ose
justification rests on making it appear that the difficulty did not
arise with himself; and it is right to add, that the only _fact_
produced goes to discredit this surmise; viz. that Gen. Friere did,
without any delay, furnish the whole number of troops which Sir Arthur
engaged to feed. However the Board exhibited so little anxiety to be
satisfied on this point, that no positive information was gained.

A reference being here first made to the official report of the Board of
Inquiry; I shall make use of the opportunity which it offers to lay
before the reader an outline of that Board's proceedings; from which it
will appear how far the opinion--pronounced, by the national voice, upon
the transactions in Portugal--ought, in sound logic, to be modified by
any part of those proceedings.

We find in the warrant under which the Board of Inquiry was to act, and
which defined its powers, that an inquiry was to be made into the
conditions of the 'armistice and convention; and into all the causes and
circumstances, whether arising from the operations of the British army,
or otherwise, which led to them.'

Whether answers to the charges of the people of England were made
possible by the provisions of this warrant--and, secondly, whether even
these provisions have been satisfied by the Board of Inquiry--will best
appear by involving those charges in four questions, according to the
following scale, which supposes a series of concessions impossible to
those who think the nation justified in the language held on the
transactions in Portugal.

1. Considering the perfidy with which the French army had entered
Portugal; the enormities committed by it during its occupation of that
country; the vast military power of which that army was a part, and the
use made of that power by its master; the then existing spirit of the
Spanish, Portugueze, and British nations; in a word, considering the
especial nature of the service, and the individual character of this
war;--was it lawful for the British army, under any conceivable
circumstances, so long as it had the liberty of re-embarking, to make
_any conceivable_ convention? i.e. Was the negative evil of a total
failure in every object for which it had been sent to Portugal of worse
tendency than the positive evil of acknowledging in the French army a
fair title to the privileges of an honourable enemy by consenting to a
mode of treaty which (in its very name, implying a reciprocation o