Joseph was a man of so amiable a nature, that even the Spaniards never accused him of any thing worse than being too convivial; but it is evident that he was unequal to his task and mistook his true situation, when, resisting Napoleon’s policy, he claimed the treatment of an independent king. He should have known that he was a tool, and in Spain, could only be a tool of the emperor’s. To have refused a crown, like his brother Lucien, would have been heroic firmness, but like his brother Louis, first to accept, and then to resist the hand that conferred it, was a folly that, without ameliorating the condition of the Spaniards, threw fatal obstacles in Napoleon’s path. Joseph’s object was to create a Spanish party for himself by gentle and just means, but the scales fell from the hands of justice when the French first entered the Peninsula, and while the English supported Spain, it was absurd to expect even a sullen submission, much less attachment from a nation so abused, neither was it possible to recast public feeling, until the people had passed through the furnace of war. The French soldiers were in Spain for conquest, and without them the intrusive monarch could not keep his throne. [Sidenote: Appendix, No. IV. Section 1.] Now Joseph’s Spanish ministers, were men who joined him upon principle, and who, far from shewing a renegado zeal in favour of the French, were as ardently attached to their own country, as any of those who shouted for Ferdinand VII.; and whenever Spanish interests clashed (and that was constantly) with those of the French armies, they as well as the king invariably supported the former; and so strenuously, that in Paris it was even supposed that they intended to fall on the emperor’s troops. Thus civil contention weakened the military operations, and obliged Napoleon either to take the command in person, or to adopt a policy which however defective, will upon inspection prove perhaps, to have been the best adapted to the actual state of affairs. He suffered, or as some eager to lower a great man’s genius to their own level, have asserted, he fomented disputes between the marshals and the king, but the true question is, could he prevent those disputes? A wise policy, does not consist in pushing any one point to the utmost perfection of which it may be susceptible, but in regulating and balancing opposing interests, in such a manner, that the greatest benefit shall arise from the working of the whole.