The third charge relates to the same Province:  it is a complaint that ‘the people run away; the villages are deserted;’ and again, in his last letter,—­’They abandoned their dwellings at our approach; drove away their carts, oxen, and every thing which could be of the smallest aid to the army.’  To this charge, in so far as it may be thought to criminate the Spaniards, a full answer is furnished by their accuser himself in the following memorable sentence in another part of the very same letter:—­’I am sorry to say that the army, whose conduct I had such reason to extol in its march through Portugal and on its arrival in Spain, has totally changed its character since it began to retreat.’  What do we collect from this passage?  Assuredly that the army ill-treated the Gallicians; for there is no other way in which an army, as a body, can offend—­excepting by an indisposition to fight; and that interpretation (besides that we are all sure that no English army could so offend) Sir J. Moore expressly guards against in the next sentence.

The English army then treated its Ally as an enemy:  and,—­though there are alleviations of its conduct in its great sufferings,—­yet it must be remembered that these sufferings were due—­not to the Gallicians—­but to circumstances over which they had no controul—­to the precipitancy of the retreat, the inclemency of the weather, and the poverty of the country; and that (knowing this) they must have had a double sense of injustice in any outrages of an English army, from, contrasting them with the professed objects of that army in entering Spain.—­It is to be observed that the answer to the second charge would singly have been some answer to this; and, reciprocally, that the answer to this is a full answer to the second.

Having thus shewn that, in Sir J. Moore’s very inaccurate statements of facts, we have some further reasons for a previous distrust of any opinion which is supported by those statements,—­it is now time to make the reader acquainted with the real terms and extent of that opinion.  For it is far less to be feared that, from his just respect for him who gave it, he should allow it an undue weight in his judgment—­than that, reposing on the faithfulness of the abstracts and reports of these letters, he should really be still ignorant of its exact tenor.

The whole amount then of what Sir John Moore has alleged against the Spaniards, in any place but one, is comprised in this sentence:—­’The enthusiasm, of which we have heard so much, no where appears; whatever good-will there is (and I believe amongst the lower orders there is a great deal) is taken no advantage of.’  It is true that, in that one place (viz. in his last letter written at Corunna), he charges the Spaniards with ‘apathy and indifference:’  but, as this cannot be reconciled with his concession of a great deal of good-will, we are bound to take that as his real and deliberate opinion which