The requisitions were enforced by a system of terror. A magistrate was ordered to provide for the troops, and was told that the latter would, in case of failure, take the provisions and punish the village or district in a variety of ways. Now were it expedient to follow this mode of requisition there must be two armies, one to fight the enemy and one to enforce the requisitions, for the Spaniards would never submit to such proceedings without the use of force. The conscription gave the French armies a more moral description of soldiers, but even if this second army was provided, the British troops could not be trusted to inflict an exact measure of punishment on a disobedient village, they would plunder it as well as the others readily enough, but their principal object would be to get at and drink as much liquor as they could, and then to destroy as much valuable property as should fall in their way; meanwhile the objects of their mission, the bringing of supplies to the army and the infliction of an exact measure of punishment on the magistrates or district would not be accomplished at all. Moreover the holders of supplies in Spain being unused to commercial habits, would regard payment for these requisitions by bills of any description, to be rather worse than the mode of contribution followed by the French, and would resist it as forcibly. And upon such a nice point did the war hang, that if they accepted the bills, and were once to discover the mode of procuring cash for them by discounting high, it would be the most fatal blow possible to the credit and resources of the British army in the Peninsula. The war would then soon cease.