Reform abuses, raise your actual taxes with vigour and impartiality, pay your present debt before you contract a new one, was his constant reply to the propositions for loans. And when the English ministers pressed the other plans, which, besides the bank, included a recoinage of dollars into cruzados, in other words the depreciation of the silver standard, he with an unsparing hand laid their folly bare. The military and political state of Portugal he said was such that no man in his senses, whether native or foreigner, would place his capital where he could not withdraw it at a moment’s notice. When Massena invaded that country unreasonable despondency had prevailed amongst the ministers, and now they seemed to have a confidence as wild as their former fear; but he who knew the real state of affairs; he who knew the persons that were expected to advance money; he who knew the relative forces of the contending armies, the advantages and disadvantages attending each; he who knew the absolute weakness of the Portuguese frontier as a line of defence, could only laugh at the notion that the capitalists would take gold out of their own chests to lodge it in the chests of the bank and eventually in those of the Portuguese treasury, a treasury deservedly without credit. The French armies opposed to him in the field (he was then on San Christoval) were, he said, just double his own strength, and a serious accident to Ballesteros, a rash general with a bad army, would oblige the Anglo-Portuguese force to retire into Portugal and the prospects of the campaign would vanish; and this argument left out of the question any accident which might happen to himself or general Hill. Portugal would, he hoped, be saved but its security was not such as these visionaries would represent it. But they had proposed also a British security, in jewels, for the capital of their bank, and their reasonings on this head were equally fallacious. This security was to be supported by collecting the duties on wines, exported from Portugal to England, and yet they had not even ascertained whether the existence of these duties was conformable to the treaty with England. Then came the former question. Would Great Britain guarantee the capital of the subscribers whether Portugal was lost or saved? If the country should be lost, the new possessors would understand the levying the duties upon wines as well as the old; would England make her drinkers of port pay two duties, the one for the benefit of the bank capitalists, the other for the benefit of the French conquerors? If all these difficulties could be got over, a bank would be the most efficacious mode in which England could use her credit for the benefit of Portugal; but all the other plans proposed were mere spendthrift schemes to defray the expenses of the war, and if the English government could descend to entertain them they would fail, because the real obstacle, scarcity of specie, would remain.