No needless severity was used. D. Carlos d’España made known by an edict, that persons of both sexes in that capital carried on a correspondence with those unhappy Spaniards who had followed the French, and that in this manner they supplied the enemy with intelligence; all such communication, therefore, was prohibited to all persons, on pain of being brought before a council of war, and condemned irremissibly to suffer the punishment appointed for spies. The families of the fugitives, and of those who had enriched themselves by the purchase of what the Intrusive Government called national goods, were ordered to remain in their houses under the word of three respectable sureties, and not to leave them except for the purpose of attending their religious duties; but their wives and daughters were advised to retire into a convent, as the course which consisted best with their own honour, and with that of their husbands and fathers, for whom they might there offer up their prayers, supplicating Providence to bring them in its mercy back to the path of duty which they had forsaken. How to deal with the _juramentados_, as those Spaniards were called who had entered into Joseph’s armies, was a question which now became of great importance. Hitherto it had been possible to execute the rigour of the law, and put to death those who were taken in arms against their country; but the tide having now turned, it might reasonably be expected that they would eagerly desert a cause in which they had never heartily engaged; and the policy of thus recruiting the Spanish army, instead of driving these men to despair, was so evident, that Alava, immediately on the occupation of Madrid, issued a proclamation, as commissary for the Government, inviting them to accept the free pardon which the Cortes had offered them on the publication of the new constitution. Great numbers in consequence came over. Another measure of the Intrusive Government, which was not less obvious and dangerous in its possible results, than the scheme of raising a Spanish force to be employed in the subjugation of Spain, was that of selling or otherwise disposing of confiscated houses and lands, and thus binding the new possessors to their allegiance by the only tie which they would not be likely under any circumstances to break. They had contrived thus to connect with the French interest many who would have been unwilling or unable to purchase property of this description; for under pretext of embellishing the capital, they pulled down about a fourth of it, and by way of compensating the owners of the demolished dwellings, assigned among them in exchange the houses of those who adhered to the national cause. This policy the Cortes met by a timely decree, declaring all purchases of confiscated estates null, and empowering the rightful owners to enter upon them whenever the fortune of war should permit, and authorising them to exact from the intrusive proprietors the mean