Such are the results for nations, when they betray to the whole world an aristocracy bankrupt of honour, emasculated, and slothful. Spoliators so reckless as Napoleon, are not always at hand for taking advantage of this domestic ruin; but it is impossible that a nation, absolutely rich as Spain was in the midst of her relative poverty, can advertise itself for centuries as a naked, defenceless waif, having neither leaders nor principles for organizing a resistance, but that eventually she will hear of a customer for her national jewels. In reality, Spain had been protected for 150 years, by the local interposition of France; had France not occupied the antechamber to the Peninsula, making it impossible for any but a maritime power to attack Spain in strength, Madrid would have echoed to the cannon of the spoiler, at least a century before the bloody 3d of May 1808.[6] In the same way, Austria has furnished for centuries a screen to the Italian Peninsula. Yet, in that case, the want of unity amongst so many subdivisions that were independent states, might be pleaded as an excuse. Pitiable weakness there was in both cases; and "to be weak is to be miserable;" but degradation _by_ degradation, universal abasement of the national energies, as an effect through wilful abasement as a cause; this miserable spectacle has been exhibited in mellow maturity by no Christian nations but those of Spain and Portugal. Both have degenerated into nations of poltrons, and _from_ what ancestors? From those who once headed the baptized in Europe, and founded empires in the other hemisphere. ------"Into what depth thou see'st, From what height fallen!"------ So that, if this gloomy shadow has crept over luminaries once so bright through the gradual eclipse of their aristocracies, we need no proof more pathetic or terrific of the degree in which great nations, with the whole burden of their honour and their primary interests, are dependent, in the final extremity, upon the quality of their gentry--considered as their sole natural leaders in battle. [Footnote 6: To say the truth, during the Marlborough war of the Succession, and precisely one hundred years before Murat's bloody occupation of Madrid, Spain presented the same infamous spectacle as under Napoleon; armies of strangers, English, French, Germans, marching, and counter-marching incessantly, peremptorily disposing of the Spanish crown, alternately placing rival kings upon the throne, and all the while no more deferring to a Spanish will than to the yelping of village curs.] With this previous indication of the unrivalled responsibility pressing upon aristocracies, it is our purpose to dwell a little upon those accidents of advantage arising out of constitution, and those differences of quality, experimentally made known to us in a thousand trials, which sum and express the peculiarities of the British nobility and gentry.