He had long meditated the organisation of this system, and embraced, as a favourable opportunity for its promulgation, the moment which saw him at length predominant in the North of Germany, and thus, in effect, master of the whole coasts of Europe from the mouth of the Oder round to the Adriatic Gulf. The system, however, could not be carried into effect, because from long habit the manufactured goods and colonial produce of Britain had come to be necessaries of life among every civilised people of the world; and consequently every private citizen found his own domestic comforts invaded by the decree, which avowedly aimed only at the revenues of the English crown. Every man, therefore, was under continual temptation, each in his own sphere and method, to violate the decrees of Berlin. The custom-house officers were exposed to bribes which their virtue could not resist. Even the most attached of Napoleon's own functionaries connived at the universal spirit of evasion--his brothers themselves, in their respective dominions, could not help sympathising with their subjects, and winking at the methods of relief to which they were led by necessity, the mother of invention. The severe police, however, which was formed everywhere as a necessary part of the machinery for carrying these edicts into execution--the insolence of the innumerable spies and informers whom they set in motion--and the actual deprivation of usual comforts, in so far as it existed--all these circumstances conspired to render the name of the Berlin decrees odious throughout Europe and in France itself. It may be added that the original conception of Napoleon was grounded on a mistaken opinion, to which, however, he always clung--namely, that England derives all her strength from her foreign commerce. Great as that commerce was, and great as, in spite of him, it continued to be, it never was anything but a trifle when compared with the internal traffic and resources of Great Britain--a country not less distinguished above other nations for its agricultural industry, than for its commercial.