After a careful investigation of the details of this famous agreement, the conclusion at which the impartial student will probably arrive is that while on the military side it was justifiable, it presented grave political faults. In order to recover Lisbon with its arsenals, its forts and its shipping, all intact, Dalrymple might without serious blame have granted even more to the French. By the Convention he saved, not only the wealth of the capital, and the lives of the troops who must have fallen in storming it, but, most important of all, time. If he had but known the value of that commodity, he might have been in Madrid at the head of all his British troops by October 1, or even earlier. ‘I do not know what Sir Hew proposes to do,’ wrote Wellesley the morning after the Convention was signed, ‘but if I were in his situation I would have 20,000 men in Madrid in less than a month from this day[258]’ But the importance of time was never realized by the old commander-in-chief: he was superseded long before his army had even moved up to the Portuguese frontier. Looking, therefore, at the Convention in the broadest aspect, we hold that its military advantages entirely outweighed those which might have been secured by a prolongation of hostilities. But this conclusion does not mean that there were not points in the military part of the agreement that might have been modified with advantage. [258] Wellesley to Mr. Stuart, Sept. 1, 1808 (_Well. Disp._, iv. 121). It is when we turn to the political section of the Convention that we light upon grave faults and mistakes on the part of Dalrymple. The first and foremost was that he signed the document without previously submitting certain portions of it to the Portuguese government. In the sixteenth and seventeenth articles the British general took upon himself to grant certain favours both to French civilians resident in Portugal, and to Portuguese subjects who had taken service under Junot, which he had no authority to concede. These were points which concerned not the British army but the Portuguese civil administration, and should not have been decided without a consultation with our allies, and a permission from them to make terms on their behalf. The sixteenth article allowed Frenchmen resident in Lisbon to remain there for a year after the Convention, if they did not chose to leave the country with Junot and his troops. To permit subjects of the hostile power to remain in Lisbon for so long was, of course, most distasteful to the Portuguese government, which was naturally desirous of expelling at once, according to the ordinary customs of war, a body of persons many of whom had made themselves the partners and instruments of Junot’s peculations, and who for the next twelve months would serve as spies and purveyors of intelligence to the French Emperor. Nothing more than the leave to quit Lisbon in Junot’s wake should have been secured to them, unless the Junta of Regency gave its consent.