The _dezembargador_, Joam Gaudencio Torres, and Mr. Croft (one of a family which had been long established at Porto, and who was subsequently attached to the British legation) accepted the charge of distributing this grant, and for that purpose, of visiting the districts which had been ravaged, and seeing in person to the distribution. It required no common degree of humanity, and no ordinary strength of heart, to undertake so painful an office. The time, it may be hoped, is approaching, when the usages of war will as little be admitted before man, as a plea for having destroyed the innocent and the helpless, as it will before God. Massena had gone to the utmost limits of that dreadful plea before he broke up from his position. Opposite to the house in which he had fixed his own quarters at Santarem were the ruins of a church, into which a number of wretched children, whose parents had perished, and who were themselves perishing for hunger, had crept, that they might lie down and ♦CHILDREN FAMISHED AT SANTAREM.♦ die. They were found there by the first British troops who entered the town, stretched upon straw and rubbish ... the dying and the dead together, reduced to skeletons before they died. When the officer, who relates this in his journal, saw them, pieces of bread which our soldiers had given these poor orphans were lying untouched before many who were incapable of eating, and some who had breathed their last. Multitudes, indeed, had been famished before he abandoned his hopes of conquest; but for the subsequent conduct of that merciless general and his army no military motives can be assigned ... none but what are purely malignant and devilish. Marshal Massena had formerly declared, that if he could land with an army in England, he would pledge himself, not indeed to effect the conquest of the country, but to reduce it to a desert. In Portugal it was proved that out of the wickedness of his heart his lips had then spoken; for on his retreat, he endeavoured, in perfect conformity with the political system of his emperor, to increase by every possible means the horrors of war and the sum of human suffering. The cruelties which were perpetrated by that retreating army formed but a little part of the evils they inflicted upon the brave nation which had successfully ♦STATE IN WHICH THE FRENCH LEFT THE COUNTRY THEY HAD OCCUPIED.♦ resisted them; and in the districts which they devastated, the inhabitants who perished under their hands were less to be compassionated than those who survived. The famine which they intentionally produced, by destroying every thing in the course of their retreat and within reach of their power, continued to depopulate the country long after it was delivered from its enemies. Endemic diseases were produced by want of food and of raiment, by exposure, by grief, and hopeless wretchedness. The hospitals, with which Portugal abounded, had shared the general destruction: many had