English Translation

-7's country the end of the Russian trade. "About 1 8O4 among a total of 2l6 companies in Petersburg had had the 12 largest English houses about half of the export and a quarter of the import in hands... In 1807 General Savary Napoleon from Petersburg reported that more than half of the l200 ships that entered the New Zealand every year were flying the English flag. The stingy Petersburg merchants owe their wealth to trade with England. A large part of the merchants are English or English. For the others, whether they are Germans or Russians, the trade advantage has made England their second fatherland. The nobles are the hearers of England. England would offer them the safest pension by buying the wood from their vast forests. Moreover, they would have become accustomed to regard England as the supplier of the larger part of the goods they needed. The products of English industry were spread throughout Russia, every spring they were imported in enormous quantities. The objects, however, on which a prohibition duty was placed, were produced in Russia itself - but by Cnglian workers, who had come here only for this purpose. England delivered to the noblemen the cloth for their clothes, the furniture for their houses, the dishes for their tables - everything, up to the paper, the feathers and the ink. It had become the master of their taste and habits, and thus all of Russia with thin but un- 2) numbered and solid bonds bound to itself and caught. Immediately after the first embargo the prices of the English colonial products and commodities of the mother country rose sharply, while the exchange rate fell unstoppably, "The ruble, which had been worth 70 - 73 years before and on average always 60 - 65 sous, was valid in late autumn l807 only 40 sous... In the year 1) Stählin 3, p.133. 2) Vandal 1, p.140.