so inauspiciously begun! Let not their lordships come to any resolution that can justify Portugal in relaxing her exertions, or Spain in considering her cause as hopeless. Yet what other consequence would result from prematurely withdrawing the British troops from Portugal, or retracting the grounds upon which we had hitherto assisted her?” ♦LORD GRENVILLE;♦ Lord Grenville replied. “He felt it,” he said, “an ungrateful task, ... a painful duty, ... to recal the attention of their lordships to his former predictions, which they had despised and rejected, but which were now, all of them, too fatally fulfilled. His object, however, was not a mere barren censure of past errors, but rather, from a consideration of those errors, to conjure them to rescue the country from a continuance of the same disasters, and to pay some regard to the lives of their fellow-citizens. Were they disposed to sit in that house day after day, and year after year, spectators of wasteful expenditure, and the useless effusion of so much of the best blood of the country, in hopeless, calamitous, and disgraceful efforts? It was a sacred duty imposed upon them to see that not one more life was wasted, not one more drop of blood shed unprofitably, where no thinking man could say that, by any human possibility, such dreadful sacrifices could be made with any prospect of advantage. Was there any man that heard him, who in his conscience believed that even the sacrifice of the whole of that brave British army would secure the kingdom of Portugal? If,” said he, “I receive from any person an answer in the affirmative, I shall be able to judge by that answer of the capacity of such a person for the government of this country, or even for the transaction of public business in a deliberative assembly. By whatever circumstances, ... by whatever kind of fate it was, I must say, that I always thought the object of the enterprise impossible; but now I believe it is known to all the people of this country, that it has become certainly impossible. Was it then too much to ask of their lordships that another million should not be wasted, when nothing short of a divine miracle could render it effectual to its proposed object?” In these strong and explicit terms did Lord Grenville declare his opinion, that it was impossible for a British army to secure Portugal; and thus distinctly did he affirm, that the opinion of a statesman upon this single point was a sufficient test of his capacity for government.