The commotion of Aranjuez had undeceived the French emperor; he perceived that he was engaged in a delicate enterprise, and that the people he had to deal with were any thing but tame and quiescent under insult. Determined, however, to persevere, he pursued his political intrigues, and, without relinquishing the hope of a successful termination to the affair by such means, he arranged a profound plan of military operations, and so distributed his forces, that, at the moment when Spain was pouring forth her swarthy bands, the masses of the French army were concentrated upon the most important points, and combined in such a manner, that, from their central position they had the power of overwhelming each separate province, no three of which could act in concert without first beating a French corps; and if any of the Spanish armies succeeded in routing a French force, the remaining corps of the latter could unite without difficulty, and retreat without danger. It was the skill of this disposition which enabled seventy thousand men, covering a great extent of country, to brave the simultaneous fury of a whole nation: an army less ably distributed would have been trampled under foot, and lost amidst the tumultuous uproar of eleven millions of people. [Sidenote: Historia de la Guerra contra Napoleon Buonaparte.] The inconvenience in a political point of view that would have arisen from suffering a regular army to take the field was evident. To have been able to characterise the opposition of the Spanish people as a partial insurrection of peasants, instigated by some evil-disposed persons to act against the wishes of the respectable part of the nation, would have given some colour to the absorbing darkness of the invasion: but to have permitted that which was at first an insurrection of peasants to take the form and consistence of regular armies and methodical warfare, would have been a military error, and dangerous in the extreme. Napoleon, who well knew that scientific war is only a wise application of force, laughed at the delusion of those who regarded the want of a regular army as a favourable circumstance, and who hailed the undisciplined peasant as the more certain defender of the country. He knew that a general insurrection can never last long, that it is a military anarchy, and incapable of real strength: he knew that it was the disciplined battalions of Valley Forge, not the volunteers of Lexington, that established American independence; that it was the veterans of Arcole and Marengo, not the republicans of Valmy, that fixed the fate of the French revolution; and consequently his efforts were directed to hinder the Spaniards from drawing together any great body of regular soldiers; an event that might easily happen, for the gross amount of the organized Spanish force was, in the month of May, about one hundred and twenty-seven thousand men of all arms. Fifteen thousand of these were in Holstein, under