Such was his reasoning but it had little effect on his persecutors; for when his best men were falling by hundreds, his brightest visions of glory fading on the smoky walls of Burgos, he was again forced to examine and refute anew, voluminous plans of Portuguese finance, concocted by Funchal and Villiers, with notes by Vansittart. All the old schemes of the Principal Souza, which had been so often before analyzed and rejected as impracticable, were revived with the addition of a mixed Anglo-Portuguese commission for the sale of the crown and church lands. And these projects were accompanied with complaints that frauds had been practised on the custom-house, and violence used towards the inhabitants by the British commissaries, and it was insinuated such misconduct had been the real cause of the financial distresses of Portugal. The patient industry of genius was never more severely taxed. Wellington began by repelling the charges of exactions and frauds, as applied to the army; he showed that to reform the custom-house so as to prevent frauds, had been his unceasing recommendation to the Portuguese government; that he had as repeatedly, and in detail, shewed the government, how to remedy the evils they complained of, how to increase their customs, how to levy their taxes, how in fine to arrange their whole financial system in a manner that would have rendered their revenues equal to their expenses, and without that oppression and injustice which they were in the habit of practising; for the extortions and violence complained of, were not perpetrated by the English but by the Portuguese commissariat, and yet the troops of that nation were starving. Having exposed Funchal’s ignorance of financial facts in detail, and challenged him to the proof of the charges against the British army, he entered deeply into the consideration of the great question of the sale of the crown and church lands, which it had been proposed to substitute for that economy and reform of abuses which he so long, so often, and so vainly had pressed upon the regency. The proposal was not quite new. “I have already,” he observed, “had before me a proposition for the sale or rather transfer, to the creditors of the ‘_Junta de Viveres_’ of crown lands; but these were the uncultivated lands in Alemtejo, and I pointed out to the government the great improbability that any body would take such lands in payment, and the injury that would be done to the public credit by making the scheme public if not likely to be successful. My opinion is that there is nobody in Portugal possessed of capital who entertains, or who ought to entertain, such an opinion of the state of affairs in the Peninsula, as to lay out his money in the purchase of crown lands. The loss of a battle, not in the Peninsula even, but elsewhere, would expose his estate to confiscation, or at all events to ruin by a fresh incursion of the enemy. Even if any man could believe that Portugal is secure