Now, before I quit the Peninsula, a single word more to the honourable member for Westminster and his constituents.  Have they estimated the burdens of a Peninsular War?  God forbid that, if honour, or good faith, or national interest required it, we should decline the path of duty because it is encompassed with difficulties; but at least we ought to keep some consideration of these difficulties in our minds.  We have experience to teach us, with something like accuracy, what are the pecuniary demands of the contest for which we must be prepared, if we enter into a war in the Peninsula.  To take only two years and a half of the last Peninsular War of which I happen to have the accounts at hand, from the beginning of 1812 to the glorious conclusion of the campaign of 1814, the expense incurred in Spain and Portugal was about L33,000,000.  Is that an expense to be incurred again, without some peremptory and unavoidable call of duty, of honour, or of interest?

Such a call we are at all times ready to answer, come (to use the expression so much decried), come what may.  But there is surely sufficient ground for pausing, before we acquiesce in the short and flippant deduction of a rash consequence from false premises, which has been so glibly echoed from one quarter to another, during the last four months.  ’Oh! we must go to war with France, for we are bound to go to war in defence of Portugal.  Portugal will certainly join Spain against France; France will then attack Portugal; and then our defensive obligation comes into play.’  Sir, it does no such thing.  If Portugal is attacked by France, or by any other Power, without provocation, Great Britain is indeed bound to defend her:  but if Portugal wilfully seeks the hostility of France, by joining against France in a foreign quarrel, there is no such obligation on Great Britain.  The letter of treaties is as clear as the law of nations is precise upon this point:  and as I believe no British statesman ever lived, so I hope none ever will live, unwise enough to bind his country by so preposterous an obligation, as that she should go to war, not merely in defence of an ally, but at the will and beck of that ally, whenever ambition, or false policy, or a predominant faction, may plunge that ally into wars of her own seeking and contriving.

On the other hand, would it have been advisable for us to precipitate Portugal into the war?  Undoubtedly we might have done so.  For by declaring war against France, on behalf of Spain, we should have invited France (and there was perhaps a party in Portugal ready enough to second the invitation) to extend her hostilities to the whole of the Peninsula.  But was it an object of sound policy to bring a war upon our hands, of which it was clear that we must bear all the burden?  And was not the situation of Portugal, then, so far from being a reason for war, that it added the third motive, and one of the greatest weight, to our preference for a pacific policy?