selves upon having made that assembly swear to preserve the catholic religion as the exclusive religion of Spain:"This," they said, "was one of the things which gave most lustre to the cortes." The liberal party, as they called themselves, assented to this, because it would have been madness to oppose it; but they were of the French philosophy, and their good intentions were too often marred by the crude and shallow notions of that superficial school. This party, though far inferior in number, took the lead in the cortes. They displayed little of imposing eloquence, and still less of commanding ability, but they had the activity and zeal of men who had embraced new opinions, and were labouring to promote them; and in the reforms at which they aimed, they had the advantage of being right in the feeling, and in the general principle, even when they were wrong in the application. Much good was effected by them; the use of the torture was abolished by acclamation, feudal jurisdictions were abolished, the slavetrade was abolished, and it was evident that the inquisition, though it had strenuous supporters in the cortes, would not long be suffered to stand.

But in those measures which the crisis required the cortes were deficient. Instead of infusing into the government that energy which had been expected, they weakened and embarrassed the executive, by perpetually intermeddling with it, so that the regency which they had appointed became even more inefficient than the central junta. And instead of making the deliverance of the country their first and paramount object, they busied themselves in framing a constitution, a work which might well have been left for a more convenient season. Great part of their sittings was consumed in metaphysical discussions, arising out of the scheme of this constitution,

and the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people was supported with a temper which sufficiently indicated how soon that sovereignty would become unendurably tyrannical. Day after day these abstractions were debated, while the enemy was besieging Cadiz, but nothing was done towards placing the army in a better state. This was now the fourth year of the war; the spirit of the people, and the defects of their military system, had been abundantly proved; nothing was wanting but to remedy those defects by raising an ar my under the direction of Lord Wellington, who had delivered Portugal, and would by similar means speedily and certainly have delivered Spain. Many causes prevented this; one is to be found in a jealousy or rather dislike of England, which had grown up in the liberal party, with their predilection for republican France, and which continued, with other errors from the same source, still to actuate them. The pride of the Spanish character was another and more widely influencing cause; the Spaniards remembered that their troops were once the best in the world, and this remembrance, which in the people so greatly contributed to keep up their spirit, in the government produced only a contented and baneful torpor which seemed like infatuation. The many defeats, in the course of four years, which they had sustained, from that at Rio Seco to the last ruinous action before Valencia, brought with them no conviction to the successive governments of their radical weakness and their radical error. After Lord Wellington had driven Massena out of Portugal, it was proposed that the command of the frontier provinces should be given him, and that an army should be raised there under him: it was debated in a secret sitting, and rejected by a hundred voices against thirty.

"There are three classes of men,"

said Sr Duenas," who will do for the cortes, if the cortes does not do for them; they who refuse to acknowledge the sovereignty of the nation, calling it a mere chimera, and saying there is no sovereignty except that of the king; they who distrust our cause, and say that the few millions who inhabit Spain cannot make head against all Europe; and, lastly, they who imagine, that as the French have conquered while they despise God, we may do the same." The deputy's fears of the first and third of these classes were groundless, and there were but few of the second, but few Spaniards who despaired of Spain. Nothing, however, could tend so much to increase their number as

the conduct of the government; it might well be feared that a system, if system it may be called, which trusted to its allies, and to the events that time and chance might bring forth, would exhaust the hopes and the con stancy, as well as the blood, of the Spaniards. Happily the supineness of the government was so far remedied by the zeal of the provincial juntas, the enterprising talents of the Guerrilla chiefs, and the temper of the people, that, though the deliverance of Spain by any combined and energetic plan daily became less probable, it daily became more certain that the conquest of the country was impossible.

with the heroic history of their mother-land, and the proudest part of those proud annals was that which related the conquest of the new world by their ancestors. In the United States a great number of Dutch and Swedes and Germans had been absorbed into the British population; the mixture was sufficiently extensive to be one of the causes which have given the Americans a national countenance as well as character: and if the rest of the people had little attachment to Great Britain, the mixed breed had none. In the Spanish colonies there was none of this amalgamation; foreigners were carefully excluded. The different races there were marked by jealous lines of law, and custom equally imperious; this threatened, at some indefinite futurity, a war of casts and of colours, which of all civil wars is the most fearful; but so long as social rank and political power was regulated by shades of complexion, it was favourable to the authority of the mother country. There was no danger that classes, in whom these invidious distinctions had produced jarring interests and hostile dispositions, should unite against the existing order of things. On the other hand, these very distinctions which delayed the inevitable hour of separation, would render revolution tenfold more terrible and destructive whenever the hour should come. The Spanish Americans were oppressed by rigorous commercial restrictions, which, by attempting to secure a monopoly of their trade to the mother country, compelled them to purchase European commodities at the dearest rate, and to sell their produce at the lowest. Sinuggling was the natural remedy for this grievance, and of course it was practised to the ut most extent wherever it was practicable but a government that makes its subjects smugglers, loosens the cement by which it is kept together.

