Chapter IV.: Economic Position of Great Britain

'THE Causes of the Rise and Decline of Cities, Countries, and Republics,' Die Ursachen des Auff und Abnehmens der Städt, Länder und Republicken—to quote the title of a book by the German mercantilist, Johann Joachim Becher—have always formed, and still form, a very obscure chapter in economic history, and one which has been far from fully elucidated by economic inquiry. During the period with which we are now concerned the stability of the position of England as the leading maritime and colonial nation, after the relative decline of the Netherlands, formed a constant source of speculation and doubt. It was perhaps natural that this mistrust was most prevalent in French circles, and particularly among the French revolutionaries; for to those who had been trained in the school of Rousseau it was necessarily quite obvious that an organization so completely detached from the land was unnatural and, therefore, not durable—all the more so for the reason that physiocracy, so far as its influence was to be taken into account at all, might also lead to the same conclusions. The hollowness of the English economic system is also the burden of the often quoted official speech in which Brissot, the leader of the Girondists, on January 12, 1793, laid before the National Convention the whole argument in favour of a war with England, in terms which were to be re-embodied in the final declaration of war. 'We must tear asunder,' he declared, 'the veil that envelops the imposing colossus of England.... When the well-informed observer regards this imposing scaffold of English greatness, he is able to penetrate to its internal vacuity.... Say, then, if it will not be an easy matter to overturn a power whose colossal stature betrays its weakness and calls for its overthrow.'

This representation of 'perfidious Albion' as a colossus with feet of clay is of frequent occurrence, whether it signifies merely what people wished or what they actually believed, or—what is most likely—something betwixt and between. In Napoleon, too, it was based on a general economic conception, namely, that a country's trade is of slight value in comparison with its industry and agriculture; and this could not fail to react on his conception of the strength of the foremost commercial nation. The well-known French chemist, Jean Antoine Chaptal, Minister of the Interior under the Consulate, and afterwards closely connected with the industrial policy of the Empire, describes in his memoirs Napoleon's dislike of merchants, who only exchanged goods, he said, while manufacturers produced them, and who with a turnover of a million gave employment to only two or three assistants, while manufacturers with the same turnover supported five or six hundred families. And that Chaptal is here correctly reporting Napoleon's conception—which, in that case, would not greatly diverge from that which is still popular—seems all the more probable when one considers the perfect coolness with which the Emperor from the very first prophesied that the Continental System would ruin, under his direct or indirect rule, such commercial towns as Lyons, Amsterdam, and Rotterdam.