5º. The two circumstances that principally contributed to the success of the defence were, first, the bad discipline of the French soldiers; and secondly, the system of terror which was established by the Spanish leaders, whoever those leaders were. Few soldiers can be restrained from plunder when a town is taken by assault; yet there is no period when the chances of war are so sudden and so decisive, none where the moral responsibility of a general is so great. Will military regulations alone secure the necessary discipline at such a moment? The French army are not deficient in a stern code, and the English army, taken altogether, is probably the best regulated of modern times; but here it is seen that Lefebre failed to take Zaragoza in default of discipline; and in the course of this work it will appear that no wild horde of Tartars ever fell with more licence upon their rich effeminate neighbours than did the English troops upon the Spanish towns taken by storm. The inference to be drawn is, that national institutions alone will produce that moral discipline necessary to make a soldier capable of fulfilling his whole duty; yet a British statesman[8] was not ashamed to declare in parliament that the worst men make the best soldiers; and this odious, narrow-minded, unworthy maxim, had its admirers. That a system of terror was at Zaragoza successfully employed to protract the defence is undoubted. The commandant of Monte Torrero, ostensibly for suffering himself to be defeated, but according to some, for the gratification of private malice, was tried and put to death; and a general of artillery was in a more summary manner killed without any trial; the chief engineer, a man of skill and undaunted courage, was arbitrarily imprisoned; and the slightest word or even gesture of discontent, was punished with instant death. A stern band of priests and plebeian leaders, in whose hands Palafox was a tool, ruled with such furious energy, that resistance to the enemy was less dangerous than disobedience to their orders. Suspicion was the warrant of death, and this system once begun, ceased not until the town was taken in the second siege. CHAPTER VI. OPERATIONS IN CATALONIA. [Sidenote: Cabanes, 1st Part.] When Barcelona fell into the power of the French, the Spanish garrison amounted to nearly four thousand men; but Duhesme daily fearing a riot in the city, connived at their escape in parties, and even sent the regiment of Estremadura (which was eight hundred strong) entire to Lerida, where, strange to relate, the gates were shut against it; and thus, discarded by both parties, it made its way into Zaragoza during the siege of that place. Many thousand citizens also fled from Barcelona, and joined the patriotic standards in the neighbouring provinces. [Sidenote: Napoleon’s Notes, Appendix, No. 2.] [Sidenote: Cabanes, 1st Part.]