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The measure now under consideration was, we are satisfied, long since concerted by this indefatigable enemy of the human race. In that article of his treaty with Holland which contains a stipulation with respect to American property, and in his own particular orders for the seizure of the cargoes of American vessels, there is a sort of reservation which refers to a new state of things that might exist between us. General Armstrong's residence in Paris was protracted for many weeks in consequence of intimations often repeated, that a change might take place in the dispositions of his imperial majesty; that events might happen which would render the presence of our minister both useful and convenient. Insinuations of this kind were thrown out long before information of our act of the first of May could have been conveyed to France. The plan of the delusive revocation was then maturing, and that act of congress was deemed a suitable pretext, when it was officially notified by general Armstrong. Measures of this kind are not suddenly adopted by the French government;and it must, we think, be sufficiently apparent after all that has been said in the foregoing pages, that the act of the first of May was a cause wholly incommensurate with the effect which the French minister hypocritically ascribes to it.

The assurances on this subject, extraneous to the letter of Cadore, which may have been given to our government will not, we are persuaded, be contradictory to the spirit of that letter; and we can venture to predict that the policy of Bonaparte in this instance will be ultimately found to bear the same stamp of perfidy and rapine which is imprinted on all his other cabinet deliberations. To divine all the motives by which he may have been actuated in this, or which may actuate him in any other scheme of policy, would require a mind almost as fertile in the devices of mischief and in the wiles of cunning as his own; but we are not at a loss to understand some of the consequences which he anticipated from this measure. We discard, in limine, the supposition which has been somewhere indulged, that the whole is a matter of collusion between him and our administration with the view of betraying this nation into a war with Great Britain. Whatever may be the opinions which we entertain with regard to their capacity, we cannot think them either so blind to their personal interests, or so indifferent to those of the state as to cooperate designedly in a plan of which the accomplishment would lead to their destruction as certainly as to that of their country.

After exhausting the resources of violence against the United States,-with the exception only of the imprisonment of all the American citizens who happened to be within his grasp, and glutting his rapacity at the same time with the spoils of our property, Bonaparte discovered that the body of this nation was not to be arved or coerced into a war with Great Britain. The people of this country although they did not feel or display the resentment which the most enormous outrages of every description were fitted to excite, were,nevertheless, so far influenced by them as to recoil rather than to advance in that common highway of ruin,-if we may so express ourselves, in speaking of an alliance with France,which so many other nations have been forced to travel. Violence with respect to us, although it indulged the immediate desires of rapine, was not found to promote the views of ambition and hate; and another course was therefore to be devised which, while it tended to gratify all the voracious and malignant passions at once, might, also, answer exigent purposes of general policy and domestic plunder.

After full deliberation,-as we are well satisfied,—after a calculation of all possible consequences, after comparing them, and ascertaining their compatibility with his former declarations and with the anticommercial system which he considers as one of the fundamental securities of his present and future power, Bonaparte resolved upon the revocation of the Berlin and Milan decrees in its present form, as the measure best adapted to promote the ends and interests of his despotism. We cannot admit some of the conjectures which have been hazarded on the subject of his motives; such for instance as that he has been either prompted by humanity or urged by fear to attempt to mitigate the sufferings of his subjects. This reasoning argues but a very imperfect knowledge of the character of the individual, and of the genius of a military despotism supported by seven hundred thousand well appointed and well disciplined troops. His "mighty arch of empire" rests upon this foundation, and the murmurs or even the struggles of civil life would be as ineffectual to shake it, as tears and groans to mollify the heart or to alter the purpose of a tyrant to whose imagination and to whose eye scenes of blood and anguish are equally familiar, and who well knows that if they disappeared, his own power would not long survive. We need not, we trust, stop to refute another surmise bottomed upon the increased misery or disaffection of the nations of the continent who are not as yet nominally incorporated with

the French empire. The most extended operation of the present decree can by no possibility administer any substantial relief to them. Their ports are every day more and more industriously closed, and there is in fact, no profession on the part of the French emperor of an intention to allow them a free trade. By making France the depot of all foreign commerce (for such is the erroneous construction put by many on his present measures) he will not alleviate, but obviously incumber the galling yoke which he has riveted upon them.

With respect to the relation which this pretended revocation bears to his domestic policy, it was meant, in the first place, as a fiscal regulation to relieve the immediate necessities of his exchequer; and if its effects had ended there,—if it had been altogether momentary,-the profit of the measure would not have been inconsiderable. It was a policy congenial to the nature and useful to the temporary exigence of the French government, to hold forth a delusive and slender hope to its subjects of the amelioration of their condition, by the importations and the traffic of even a refuse of commerce, as a cover or douceur, for the imposition of enormous duties not only upon the colonial or other produce which might thereafter be sold in France, but upon an immense quantity which was then selling and upon much that had been sold. This stretch of despotism, without a parallel except in the history of the revolutionary governments of the same country,—was introduced with a palliative which by placing the meteor of hope before the eyes of his subjects, somewhat diverted their attention from the oppressions to which it led,—and at the same time actually softened those oppressions, at the expense of the foreign merchant, by causing the price of colonial produce to fall. It was sagaciously calculated that the immediate gain to the imperial exchequer would be great, and the odium of the fiscal expedient lessened, whatever might be the ulterior result of the pretended revocation;—whether it was immediately after recalled, or whether its operation was wholly defeated by the opposition of the British. The immediate effects such as we shall proceed to describe them, will prove the accuracy of this reasoning.

