itary provinces, seized all the
public moneys, and sought to conciliate his master's debtors at his
master's expense; for, instead of the forty millions indemnity
demanded by Napoleon, he took his pen, like the unjust steward, and
wrote twenty. In return the Portuguese radicals were to ask the
Emperor that he should be made their king. Owing in part to Junot's
insatiable greed and his appropriation of enormous private
treasure,--an example which his army was quick to follow,--in part to
the subsequent disenchantment and a general revulsion of feeling, the
plan came to naught. Before long the Spanish general Bellesca seized
the French governor of Oporto and began a rebellion in favor of Don
John. The commander-in-chief, called from Lisbon to suppress the
insurgents, left the city under a committee at the head of which was
the Bishop of Oporto. The prelate at once applied to England for help,
and in a short time the whole country had organized secret juntas in
order to throw off the French yoke. England responded with alacrity,
sending troops from Sicily and from Ireland; but the strongest
reinforcement of all was the general appointed to command them, Sir
Arthur Wellesley. Before the middle of August, 1808, the Peninsular
war was raging and the laurels were England's.

Meantime the contemplated upheaval had occurred in Spain. It is
impossible to conceive deeper degradation than that into which the
Bourbon monarchy of that country had sunk, and the court had carried
the country with it in its debasement. The population had fallen to
ten millions, and of a nominal army of a hundred and twenty thousand
men not fifty thousand were really effective. The host of
office-holders and privileged nobility which battened like leeches on
an exhausted treasury was equaled in number only by the clergy,
secular and regular, with nuns, novices, and servants, who lived on
the revenues of the ecclesiastical estates, and on what could be
extorted from an impoverished people. By a terrible form of
primogeniture the lands which did not belong to the Church had
gradually fallen into the hands of a few owners, who lived in state at
Madrid and never laid eyes on their farms, forests, or pastures. The
peasantry had no interest to improve what might be taken from them at
the death of the proprietor, or by caprice be appraised at a higher
value on account of their very efforts toward the amelioration of
their lot. The grandees kept gloomy state in