He further recommended Murat and Eugene to press hard on such wares in order to replenish their exchequers and raise funds for restoring their commerce.

Eugene must, however, be careful to tax American and colonial cotton most heavily, while letting in that of the Levant on favourable terms.
Jerome, too, was bidden rigorously to enforce the Trianon tariff in Westphalia; and the hint was to be passed on to Prussia and the Rhenish Confederation that, by subjecting colonial goods to these enormous imposts, those States would gain several millions of francs "and the loss would fall partly on English commerce and partly on the smugglers."[229] In fact, all his acts and words at this time reveal the densest ignorance, not only of political economy, but of the elementary facts of commerce, as when he imagined that officials, who were sufficiently hard worked with watching a nimble host of some 100,000 smugglers along an immense frontier, would also be able to distinguish between Syrian and American cottons, and to exact 800 francs from 100 kilogrammes of the latter, as against 400 francs from the former, or that six times as much could ever be levied on Chinese teas as on other teas! Such a tariff called for a highly drilled army of those sufficiently rare individuals, honest _douaniers_, endowed also with Napoleonic activity and omniscience.

But, as Chaptal remarked, the Emperor had never thought much about the needs of commerce, and he despised merchants as persons who had "neither a faith nor a country, whose sole object was gain." His own notion about commerce was that he could "make it manoeuvre like a regiment"; and this military conception of trade led him to entertain the fond hope that exchequers benefited by confiscation and prohibitive tariffs, that a "national commerce" could be speedily built up by cutting off imports, and that the burden of loss in the present commercial war fell on England and not on the continental consumer.
Such was the penalty which the great man paid for scorning all new knowledge as _idealogie_.

The principles set forth by Quesnay, Turgot, and Adam Smith were to him mere sophistical juggling.

He once said to Mollien: "I seek the good that is practical, not the ideal best: the world is very old: we must profit by its experience: it teaches that old practices are worth more than new theories: you are not the only one who knows trade secrets."[230] This was his general attitude towards the exponents of new financial or commercial views.