Unable to meet, as yet, the English troops in battle on the land as he had met and defeated those of the Continent, and unequal to England on the seas, Napoleon devised a more insidious plan of campaign. Believing that a "nation of shop-keepers" might be attacked through its trade, he issued from the Prussian capital, in 1806, the famous Berlin Decree, which was the first note of that "Continental System," which was intended to close the ports of Europe to British goods. The British government met this boycott by its "Orders in Council," which placed a blockade upon French ports, and authorized the capture of neutral vessels endeavoring to trade with them. This inconclusive commercial warfare lasted several years, but was far from being successful in its object of ruining England. Indeed, it is said that the most stringent enforcement of the "Decrees" and "Orders" did not prevent the Napoleonic armies from wearing uniforms of English cloth and carrying English steel in their scabbards. England first began to make head against the French conqueror when that far-sighted minister George Canning sent Sir Arthur Wellesley to Portugal to take command of the British forces in the Peninsula. Wellesley had recently returned from India, where he had achieved a brilliant reputation for thoroughness of organization, precision of manoeuver, and unvarying success, qualities which at that time were lamentably rare among British generals. In Portugal first, and later in Spain, the sterling qualities of the new commander steadily gained ground for England, driving out the French marshals, and carrying this Peninsular War to a triumphant conclusion by the invasion of France (1814). Created Duke of Wellington for his successes in the Peninsula, Wellesley held command of the allied forces on the Belgian frontier when, on the 18th of June, 1815, they met and routed the French at Waterloo. That day made Napoleon an exile, and "the Iron Duke" the idol of the English lands in which he continued to be the most conspicuous personage for nearly half a century. THE RESETTLEMENT OF EUROPE