We have now before us a list printed under the authority of the French government, of the imperial sales made in the month of September, of confiscated American property. Our limits will not allow us to quote them at large; but whoever will take the trouble of examining them, will find, by a comparison of the duties with the amount of sales, that the former average two hundred per cent. and more on

all articles of colonial produce. The article of cotton, for instance, sold for one hundred and eighty francs the cwt.The duties are put down at three hundred and thirty, which together with extra charges for the service of the auctioneer, &c. made the whole sum of extraneous charges about four hundred francs. These duties were paid without delay to the receiver of the customs, by the purchaser.

Our readers will remark that the weight of the duties falls chiefly on the consumers. Their situation is not in any manner alleviated by this illusory revocation, as they continue to pay the same price as before, and perhaps a greater,-for the commodities taxed. The foreign merchant can never afford to sell his cotton, his indigo, or his coffee but at a rate which, with the duties superadded-must render it unattainable to the great mass of the nation. The general consumption then of foreign commodities will increase but little, -importations although they should be at first exuberant must soon cease to be abundant;-and the operations of trade will be scarcely less languid and certainly not more productive than before. Should the Berlin and Milan decrees be immediately reanimated, the government will have reaped a considerable harvest of booty-while the merchant and the consumer, so far from having been favoured, will have been sorely aggrieved.

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If the necessities of the French exchequer require, and the supineness of the British or our own credulous cupidity allow, that this new fraud and bubble of a wily and famished despotism should continue for a little time, it is, as we think we have demonstrably shown-so contrived that the spirit of commerce can never revive under its operation,-that the movements of trade will be but little quickened, and the gains both of the foreign and of the French merchant, but inconsiderably, if at all, increased. The treasury of Paris may "like a disor"dered spleen in the human body" swell and fatten, but the impoverishment of the rest of the system must be the consequence. The sole drift of this new device of rapine, as a measure of internal policy and in its relation to the commercial and agricultural classes of France is,-that the military chest may"suck the honey of their search."

Some portion of the produce of the French soil and manufactures may indeed be exported. This is contemplated by the French ruler; and to those at a distance who are ignorant of the fiscal system of the military cabinet, it may appear likely to mitigate the condition of the manufacturer and the farmer. But this, although the natural effect, is not that which

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will ensue, or which is contemplated by the alchymists of the Thuileries. It is calculated that the vent of the produce will afford scope for new taxes; that it will furnish some additional means of discharging those which now crush to the earth all the industrious classes of the empire. There never has been an instance and for the truth of this assertion we can ourselves vouch, and would appeal to every man who has had opportunities of personal observation,-of an alleviation afforded by the French government to any of the laborious orders of civil life in France which has not been counterbalanced and defeated by regulations tending either to replenish the treasury at their expense,-to multiply the monuments of national vanity and the gratifications of idle luxury; or to swell the pomp, and minister to the ostentatious pride of the imperial family and favourites.

We scarcely need remind our readers that if the proceeds of the immense property treacherously ravished from our merchants, should be even returned to them, the French treasury will have gained immensely by the seizure. There is no man so extravagantly credulous as to suppose that Bonaparte will relinquish more than the sums for which that property was sold. The duties of two hundred per cent. will be retained; and we leave our merchants to calculate the amount. They will have the satisfaction of knowing, if they ever regain any part of the proceeds of their stolen goods,—that they have been the occasion of enriching the imperial exchequer in double the value of their cargoes;-that their coffee and cotton, if it had not been so officiously forestalled and distributed by their affectionate ally, and if his new decree had not interven ed-would have yielded instead of two francs per pound, double or triple the sum.-The nature of this transaction throughout furnishes an additional reason for believing that the decree was in petto, at the very time that the property was seized; so that if our submissions to France were such as to render it necessary,—for more important objects,—that the property should be returned, it might, nevertheless, be rendered productive to the imperial consignee.

The foreign policy, as it may be termed, of this pretended revocation, may be divined-in part at least-without much difficulty. We assume it as an undisputed point that the French emperor must have foreseen the tenor of the reply which the marquis Wellesley has given to the notification of Mr. Pinkney on this subject. His imperial majesty knew well that the British orders in council would not be rescinded until his own decrees were known to be wholly inoperative and exVOL. I.

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