Our very existence was bound up with maritime commerce; and an abandonment of the carrying trade to neutrals would have been the tamest of surrenders, at a time when surrender meant political extinction.
We turn now to follow the chief steps in Napoleon's onward march, which enabled him to impose his system on nearly the whole of the Continent.

While encamped in the Prussian capital he decreed the deposition of the Elector of Hesse-Cassel, and French and Dutch troops forthwith occupied that Electorate.

Towards Saxony he acted with politic clemency; and on December 11th, 1806, the Elector accepted the French alliance, entered the Confederation of the Rhine, and received the title of King.[118] Meanwhile Frederick William, accompanied by his grief-stricken consort, was striving to draw together an army in his eastern provinces.

Some overtures with a view to peace had been made after Jena; but Napoleon finally refused to relax his pursuit unless the Prussians retired beyond the Vistula, and yielded up to him all the western parts of the kingdom, with their fortresses.

Besides, he let it be known that Prussia must join him in a close alliance against Russia, with a view to checking her ambitious projects against Turkey; for the Czar, resenting the Sultan's deposition of the hospodars of the Danubian Principalities, an act suggested by the French, had sent an army across the River Pruth, even when the Porte timidly revoked its objectionable firman.[119] The Eastern Question having been thus reopened, Napoleon suggested a Franco-Prussian alliance so as to avert a Russian conquest of the Balkan Peninsula.