on principles that were calculated to enrich the clergy and gain their approbation, what would be the consequence? Would not an order from a priest disband an army; or an address from the Archbishop of Toledo requiring the peasantry to lay down their arms be attended with the desired effect-the obedience to the order? If this, or any part of it is granted, where is their freedom? That their priests are but indifferent guides in politicks may be easily believed if we look to the consequences of obedience to them in matters of religion it therefore follows that the people are influenced by some other motive, and that the pretensions of the old government, as well of Spain as of other countries, rests upon some other foundation: this is either divine authority or hereditary right. As to the first of these, I believe, the pope is the only monarch who will pretend to it; and even his holiness, if he has a firm persuasion of a power immediately delegated from heaven, must, on the same principle, confess, that such a right is, at least for the present, suspended. Let him, therefore, instead of repining at his fate, hush every contending passion with -The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.

But the claim of hereditary right is much more generally admitted: even in this country there are not wanting men of talents who will abuse their abilities in defending so -gross an absurdity. Tory principles have not wanted a Johnson to defend them openly, and liberty has suffered even more by the secret stabs of a Burke. In order to determine the justice of such claims, it may not be amiss to observe, that the government which has so devolved, must be originally founded either by the right of conquest or, in plain English, by force; or it must have been originally derived from the people. Concerning the first, it may

be observed, that whatever force has a right to establish, force has a right to overthrow; what is obtained by force, and has no other pretensions, can support itself no longer than the power by which it is obtained exists; while, therefore, the successors of the first founder can maintain themselves by power, if power constitutes right, they have a claim to govern, but no longer.

The only remaining claim is that of hereditary right, founded on the choice of the people. This will hold good so long as the laws and regulations by which the sovereign was to rule remain in full force; but if thro' inattention of the people, increasing influence of the government, or any other cause, such regulations are trampled on; if by any act of deception, or violence, the government becomes arbitrary, that moment the original right ceases, and the government is maintained by fraud or force.

Now, those who gain their authority by deception may hold it so long as new arts may be found to deceive, and new snares to intrap; when these fail the foundation is gone. What then is to become of the superstructure? A slight inspection, without any great historical knowledge, will convince the candid enquirer that on some of these irrational grounds the claims of the old monarchies are founded. Against these Napoleon has to oppose the all powerful one-the claim of conquest. If, therefore, the right of conquest will be sufficient to found a claim for successors, surely it will establish the right of the conqueror in person. Whatever may be the sentiments of the other sovereigns, the Pope has formally acknowledged this claim, by putting the imperial crown on the head of Bonaparte: should it be argued that Bonaparte was chosen by the people, it may be replied, that if the senate, or constituted authorities were suffi-'

cient, in the manner they were then

elected, by their sanction to constitute a lawful King, the consulta of Rome have by their address formally expressed their approbation, and rendered the claims of Napoleon valid. Thus have I run superficially through this subject; and from what I have already advanced I infer, that the grounds on which the character of Bonaparte has been censured are insufficient, and will not stand the test of argument; that we have expressed our satisfaction at the consequences of measures similar to those we now deprecate; that we have just reason to rejoice; and that

JUNTA OF SPAIN.

Seville, Nov. 3.-IIis Majesty has thought proper to publish the following manifesto, fixing the days when the General Cortes of the Spanish monarchy are to be convoked and held.

PROCLAMATION.

SPANIARDS-By a combination of events, as singular as fortunate, it has seemed good to Providence, that in this terrible crisis you shall not advance a step towards independence without like wise advancing one towards a foolish and feeble tyranny, in order to rivet your fetters and aggravate your chains, preparing the way for French despotism, which, with the terrible apparatus of its arms and victories, endeavoured to subject you to a yoke of iron. It at first exhibited itself, like every new tyranny, under a flattering form, and its political impostors presumed they should gain your favour by promising you reforms in the administration, and announcing in a constitution framed at their pleasure the empire of the laws. A bar barous and absurd contradiction worthy certainly of their insolence. Would they have us believe that the moral edifice of the liberty and fortune of a nation can be securely founded on usurpation, inequity, and treachery? But the Spamish people who were the first of modern

DIOGENES.

nations to recognise the true principles of the social equilibrium, that people who enjoyed, before any other, the prerogatives and advantages of civil liberty, and knew to oppose to arbitrary power the eternal barrier directed by justice, will borrow from no other nation maxims of prudence and political precaution, and tell those impudent legislators that they will not acknowledge as laws the artifices of intriguers nor the mandates of tyrants; animated by this generous instinct, and inflamed with the indignation excited by the perfidy with which you were invaded, you ran to arms, without fearing the terrible vicissitudes of so unequal a combat, and fortune, subdued by your enthusiasm, rendered you homage, and bestowed on you victory in reward for your valour.--The immediate effect of these first advantages, was the recomposition of the state, tions as provinces. Our enemies thought at that time divided into as many facthat they had sown among us the deadly germ of anarchy, and did not advert that Spanish judgment and circumspec, tion were always superior to French machiavelism. Without dispute, without blished, and the people, after having violence, a supreme authority was estaastonished the world with the spectacle of their sublime exaltation and their victories, filled it with admiration and respect by their moderation and dis cretion.

