In every way he strives to awaken indignation and hatred against England. The alliance which has compelled him to turn his armies against his neighbors on the Continent, he characterizes as an “unjust league fomented by the hatred and gold of England.” He tells the soldiers of the Grand Army that it is English gold which has transported the Russian army from the extremities of the universe to fight them. He charges the horrors of Austerlitz upon the English. “May all the blood shed, may all these misfortunes, fall upon the perfidious islanders who have caused them! May the cowardly oligarchies of London support the consequences of so many woes!” From now on, all the treaties he makes are drawn up with a view to humbling “the eternal enemies of the Continent.” [Illustration: THE QUEEN OF NAPLES AND MARIE MURAT. By Madame Vigée-Lebrun. This canvas, executed in 1807, is in the museum of Versailles. Caroline of Naples is represented with her eldest child, Marie Lætitia Josèphe Murat, afterwards Countess Pepoli.] Negotiation for peace went on, it is true, in 1806, between the two countries. Napoleon offered to return Hanover and Malta. He offered several things which belonged to other people, but England refused all of his combinations; and when, a few days after Jena, he addressed his army, it was to tell them: “We shall not lay down our arms until we have obliged the English, those eternal enemies of our nation, to renounce their plan of troubling the Continent and their tyranny of the seas.” A month later—November 21, 1806—he proclaimed the famous Decree of Berlin, his future policy towards Great Britain. As she had shut her enemies from the sea, he would shut her from the land. The “continental blockade,” as this struggle of land against sea was called, was only using England’s own weapon of war; but it was using it with a sweeping audacity, thoroughly Napoleonic in conception and in the proposed execution. Henceforth, all communication was forbidden between the British Isles and France and her allies. Every Englishman found under French authority—and that was about all the Continent as the emperor estimated it—was a prisoner of war. Every dollar’s worth of English property found within Napoleon’s boundaries, whether it belonged to rich trader or inoffensive tourist, was prize of war. If one remembers the extent of the seaboard which Napoleon at that moment commanded, the full peril of this menace to English commerce is clear. From St. Petersburg to Trieste there was not a port, save those of Denmark and Portugal, which would not close at his bidding. At Tilsit he and Alexander had entered into an agreement to complete this seaboard, to close the Baltic, the Channel, the European Atlantic, and the Mediterranean to the English. This was nothing else than asking Continental Europe to destroy her commerce for their sakes. [Illustration: JOACHIM MURAT (1771–1815). Engraved by Ruotte, after Gros.]