The Spanish Americans, however, had more than mere commercial restrictions to complain of these alone, in the extent to which they were carried, would have been sufficiently injurious to agriculture, but the agriculturist laboured under direct prohibitions. In countries where the vine and the olive would have flourished, trees, which from the earliest ages have been ranked among the most precious rewards which Hea ven has provided for the industry of man, the Spanish American was for bidden to cultivate them, in order that the merchants of Cadiz might supply him with wine and oil! and when some individuals in Mexico, either through the connivance of a viceroy, wiser than his government, or unknown to him, planted vineyards, and the country was beginning to drink of their fruit, the Spanish merchants of Vera Cruz gave the alarm to their cor respondents at Cadiz, complaint was made to the court, and an order was issued from Madrid to root up the vines.

During the course of three centuries the Spaniards had been seldom endan gered or disturbed in their American possessions. Peru indeed, in the first age of its conquest, had nearly been, wrested from the Spanish crown by the same spirit whereby it had been subdued. Three formidable revolts succeeded each other, and perhaps it might have been happy for that part of the continent if either of the leaders had been successful, and established an independent sovereignty, especially if Francisco Hernandez Giron had been the fortunate adventurer. Panama, when it commanded the only communication between Spain and Peru, was twice seized by insurgents, and Cortes, who, of all men whom history has recorded, achieved the most splendid deeds, and the widest conquests for his country, serving it with perfect fideli ty as well as boundless ambition, had his latter years embittered by the su

picion of injustice of the court, who feared lest he should found a dynasty in the great empire which he had ac quired for Spain. But the age of enterprize passed away with the genera tion of the conquerors; there were no farther disturbances from within, and from without their conquests were never seriously attacked; Drake and Cavendish confined their devastations to the coast; and when, in the 17th century, Spain was at war with an enemy ambitious of colonial dominions, those possessions which were properly her own escaped unmolested, and all the efforts of the Dutch were directed against Brazil and the Portugueze conquests in Africa and Asia. An age later the buccaneers began their depredations, and committed dreadful ravages, but they seldom ventured inland above a few hours march; and after shame and decent humanity, and the common interests of civilized society, compelled the English and French governments to break up this atrocious fraternity, the Spanish Ame. ricans remained in peace.

Scattered over an immense extent of country, under almost every imagi. nable difference of climate and local circumstances, obedience to the mother-country was their only link, and the name of Spaniards, and the superstitions of popery, all that they had in common; for the bond of their mother-tongue was broken; in some places the native language had prevailed over the Castilian, in others a mixed speech had grown up. Where there was most intercourse with Europe, where there were rich mines, and where there were no obstacles to the progress of the back-settlers, who, while they go back towards the savage state themselves, are the pioneers and advanced guard of civilization, the population silently and rapidly increased, in spite of every political impediment. Mexico was the most flourishing as well as the most

VOL. IV. PART I.

important of these possessions; Venezuela and Buenos-Ayres were next in prosperity: Peru advanced more slowly Chili was not progressive, and Paraguay had for some time been re trograde, even before the expulsion of the Jesuits.

If any monastic orders are to exist, he must be a sturdy bigot who does not wish for the re-establishment of the Jesuits. Their conduct in Ame rica more than atoned for their misdeeds in Europe, and the reasons assigned for their expulsion from the new world, and for the abolishment of their order, were as false as the acts themselves were impolitic and wicked. The number of those who, having been collected from all their missions, were driven out from Spain to find shelter where they could, amounted nearly to 4000. Many of them died broken-hearted; others beguiled their life-long exile by commu nicating to the public the knowledge which they had acquired of barbarous tribes and distant countries; and in this legacy which the expiring order be-queathed to the world, more informa tion concerning America was impart ed than had appeared in any one age since that of the first conquerors. But there were other members of the company who longed to deprive the court of Madrid of its American possessions, partly, perhaps, because resentment prevailed over patience; yet more, it is to be believed, from a love for those countries to which the labour of their painful lives had been devoted. Their talents and knowledge were from this time at the service of the enemies of

Spain, and they knew that among their friends and relations in America (for many of them were Americans by birth) a disposition to favour the design of emancipation would not be wanting.

Thus, by an act of consummate impolicy and injustice, the court of Ma

2 A.