We must always recollect that the Grand Army of England was a two-edged weapon. Napoleon told Metternich that he always intended to use it against Austria, as he actually did use it; but he told the captain of the _Northumberland_, on August fifteenth, 1815, that he had intended the invasion seriously, expecting to land as near London as possible. Although these antipodal statements were clearly intended to flatter the national pride of the respective dignitaries to whom they were addressed, yet, paradoxical as the assertion seems, when taken together they express the exact truth: successful invasion would have involved the immediate overthrow of British power; while protective exclusion and the destruction of the coalition was the slower, perhaps, but the more certain of the two ways. The latter was probably the intention toward which Napoleon leaned most seriously. By compelling the British to maintain a costly war establishment, the great schemer would exhaust their by no means bottomless purse; and thus would be able to cripple the equipment of the coalition, to expand by victory the territorial empire of France, and to open the way for her enterprise to the eastward. Finally, Napoleon made no serious effort toward the "Descent," using the notion to extort war funds from the French exactly as the Jacobins and the Directory had done; and the actual fact of the magnificent countermarch toward Vienna and the results of Austerlitz ought to convince us that, while at times he did contemplate invading England, his mind was on the whole directed toward the course he actually pursued--that of striking at the coalition through Austria. The extension of the protective system beyond France and the countries immediately under her control began in 1803, when Spain was admonished to observe it or to take the consequences; immediately after Austerlitz, Istria and Dalmatia were included in the system. When, thereupon, Prussia was requested to include the North Sea coasts in its operation, as the price for the occupation of Hanover, Great Britain retorted by her Orders in Council, declaring the shore line from the mouth of the Elbe all the way around as far as Brest to be in a state of blockade. Prussia chose to accept neither the terms of Great Britain nor those of France, and struggled to remain neutral--a sheer impossibility; the Czar of Russia then repudiated the treaty into which his ambassador, Oubril, had been drawn by the wiles of Talleyrand; in due course of time followed Jena and Friedland; and at last the way was clear for turning a protective system hitherto more or less local into one which could be more or less continental. The Berlin Decree was the longest step possible after Jena; while the Milan Decree was the natural sequence of the enlarged opportunity which the Peace of Tilsit gave for pursuing the same old economic policy.