is plain that the French had forfeited by their crimes all right to those privileges, or to those modes of intercourse, which one army may demand from another according to the laws of war.  They were not soldiers in any thing but the power of soldiers, and the outward frame of an army.  During their occupation of Portugal, the laws and customs of war had never been referred to by them, but as a plea for some enormity, to the aggravated oppression of that unhappy country!  Pillage, sacrilege, and murder—­sweeping murder and individual assassination, had been proved against them by voices from every quarter.  They had outlawed themselves by their offences from membership in the community of war, and from every species of community acknowledged by reason.  But even, should any one be so insensible as to question this, he will not at all events deny, that the French ought to have been dealt with as having put on a double character.  For surely they never considered themselves merely as an army.  They had dissolved the established authorities of Portugal, and had usurped the civil power of the government; and it was in this compound capacity, under this twofold monstrous shape, that they had exercised, over the religion and property of the country, the most grievous oppressions.  What then remained to protect them but their power?—­Right they had none,—­and power! it is a mortifying consideration, but I will ask if Bonaparte, (nor do I mean in the question to imply any thing to his honour,) had been in the place of Sir Hew Dalrymple, what would he have thought of their power?—­Yet before this shadow the solid substance of justice melted away.

And this leads me from the contemplation of their errors in the estimate and application of means, to the contemplation of their heavier errors and worse blindness in regard to ends.  The British Generals acted as if they had no purpose but that the enemy should be removed from the country in which they were, upon any terms.  Now the evacuation of Portugal was not the prime object, but the manner in which that event was to be brought about; this ought to have been deemed first both in order and importance;—­the French were to be subdued, their ferocious warfare and heinous policy to be confounded; and in this way, and no other, was the deliverance of that country to be accomplished.  It was not for the soil, or for the cities and forts, that Portugal was valued, but for the human feeling which was there; for the rights of human nature which might be there conspicuously asserted; for a triumph over injustice and oppression there to be achieved, which could neither be concealed nor disguised, and which should penetrate the darkest corner of the dark Continent of Europe by its splendour.  We combated for victory in the empire of reason, for strongholds in the imagination.  Lisbon and Portugal, as city and soil, were chiefly prized by us as a language; but our Generals mistook the counters of the game for