del,
the director of that department, performed his duty with zeal and
disinterestedness. I feel gratified in rendering him this tribute.
Enormous quantities of English merchandise and colonial produce were
accumulated at Holstein, where they almost all arrived by way of Kiel and
Hudsum, and were smuggled over the line at the expense of a premium of 33
and 40 per cent. Convinced of this fact by a thousand proofs, and weary
of the vexations of the preventive system, I took upon myself to lay my
opinions on the subject before the Emperor. He had given me permission
to write to him personally, without any intermediate agency, upon
everything that I might consider essential to his service. I sent an
extraordinary courier to Fontainebleau, where he then was, and in my
despatch I informed him that, notwithstanding his preventive guard, every
prohibited article was smuggled in because the profits on the sale in
Germany, Poland, Italy, and even France, into which the contrabrand goods
found their way, were too considerable not to induce persons to incur all
risks to obtain them. I advised him, at the very time he was about to
unite the Hanse Towns to the French Empire, to permit merchandise to be
imported subject to a duty of 33 per cent., which was about equal to the
amount of the premium for insurance. The Emperor adopted my advice
without hesitation, and in 1811 the regulation produced a revenue of
upwards of 60,000,000 francs in Hamburg alone.

This system, however, embroiled us with Sweden and Russia, who could not
endure that Napoleon should enact a strict blockade from them, whilst he
was himself distributing licences in abundance. Bernadotte, on his way
to Sweden, passed through Hamburg in October 1810. He stayed with me
three days, during which time he scarcely saw any person but myself. He
asked my opinion as to what he should do in regard to the Continental
system. I did not hesitate to declare to him, not as a French Minister,
but as a private individual to his friend, that in his place, at the head
of a poor nation, which could only subsist by the exchange of its
territorial productions with England, I would open my ports, and give the
Swedes gratuitously that general licence which Bonaparte sold in detail
to intrigue and cupidity.

The Berlin decree could not fail to cause a reaction against the
Emperor's fortune by raising up whole nations against him. The hurling
of twenty kings from their thrones would have ex