These or similar measures being applied likewise to Piedmont, Liguria, Tuscany, Parma, and Placentia, the sums of money raised from confiscated estates became enormous. A large proportion of these funds flowed of course into the imperial coffers, and to this fact, as well as to the restored public confidence, was largely due the rise in prices on the stock exchange which occurred on the consummation of the Austrian marriage. These sweeping changes were of great service to true religion and to the lands in which they were made, breaking as they did the chains of an ecclesiastical oppression under which the populace had been reduced to poverty, ignorance, and apathy. Unfortunately the new rule, while more economical than the old, was not less arbitrary--military despotism being as little fitted for the development of a people as the rule of a corporation. Men looked aghast as the papacy and papal influence crumbled together, while the seat of real ecclesiastical power was removed from the banks of the Tiber to those of the Seine. Time seemed to be taking its revenge. Seven centuries earlier Lothair had been the vassal of Innocent II; Napoleon was now the suzerain of Pius VII. So contemptible had the Pope become, even in the eyes of devout Catholics, that de Maistre called the inflexible but supine Pontiff a punchinello of no importance. It had been clear since Trafalgar that though France might dominate earth, air, and fire in Europe, she could not gain the mastery of the sea and its islands, at least, by the ordinary means. The Emperor's infatuation with the plausible scheme of destroying England's commerce by paper blockades and by embargoes on British goods had not been diminished either by his inconclusive struggle in Spain or by his victory over Austria. It was in vain that he had changed his naval policy from one of fleet-fighting to one of commerce-destroying; that he had seized and was continuing to seize neutral vessels laden with British wares; that he had expanded his political system by conquest until he was nominally master of the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Baltic harbors. Since 1805 English trade with the Continent, so far from diminishing, had steadily increased in the hands of contrabandists and neutral carriers, until it had now reached annual dimensions of twenty-five millions sterling. In spite of the Tilsit alliance, even French soldiers occasionally wore English-made shoes and clothing. English ships carried naval stores out of Russian harbors, and colonial wares found their way from the wharves of Riga to the markets of Mainz. But the chief offenders in defying Napoleon's chimerical policy were the Dutch and Hanseatic cities. The resistance elsewhere in the Continent was passive compared with the energetic smuggling and the clandestine evasion of decrees which went on under the eyes of the officials in places like Amsterdam and Hamburg.