France most beloved; to extend your great power, in order to diminish the miseries of war, and to compel the enemy of the continent to a general peace, which is the sole object of all your measures, and the only means for the repose and prosperity of our country. The will of the French people is, therefore, Sire, the same as that of your Majesty. The war with Spain is politic, just, and necessary.”... If the transactions which are the subject of this history had passed in remote ages, and such a narrative as is here presented had been preserved to us, it would scarcely be possible, when we found the Senate of a great nation, like France, thus solemnly approving and ratifying the conduct of its Emperor, not to suspect that the history had been handed down in an imperfect state; that some facts had been suppressed, and others distorted; for, however credible the usurpation itself might appear, as the act of an individual tyrant, that it should, with its attendant circumstances of perfidy and cruelty, be thus represented as a just and necessary act, by a legislative assembly, and made the ground of a national war, is something so monstrous, that it would startle our belief; and, for the honour of human nature, we should hesitate before we trusted human testimony. ♦MARCH OF THE TROOPS TOWARD SPAIN.♦ The conscription for which the tyrant called was decreed without one dissentient voice, by an assembly constituted for no other purpose than that of executing his will and pleasure. His other measures had already been taken. About the middle of August he had ordered General Gouvion Saint Cyr from Boulogne, to repair to Perpignan, and there collect an army, with which to enter Catalonia, as soon as Buonaparte himself should enter Spain on the other side. He gave him no other instructions than that he should use all efforts to preserve Barcelona: “if that place be lost,” said he, “to recover it will cost me eighty thousand men.” The troops from Prussia and Poland were recalled; they consisted not of Frenchmen alone, but of Germans and Italians, Poles, Swiss, and Dutch, Irish, and Mamalukes, men of all countries and languages, of all religions and of none, united into one efficient body by the bond of discipline. They cared not whither they were ordered, so it were only to a land which produced the grape, ... upon what service, or in what cause, was to them a matter of indifference; war was their element, and where-ever they went they expected to find free quarters, and no enemy who could resist them. Not a few of them when they heard, as they had so often heard before, that they were now to give the last blow to the tottering power of England, believed they were about to march to England by land through Spain; the desert, they said, had separated them from that country when they were in Egypt, and when they were at Boulogne there was the sea; but they should get there now. As soon as these troops had crossed the Rhine, they were received with