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 Napoleon had despatched extraordinary couriers to the governments of Holland, Spain, and Italy with orders to some, and a peremptory summons to others, to carry it into immediate execution. Indeed Marshal Mortier, who had already invaded Hesse, was ordered to proceed with all speed to the Hanseatic towns, Bremen, Hamburg, and Lubeck, and to seize not only those towns but the ports of Mecklenberg and of Swedish Pomerania, as far as the mouths of the Oder. He was further instructed, by occupying the rich entrepôts of these towns, to seize all goods of English origin, to arrest the English merchants, to transport to Germany a certain number of seamen taken from the flotilla of Boulogne, in order that they might cruise in boats at the mouths of the Elbe and Weser, and to sink at once every merchant vessel suspected of attempting to run the blockade.

While carrying into effect all over Europe "the continental system," shadowed forth in this decree, in retaliation, as Napoleon alleged, of the English "paper blockade," and fulminating his memorable manifesto against England, its author, as is now confessed, was meditating a march to the Vistula, to compel Russia, the only remaining friend and ally of England, to turn against her, while he at the same time attempted to turn the Poles against Russia, by amusing them with the silly notion of the restoration of the kingdom of Poland under the benign protection of France, and to work upon the Sultan of Turkey, with a view to excluding England from the whole of Europe, and thus "to achieve the command of the ocean by land."