To pause in the strife, to relax our hold on our new colonies, and to desert the Spaniards, in order to preserve the merely titular independence of Holland and the Hanse Towns, would have been an act of singular simplicity.

Nor does Napoleon seem to have expected it.

He wrote to his Foreign Minister, Champagny, on March 20th, 1810: "From not having made peace sooner, England has lost Naples, Spain, Portugal, and the market of Trieste.

If she delays much longer, she will lose Holland, the Hanse Towns, and Sicily." And surely this Sibylline conduct of his required that he should annex these lands and all Europe in order to exact a suitable price from the exhausted islanders.

Such was the corollary of the Continental System.
Meanwhile Louis, nettled by the inquisitions of the French _douaniers_, and by the order of his brother to seize all American ships in Dutch ports, was drawing on himself further reproaches and threats: "Louis, you are incorrigible ...