Then after arguing that time had been lost in arming and disciplining the Portugueze, he relapsed into his strain of unhappy prophecy. “He did not,” he said, “mean to undervalue the services or the character of the Portugueze soldiery, whom he considered as possessing qualities capable of being made useful, but he would never admit that they could form a force competent to the defence of the kingdom; they might be useful in desultory warfare, but must be wholly unfit for co-operation with a regular army. He was not afraid, therefore, of any responsibility that might be incurred by his stating, that if the safety of the British army was to be committed on the expectation of such co-operation, it would be exposed to most imminent and perhaps inevitable hazard. But if these 30,000 men were not composed of undisciplined peasants and raw recruits, but consisted of British troops, in addition to the British army already in Portugal, he should consider it nothing but infatuation to think of defending Portugal, even with such a force. Against a power possessing the whole means of Spain, as he must suppose the French to do at this moment, Portugal was the least defensible of any country in Europe. It had the longest line of frontier, compared with its actual extent, of any other nation; besides, from its narrowness, its line of defence would be more likely to be turned; and an invading enemy would derive great advantages from its local circumstances. As to the means of practical defence afforded by its mountains, he should only ask, whether the experience of the last seventeen years had taught the world nothing; whether its instructive lessons were wholly thrown away? Could it be supposed that a country so circumstanced, with a population without spirit, and a foreign general exercising little short of arbitrary power within it, was capable of any effectual defence?” Lord Grenville concluded this memorable speech, by moving, as an amendment to the usual address, “that the house would without delay enter upon the consideration of these most important subjects, in the present difficult and alarming state of these realms.” ♦EARL OF LIVERPOOL;♦