Excerpt from British Credit in the Last Napoleonic War

No doubt Napoleon was mistaken in his calculations. We, looking back to his time, know that his great scheme miscarried, but I hope to show that, although the result was failure, Napoleon's plans may have been more reason able and laid on a more intelligent foundation than is generally admitted; that he was not misled by crude economic theories which were already out of date, but that he directed his attack upon a point where we were then, and indeed still are, most vulnerable, and adopted measures which were not haphazard but were well calculated to bring it to a successful issue. At Trafalgar his attack upon the naval power of Britain had completely failed, he could not invade us with his armies but he could still attempt to paralyse the government by destroying our European trade and so undermining public credit and fomenting a social revolution, which might overthrow the state from within. It appears to have been his deliberate aim to render the maintenance Of the gold reserve impos sible, and so to bring down the whole fabric of British credit; and the Continental System on the one hand and the permission to export corn to the British Isles on the other, were quite compatible with this object.

Foreign payments were a continuous difficulty to our government. Napier describes the financial troubles which had come to be severely felt in 1809 by the British forces in the Peninsula; they were insufficiently provided with boots, transport and other necessaries, and the soldiers' pay was in arrears. Desperate efforts were made to provide the a month which were needed, but Napier explains that in all commercial places the exchange rose against England because of her great and increasing paper issues; and those issues, the extravagant supplies to Spain, and the Austrian subsidy, rendered it impossible to provide specie for the army, save by pur chasing it all over the world with treasury bills and at an enormous loss. This evil, great in itself, Opened a wide door to fraud, and made the war between France and England not so much a glorious contest of arms as a struggle between public credit and military genius, victory being to the first nearly as pernicious as defeat.

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