[178] The British
authorities understood that, by relinquishing these rights, they would
abandon in great measure the control of the sea, so far as useful to
war. The United States have received their lesson in history. If the
principle contended for by their representatives, Marshall and
Pinkney, had been established as international law before 1861, there
could have been no blockade of the Southern coast in the Civil War.
The cotton of the Confederacy, innocent "private property," could have
gone freely; the returns from it would have entered unimpeded;
commerce, the source of national wealth, would have flourished in full
vigor; supplies, except contraband, would have flowed unmolested; and
all this at the price merely of killing some hundred thousands more
men, with proportionate expenditure of money, in the effort to
maintain the Union, which would probably have failed, to the
immeasurable loss of both sections.

The British Government took some time to analyze the "inarticulate
import" of the Berlin Decree. Hence, in the paper presented to Monroe
and Pinkney, stress was laid upon the methods only, ignoring the
object of compelling Great Britain to surrender her maritime rights.
In the methods, however, instinct divined the true character of the
plotted evil. There was to be formed, under military pressure, a vast
political combination of states pledged to exclude British commerce
from the markets of the Continent; a design which in execution
received the name of the Continental System. The Decree being issued
after the battle of Jena, upon the eve of the evident complete
subjugation of Prussia, following that of Austria the year before,
there was room to fear that the predominance of Napoleon on the
Continent would compel in Europe universal compliance with these
measures of exclusion. It so proved, in fact, in the course of 1807,
leading to a commercial warfare of extraordinary rigor, the effects of
which upon Europe have been discussed by the author in a previous
work.[179] Its influence upon the United States is now to be
considered; for it was a prominent factor in the causes of the War of
1812.

Although in a military sense weak to debility, and politically not
welded as yet into a nation, strong in a common spirit and accepted
traditions, the United States was already in two respects a force to
be considered. She possessed an extensive shipping, second in tonnage
only to that of the British Islands, to wh