The central junta was installed, and its first care was to announce to you that if the expulsion of the enemy was the first object of its attentions, the interior and permanent felicity of the state was the principal in importauce; to leave it plunged into the flood of abuses, prepared for its ruin by arbitrary power, would have been, in the eyes of your present government, a crime as enormous as to deliver you into the hands of Bonaparte; therefore when the turbulence of war permitted, it caused to resound in your ears the name of your CORTES, which to us have ever been the bulwark of civil liberty, and the throne of national majesty, a name heretofore pronounced with mystery by the learned, with distrust by politicians, and with horror by tyrants, but which henceforth signify in Spain the indestruçtable base of the monarchy, the most-secure supporter of the rights of Ferdinand VII. and of his family, a right for the people, and the government an obligation.

That moral resistance, as general as sublime, which has reduced our enemies to confusion and despair in the midst of their victories, must not receive less reward. Those battles which are lost; those armies which are destroyed, not without producing new battles, creating new armies, and again displaying the standard of loyalty on the ashes and ruins which the enemies abandon; those soldiers who, dispersed in one action, return to offer themselves for another; that populace which, despoiled of almost all they possessed, return to their homes to share the wretched remains of their property with the defenders of their country; that concert of lamentable and despairing groans and patriotic songs; that struggle in fine of ferocity and barbarity on the one hand, and of resistance and invincible constancy on the other, present a whole as terrible as magnificent, which Europe contemplates with astonishment, and which history will one day record' in letters of gold for the admiration and example of pos terity. A people so magnanimous and generous ought only to be governed by Jaws which are truly such, and which shall bear the great character of public consent and common utility-a charace ter which they can only receive by emanating from the august assembly which has been announced to you. The junta had proposed that it should be held dufing the whole of the ensuing year, of

sooner, if circumstances should permit. But in the time which has intervened since this resolution, a variety of public events have agitated the minds of the people, and the difference of opinions relative to the organization of the government, and the re-establishment of our fundamental laws, has recalled the attention of the junta to shese important objects with which it has latterly been profoundly occupied. It has been recommended on the one hand, that the present government should be converted into a regency of three or five persons, and this opinion has been represented as supported by one of our ancient laws, applicable to our present situation. But the situation in which the kingdom was when the French threw off the mask of friendship, to execute their treacherous usurpation, is singular in our history, and cannot have been foreseen in our institutions. Neither the infancy nor the insanity, nor even the captivity of the Prince in the usual way in which these evils occur, can be compared with our present case, and the deplorable situation to which it has reduced us. A political position, entirely new, requires political forms and principles likewise entirely new. To expel the French, to restore to his liberty and his throne our adored King, and to establish solid and permanent bases of good government, are the maxims which gave the impulse to our revolution, are those which support and direct it; and that government will be the best which shall most promote and fulfil these three wishes of the Spanish nation.

Does the regency of which that law speaks promise us this security? What inconveniences, what dangers, how many divisions, how many parties, how many ambitious pretensions within and without the kingdom, how much and how just discontent in our Americas, now called to have a share in the present government? What would become of our cortes, our liberty, the cheering prospects of future welfare and glory which now present themselves? What would become of the object most valuable and sacred to the Spanish nation, the preservation of the rights of Ferdinand? The advocates for this institution ought to shudder at the imminent danger to which they exposed themselves, and to bear in mind that by it they afforded to the tyrant a new opportunity of buying and selling them; let us bow

with reverence to the venerable antiquity of the law, but let us profit by the experience of ages; let us open our aunals and trace the history of our regencies: what shall we find? A picture equally melancholy and frightful, of desolation, of civil war, of rapine, and of human depravity, in unfortunate Castile.

Doubtless in great states power is more beneficially exercised by few than by many. Secrecy in deliberation, unity in concert, activity in measures, and celerity in execution, are indispensable requisites for the favourable issue of the acts of government, and are properties of a concentrated authority only. The supreme junta has therefore just concentrated its own with that present circumspection which neither exposes the state to the oscillations consequent upon every change of government, nor inaterially affects the unity of the body which is entrusted with it. Henceforth a section composed of the removeable members will be specially invested with the necessary authority to direct those measures of the executive power which from this nature require secrecy, energy, and dispatch. Another opinion, hostile to the regency, equally contradicts whatever innovation may be attempted to be made in the political form which the government has at present, and objects to the intended cortes as an insufficient representation, if they are constituted according to the ancient formalities; as ill-timed, and perhaps hazardous in respect to present circumstances; in short, as useless, since it supposes that the superior juntas erected immediately by the people are their real representatives. But the junta had'expressly declared to the nation that its first attention in the great object would be occupied with the number, mode, and class, with which the meeting of this august assembly in the present situation of affairs should be carried into effect; and after this declaration it is quite superfluous, not to say malicious, to suspect that the future cortes are to be confined to the rigid and exclusive forms of our ancient ones! Yes, Spaniards, you are going to have your cortes, and the national representation will in them be as perfect and full as it can and ought to be, in an assembly of such importance and eminent dignity. You are going to have the cortes, and to have them immediately, because the urgent situation in which the nation is placed imperiously demand

