The whole force of Spain in arms was at this period about one hundred and sixty thousand men. Of this number not more than fifty thousand were available for operations in the field, and those only because they were paid clothed and armed by England, and kept together by the ability and vigour of the English general. He had proposed when at Cadiz an arrangement for the civil and political government of the provinces rescued from the French, with a view to the supply of the armies, but his plan was rejected and his repeated representations of the misery the army and the people endured under the system of the Spanish government were unheeded. Certain districts were allotted for the support of each army, yet, with a jealous fear of military domination, the government refused the captain-generals of those districts the necessary powers to draw forth the resources of the country, powers which lord Wellington recommended that they should have, and wanting which the whole system was sure to become a nullity. Each branch of administration was thus conducted by chiefs independent in their attributes, yet each too restricted in authority, generally at variance with one another, and all of them neglectful of their duty. The evil effect upon the troops was thus described by the English general as early as August. “More than half of Spain has been cleared of the enemy above a year, and the whole of Spain excepting Catalonia and a small part of Aragon since the months of May and June last. The most abundant harvest has been reaped in all parts of the country; millions of money spent by the contending armies are circulating every where, and yet your armies however weak in numbers are literally starving. The allied British and Portuguese armies under my command have been subsisted, particularly latterly, almost exclusively upon the magazines imported by sea, and I am concerned to inform your excellency, that besides money for the pay of all the armies, which has been given from the military chest of the British army and has been received from no other quarter, the British magazines have supplied quantities of provisions to all the Spanish armies in order to enable them to remain in the field at all. And notwithstanding this assistance I have had the mortification of seeing the Spanish troops on the outposts, obliged to plunder the nut and apple-trees for subsistence, and to know that the Spanish troops, employed in the blockade of Pampeluna and Santona, were starving upon half an allowance of bread, while the enemy whom they were blockading were at the same time receiving their full allowance. The system then is insufficient to procure supplies for the army and at the same time I assure your excellency that it is the most oppressive and injurious to the country that could be devised. It cannot be pretended that the country does not produce the means of maintaining the men necessary for its defence; those means are undoubtedly superabundant, and the