However amidst all the varying subjects of interest the insane project of reducing the colonies by force, remained a favourite with all parties; nor was it in relation to the colonies only, that these men, who were demanding aid from other nations, in the names of freedom, justice, and humanity, proved themselves to be devoid of those attributes themselves. “The humane object of the abolition of the slave-trade has been frustrated,” said lord Castlereagh, “because not only Spanish subjects but Spanish public officers and governors, in various parts of the Spanish colonies, are instrumental to, and accomplices in the crimes of the contraband slave-traders of Great Britain and America, furnishing them with flags, papers, and solemn documents to entitle them to the privileges of Spanish cruizers, and to represent their property as Spanish.” With respect to the war in Spain itself, all manner of mischief was abroad. The regular cavalry had been entirely destroyed, and when, with the secret permission of their own government, some distinguished Austrian officers, proffered their services to the regency, to restore that arm, they were repelled. Nearly all the field-artillery had been lost in action, the arsenals at Cadiz were quite exhausted, and most of the heavy guns on the works of the Isla were rendered unserviceable by constant and useless firing; the stores of shot were diminished in an alarming manner, no sums were appropriated to the support of the founderies, and when the British artillery officers made formal representations of this dangerous state of affairs, it only produced a demand of money from England to put the founderies into activity. To crown the whole, Abadia, recalled from Gallicia, at the express desire of sir Henry Wellesley because of his bad conduct, was now made minister of war. In Ceuta, notwithstanding the presence of a small British force, the Spanish garrison, the galley-slaves, and the prisoners of war who were allowed to range at large, joined in a plan for delivering that place to the Moors; not from a treacherous disposition in the two first, but to save themselves from starving, a catastrophe which was only staved off by frequent assistance from the magazines of Gibraltar. Ceuta might have been easily acquired by England at this period, in exchange for the debt due by Spain, and general Campbell urged it to lord Liverpool, but he rejected the proposal, fearing to awaken popular jealousy. The notion, however, came originally from the people themselves, and that jealousy which lord Liverpool feared, was already in full activity, being only another name for the democratic spirit rising in opposition to the aristocratic principle upon which England afforded her assistance to the Peninsula.