But I began with hope; and hope has inwardly accompanied me to the end.  The whole course of the campaign, rightly interpreted, has justified my hope.  In Madrid, in Ferrol, in Corunna, in every considerable place, and in every part of the country over which the French have re-extended their dominion,—­we learn, from their own reports, that the body of the People have shewed against them, to the last, the most determined hostility.  Hence it is clear that the lure, which the invading Usurper found himself constrained lately to hold out to the inferior orders of society in the shape of various immunities, has totally failed:  and therefore he turns for support to another quarter, and now attempts to cajole the wealthy and the privileged.  But this class has been taught, by late Decrees, what it has to expect from him; and how far he is to be confided-in for its especial interests.  Many individuals, no doubt, he will seduce; but the bulk of the class, even if they could be insensible to more liberal feelings, cannot but be his enemies.  This change, therefore, is not merely shifting ground; but retiring to a position which he himself has previously undermined.  Here is confusion; and a power warring against itself.

So will it ever fare with foreign Tyrants when (in spite of domestic abuses) a People, which has lived long, feels that it has a Country to love; and where the heart of that People is sound.  Between the native inhabitants of France and Spain there has existed from the earliest period, and still does exist, an universal and utter dissimilitude in laws, actions, deportment, gait, manners, customs:  join with this the difference in the language, and the barrier of the Pyrenees; a separation and an opposition in great things, and an antipathy in small.  Ignorant then must he be of history and of the reports of travellers and residents in the two countries, or strangely inattentive to the constitution of human nature, who (this being true) can admit the belief that the Spaniards, numerous and powerful as they are, will live under Frenchmen as their lords and masters.  Let there be added to this inherent mutual repulsiveness—­those recent indignities and horrible outrages; and we need not fear to say that such reconcilement is impossible; even without that further insuperable obstacle which we hope will exist, an establishment of a free Constitution in Spain.—­The intoxicated setter-up of Kings may fill his diary with pompous stories of the acclamations with which his solemn puppets are received; he may stuff their mouths with impious asseverations; and hire knees to bend before them, and lips to answer with honied greetings of gratitude and love:  these cannot remove the old heart, and put a new one into the bosom of the spectators.  The whole is a pageant seen for a day among men in its passage to that ‘Limbo large and broad’ whither, as to their proper home, fleet

    All the unaccomplish’d works of Nature’s hand,
    Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mix’d,
    Dissolv’d on earth.