended it. In after-days, however, he always spoke
of this licence-system as one of the few great mistakes of his
administration. Some petty riots among the manufacturing population of
the county of Derby were magnified in his eyes into symptoms of an
approaching revolution in England; the consequence, as he flattered
himself, of the misery inflicted on his great enemy by the "continental
system"; and to the end he continued to think that, had he resisted the
temptation to enrich his own exchequer by the produce of licences, such
must have been the ultimate issue of his original scheme. It was,
however, by admitting Alexander to a share in the pecuniary advantages
of the licence-system, that he seems to have thought the commercial part
of his dispute with Russia might be accommodated.

And, indeed, had there been no cause of quarrel between these powers,
except what appeared on the face of their negotiations, it is hardly to
be doubted that an accommodation might have been effected. The simple
truth was, that the Czar, from the hour of Maria Louisa's marriage, felt
a perfect conviction that the diminution of the Russian power in the
north of Europe would form the next great object of Napoleon's