to be burnt; the estates which are to be divided among his satellites; the virgins and matrons who are to be taken to his seraglio; the youths who are to be sent as the tribute to the Minotaur of France! “Spaniards, think not that the Junta speak thus to excite you by the arts of language; what need of words, when things speak for themselves? Your houses are destroyed; your churches demolished; your fields laid waste; your families dispersed and wandering through the country, or hurried into the grave. Have we made so many sacrifices, have the flames of war consumed half Spain, that we should abandon the other half to the far more deadly peace which the enemy prepares for it? For no one will beguile himself with the insidious parade of the improvements which the French hold out. The Tartar who commands them has decreed, that Spain shall have neither industry, nor commerce, nor population, nor political representation whatever: ... to be made a waste and solitary sheep-walk for supplying French manufactures with our wools; to become a nursery of men who may be hurried away to slaughter; such is the destiny which he would impose upon the most highly favoured of all countries! Shall we then, submitting to this, submit also to the destruction of our religion; abandon the interests of heaven and the faith of our fathers to the sacrilegious mockery of these banditti; and forsake the sanctuary which, during seven centuries, and in a thousand and a thousand battles, our forefathers maintained against the Saracens? If we should do this, the victims who perished in that contest would cry to us from their graves, Ungrateful and perfidious race, shall our sacrifices be in vain, and is our blood of no estimation in your eyes? No, patriots! rest in peace, ... and let not that bitter thought disturb the quiet of your sepulchres! “There is no peace, there can be none in this state of things! That Spain may be free, is the universal wish of the nation; and if that cannot be obtained, at least it may become one immense desert, one wide grave, where the accumulated remains of French and Spaniards may exhibit to future ages our glory and their shame. But fortune is not so inimical to virtue as to leave to its defenders only this melancholy termination. It is written in heaven, and the history of all ages attests the truth, that a people who decidedly love their liberty and independence must ultimately establish them, in despite of all the artifice and all the violence of tyranny. Victory, which is so often a gift of fortune, is sooner or later the reward of constancy. What defended the little republics of Greece from the barbarous invasion of Xerxes? What reconstructed the Capitol when it was almost destroyed by the Gauls? What preserved it from the mighty arms of Hannibal? What, in times nearer our own, protected the Swiss from German tyranny, and gave independence to Holland in spite of the power of our ancestors?