is
nothing without its powers, and it is only in these feelings that the
powers of wisdom exist. If then we do not forget that the Spanish and
Portugueze Nations stand upon the loftiest ground of principle and
passion, and do not suffer on our part those sympathies to languish
which a few months since were so strong, and do not negligently or
timidly descend from those heights of magnanimity to which as a Nation
we were raised, when they first represented to us their wrongs and
entreated our assistance, and we devoted ourselves sincerely and
earnestly to their service, making with them a common cause under a
common hope; if we are true in all this to them and to ourselves, we
shall not be at a loss to conceive what actions are entitled to our
commendation as being in the spirit of a friendship so nobly begun, and
tending assuredly to promote the common welfare; and what are abject,
treacherous, and pernicious, and therefore to be condemned and abhorred.
Is then, I may now ask, the Convention of Cintra an act of this latter
kind? Have the Generals, who signed and ratified that agreement, thereby
proved themselves unworthy associates in such a cause? And has the
Ministry, by whose appointment these men were enabled to act in this
manner, and which sanctioned the Convention by permitting them to carry
it into execution, thereby taken to itself a weight of guilt, in which
the Nation must feel that it participates, until the transaction shall
be solemnly reprobated by the Government, and the remote and immediate
authors of it brought to merited punishment? An answer to each of these
questions will be implied in the proof which will be given that the
condemnation, which the People did with one voice pronounce upon this
Convention when it first became known, was just; that the nature of the
offence of those who signed it was such, and established by evidence of
such a kind, making so imperious an exception to the ordinary course of
action, that there was no need to wait here for the decision of a Court
of Judicature, but that the People were compelled by a necessity
involved in the very constitution of man as a moral Being to pass
sentence upon them. And this I shall prove by trying this act of their's
by principles of justice which are of universal obligation, and by a
reference to those moral sentiments which rise out of that retrospect of
things which has been given.

I shall now proceed to facts. The dispatches of Sir Arth