Putting purely Portuguese difficulties aside, Wellington was much worried at this time by a trouble which concerned the British and not the local finances. This was the delay in the cashing of the ‘_vales_’ or bills for payment issued by the Commissary-General for food and forage bought from the peasantry. As long as they were settled at short intervals, no difficulty arose about them--they were indeed treated as negotiable paper, and had passed from hand to hand at a lesser discount than the inconvertible Portuguese government papers. But all through the year 1811 the interval between the issue of the ‘_vale_’ and its payment in cash at Lisbon had been growing longer, and an uncomfortable feeling was beginning to spread about the country-side. The peasantry were growing suspicious, and were commencing to sell the bills, for much less than their face value, to speculators who could afford to wait for payment. To recoup themselves for their loss they were showing signs of raising prices all round. Fortunately they were a simple race, and communication between districts was slow and uncertain, so that no general tendency of this sort was yet prevalent, though the symptoms were making themselves visible here and there. Hence came Wellington’s constant applications for more cash from England at shorter notice. Late in the spring he devised a scheme by which interest at 5 per cent. was to be paid by the Commissary-General on bonds or certificates representing money or money’s worth advanced to the British army, till the principal was repaid--two years being named as the period after which the whole sum must be refunded. This was a desperate measure, an endeavour to throw forward payment on to a remote future, ‘when it is not probable that there will be the same difficulty in procuring specie in England to send abroad as there is at the present moment.’ The plan[153] was never tried, and was not good: for how could small creditors of the English army be expected to stand out of their money--representing the price of their crops or their cattle--for so long a period as two years, even if they were, in the meantime, receiving interest on what was really their working capital? Wellington himself remarked, when broaching the scheme to Lord Liverpool, that there remained the difficulty that no one could look forward, and say that the British army would still be in the Peninsula two years hence. If it had left Portugal--whether victorious and pushing towards the Pyrenees, or defeated and driven back on to Great Britain--how would the creditors communicate with the Commissary-General, their debtor? They could only be referred to London, to which they would have no ready access: indeed many of them would not know where, or what, London was. That such an idea should have been set forward only shows the desperate financial situation of the British army.