ive service, with forty-two thousand for garrison
duty, and afforded the French armies free course through her
territories, with the right to charge up such requisitions as were
made against the war indemnity. To this pass Alexander's narrowness
had brought the proud, regenerated nation; its temper can be imagined.

French diplomacy, triumphant elsewhere, was utterly unsuccessful
with Sweden. Alexander offered Norway as the price of alliance, with
hints of the crown of France for Bernadotte somewhere in the dim
future. Napoleon temptingly offered Finland for forty thousand Swedish
soldiers. But the new crown prince was seemingly coy, and dallied with
both. This temporizing was brought to a sudden end in January, 1812,
when Davout occupied Swedish Pomerania. On April twelfth the alliance
between Sweden and Russia was sealed. It carried with it an armistice
between Russia and Great Britain. This was essential to the Czar, for
he would be compelled to withdraw his troops from the Danube for
service in the North, and to that end must make some arrangement with
Turkey. He offered the most favorable terms; Napoleon, on the other
hand, demanded a hundred thousand men if he were to restore to the
Sublime Porte all it had lost. England threatened to bombard
Constantinople if there should be too much hesitancy, and on May
twenty-eighth, 1812, the Sultan closed a bargain with Russia which
gave him the Pruth as a frontier.

In spite of Turkey's submission, Great Britain was not to be left
passive. The neutrality of the United States had, on the whole, been
successfully maintained, but their commerce suffered. On May first,
1810, Congress enacted that trade with Great Britain should be
forbidden if France revoked her decrees, and vice versa. Madison and
the Republicans believed that this would relieve the strain under
which farmers as well as merchants were now suffering. This enabled
Napoleon, in those days of slow communication, to make a pretense of
relaxing the Berlin and Milan decrees, while continuing to seize
American ships as before. England was not for a moment deceived, and
enforced the orders in council with added indignities. This conduct so
exasperated the American people that they demanded war with the
oppressor, and on June nineteenth the war of 1812 began. Napoleon's
diplomatic juggling had been entirely successful.

A year earlier the princes of the Rhenish Confederation had received
their orders. Their peoples w