men, who will go into a great town, will take the letters from the post, will seize the richest citizens, their letters, papers, gazettes, &c. It is beyond doubt, that even in the French lines, the inhabitants are all informed of what passes; of course, out of that line, they know more; what, then, should prevent you from seizing the principal men? Let them be sent back again without being ill treated. It is a fact, that when we are not in a desert, but in a peopled country, if the general is not well instructed, it is because he is ignorant of his trade. The services which the inhabitants render to an enemy’s general, are never given from affection, nor even to get money. The truest method to obtain them is by safeguards and protections to preserve their lives, their goods, their towns, or their monasteries!” [Sidenote: Appendix, No. 6.] Joseph, although by no means a dull man, seems to have had no portion of his brother’s martial genius, and the operations recommended by the latter did not appear to the king to be applicable to the state of affairs. He did not adopt them, but proposed others; in discussing which, he thus defended the policy of his retreat from Madrid. “When the _defection_ of twenty-two thousand men (Dupont’s) caused the king to quit the capital, the disposable troops remaining were divided in three corps: that immediately about his person; that of marshal Bessieres; and that of general Verdier, then besieging Zaragoza: but these bodies were spread over a hundred leagues of ground, and with the last the king had little or no connexion. His first movement was to unite the two former at Burgos, and afterwards to enter into communication with the third. The line of defence on the Ebro was adopted.” This operation Joseph affirmed to have been dictated by sound reason.--Because “when the events of Andalusia foreboded a regular and serious war, prudence did not permit three corps, the strongest of which was only eighteen thousand men, to separate to a greater distance than six days’ march, in the midst of eleven millions of people in a state of hostility. But fifty thousand French could defend with success a line of sixty leagues, guarding the two grand communications of Burgos and Tudela, against enemies who had not, up to that period, been able to carry to either point above twenty-five thousand men; because fifteen thousand French could be united upon either.”