Yet it must be admitted that the errors of the Junta were more attributable to the character of the nation than of the individuals; and those individuals were placed in circumstances of unexampled difficulty. Four-and-thirty men, most of them strangers to each other, and unaccustomed to public business, were brought together to govern a nation in the most perilous crisis of its history, without any thing to direct them except their own judgement, and almost without any other means than what the patriotism of the people could supply. They had troops indeed, but undisciplined, unofficered, unprovided, half armed, and half clothed. The old system of government was broken up, the new one was yet to be formed. They had neither commissariat nor treasury; the first donations and imposts were exhausted; so also were the supplies which England had liberally given, and those from America had not yet arrived. Added to these difficulties, and worse than all, was that dreadful state of moral and social anarchy into which the nation had been thrown, and which was such that no man knew in whom he could confide. To poison food or water in time of war is a practice which all people, who are not absolute savages, have pronounced infamous by common consent; but it is a light crime compared to the means which Buonaparte employed for the subjugation of Spain,--means which poisoned the well-springs of social order, and loosened the very joints and fibres of society. Morla, when he betrayed his country, committed an act of treason against human nature. The evil had been great before, but when a Judas Iscariot had been found in Morla during the agony of Spain, in whom could the people confide? “Suspicion,” says Jovellanos, “and hatred were conceived and spread with frightful facility. How many generals, nobles, prelates, magistrates, and lawyers, were regarded with distrust, either because of their old relations with Godoy, or because they were connected with some of the new partizans of the tyranny; or for the weakness, or indecision, or ambiguity of their conduct; or for the calumnies and insinuations which rivalship and envy excited against them! It was considered as a crime to have gone to Bayonne, to have remained at Madrid, or resided in other places which were occupied by the intrusive government; to have submitted to swear allegiance to it, to have obeyed its orders, or to have suffered even compulsively its yoke and its contempt. What reputation was secure? Who was not exposed to the attacks of envy, to the imputations of calumny, and to the violence of an agitated populace?”