The oath of obedience and allegiance was then administered to those persons who either retained or accepted office under the Intruder’s government. A superb entertainment followed, at which Lasnes and his chief officers sate down to a table of four hundred covers, and at every health which was drunk to the family of Buonaparte the cannons were discharged. The transactions of the day furnished a fine topic for the journalists at Paris. “All the people,” they said, “manifested their joy at so sudden and happy a change in acclamations of ‘long live the Emperor!’ they were edified by the behaviour of their conquerors during the religious ceremony; that ceremony had melted the most obdurate hearts, the hatred of the French was eradicated from all breasts, and Aragon would soon become one of the most submissive provinces in Spain!” At the time when these falsehoods were circulated in France, Junot issued a proclamation, declaring, that every Aragoneze found in arms should be punished with death. Upon this the Supreme Junta addressed an order to their generals, requiring them to apprise the French commanders to whom they might be opposed, that every Spaniard who was capable of carrying arms was a soldier, so their duty required them to be, and ♦DECREE OF THE CENTRAL JUNTA.♦ such the Supreme Junta declared them: “This,” they said, “was not a war of armies against armies, as in other cases, but of an army against a whole nation, resisting the yoke which a tyrant and usurper sought to force upon them; every individual, therefore, of that nation was under the protection of the laws of war, and the general who should violate those laws was not a soldier, but a ruffian, who would provoke the indignation of Heaven, and the vengeance of man. The Junta well knew,” they said, “that the French, when they were victorious, ridiculed principles which the observance and respect of all nations had consecrated, and that they did this with an effrontery and insolence equal to the affectation with which they appealed to them when they were vanquished. The Spaniards were, however, in a condition to enforce that justice which they demanded. Three Frenchmen should suffer for every Spaniard, be he peasant or soldier, who might be put to death. Europe would hear with admiration as well as horror, that a magnanimous nation, which had begun its struggle by making 30,000 prisoners, was forced, in opposition to its natural character, to decimate those prisoners without distinction, from the first general to the meanest in the ranks. But it was the chiefs of their own nation who condemned these unfortunate wretches, and who, by imposing upon Spain the dreadful necessity of retaliation, signed the death of their own countrymen when they murdered a Spaniard.” ♦ADDRESS TO THE NATION.♦