Among other bodies which sent deputations to congratulate the Emperor on the birth of his child was the Paris Chamber of Commerce. Their address was sufficiently adulatory, but it contained a suggestion that the trade and commerce of the country were not all that could be desired. Napoleon replied in language which attracted attention throughout Europe. There was some irritability in his tone, but there was an unqualified assurance with regard to the future. He said, among other things, that England was depressed. This was true; the new measures taken to enforce the Continental system had told. British harbors were glutted with the products of all the colonies--not only of her own, but of those she had seized during the Napoleonic wars. The storehouses could hold no more; and as colonial trade was conducted by barter, all the products of English industry must remain at home for lack of an export market. Business was at a standstill, and the specter of English bankruptcy stalked abroad. As to France, the Emperor declared that he was in no sense the successor of either Louis XIV or Louis XV, but of Charles the Great; for the present Empire was but the continuation of the old Frankish dominion. In four years, he said in substance, I shall have a navy. When my fleets shall have been three or four years at sea we can hold our own with the English. I know I may lose three or four battles; very good, I will lose them. But we are ever courageous, ever booted and spurred, and we shall succeed. Before ten years have expired I shall have beaten England. No state of Europe will any longer have intercourse with her. It is my customhouses which do the greatest harm to the English. Her blockade has injured herself the most by teaching us how to get on without her products, her sugar, her indigo. A few years longer, and we shall be thoroughly accustomed to it. I shall soon have enough beet-root sugar to supply all Europe; for your manufactures there is an open market in France, Italy, Naples, and Germany. At the close he added words to this effect: The Bank of France is full of silver, while that of England has not a white sou [five francs]. Since 1806 I have taken over a milliard francs in contributions. I alone have money. Austria is already bankrupt, and Russia and England will be. There exist three versions of this famous allocution. In one of them are the words: "I showed mercy to the Emperor of Russia at Tilsit in return for promises of help; but if those promises are not kept, I will go, if need be, to Riga, to Moscow, to St. Petersburg."