When Massena retreated the provincial organization of the country was restored, and to encourage the people to sow the devastated districts before the season passed, Mr. Stuart had furnished seed corn on the credit of the coming subsidy; an amnesty for deserters was also published, the feudal imposts for the year were remitted, and fairs were established to supply tools of husbandry; but notwithstanding these efforts, such was the distress, that at Caldas eighty persons died daily, and at Figueras where twelve thousand people, chiefly from Portuguese Estremadura, had taken refuge, the daily deaths were above a hundred, and the whole would have perished but for the active benevolence of major Von Linstow, an officer of general Trant’s staff. Meanwhile the country was so overrun with robbers that the detached officers could not travel in safety upon the service of the army, and Wellington was fearful of being obliged to employ his troops against them. British officers were daily insulted at Lisbon, and even assassinated while on duty with impunity; the whole army was disgusted, the letters to England were engendering in that country a general dislike to the war, and the British soldiers, when not with their regiments, committed a thousand outrages on the line of operations. As a climax to these scenes of misery and mischief, the harvest which had failed in Portugal, failed also in England; and no corn was to be got from the Baltic because there was no specie to pay for it, and bills were refused. Hence the famine spread in a terrible manner until Mr. Stuart obtained leave to license fifty American vessels with corn, whose cargoes were paid for out of funds provided partly by the charity of the people of England, and partly by a parliamentary grant which passed when Massena retreated. In this crisis the British cabinet granted an additional subsidy to Portugal, but from the scarcity of specie, the greatest part of it was paid in kind, and the distress of the regency for money was scarcely lessened; for these supplies merely stood in the place of the plunder which had hitherto prevailed in the country. Thus Mr. Canning’s prodigality, Mr. Vansittart’s paper system, and Mr. Perceval’s economy, all combined to press upon the British general, and to use his own words, he was supplied with only one-sixth part of the money necessary to keep the great machine going which had been set in motion. Mr. Perceval however, in answer to his remonstrances, employed a secretary of the Treasury to prove in a laboured paper, founded entirely upon false data, that the army had been over-supplied, and must have money to spare. But that minister, whose speeches breathed nothing but the final destruction of France, designed to confine the efforts of England to the defence of Portugal alone, without any regard to the rest of the Peninsula. [Sidenote: Mr. Stuart’s papers, MSS.]