There was an English spirit in this speech, such as might have been looked for from Mr. Windham: for if sometimes he seemed to delight in making with perverse ingenuity the worse appear the better reason, and treated as a sport for the intellect subjects which deserved a serious and severe feeling, no political views or enmities ever betrayed him into an unworthy act, or sentiment inconsistent with his natural generosity. The motion for inquiry was rejected; but whatever papers were called for were granted, though Lord Liverpool warned his opponents, that if they insisted upon making ♦SIR JOHN MOORE’S DISPATCHES.♦ some of these documents public, they would perceive the impropriety when it was too late. They found in these papers what they wanted, ... an assertion broadly made by Sir John Moore, “that the Spaniards had neither the power nor the inclination to make any efforts for themselves. To convince the people of England, as well as the rest of Europe, of this,” he said, “it was necessary to risk his army, and for that reason he made the march to Sahagun. As a diversion,” he continued, “it succeeded. I brought the whole disposable force of the French against this army, and it has been allowed to follow me, without a single movement being made to favour my retreat. The people of Galicia, though armed, made no attempt to stop the passage of the French through the mountains. They abandoned their dwellings at our approach, drove away their carts, oxen, and every thing that could be of the smallest aid to the army. The consequence has been, that our sick have been left behind: and when our horses or mules failed, which, on such marches, and through such a country, was the case to a great extent, baggage, ammunition, stores, and even money, were necessarily destroyed or abandoned.” This was a heavy charge against the Spaniards, and it was triumphantly repeated by those who, being the opponents of ministry, became thereby the enemies of the Spanish cause. Yet it might have occurred to them that it was neither generous nor prudent to reproach an undisciplined peasantry for not attempting to defend defiles through which the finest army that had ever left England, with a man who was supposed to be their best general at its head, was retreating faster than ever army had retreated before. If these passes were not defensible, why should the Galicians be condemned for not defending them? If they were, why did the British army run through, leaving their baggage, stores, and ammunition, their money, their horses, their sick, their dying, and their dead, to track the way?