The crown had indeed been won without a battle. That there remained a Spanish nation ready to fight to the death for its independence was not a circumstance which Napoleon had taken into account. His experience had as yet taught him of no force but that of Governments and armies. In the larger States, or groups of States, which had hitherto been the spoil of France, the sense of nationality scarcely existed. Italy had felt it no disgrace to pass under the rule of Napoleon. The Germans on both sides of the Rhine knew of a fatherland only as an arena of the keenest jealousies. In Prussia and in Austria the bond of citizenship was far less the love of country than the habit of obedience to government. England and Russia, where patriotism existed in the sense in which it existed in Spain, had as yet been untouched by French armies. Judging from the action of the Germans and the Italians, Napoleon might well suppose that in settling with the Spanish Government he had also settled with the Spanish people, or, at the worst, that his troops might have to fight some fanatical peasants, like those who resisted the expulsion of the Bourbons from Naples. But the Spanish nation was no mosaic of political curiosities like the Holy Roman Empire, and no divided and oblivious family like the population of Italy. Spain, as a single nation united under its King, had once played the foremost part in Europe: when its grandeur departed, its pride had remained behind: the Spaniard, in all his torpor and impoverishment, retained the impulse of honour, the spirited self-respect, which periods of national greatness leave behind them among a race capable of cherishing their memory. Nor had those influences of a common European culture, which directly opposed themselves to patriotism in Germany, affected the home-bred energy of Spain. The temper of mind which could find satisfaction in the revival of a form of Greek art when Napoleon's cavalry were scouring Germany, or which could inquire whether mankind would not profit by the removal of the barriers between nations, was unknown among the Spanish people. Their feeling towards a foreign invader was less distant from that of African savages than from that of the civilised and literary nations which had fallen so easy a prey to the French. Government, if it had degenerated into everything that was contemptible, had at least failed to reduce the people to the passive helplessness which resulted from the perfection of uniformity in Prussia. Provincial institutions, though corrupted, were not extinguished; provincial attachments and prejudices existed in unbounded strength. Like the passion of the Spaniard for his native district, his passion for Spain was of a blind and furious character. Enlightened conviction, though not altogether absent, had small place in the Spanish war of defence. Religious fanaticism, hatred of the foreigner, delight in physical barbarity, played their full part by the