The Portugueze are not so light a people as to be thus easily deceived. They had seen the tender mercies of the French too recently to be duped by their professions, and not more than a sixth part of the inhabitants remained in Porto under their government. If this proof of their ♦OPERATIONS, &C. 183.♦ disposition augured ill for the French, it lessened the difficulty of providing for the city, which was an object of no small anxiety to the captors. They who had undertaken to supply the troops went into the country by night to make their bargains with persons whom they could trust, ♦DO. 206.♦ and the supplies were brought in darkness at a stated hour to a stated place; for if any person had been seen engaged in thus administering to the enemy, his life would have been the penalty of his treason. When the English property was put up to sale, not a person would bid for it: an individual at last ventured to offer about a third part of its value for certain goods, but before four-and-twenty hours had elapsed he absconded, either for the fear of being marked as one who had dealt with the French, or unable ♦OPERATIONS, &C. 205.♦ to bear the shame of having been the only Portugueze in Porto who had thus disgraced himself. ♦MARSHAL SOULT’S VIEWS RESPECTING THE LIBERALS AND THE JEWS.♦ There were, however, in Portugal, as in every country, men who have no other principle than the determination of promoting their own interest by any means; and there were some few who entertained that abject and superstitious faith in Buonaparte’s fortune which his partizans and flatterers every where endeavoured to promote. Some also there were who, in their vehement abhorrence for the besotted despotism and the filthy superstition which degraded their country, had renounced their national feeling and their Christian faith. The scheme of Soult’s policy was to make such persons (whom he supposed more numerous than they were) stand forward as a party, engage them in the irremissible offence of swearing fidelity to Napoleon and obedience to his representative, and employ them in corrupting their countrymen, and in watching and subjugating those whom they could not seduce. For this purpose he had his emissaries in the capital and in the provinces to spread disaffection by representing the abuses and evils both of the civil and ecclesiastical system, ... abuses which it was hardly possible to exaggerate, and evils which in themselves and in their consequences were only more tolerable and less pernicious than the iron tyranny which Buonaparte would have substituted in ♦CAMPAIGN OF 1809 IN THE PENINSULA, 15. DO. APPENDIX A.♦ their place. Marshal Soult had also conceived the strange intention of making the Jews, whose number in Portugal he estimated at 200,000, avow their religion under the protection of France, and hold upon an appointed day a general feast for the success of the Emperor’s arms. It is probable that he overrated