you have taken, all the armies which have retreated before your leaders, are but paltry subjects of self-congratulation, if your land divides against itself, and your dragoons and your executioners must be let loose against your fellow-citizens.—­You call these men a mob, desperate, dangerous, and ignorant; and seem to think that the only way to quiet the “Bellua multorum capitum” is to lop off a few of its superfluous heads.  But even a mob may be better reduced to reason by a mixture of conciliation and firmness, than by additional irritation and redoubled penalties.  Are we aware of our obligations to a mob?  It is the mob that labour in your fields and serve in your houses,—­that man your navy, and recruit your army,—­that have enabled you to defy all the world, and can also defy you when neglect and calamity have driven them to despair!  You may call the people a mob; but do not forget, that a mob too often speaks the sentiments of the people.  And here I must remark, with what alacrity you are accustomed to fly to the succour of your distressed allies, leaving the distressed of your own country to the care of Providence or—­the parish.  When the Portuguese suffered under the retreat of the French, every arm was stretched out, every hand was opened, from the rich man’s largess to the widow’s mite, all was bestowed, to enable them to rebuild their villages and replenish their granaries.  And at this moment, when thousands of misguided but most unfortunate fellow-countrymen are struggling with the extremes of hardships and hunger, as your charity began abroad it should end at home.  A much less sum, a tithe of the bounty bestowed on Portugal, even if those men (which I cannot admit without enquiry) could not have been restored to their employments, would have rendered unnecessary the tender mercies of the bayonet and the gibbet.  But doubtless our friends have too many foreign claims to admit a prospect of domestic relief; though never did such objects demand it.  I have traversed the seat of war in the Peninsula, I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey, but never under the most despotic of infidel governments did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return in the very heart of a Christian country.  And what are your remedies?  After months of inaction, and months of action worse than inactivity, at length comes forth the grand specific, the never-failing nostrum of all state physicians, from the days of Draco to the present time.  After feeling the pulse and shaking the head over the patient, prescribing the usual course of warm water and bleeding, the warm water of your mawkish police, and the lancets of your military, these convulsions must terminate in death, the sure consummation of the prescriptions of all political Sangrados.  Setting aside the palpable injustice and the certain inefficiency of the bill, are there not capital punishments sufficient in your statutes?  Is there not blood enough upon