General Situation on the Continent

When, after this discussion of the development of different countries, one undertakes to form a general picture of the situation on the Continent of Europe, it cannot escape the observation of anyone who is at all free from prejudice that the effects of the Continental System on the actual material foundation of the life of the people—what economists call the satisfaction of the wants of the people—were far less than those which accompanied the recent blockade. What was lacking with regard to pure articles of consumption was little else than coffee and sugar, and, to some extent, tobacco; and however severely the scarcity of coffee may have been felt during the recent war, surely no one will deny that the material effects of the war would have been quite insignificant in comparison with what they actually were if they had not extended beyond that. For the rest, the scarcity under the Continental System applied to industrial raw materials, mainly cotton and dyestuffs, but in many countries also other textile raw materials, such as wool, flax, hemp, and silk. So far, therefore, the situation seems to correspond to our recent experience; but in reality this is not the case. For while the shortage in our own time seriously reduced the supply of woven goods themselves, that is to say, articles actually required for consumption, during the time of the Continental System complaints were always, at least as far as I know, limited to the inconveniences suffered by production in consequence of the lack of raw materials and the resulting unemployment. Unemployment, in particular, with its consequences in the way of mendicancy and vagrancy, is a consistently recurring theme in the descriptions of the effects of the Continental System—during the whole period in the ports, and in times of war and under the influence of shortage of raw materials in the industrial districts. Parallel with this run the accounts of the death-like silence in the great coast towns, grass growing in the streets of La Rochelle, the ruin of shipping, and the like. In order to conceive the importance of these phenomena aright, one must necessarily have a firm grip of the fact that trade, shipping, and industrial activity are means for covering the wants of the people, not ends in themselves; and what settles the matter in the last resort is to what extent those wants could be satisfied more or less as usual. So far as we can judge, that was far more the case a hundred years ago than it has been in our own day.

We might perhaps summarize this contrast by saying that the effect of the Continental System on the European mainland was continuous dislocation, while the dislocation of the recent war was, in the main, overcome during the first year of hostilities. On the other hand, during the recent war, in contrast with the great war of a century ago, the lowering of the standards of life and the decrease in supplies necessary for the general wants continued uninterruptedly and probably at an accelerated pace, but without dislocations, in the proper sense of the term, and with an immense decline in unemployment, as compared with peace conditions. The fact that the course of development took two such opposite directions then and now and that there was no dislocating effect in our own day shows, on the one hand, how much more flexible and adaptable economic organization has become during the last century. But, on the other hand, the difference is due to the dissimilarity of the two blockades, which is the reason why the satisfaction of general wants remained comparatively undisturbed a hundred years ago. At a time when Great Britain asked for nothing more than an opportunity to flood the Continent with colonial goods and industrial products, the supply must, despite all selfblockade, have been quite different from what it was when the normal producers proceed to hinder all supply.

Finally, another contributory cause was the relative selfsufficiency , which evidently greatly limited the effects of the Continental System as regards the satisfaction of general wants of the population of the continental states. The most important fact is that difficulties regarding food did not possess anything like the importance that they had during the recent war; indeed they practically played no part whatever on the Continent before the winter of 1811-12. The one exception was in Norway. This self-sufficiency as regards food was far greater than can be found in our own time, even in countries that produce the necessary amount of food for their own population, because they are dependent upon imports of manure and fodder, while such a situation was practically unknown a hundred years ago. Moreover, the self-sufficiency within the continental countries, the relative economic independence of the particular household, went far to prevent the hardships occasioned by a blockade in the twentieth century. The fact that, as a consequence of this, the corn problem was really a problem only for England, makes it proper to postpone its treatment to the section in the following chapter dealing with the effects of the Continental System in that country, and makes a mere reference to it sufficient in this place. In that connexion, too, Norway will be considered. The explanation of the seeming paradox that the scarcity of raw materials principally hit production and left consumption almost unchanged, also lies in the consumers' comparatively great independence of market conditions as well as in the great reserves of linen, cloth, and wearing apparel kept in every self-respecting household.

In spite of the limitation in the general effects of the Continental System that follows from all this, one cannot shut one's eyes to the fact that the years 1811-13, after the crisis in France, Great Britain, and most of the other countries, are characterized by a serious deterioration of the economic conditions prevailing everywhere on the Napoleonic mainland. It is true that the character of this deterioration is anything but clear and would deserve a really searching examination; but the fact stands out clearly in many different quarters. As early as the autumn of 1810 one of the French commercial spies speaks openly and very pointedly of the 'pretty general condition of ill-being (malaise)' in Germany; and afterwards the situation finds particular expression in the difficulties, already indicated, that the luxury industries experienced in finding a market. Moreover, the same thing is shown by the difficulty in overcoming the crisis of 1810-11 and its more or less latent continuation down to the great transformation brought about by Napoleon's fall. It was just at that time, too, that food difficulties showed themselves to some extent all over Europe and hit the most vital of the general needs. There is no justification, it is true, for laying the blame for this position entirely on the Continental System, which was merely one side of a state of war that had then existed for twenty years; but undoubtedly the trade blockade had its share in the result. It is possible that conditions would have come to develop in a direction more like our recent experiences if the fall of Napoleon had been delayed a few more years. As things turned out, however, people got scarcely more than a preliminary taste of what would have been involved in such a situation.