The former plan, though requiring a great effort and many sacrifices, is (I have no doubt) practicable:  its difficulties would yield to a bold and energetic Ministry, in despite of the present constitution of Parliament.  The Militia, if they had been called upon at the beginning of the rising in the Peninsula, would (I believe)—­almost to a man—­have offered their services:  so would many of the Volunteers in their individual capacity.  They would do so still.  The advantages of this plan would be—­that the power, which would attend it, must (if judiciously directed) insure unity of effort; taming down, by its dignity, the discords which usually prevail among allied armies; and subordinating to itself the affections of the Spanish and Portugueze by the palpable service which it was rendering to their Country.  A further encouragement for adopting this plan he will find, who perceives that the military power of our Enemy is not in substance so formidable, by many—­many degrees of terror, as outwardly it appears to be.  The last campaign has not been wholly without advantage:  since it has proved that the French troops are indebted, for their victories, to the imbecility of their opponents far more than to their own discipline or courage—­or even to the skill and talents of their Generals.  There is a superstition hanging over us which the efforts of our army (not to speak of the Spaniards) have, I hope, removed.—­But their mighty numbers!—­In that is a delusion of another kind.  In the former instance, year after year we imagined things to be what they were not:  and in this, by a more fatal and more common delusion, the thought of what things really are—­precludes the thought of what in a moment they may become:  the mind, overlaid by the present, cannot lift itself to attain a glimpse of the future.

All—­which is comparatively inherent, or can lay claim to any degree of permanence, in the tyranny which the French Nation maintains over Europe—­rests upon two foundations:—­First; Upon the despotic rule which has been established in France over a powerful People who have lately passed from a state of revolution, in which they supported a struggle begun for domestic liberty, and long continued for liberty and national independence:—­and, secondly, upon the personal character of the Man by whom that rule is exercised.

As to the former; every one knows that Despotism, in a general sense, is but another word for weakness.  Let one generation disappear; and a people over whom such rule has been extended, if it have not virtue to free itself, is condemned to embarrassment in the operations of its government, and to perpetual languor; with no better hope than that which may spring from the diseased activity of some particular Prince on whom the authority may happen to devolve.  This, if it takes a regular hereditary course:  but,—­if the succession be interrupted, and the supreme power frequently usurped or given by election,—­worse