be not overthrown, it
will last; that it needs must last:--and therefore would they hate and
abhor him and his pride, even if he were not cruel; if he were merely an
image of mortal presumption thrust in between them and the piety which
is natural to the heart of man; between them and that religious worship
which, as authoritatively as his reason forbids idolatry, that same
reason commands. Accordingly, labouring under these violations done to
their moral nature, they describe themselves, in the anguish of their
souls, treated as a people at once dastardly and _insensible_. In the
same spirit they make it even matter of complaint, as comparatively a
far greater evil, that they have not fallen by the brute violence of
open war, but by deceit and perfidy, by a subtle undermining, or
contemptuous overthrow of those principles of good faith, through
prevalence of which, in some degree, or under some modification or
other, families, communities, a people, or any frame of human society,
even destroying armies themselves can exist.

But enough of their wrongs; let us now see what were their consolations,
their resolves, and their hopes. First, they neither murmur nor repine;
but with genuine religion and philosophy they recognize in these
dreadful visitations the ways of a benign Providence, and find in them
cause for thankfulness. The Council of Castile exhort the people of
Madrid 'to cast off their lethargy, and purify their manners, and to
acknowledge the calamities which the kingdom and that great capital had
endured as a punishment necessary to their correction.' General Morla in
his address to the citizens of Cadiz thus speaks to them:--'The
commotion, more or less violent, which has taken place in the whole
peninsula of Spain, has been of eminent service to rouse us from the
state of lethargy in which we indulged, and to make us acquainted with
our rights, our glory, and the inviolable duty which we owe to our holy
religion and our monarch. We wanted some electric stroke to rouse us
from our paralytic state of inactivity; we stood in need of a hurricane
to clear the atmosphere of the insalubrious vapours with which it was
loaded.'--The unanimity with which the whole people were affected they
rightly deem, an indication of wisdom, an authority, and a
sanction,--and they refer it to its highest source. 'The defence of our
country and our king,' (says a manifesto of the Junta of Seville) 'that
of our laws, our religion, a