iards and
Portuguese supported by the regular armies of Wellington, Beresford,
Blake, La Romana, Cuesta, Castanos, Reding, and Ballasteros!

If success be possible in such a war, the following general course will
be most likely to insure it,--viz.: make a display of a mass of troops
proportioned to the obstacles and resistance likely to be encountered,
calm the popular passions in every possible way, exhaust them by time
and patience, display courtesy, gentleness, and severity united, and,
particularly, deal justly. The examples of Henry IV. in the wars of the
League, of Marshal Berwick in Catalonia, of Suchet in Aragon and
Valencia, of Hoche in La Vendee, are models of their kind, which may be
employed according to circumstances with equal success. The admirable
order and discipline of the armies of Diebitsch and Paskevitch in the
late war were also models, and were not a little conducive to the
success of their enterprises.

The immense obstacles encountered by an invading force in these wars
have led some speculative persons to hope that there should never be any
other kind, since then wars would become more rare, and, conquest being
also more difficult, would be less a temptation to ambitious leaders.
This reasoning is rather plausible than solid; for, to admit all its
consequences, it would be necessary always to be able to induce the
people to take up arms, and it would also be necessary for us to be
convinced that there would be in the future no wars but those of
conquest, and that all legitimate though secondary wars, which are only
to maintain the political equilibrium or defend the public interests,
should never occur again: otherwise, how could it be known when and how
to excite the people to a national war? For example, if one hundred
thousand Germans crossed the Rhine and entered France, originally with
the intention of preventing the conquest of Belgium by France, and
without any other ambitious project, would it be a case where the whole
population--men, women, and children--of Alsace, Lorraine, Champagne,
and Burgundy, should rush to arms? to make a Saragossa of every walled
town, to bring about, by way of reprisals, murder, pillage, and
incendiarism throughout the country? If all this be not done, and the
Germans, in consequence of some success, should occupy these provinces,
who can say that they might not afterward seek to appropriate a part of
them, even though at first they had never contemplated i