at Austerlitz, and the Prussian one at Jena, he wrote the
Berlin Decrees, ordering every port on the continent of Europe to be shut
against every single British ship. This was blockade from the land. The
British answered with a blockade from the sea, giving notice, by their
Orders-in-Council, that their Navy would stop the trade of every port
which shut out British vessels. Napoleon hoped that if he could bully
Europe into obeying his Berlin Decrees he would "conquer the sea by the
land." But what really happened was quite the other way round; for
Napoleon's land was conquered by the British sea. So much of the trade
of the European ports had been carried on by British vessels that to shut
these out meant killing the trade in some ports and hurting it in all.
Imagine the feelings of a merchant whose country's army had been beaten
by Napoleon, and whose own trade was stopped by the Berlin Decrees, when
he saw the sea open to all who were under the care of the British Navy
and closed to all who were not! Imagine also what he thought of the
difference between Napoleon's land-power, which made him a prisoner at
home, and British sea-power, which only obliged him to obey certain laws
of trade abroad! Then imagine which side he thought the better one for
trade, when he saw Napoleon himself being forced to choose between
letting British vessels into France with cloth or letting his army go
bare!

Slowly, at first, but very surely, and faster as time went on, the
shutting of the ports against British vessels roused the peoples of
Europe against Napoleon. They were, of course, roused by his other acts
of tyranny--by the way he cut up countries into new kingdoms to suit
himself first and the people of these countries last or not at all, by
his ordering foreigners about like slaves, and by his being a ruthless
conqueror wherever he could. But his shutting of the ports added a kind
of slow starvation in the needs and arts of life to all his other sins;
while the opening of the ports to British fleets and armies, and to the
British trade that followed, meant the bread of life and liberty. Thus
Trafalgar forced Napoleon either to give in at once or else to go on
raising those hosts of enemies which sapped his strength in Spain and
Russia and caused his fall at Waterloo.

CHAPTER XIX

"1812"

The fight between Napoleon's land-blockade and Britain's sea-blockade
divided not only the people of Europe into friends an