lics, that de Maistre
called the inflexible but supine Pontiff a punchinello of no
importance.

It had been clear since Trafalgar that though France might dominate
earth, air, and fire in Europe, she could not gain the mastery of the
sea and its islands, at least, by the ordinary means. The Emperor's
infatuation with the plausible scheme of destroying England's commerce
by paper blockades and by embargoes on British goods had not been
diminished either by his inconclusive struggle in Spain or by his
victory over Austria. It was in vain that he had changed his naval
policy from one of fleet-fighting to one of commerce-destroying; that
he had seized and was continuing to seize neutral vessels laden with
British wares; that he had expanded his political system by conquest
until he was nominally master of the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and
Baltic harbors. Since 1805 English trade with the Continent, so far
from diminishing, had steadily increased in the hands of
contrabandists and neutral carriers, until it had now reached annual
dimensions of twenty-five millions sterling. In spite of the Tilsit
alliance, even French soldiers occasionally wore English-made shoes
and clothing. English ships carried naval stores out of Russian
harbors, and colonial wares found their way from the wharves of Riga
to the markets of Mainz. But the chief offenders in defying Napoleon's
chimerical policy were the Dutch and Hanseatic cities. The resistance
elsewhere in the Continent was passive compared with the energetic
smuggling and the clandestine evasion of decrees which went on under
the eyes of the officials in places like Amsterdam and Hamburg.

These facts had not been concealed from the Emperor of the French at
any time, and he now made ready to enforce the threats which he had
uttered in the agony of the late wars. It had come to a life-or-death
struggle between the policies laid down respectively in the imperial
decrees and in the British orders in council. Neither measure was in
the strictest sense military, but it is easy to see that the two were
irreconcilable in their intent, while the success of either one meant
the ruin of the land which upheld the other. It was for the sake,
apparently, of waging this decisive though unwarlike contest that
Napoleon renounced leading his victorious legions into Spain for the
expulsion of English troops from the peninsula. What he himself called
the "Spanish ulcer" might weaken the French system, a