The province was in a miserable state: though the population had increased from the end of the Succession war till the beginning of Charles IV.’s reign, it had diminished since that time, owing to causes which have not been explained. There were 150 deserted villages in it, and nearly 400 in which a few houses were all that remained, ... this, not in consequence of the existing war, but of the preceding decay. Yet before the invasion, Aragon exported corn, wine, and oil to Catalonia on one side, and to Navarre on the other: to that export the war had put an end; fields, and vineyards, and oliveyards, had been laid waste; and an enormous consumption of sheep by the armies had almost destroyed the only kind of cattle which in that country could be depended on for food. It had been drained of money also both by the national and intrusive governments: before the siege of Zaragoza, three millions of francs had been remitted to Seville; and the spoils of the suppressed convents to the amount of a million _reales_ and 3000 marks of silver had been afterwards sent to Joseph’s treasury at Madrid. Very many families, and among them all the wealthiest, had emigrated, taking with them all the specie they could collect, ... the miserable remains of their fortunes. Trade had suffered in the same degree as agriculture; there were no manufacturers left; and from a province in this condition, which in its best times paid only four million francs to its native government, eight millions were to be raised for the annual pay of the troops alone. Suchet began by levying an extraordinary contribution per month, which ♦SYSTEM OF THE FRENCH GENERAL.♦ more than doubled in amount the tax in ordinary times; the mode of collecting was prepared for him by a regulation of Philip V., who, as a punishment upon the three provinces of Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia, for their adherence to his opponent the Archduke Charles, had subjected them to a property tax, taking from them the privilege which they had formerly possessed of taxing themselves. It might have been thought impossible to wring this additional impost from a ruined people; but the hoards of prudence, of selfishness, and of misery are opened at such times, and what has been withheld from the pressing necessities of a just cause, is yielded to a domineering enemy; and Suchet, while he insisted to the utmost upon the law of the strongest, and regarded no other law, had clear views of the policy by which obedience to that law is to be facilitated or conciliated. No compunction withheld him from any crime which he deemed it expedient to commit; but he would do good as well as evil, and perhaps more willingly, when it accorded with his purpose; and worldly wisdom producing the effect of better motives might under other circumstances have made him a beneficent ruler. He abolished monopolies, by retaining which nothing was to be gained; he sent for his wife from France, to conciliate the Aragonese ladies by her means,