he blessings for which the people
of the Peninsula were contending--immediate independence, which was not
to be gained but by modes of exertion from which liberty must ensue.
Now, liberty--healthy, matured, time-honoured liberty--this is the
growth and peculiar boast of Britain; and Nature herself, by encircling
with the ocean the country which we inhabit, has proclaimed that this
mighty Nation is for ever to be her own ruler, and that the land is set
apart for the home of immortal independence. Judging then from these
first fruits of British Friendship, what bewildering and depressing and
hollow thoughts must the Spaniards and Portugueze have entertained
concerning the real value of these blessings, if the people who have
possessed them longest, and who ought to understand them best, could
send forth an army capable of enacting the oppression and baseness of
the Convention of Cintra; if the government of that people could
sanction this treaty; and if, lastly, this distinguished and favoured
people themselves could suffer it to be held forth to the eyes of men as
expressing the sense of their hearts--as an image of their
understandings.

But it did not speak their sense--it was not endured--it was not
submitted to in their hearts. Bitter was the sorrow of the people of
Great Britain when the tidings first came to their ears, when they first
fixed their eyes upon this covenant--overwhelming was their
astonishment, tormenting their shame; their indignation was tumultuous;
and the burthen of the past would have been insupportable, if it had not
involved in its very nature a sustaining hope for the future. Among many
alleviations, there was one, which, (not wisely, but overcome by
circumstances) all were willing to admit;--that the event was so strange
and uncouth, exhibiting such discordant characteristics of innocent
fatuity and enormous guilt, that it could not without violence be
thought of as indicative of a general constitution of things, either in
the country or the government; but that it was a kind of _lusus
naturae_, in the moral world--a solitary straggler out of the
circumference of Nature's law--a monster which could not propagate, and
had no birth-right in futurity. Accordingly, the first expectation was
that the government would deem itself under the necessity of disanulling
the Convention; a necessity which, though in itself a great evil,
appeared small in the eyes of judicious men, compared with the
conseq