Without suicide, England could hardly accept the principles required by this note; nor had she reason to suppose that her acceptance would satisfy Napoleon’s demands. As though to encourage her in obstinacy, the note was printed in the “Moniteur” of October 6, by the Emperor’s order, before it could have reached America. This unusual step served no purpose except to give public notice that France would support England in restricting American rights; it strengthened the hands of Spencer Perceval and took away the last chance of American diplomacy, if a chance still existed. Yet neither this stroke nor the severity foreshadowed by the secret Decree of Vienna was the only punishment inflicted by Napoleon on the United States for the Non-intercourse Act and Erskine’s arrangement. The principle of the Vienna Decree required confiscation of American commerce in retaliation for penalties imposed on French ships that should knowingly violate the Non-intercourse Act. Although this rule and the Bayonne Decree seemed to cover all ordinary objects of confiscation, the Emperor adopted the supplementary rule that American merchandise was English property in disguise. In the month of November a cotton-spinner near Paris, the head of a very large establishment, petitioned for leave to import about six hundred bales of American cotton. His petition was returned to him with the indorsement: “Rejected, as the cotton belongs to American commerce.” The severity of the refusal surprised every one the more because the alternative was to use Portuguese--that is to say English--cotton, or to encourage the consumption of fabrics made wholly in England, of English materials.[116] Having decided to seize all American merchandise that should arrive in France on private account, and having taken into his own hands the business of selling this property as well as of admitting other merchandise by license, Napoleon protected what became henceforward his personal interests, by shutting the door to competition.[117] Armstrong caught glimpses of this stratagem even before it had taken its finished shape. “I am privately informed,” wrote Armstrong December 10, “that General Loison has left Paris charged to take hold of all British property, or property suspected of being such in the ports of Bilbao, San Sebastian, Pasages, etc. The latter part of the rule is no doubt expressly intended to reach American property. With the General goes a mercantile man who will be known in the market as his friend and protégé, and who of course will be the exclusive purchaser of the merchandise which shall be seized and sold as British. This is a specimen at once of the violence and corruption which enter into the present system; and of a piece with this is the whole business of licenses, to which, I am sorry to add, our countrymen lend themselves with great facility.”