terms in United States harbors; and it was nominally in
retaliation for this, which was not a fact, that, according to the
Rambouillet Decree, issued on March twenty-third, 1810, American
vessels with their cargoes, worth together upward of eight million
dollars, were seized and kept. In reality Napoleon regarded or
pretended to regard the Non-intercourse Act as one of open hostility
to himself, and used it to fill his depleted purse, exactly as he used
the substitutes passed by Congress in the following year to bring on
the War of 1812. Owing to the general use of "simulated" American
papers and seals, the non-intercourse system introduced British goods
into every continental harbor. A vessel holding both a French and a
British license and "simulated papers" of the United States or any
other neutral state might by unscrupulous adroitness trade in English
goods almost without restriction, and this was far from Napoleon's
intention. Between 1802 and 1811, nine hundred and seventeen American
vessels were seized by the British and five hundred and fifty-eight by
the French in their harbors; the number seized in the ports of
Holland, Spain, Denmark, and Naples was very large, but it is not
definitely known. The dealings of Napoleon with the United States in
this matter, like those of England, were irregular and evasive; but
there is nothing in them to show that the Emperor of the French
contemplated either the dismemberment of the American republic or the
abandonment of his Continental System.

Having traced the whole English-Dutch conspiracy directly to Fouche,
Napoleon contemplated bringing the treacherous minister to trial on
the charge of treason. Fearing, however, the effect not merely in
Europe, but particularly in France, of such a spectacle, and the
revelations which must necessarily accompany it, he contented himself
with degrading and banishing his unruly henchman. The important office
of police minister was filled by the appointment of Savary, an equally
unscrupulous but more obedient tool. The murderer of Enghien, and the
keeper of Ferdinand as he now was and had been since Talleyrand's
return to public life, was both feared and hated in Paris. "I
believe," he says in his memoirs, "that news of a pestilence having
broken out on some point of the coast would not have caused more
terror than did my nomination to the ministry of police."

Louis, within the narrowed sphere of his activities, continued quite
as in