that was being committed. But Napoleon's otherwise keen intellect was intoxicated with success. His genius was drugged with pride; it was ruled by a superstitious belief in his "star."

Meanwhile, Napoleon, utterly blind as to the future, found a childish delight in his new kingdom. He was busy reckoning up how much gold Mexico would yield him, what tribute Spain. He saw, with the eye of fancy, new fleets coming into existence. France had, even after Trafalgar, forty-two line-ofbattle ships; the Baltic Powers, Napoleon reckoned, would give him fifty-four; Spain, thirty-five. Here was a fleet of 131 ships of the line, as he explained to his somewhat sceptical Minister of Marine. "England is mine!" he wrote. The true road to London, he was persuaded, lay through Madrid.

But Napoleon's picture of Spain under a Bonaparte was as unreal as Sancho Panza's kingdom of Barataria. Everything went by contraries. Each sanguine expectation turned to ashes in his hands. He found the Spanish treasury empty, and had to pawn the crown jewels to raise £1,000,000. He sent to Cuesta the appointment of Viceroy of Mexico, and Cuesta, by way of reply, took command of the insurgent forces against him in Leon. Napoleon would reap a new harvest of victories; he found the capitulation of Baylen and of Cintra. He thought he had gained a subject nation; it proved to be a new and most ferocious enemy. He gave to Joseph a throne

and 11,000,000 subjects, and the unhappy Joseph found himself absolutely alone. "I have not one single partisan here," he wrote to his brother. "Neither the honest men nor the rogues," reported the disgusted Joseph, "are on my side." "There is nothing to fear," Napoleon wrote on July 21; and on that very day Dupont was surrendering with his entire army! "In one month," says Lanfrey, " from July 15 to August 20, Napoleon had experienced more checks than he ever sustained in his whole career." The magic spell of his fortune seemed, at last, to be shattered.

ON

CHAPTER III

THE APPEAL TO ENGLAND

N the night of June 6, 1808, two Asturian deputies landed at Falmouth, bringing to England an appeal for help from the local Junta. Never were the messengers of a people attended with less of official pomp. The two Asturians had actually started from the Spanish coast in an open boat; they had been picked up by a casual privateer and brought after nightfall to Falmouth, and by seven o'clock the morning after they landed they were pouring their tale into eager ears at the British Admiralty. Spain and Great Britain, as a matter of official fact, were at that moment at war, and 5000 troops were on the point of starting to attack the Spanish colonies-the very troops, it may be added, which, two months later, were fighting for Spain at Vimiero ! The Asturian deputies, in a sense, had no credentials. They represented no settled government. They spoke not for Spain, but for only a tiny patch of it. Yet these two vagrant Spaniards instantly took captive, not only the shrewd brains of English statesmen, but the gene

rous sympathies of the common people of the three kingdoms.

The rising of Spain against Napoleon was a portent visible to all Europe. It changed the whole aspect of the world's politics. The Asturian deputies were received not merely as the spokesmen of a nation, but as the symbols of a totally new force which had suddenly emerged in the struggle against Napoleon. The British Opposition welcomed them as eagerly as did Ministers. They represented, in a word, a movement which satisfied both the great political parties in England.

The Grenville Ministry, during their brief period of office, abandoned Pitt's policy of costly coalitions. They would not hire by vast subsidies half-hearted governments, moved chiefly by dynastic interests, to oppose Napoleon. As a sign of the new policy, they dismantled the whole transport service of Great Britain. They saved by this £4000 per month; but as Alison-whose arithmetic probably has a Tory complexion-argues, they added eight years to the duration of the Great War, and increased the public debt of Great Britain by £400,000,000 sterling! Pitt's policy, that is, would have put 30,000 British troops into the battle - line at Friedland against Napoleon; and, in that case, there might have been no Treaty of Tilsit, no Continental system, and no Peninsular War. But even the Grenville Ministry declared that, if a nation awoke to fight for existence

and freedom against the new despotism, then England would cast all her wealth and strength into the struggle on its side. Now Spain offered exactly such an example of a national uprising.

The Portland Ministry, at that moment in power, inherited Pitt's coalition policy, and its two leading spirits, Canning and Castlereagh, welcomed the chance of not only aiding a nation against Napoleon, but of destroying a new naval combination against Great Britain. A new force had arisen in English politics. George Canning was not exactly a Pitt, but as compared with the Addingtons, the Portlands, the Percevals, the Liverpools of the time, he had something of Pitt's scale and much of Pitt's spirit. He was the greatest personal force in the Ministry of which Portland (and afterwards Perceval) was the nominal head. He breathed a new daring and energy into the war. The situation created by the Treaty of Tilsit, the disappearance of all other Powers save France and Russia, and the conspiracy of the two Emperors against the freedom of the rest of the world, might well have daunted even Pitt's lofty courage. But Canning met the new peril with dauntless spirit; and the speed and decisive force of his counter-stroke at Copenhagen showed that on the side of England, Napoleon was confronted by an opponent with a touch of his own genius. It was with equal daring, but more doubtful wisdom, that Canning framed the second Order in Council,