But—­whatever plans be adopted—­there can be no success, unless the execution be entrusted to Generals of competent judgement.  That the British Army swarms with those who are incompetent—­is too plain from successive proofs in the transactions at Buenos Ayres, at Cintra, and in the result of the Board of Inquiry.—­Nor must we see a General appointed to command—­and required, at the same time, to frame his operations according to the opinion of an inferior Officer:  an injunction (for a recommendation, from such a quarter, amounts to an injunction) implying that a man had been appointed to a high station—­of which the very persons, who had appointed him, deemed him unworthy; else they must have known that he would endeavour to profit by the experience of any of his inferior officers, from the suggestions of his own understanding:  at the same time—­by denying to the General-in-Chief the free use of his own judgement, and by the act of announcing this presumption of his incompetence to the man himself—­such an indignity is put upon him, that his passions must of necessity be rouzed; so as to leave it scarcely possible that he could draw any benefit, which he might otherwise have drawn, from the local knowledge or talents of the individual to whom he was referred:  and, lastly, this injunction virtually involves a subversion of all military subordination.  In the better times of the House of Commons—­a minister, who had presumed to write such a letter as that to which I allude, would have been impeached.

The Debates in Parliament, and measures of Government, every day furnish new Proofs of the truths which I have been attempting to establish—­of the utter want of general principles;—­new and lamentable proofs!  This moment (while I am drawing towards a conclusion) I learn, from the newspaper reports, that the House of Commons has refused to declare that the Convention of Centra disappointed the hopes and expectations of the Nation.

The motion, according to the letter of it, was ill-framed; for the Convention might have been a very good one, and still have disappointed the hopes and expectations of the Nation—­as those might have been unwise:  at all events, the words ought to have stood—­the just and reasonable hopes of the Nation.  But the hacknied phrase of ’disappointed hopes and expectations’—­should not have been used at all:  it is a centre round which much delusion has gathered.  The Convention not only did not satisfy the Nation’s hopes of good; but sunk it into a pitfall of unimagined and unimaginable evil.  The hearts and understandings of the People tell them that the language of a proposed parliamentary resolution, upon this occasion, ought—­not only to have been different in the letter—­but also widely different in the spirit:  and the reader of these pages will have deduced, that no terms of reprobation could in severity exceed the offences involved in—­and connected with—­that instrument.  But, while the grand keep of the castle