ore the reader: let him listen to the
reports--which they, who really have had means of knowledge, and who are
worthy to speak upon the subject, will give to him--of the things done
or endured in every corner of Spain; and he will see what emancipation
had there been effected in the mind;--how far the perceptions--the
impulses--and the actions also--had outstripped the habit and the
character, and consequently were in a process of permanently elevating
both; and how much farther (alas! by infinite degrees) the principles
and practice of a people, with great objects before them to concentrate
their love and their hatred, transcend the principles and practice of
governments; not excepting those which, in their constitution and
ordinary conduct, furnish the least matter for complaint.

Then it was--when the people of Spain were thus rouzed; after this
manner released from the natal burthen of that government which had
bowed them to the ground; in the free use of their understandings, and
in the play and 'noble rage' of their passions; while yet the new
authorities, which they had generated, were truly living members of
their body, and (as I have said) organs of their life: when that
numerous people were in a stage of their journey which could not be
accomplished without the spirit which was then prevalent in them, and
which (as might be feared) would too soon abate of itself;--then it was
that we--not we, but the heads of the British army and Nation--when, if
they could not breathe a favouring breath, they ought at least to have
stood at an awful distance--stepped in with their forms, their
impediments, their rotten customs and precedents, their narrow desires,
their busy and purblind fears; and called out to these aspiring
travellers to halt--'For ye are in a dream;' confounded them (for it was
the voice of a seeming friend that spoke); and spell-bound them, as far
as was possible, by an instrument framed 'in the eclipse' and sealed
'with curses dark.'--In a word, we had the power to act up to the most
sacred letter of justice--and this at a time when the mandates of
justice were of an affecting obligation such as had never before been
witnessed; and we plunged into the lowest depths of injustice:--We had
power to give a brotherly aid to our Allies in supporting the mighty
world which their shoulders had undertaken to uphold; and, while they
were expecting from us this aid, we undermined--without forewarning
them--the gro