The turn of affairs in the North at this time, and during the succeeding critical twelvemonth, was powerfully influenced by the presence of a great British fleet in the Baltic and by the extreme discretion of its admiral. Napoleon had compelled Sweden to follow up her exclusion of British ships by a formal declaration of war, which was issued November 17, 1810. The British minister had to leave Stockholm; and, after his departure, the political as well as military direction of affairs on the spot was under the conduct of Sir James Saumarez. That most distinguished and admirable officer had thoroughly appreciated, during his three summers in the Baltic, the feelings of the Swedish rulers and people; and it was chiefly owing to his representations to his own government, and to his steadily conciliatory action, that the formal war never became actual. He resisted with dignity and firmness every attempt on the part of the Swedish authorities to carry out Napoleon's orders to confiscate; but he did not allow himself to be moved, by such occasional yielding on their part, to any act of retaliation. Good feeling between the two nations centred around his attractive personality, and facilitated the essential, but difficult, conciliation between Sweden and Russia. The entire license trade was under the protection of his fleet, which had charge also of the suppression of privateering, of the police of the hostile coasts, and of the interruption of communications between Denmark and Norway. [467] Its presence virtually insured the independence of Sweden against France and Russia, except during the winter months, when compelled to leave the Baltic; and its numbers and character gave the Swedish government a sufficient excuse for not proceeding to the extremities demanded by Napoleon. During the summer of 1811 the flag-ship was the centre of the secret consultations which went on between the two states, to which Russia also, having finally rejected Napoleon's terms, soon became a party; and towards the end of the season the negotiation, practically completed by the admiral, was formally concluded with a British plenipotentiary. It was determined to keep up the appearance of war, but with the understanding that Sweden would join the alliance of Great Britain and Russia. The czar had then no cause to fear that, in the approaching contest with the great conqueror, he should find a hostile Sweden on his flank and rear. [468]

The preparations of Napoleon for the great Russian campaign occupied the year 1811. It was his intention to carry on a vigorous warfare in the Spanish peninsula, while collecting the immense forces of every kind needed in the north of Germany. But the unsatisfactory character of many of the soldiers gathering on the Elbe, among them being tens of thousands of refractory conscripts and foreign nationalities, compelled him to withdraw from Spain in the latter part of 1811 some forty thousand veterans, whose place was to be filled by levies of an inferior character, which, moreover, did not at once appear. The fortune of war in the Peninsula during the year had varied in different quarters. On the east coast General Suchet had brought Tortosa to capitulate on the 1st of January. Thence advancing to the south he reduced Tarragona by siege and assault on the 28th of June,—an exploit which obtained for him his grade of Marshal of France. Still moving forward, according to Napoleon's general plan and instructions to him, the end of the year found him before the city of Valencia, which surrendered on the 9th of January, 1812. But to obtain these later successes, at the time that so many hardened warriors were removed from the Peninsula, it had been necessary to support Suchet with divisions taken from the centre and west, to abandon the hope entertained of combining another great attempt against Lisbon, and also to withdraw Marmont's corps from the valley of the Tagus to a more northern position, around Salamanca and Valladolid. At this time Wellington occupied a line on the frontiers of Portugal, north of the Tagus, resting on the city of Almeida and facing Ciudad Rodrigo. The latter, with Badajoz, on the Guadiana, constituted the two supports to the strong barrier by which the emperor proposed to check any offensive movements of the enemy upon Spain.

The year had been passed by the British general in patient contention with the innumerable difficulties, political and military, of his situation. Masséna had indeed been forced to withdraw from Portugal in April, but since that time Wellington had been balked, in every attempt, by superior numbers and by the strength of the positions opposed to him. His reward was now near at hand. On the 8th of January, 1812, he suddenly appeared before Ciudad Rodrigo, favored in his movements by the pre-occupation of Marmont, who was engaged in the reorganization and arrangements necessitated by the withdrawal of so many troops for the Russian war, and also deceived by the apparent inactivity in the British lines. The siege was pushed with a vigor that disregarded the ordinary rules of war, and the place was successfully stormed on the 19th of January. As rapidly as the nature of the country, the season, and other difficulties would permit, Wellington moved to the south, intending to attack Badajoz. On the 16th of March the place was invested, and though most ably defended by a governor of unusual ability, it was snatched out of the hands of Marshal Soult by the same audacity and disregard of ordinary methods that had bereft Marmont of the sister fortress. Badajoz was stormed on the night of the 6th of April; and the Spanish frontier then lay open to the British, to be crossed as soon as their numbers, or the mistakes of the enemy, should justify the attempt.

