ation of Spain by Buonaparte would have reduced them at once to insignificance, and placed them upon a level with Godoy, whom they perhaps, as well as their countrymen, regarded as a traitor; for certain it is, that among these unhappy men there were some who began their career with good feelings, and a sincere love of their country, and who were betrayed by error and presumptuousness, and their connection with France, into the abyss of guilt and infamy. They dreaded nothing so much as Joseph's retirement, and rejoiced in his return to Spain as at a triumph.

It suited not the immediate policy of Buonaparte to displace his brother. Moscow instead of Madrid occupied at this time his ambitious thoughts, and supplying with men the intrusive government, he left it to shift as it could for means. So distressed was Joseph for money, that the plate of the royal chapel at Madrid was sent to the mint, though such an act would make him at once odious for sacrilege and contemptible for poverty in the eyes of the people. For want of funds for his emissaries to America, he sent a large quantity of quicksilver to be sold at Alicant; the governor there discovered for what use the produce was designed, and seized 1700 arrobas, and the agents who had it in charge. A great effort was made to pay some of the public arrears on Buonaparte's birth day, the fifteenth of August, for which day St Napoleone had been foisted into the Spanish kalendar. 100,000 reales de vellon were paid on this anniversary to the ministers. Lledo, the comedian, received 18,000, and 100 each were distributed to some ladies of rank, who were reduced to petition the intruder for bread! A bull-fight was given at Madrid on this day, at which all the bulls were white: long preparation must have been necessary for this. D. Damaso Martin, the Empecinado's bro

ther, carried off from the meadows of Puente de Viveros 300 bulls, which had been destined for these ferocious sports in the capital.

The legitimate government, meantime, was not less distressed than that of the intruder: as far as the contest lay between them, it was carried on on both sides almost without any certain revenue on which either could rely. The chief resources of the Spaniards, at the commencement of the struggle, had been in America, and these had been cut off by a series of deplorable events, in which it is difficult to say which of the opposite parties was most culpable. Spain had suffered all the evils of revolution, without acquiring a revolutionary strength; and what seemed more surprising, none of those commanding spirits which revolutions usually call forth had yet arisen. The most enlightened of the Spaniards had called for the cortes, as the best and surest remedy for their country; and in England, they who were most friendly to the Spaniards, and they who were most inimical to them, had agreed in the necessity for convoking it. Long as the cortes had been suspended, it was still a venerable name, and its restoration produced a consi derable effect upon the people; but no advantage was taken of this new ex, citement, and it was soon seen, that if it is difficult to form an effective army, where there are none who have any knowledge of the principles or practice of war, it is yet more difficult to make legislators of men whose minds have received none of the necessary previous discipline.

The state of education in Spain had long been deplorably bad; for pope. ry had long been supreme in that coun try, and of course the light of knowledge was extinguished. The majori ty of the cortes were little less bigotted than the most illiterate of their countrymen, and they prided them

selves upon having made that assembly swear to preserve the catholic religion 2 as the exclusive religion of Spain

cortes."

This," they said, "was one of the things which gave most lustre to the 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 army 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 acknow ledge 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 constancy, 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.

Ir the cortes and the successive governments of Spain, committed many errors in their domestic policy, their conduct toward the Spanish colonies was equally erroneous and far more ruinous. But it would be unjust to accuse them of all the evils which have ensued and are yet to ensue ; they only a little while accelerated a revolution which could not long have been averted by any human wisdom.

The system of modern Europe, with respect to its colonies, resembles the laws of China concerning parent and child. It is familiar to us to speak of realms as in their youth and strength, or their decrepitude, but we have made no practical application of this metaphorical language, and have yet to learn that there is a time when colonies come to years of discretion, and when a state of dependence becomes unnatural and oppressive. The Stamp Act, and the other blunders of the British ministry, were but the occasion of the American revolution,-not the cause the cause was, that America thought herself of age, and no concessions, no conciliations, no prudence, could long have prevented the separation.

There were in Spanish America some causes which tended to delay

ad.

this crisis, and others which, whenever it should arrive, would render it far more perilous. The habits, institutions, and prejudices of the AngloAmericans were all republican; they inherited from their fathers a hatred of the church of England, and little affection for its monarchy, and they found nothing in the history of their own country to excite any love or miration for that from which they sprung. The Spanish Americans, on the contrary, were attached to the same faith, the same ceremonies, and the same superstitions, as the Spaniards, with equal or even greater devotion: they sought for titles, and the empty honours of rank, with an ardour which could not have been so misdirected if worthier objects of ambition had been within their reach; and the king was the fount of honour from whence the stream of grace, for which all were thirsting, was to flow. Moreover, Spain was to them still the seat of arts, and arms, and empire; the jealous system under which they lived cut them off from all intercourse with other countries; they knew not to what imbecile hands the sceptre of the Philips had descended, nor the decay which two centuries of misrule had produced in every thing; but they were familiar

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. Smuggling was the natural remedy for this grievance, and of course it was practised to the utmost 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 correspondents 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 endangered 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 commu nication 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 fidelity as well as boundless ambition, had his latter years embittered by the sus