1º. This expedition to the Alentejo was an operation of military police, rather than a campaign. Junot wished to repress the spirit of insurrection by sudden and severe examples. The actions of general Loison were therefore of necessity harsh, but they have been represented as a series of massacres and cruelties of the most revolting nature, because he himself disseminated such stories in order to increase the terror which it was the object of his expedition to create; and the credulity of the nation that produced the Sebastianists was not easily shocked. The Portuguese eagerly listened to tales so derogatory to their enemies and congenial to their own revengeful disposition. The anecdotes of French barbarity current for two years after the convention of Cintra, were notoriously false. The same story being related by persons remote from each other, is no argument of their truth. The reports that Loison was captured on his march from Almeida, reached Junot through fifty different channels; there were men to declare that they had beheld him bound with cords, others to tell how he had been entrapped, some named the places he had been carried through in triumph, and his habitual and characteristic expressions were quoted. The story was complete and the parts were consistent; yet the whole was not only false, but the rumour had not even the slightest foundation of truth. 2º. The Portuguese accounts of the events of this period are but angry amplifications of every real or pretended act of French barbarity and injustice, and the crimes of individuals are made matter of accusation against the whole army. The French accounts are more plausible, but scarcely more safe as authorities, seeing that they are written by men, who being for the most part actors in the scenes they describe, are naturally concerned to defend their own characters: their military vanity also has had its share in disguising the simple facts of the insurrection; for willing to enhance the merit of the troops, they have exaggerated the number of the insurgents, the obstinacy of the combats, and the loss of the patriots. English party writers, greedily fixing upon such relations, have changed the name of battle into massacre; and thus prejudice, conceit, and clamour, have combined, to violate the decorum of history, and to perpetuate error. [Sidenote: Napoleon in Las Casas.]