Thus opened the fatal year 1812. The clouds breaking away, though scarce yet perceptibly, for Great Britain, were gathering in threatening masses on the horizon of Napoleon. A painful picture is drawn by his eulogist, M. Thiers, of the internal state of the empire at this time. An excessively dry season had caused very short crops throughout Europe, and want had produced bread riots in England, as well as in France and elsewhere. But such demonstrations of popular fury were far more dangerous and significant, in a country where all expression of opinion had been so rigorously controlled as in the empire, and in a capital which concentrates and leads, as only Paris does, the feelings of a nation. The discontent was heightened and deepened by the miseries of the conscription, which ate ever deeper and deeper, wringing the heart of every family, and becoming more and more extreme as each succeeding enterprise became vaster than those before it, and as the excessive demands, by reducing the quality of the individual victims, required ever growing numbers. Six hundred thousand men had been poured into Spain, three hundred thousand of whom had died there. [469] Besides the immense masses carried forward to the confines of Poland, and those destined for the Peninsula, there was to be a powerful reserve between the Elbe and the Rhine, another behind the Rhine in France itself, and to these Napoleon now proposed to add yet a third, of one hundred and twenty thousand so-called national guards, taken from the conscription of the four last years and legally not liable to the call. Throughout the great cities there was growing irritation, rising frequently to mutiny, with loud popular outcries, and again the number of refractory conscripts, of whom forty thousand had been arrested the year before, rose to fifty thousand; again flying columns pursued them through all the departments. Caught, shut up in the islands off the coasts, whence they could not escape, and, when drilled, marched under strong guard to the ends of Europe, they none the less contrived often to desert; and everywhere the people, hating the emperor, received them with open arms and passed them back, from hand to hand, to their homes. Thus amid starvation, misery, weeping, and violence, the time drew near for Napoleon to complete his great military undertaking of conquering the sea by the land.

In the North the situation had finally developed according to the wishes of Great Britain. The secret understanding of 1811 had resulted in January, 1812, in another commercial ukase, allowing many British manufactures to be introduced into Russia. On the 5th of April a secret treaty was concluded with Sweden, ceding Finland to Russia, but assuring to the former power Norway, of which Denmark was to be deprived. Relieved now on her northern flank, Russia soon after made peace with Turkey under the mediation of Great Britain. Thus with both hands freed she awaited the oncoming of Napoleon.

On the 9th of May, 1812, the emperor left Paris to take command of his forces in Poland; and on the 24th of June the imperial army, to the number of four hundred thousand men, crossed the Niemen and entered Russia. Two hundred thousand more followed close behind. The preceding day, June 23, the British Orders in Council of 1807 and 1809 were revoked, as to the United States of America. It was too late. War had been declared by Congress, and the declaration approved by the President, five days before, on the 18th of June, 1812.

