of competent judgement. That the
British Army swarms with those who are incompetent--is too plain from
successive proofs in the transactions at Buenos Ayres, at Cintra, and in
the result of the Board of Inquiry.--Nor must we see a General appointed
to command--and required, at the same time, to frame his operations
according to the opinion of an inferior Officer: an injunction (for a
recommendation, from such a quarter, amounts to an injunction) implying
that a man had been appointed to a high station--of which the very
persons, who had appointed him, deemed him unworthy; else they must have
known that he would endeavour to profit by the experience of any of his
inferior officers, from the suggestions of his own understanding: at the
same time--by denying to the General-in-Chief the free use of his own
judgement, and by the act of announcing this presumption of his
incompetence to the man himself--such an indignity is put upon him, that
his passions must of necessity be rouzed; so as to leave it scarcely
possible that he could draw any benefit, which he might otherwise have
drawn, from the local knowledge or talents of the individual to whom he
was referred: and, lastly, this injunction virtually involves a
subversion of all military subordination. In the better times of the
House of Commons--a minister, who had presumed to write such a letter as
that to which I allude, would have been impeached.

The Debates in Parliament, and measures of Government, every day furnish
new Proofs of the truths which I have been attempting to establish--of
the utter want of general principles;--new and lamentable proofs! This
moment (while I am drawing towards a conclusion) I learn, from the
newspaper reports, that the House of Commons has refused to declare that
the Convention of Centra _disappointed the hopes and expectations of the
Nation_.

The motion, according to the letter of it, was ill-framed; for the
Convention might have been a very good one, and still have disappointed
the hopes and expectations of the Nation--as those might have been
unwise: at all events, the words ought to have stood--the _just_ and
_reasonable_ hopes of the Nation. But the hacknied phrase of
'_disappointed hopes and expectations_'--should not have been used at
all: it is a centre round which much delusion has gathered. The
Convention not only did not satisfy the Nation's hopes of good; but sunk
it into a pitfall of unimagined and unimaginable evil. The