The final stage was reached in July, 1810, when licences to import forbidden goods were secretly sold to favoured merchants, and many officials--among them Bourrienne--reaped a rich harvest from the sale of these imperial indulgences.

Merchants were so eager to evade the hated laws that they offered high prices to the treasury and _douceurs_ to officials for the coveted boon; and as much as L40,000 is said to have been paid for a single licence.
On both sides of the Channel this device was abhorred, but its results were specially odious in Napoleon's States, where the burdens to be evaded were far heavier than those entailed by the Orders in Council.
In fact, the Continental System was now seen to be an organized hypocrisy, which, in order to ruin the mistress of the seas, exposed the peoples to burdens more grievous than those borne by England, and left all but the wealthiest merchants a prey to a grinding fiscal tyranny.

And the sting of it all was its social injustice; for while the poor were severely punished, sometimes with death, for smuggling sugar or tobacco, Napoleon and the favoured few who could buy licences often imported these articles in large quantities.

What wonder, then, that Russia and Sweden should decline long to endure these gratuitous hardships, and should seek to evade the behests of the imperial smuggler of the Tuileries! Nevertheless, as no inventive people can ever be thrown wholly on its own resources without deriving some benefit, we find that France met the crisis with the cheery patience and unflagging ingenuity which she has ever evinced.

In a great Empire which embraced all the lands between Hamburg, Bayonne, and Rome, not to mention Illyria and Dalmatia, a great variety of products might readily reward the inventor and the husbandman.