In narrating the extraordinary, and indeed unparalleled, series of events which reach their climax in the Berlin and Milan Decrees and the Orders in Council, the aim has been to compress the story within the closest limits consistent with clearness, and at the same time to indicate the mutual connection of the links in the chain; how one step led to another; and how throughout the whole, amid apparent inconsistencies, there is an identity of characteristics, not impossible to trace, from the outbreak of the Revolution to the downfall of Napoleon. To do this it has been thought expedient to suppress a mass of details, much of a very interesting character, bearing upon the working of the two opposing systems. The influence of the military element of Sea Power, the function of the British navy, after Trafalgar, has also been passed over in silence. When that great disaster wrecked Napoleon's naval hopes, and convinced him that not for many years could he possibly gather the ships and train the seamen necessary to meet his enemy in battle upon the ocean, he seized with his usual sagacity the one only remaining means of ruining her, and upon that concentrated his great energies. The history of Europe and of the civilized world, after 1805, turned upon this determination to destroy Great Britain through her commerce; and the decision was forced upon the mighty emperor by the power of the British navy, and the wise resolve of the government not to expose her land forces to his blows, until peculiarly favorable circumstances should justify so doing. The opportunity came with the Spanish uprising; and, by one of those coincidences not uncommon in history, with the hour came the man. The situation was indeed of the most favorable for Great Britain. The theatre of war, surrounded on three sides by water, was for the French a salient thrust far out into the enemy's domain on the sea, while its interior features and the political character of the people, incapable of cohesion and organized effort, made the struggle one eminently alien to the emperor's genius; for it gave no opportunity for those brilliant combinations and lightning-like blows in which he delighted. To the British the Peninsula offered the advantage that the whole coast line was a base of operations; while every friendly port was a bridge-head by which to penetrate, or upon which, in case of reverse, to retire, with a sure retreat in the sea beyond.

The course pursued by each of the two governments, in this great enterprise of commerce-destroying, may be looked at from the two points of view, of policy and of rightfulness.

In the matter of policy, both Napoleon's decrees and the Orders in Council have been fiercely assailed and extensively argued. In so broad and complicated a subject, a probable conclusion can only be reached by disregarding the mass of details, of statistics, with which the disputants have rather obscured than elucidated the subject, and by seeking the underlying principle which guided, or should have guided, either government. It is possible to form a very strong argument, for or against either, by fastening upon the inevitable inconveniences entailed upon each nation by the measures of its adversary and by its own course. It is by impressions received from these incidents—or accidents—the accompaniments rather than the essentials of the two systems, that the debates of Parliament and the conclusions of historians have been colored.

As the combined tendency of the two policies, fully carried out, was to destroy neutral trade in Europe, the preponderance of injury must fall upon the nation which most needed the concurrence of the neutral carrier. That nation unquestionably was France. [470] Even in peace, as before stated, much more than half her trade was done in neutral bottoms; the war left her wholly dependent upon them. Alike to export and to import she must have free admission of neutral ships to her ports. Prior to the Berlin decree the British made no pretence to stop this; but they did, by reviving in 1804 the Rule of 1756, and by Fox's decree of May, 1806, blockading the coast from Brest to the Elbe, betray an apprehension of the result to themselves of the neutral trade with France. This should have put the emperor upon his guard. The very anxieties shown by a people of such mercantile aptitudes should have been most seriously regarded, as betraying where their immediate danger lay. The American market was a most important benefit to them, but American merchant ships threatened to be a yet more important injury. These having, under the circumstances of the war, a practical monopoly of carrying West India produce which exceeded in quality and quantity that of the British Islands, were underselling the latter on the Continent. The ill effect of this was partially obviated by the Rule of 1756; but there remained the fear that they would absorb, and be absorbed by, the commerce of the Continent; that to it, and to it alone, they would carry both articles of consumption and raw materials for manufacture; and that from it, and from it alone, they would take away manufactured articles with which Great Britain up to the present time had supplied them,—and, through them, large tracts of Spanish America.

Up to 1804 the course of trade had been for American ships to load for continental ports, receive there the greater part of the payment for their cargoes in bills of exchange on the Continent, and with these to go to British ports and pay for British manufactures, with which they completed their lading. If, on the other hand, they went from home direct to Great Britain, the cargoes they carried were in excess of British consumption, and so far were profitable to Great Britain chiefly as to a middleman, who re-exported them to the Continent. But, when Pitt returned to power, this course of trade was being sensibly modified. American ships were going more and more direct to the Continent, there completing their cargoes and sailing direct for home. Continental manufactures were supplanting British, though not in all kinds, because the American carrier found it more profitable to take them as his return freight; just as the produce of continental colonies was, through the same medium, cutting under British coffees, sugars, and other tropical products. British merchants were alarmed because, not only their merchant shipping, but the trade it carried was being taken away; and British statesmen saw, in the decay of their commerce, the fall of the British navy which depended upon it.

