Secondly; it appears that Sir J.M. has overlooked one most important circumstance;—­viz. that the harvest, in these provinces, had been already reaped; the English army could be viewed only as gleaners.  Thus, as we have already seen, Estramadura had furnished an army which had marched before his arrival; from Salamanca also—­the very place in which he makes his complaint—­there had gone out a battalion to Biscay which Gen. Blake had held up, for its romantic gallantly, to the admiration of his whole army.

Yet, thirdly, it is not meant by any means to assert that Spain has put forth an energy adequate to the service—­or in any tolerable proportion to her own strength.  Far from it!  But upon whom does the blame rest?  Not surely upon the people—­who, as long as they continued to have confidence in their rulers, could not be expected (after the early fervours of their revolution had subsided) much to overstep the measure of exertion prescribed to them—­but solely upon the government.  Up to the time when Sir J.M. died, the Supreme Junta had adopted no one grand and comprehensive measure for calling out the strength of the nation;—­scarcely any of such ordinary vigour as, in some countries, would have been adopted to meet local disturbances among the people.  From their jealousy of popular feeling,—­they had never taken any steps, by books or civic assemblies, to make the general enthusiasm in the cause available by bringing it within the general consciousness; and thus to create the nation into an organic whole.  Sir J.M. was fully aware of this:—­’The Spanish Government,’ he says, ’do not seem ever to have contemplated the possibility of a second attack:’  and accordingly, whenever he is at leisure to make distinctions, he does the people the justice to say—­that the failure was with those who should have ’taken advantage’ of their good will.  With the people therefore will for ever remain the glory of having resisted heroically with means utterly inadequate; and with the government the whole burthen of the disgrace that the means were thus inadequate.

But, further,—­even though it should still be thought that, in the three Provinces which Sir J. Moore saw, there may have been some failures with the people,—­it is to be remembered that these were the very three which had never been the theatre of French outrages; which therefore had neither such a vivid sense of the evils which they had to fear, nor so strong an animation in the recollection of past triumphs:  we might accordingly have predicted that, if any provinces should prove slack in their exertions, it would be these three.  So that, after all, (a candid inquirer into this matter will say) admitting Sir J.M.’s description to be faithful with respect to what he saw, I can never allow that the conduct of these three provinces shall be held forth as an exponent of the general temper and condition of Spain.  For that therefore I must look to other authorities.