Having thus provided for the financial difficulties of Portugal, the ministers turned their attention to the supply of the British army, and in the same spirit concocted what they called a modified system of requisitions after the manner of the French armies! Their speeches, their manifestoes, their whole scheme of policy, which in the working had nearly crushed the liberties of England and had plunged the whole world into war; that policy whose aim and scope was, they said, to support established religion, the rights of monarchs, and the independence of nations, was now disregarded or forgotten. Yes, these men, to remove difficulties caused by their own incapacity and negligence, were ready to adopt all that they had before condemned and reviled in the French; they were eager to meddle, and in the most offensive manner, with the catholic religion, by getting from the nuncio, who was in their power, what they could not get from the pope voluntarily; they were ready to interfere with the rights of the Portuguese crown by selling its property, and finally they would have adopted that system of requisitions which they had so often denounced as rendering the very name of France abhorrent to the world. All these schemes were duly transmitted to lord Wellington and to Mr. Stuart, and the former had, in the field, to unravel the intricacies, to detect the fallacies, and to combat the wild speculations of men, who, in profound ignorance of facts, were giving a loose to their imaginations on such complicated questions of state. It was while preparing to fight Marmont that he had to expose the futility of relying upon a loan; it was on the heights of San Christoval, on the field of battle itself, that he demonstrated the absurdity of attempting to establish a Portuguese bank; it was in the trenches of Burgos that he dissected Funchal’s and Villiers’s schemes of finance, and exposed the folly of attempting the sale of church property; it was at the termination of the retreat that with a mixture of rebuke and reasoning he quelled the proposal to live by forced requisitions; and on each occasion he shewed himself as well acquainted with these subjects as he was with the mechanism of armies.