The people are for him like a mute herd of cattle; he pens them up, or drives them before him with his terrible sword. Add to this the French spirit, the French character, which, in his pride of a founder of a great empire, he wished to force upon all Europe, together with his own code of laws. God has imparted to each of the various nations a character which is its own; for good or for evil, it is unwise to run counter to it. Germany has its own morals and manners; Spain has its inveterate habits--perhaps they dispose to indolence--but what is that to strangers? Uniformity may be a plausible idea in mathematics; but in the moral organization of the human kind, harmony is the result of diversities.” What is probably a typical summing up of the case from the distinctly British point of view is afforded us in a letter written by Francis Horner on the 13th June 1808, in which he says: “I cannot but rejoice that a people who bear such a name as the Spaniards should make a struggle at least for their independence; the example cannot be otherwise than beneficial, even if they should entirely fail, to their posterity at some future day, and to all the rest of mankind. It is the most detestable of all the enormities into which Bonaparte’s love of dominion has plunged him, and more completely devoid than any other of all the pretence of provocation or security. If I were a Spaniard, I should consider resistance, however desperate in its chances of success, and however bloody in its immediate operation, as an indispensable duty of discretion and expediency; to put the proposition in its most frigid form of expression.... What a moment for a Spaniard of political and military genius!”