It was plainly the policy of Napoleon to further a change which of itself was naturally growing, and which yet depended wholly upon the neutral carrier. The latter was the key of the position; he was, while war lasted, essentially the enemy of Great Britain, who needed him little, and the friend of France, who needed him much. Truth would have justified England in saying, as she felt, that every neutral was more or less serving France. But in so doing the neutral was protected by the conventions of international law and precedent, which the British mind instinctively reveres, and for violating which it must have an excuse. This the emperor, whose genius inclined essentially to aggressive and violent action, promptly afforded. Overlooking the evident tendency of events, unmindful of the experience of 1798, he chose to regard the order of blockade of May, 1806, as a challenge, and issued the Berlin decree, which he was powerless to carry out unless the neutral ship came into a port under his control. He thus drove the latter away, lost its services, and gave Great Britain the excuse she was seeking for still further limiting its sphere of action, under the plea of retaliation upon France and her associates. And a most real retaliation it was. Opposition orators might harp on the definition of the word, and carp at the method as striking neutrals and not the enemy. Like Napoleon, they blinked at the fundamental fact that, while Great Britain ruled the sea, the neutral was the ally of her enemy.

The same simple principle vindicates the policy of the British ministry. Folios of argument and oratory have been produced to show the harm suffered by Great Britain in this battle over Commerce. Undoubtedly she suffered,—perhaps it would not be an exaggeration to say she nearly died; but when two combatants enter the lists, not for a chivalric parade but for life and death, it is not the incidental injuries, but the preponderance of harm done and the relative endurance, which determine the issue. To the same test of principle must be referred the mistakes in details charged against British ministries. Military writers say that, when the right strategic line of effort is chosen, mistakes of detail are comparatively harmless, and even a lost battle is not fatal. When France decided, practically, to suppress the concurrence of the neutral carrier, she made a strategic blunder; and when Great Britain took advantage of the mistake, she achieved a strategic success, which became a triumph.

As regards the rightfulness of the action of the two parties, viewed separately from their policy, opinions will probably always differ, according to the authority attributed by individuals to the dicta of International Law. It may be admitted at once that neither Napoleon's decrees nor the British orders can be justified at that bar, except by the simple plea of self-preservation,—the first law of states even more than of men; for no government is empowered to assent to that last sacrifice, which the individual may make for the noblest motives. The beneficent influence of the mass of conventions known as International Law is indisputable, nor should its authority be lightly undermined; but it cannot prevent the interests of belligerents and neutrals from clashing, nor speak with perfect clearness in all cases where they do. Of this the Rule of 1756 offered, in its day, a conspicuous instance. The belligerent claimed that the neutral, by covering with his flag a trade previously the monopoly of the enemy, not only inflicted a grave injury by snatching from him a lawful prey, but was guilty likewise of a breach of neutrality; the neutral contended that the enemy had a right to change his commercial regulations, in war as well as in peace. To the author, though an American, the belligerent argument seems the stronger; nor was the laudable desire of the neutral for gain a nobler motive than the solicitude, about their national resources, of men who rightly believed themselves engaged in a struggle for national existence. The measure meted to Austria and Prussia was an ominous indication of the fate Great Britain might expect, if her strength failed her. But, whatever the decision of our older and milder civilization on the merits of the particular question, there can be no doubt of the passionate earnestness of the two disputants in their day, nor of the conviction of right held by either. In such a dilemma, the last answer of International Law has to be that every state is the final judge as to whether it should or should not make war; to its own self alone is it responsible for the rightfulness of this action. If, however, the condition of injury entailed by the neutral's course is such as to justify war, it justifies all lesser means of control. The question of the rightfulness of these disappears, and that of policy alone remains.

It is the business of the neutral, by his prepared condition, to make impolitic that which he claims is also wrong. The neutral which fails to do so, which leaves its ports defenceless and its navy stunted until the emergency comes, will then find, as the United States found in the early years of this century, an admirable opportunity to write State Papers.