“I call your highness’s attention,” he said, “to the state of your troops and of all your establishments; the army of operations has been unpaid since September, the garrisons since June, the militia since February 1812. The transport service has never been regularly paid, and has received nothing since June. To these evils I have in vain called the attention of the local government, and I am now going to open a new campaign, with troops to whom greater arrears of pay are due than when the last campaign terminated, although the subsidy from Great Britain, granted especially for the maintenance of those troops, has been regularly and exactly furnished; and although it has been proved that the revenue for the last three months has exceeded, by a third, any former quarter. The honour of your highness’s arms, the cause of your allies, is thus seriously affected, and the uniform refusal of the governors of the kingdom to attend to any one of the measures which I have recommended, either for permanent or temporal relief, has at last obliged me to go as a complainant into your royal highness’s presence, for here I cannot prevail against the influence of the chief of the treasury. “I have recommended the entire reform of the customs system, but it has only been partially carried into effect. I have advised a method of actually and really collecting the taxes, and of making the rich merchants, and capitalists, pay the tenth of their annual profits as an extraordinary contribution for the war. I declare that no person knows better than I do, the sacrifices and the sufferings of your people, for there is no one for the last four years has lived so much amongst those people; but it is a fact, sir, that the great cities, and even some of the smallest places, have gained by the war and the mercantile class has enriched itself; there are divers persons in Lisbon and Oporto who have amassed immense sums. Now your government is, both from remote and recent circumstances, unable to draw resources from the capitalists by loans; it can only draw upon them by taxes. It is not denied that the regular tributes nor the extraordinary imposts on the mercantile profits are evaded; it is not denied that the measures I have proposed, vigorously carried into execution, would furnish the government with pecuniary resources, and it remains for that government to inform your highness, why they have neither enforced my plans, nor any others which the necessity of the times calls for. They fear to become unpopular, but such is the knowledge I have of the people’s good sense and loyalty, such my zeal for the cause, that I have offered to become responsible for the happy issue, and to take upon myself all the odium of enforcing my own measures. I have offered in vain!