WHEN Napoleon, Aug. 3, 1808, heard at Bordeaux that the Spaniards had captured Dupont’s army at Baylen and Rosily’s ships at Cadiz, and had thrown eighty thousand French troops back upon the Pyrenees, his anger was great; but his perplexity was much greater. In a character so interesting as that of Napoleon, the moments of perplexity were best worth study; and in his career no single moment occurred when he had more reason to call upon his genius for a resource than when he faced at Bordeaux the failure of his greatest scheme. From St. Petersburg to Gibraltar every shopkeeper knew that England had escaped, and all believed that no combination either of force or fraud could again be made with reasonable hope of driving her commerce from its channels. On this belief every merchant, as well as every government in the world, was actually shaping calculations. Napoleon also must shape his calculations on theirs, since he had failed to force theirs into the path of his own. The escape of England made useless the machinery he had created for her ruin. Spain, Russia, and Austria had little value for his immediate object, except as their control was necessary for the subjection of England; and the military occupation of Spain beyond the Ebro became worse than a blunder from the moment when Cadiz and Lisbon, Cuba and Mexico, Brazil and Peru threw themselves into England’s arms.[18] More than once this history has shown that Napoleon never hesitated to throw aside a plan which had miscarried. If he did not in the autumn of 1808 throw aside his Spanish schemes, the reason could only be that he saw no other resource, and that in his belief his power would suffer too much from the shock of admitting failure. He showed unusual signs of vacillation, and of a desire to escape the position into which his miscalculations had led him. Instead of going at once to Spain and restoring order to his armies, he left his brother helpless at Vittoria while he passed three months in negotiations looking toward peace with England. In September he went to Germany, where he met the Czar of Russia at Erfurt, and induced Alexander, or consented to his inducement, to join in an autograph letter to the King of England, marked by the usual Napoleonic character, and offering the principle of _uti possidetis_ as the preliminary to a general peace. England regarded this advance as deceptive, and George Canning was never more successful than in the gesture of self-restrained contempt with which he tossed back the letter that Napoleon and Alexander had presumed to address to a constitutional King of England; but even Canning could hardly suppose that Napoleon would invite an insult without a motive. From whatever side Napoleon approached the situation he could invent no line of conduct which did not imply the triumph of England. Study the problem as he might, he could not escape from the political and military disadvantages he incurred from the Spanish uprising. Without