After touching upon the convention of Cintra and Sir John Moore’s retreat, he spoke of the impolicy of our conduct in Portugal. “If those,” he said, “who had the management of public affairs had possessed any wisdom, any capacity for enlightened policy in the regulation of a nation’s interests and constitution, any right or sound feelings with regard to the happiness of their fellow-creatures, here had been a wide field opening to them. They had got possession of the kingdom of our ally, with its government dissolved, and no means existing within it for the establishment of any regular authority or civil administration, but such as the British government alone should suggest. Here had been a glorious opportunity for raising the Portugueze nation from that wretched and degraded condition to which a lengthened succession of mental ignorance, civil oppression, and political tyranny and prostitution had reduced it. Was not that an opportunity, which any men capable of enlarged and liberal views of policy, and influenced by any just feelings for the interests of their fellow-creatures, would have eagerly availed themselves of? Would not such men have seized with avidity the favourable occasion to rescue the country from that ignorance and political debasement, which rendered the inhabitants incapable of any public spirit or national feeling? Here was a task worthy of the greatest statesmen; here was an object, in the accomplishment of which there were no talents so transcendant, no capacity so enlarged, no ability so comprehensive, that might not have been well, and beneficially, and gloriously employed. It was a work well suited to a wise and liberal policy, to an enlarged and generous spirit, to every just feeling and sound principle of national interest, ... to impart the blessings of a free government to the inhabitants of a country so long oppressed and disgraced by the greatest tyranny that had ever existed in any nation of Europe.”