it, and at what time, gracious God! can it adopt this measure better than at present? when an obstinate war has exhausted all the ordinary means, when the egotism of some, and the ambition of others, debilitate and paralyse the efforts of the government by their opposition or indifference, when they seek to eradicate the essential principle of the monarchy, which is union, when the hydra of federalism, so happily silenced the preceding year by the creation of the central power, dares again to raise its poisonous heads, and endeavours to precipitate us into the dissolution of anarchy; when the subtlety of our enemies is watching the moment when our divisions disunite us, to destroy the state, and to erect their throne on the ruins which our distractions afford them,-this is the time, this, to collect in one point the national dignity and power, and when the Spanish people may will and decree the extraordinary surplus which a powerful nation ever has within it for its salvation; it alone can encounter and put them in motion; it alone can encou rage the timidity of some, and restrain the ambition of others; it alone will suppress importunate vanity, puerile pretensions, and infuriated passions, which, unless prevented, go to tear in pieces the government. It will, in fine, give to Europe a fresh example of its religion, its circumspection, and its discretion in the just and moderate use which it is about to make of the glorious liberty in which it is constituted. Thus it is that the supreme junta, which immediately recognised this national representation as a right, and proclaimed it as a reward, now invokes and implores it as the most necessary and efficacious remedy; and has therefore resolved that the general cortes of the monarchy, announced in the decree of the 22d of May, shall be convoked on the first day of January in the next year, in order to enter on their august functions the first day of March following. When that happy day has arrived, the junta shall say to the repre sentatives of the nation

Ye are met together, O fathers of your country! and re-established in all the plenitude of your rights, after a lapse of three centuries, when despotism and arbitrary power dissolved you, in order to subject this nation to all the evils of servitude. The aggressions which we have suffered, and the war which we maintain, are the fruits of the most

shameful oppression and the most unjust tyranny. The provincial juntas who were able to resist and repulse the enemy in the first impetus of his invasion, invested the supreme junta with the sovereign authority, which they exercised for a time to give unity to the state, and concentrate its power. Called to the exercise of this authority, not by ambition or intrigue, but by the unanimous voice of the provinces of the kingdom, the individuals of the supreme junta shewed themselves worthy of the high confidence reposed in them, by employing all their vigilance and exertions for the preservation and prosperity of the state; the magnitude of our ef forts will be apparent from the consideration of the enormity of the evil which preceded. When the power was placed in our hands, our armies, half formed, were unprovided, and destitute of every thing; ; our treasury was empty, and our resources uncertain and distant. The despot of France, availing himself of the tranquillity in which the North then was, poured upon the peninsula the military power under his command, the most formidable that has been known in them. His most warlike legions, better provided, and above all more numerous than others, rushed on every side, though much to their cost, against our armies, destitute of the same expertness and confidence. A new inunda tion of barbarians, who carried desola tion through all the provinces of which they took possession, was the consequence of these reverses, and the ill-closed wounds of our unfortunate country be gan painfully to open and pour forth blood in torrents. The state thus lost half its strength, and when the junta, bound to save the honour, the independence, and the unity of the nation, from the impetuous invasion of the tyrant, took refuge in Andalusia, a division of 30,000 men repaired to the walls of Saragossa, to bury themselves in its ruins. The army of the centre, being thus deprived of a great part of its strength, did not give to its operations that activity and energy which must have had very difficult results from those of the battle of Ucles. The avenues of the Sierra Morena and the banks of the Tagus were only defended by ill-armed handfuls of men, to whom could scarce4y be given the name of armies. The junta, however, by means of activity and sacrifices, rendered them so routed

and dispersed in the two battles of Cin drad Real, and Metellin, instead of des spairing of the country, they redoubled their efforts, and in a few days they collected and opposed to the enemy 70,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry These forces have since fought, it is true, with ill success, but always with gallan try and glory. The creation, the repa ration, and the subsistence of these ar mies have more than absorbed the con siderable supplies which have been sent us by our brethren in America. We have maintained in the free provinces, unity, order, and justice, and in those occupied by the enemy, we have executed our endeavours to preserve, though se cretly, the fire of patriotism, and the bounds of loyalty. We have vindicated the national honour and independence in the most complicated and difficult diplomatic negociations; and we have made head against adversity, ever trasting that we should overcome it by our constancy. We have, without doubt, committed errors, and we would willingly, were it possible, redeem them with our blood: but in the confusion of events, among the mountains of difficulties which surrounded us, who could be certain of always being in the right?— Could we be responsible, because one body of troops wanted valour and ano ther confidence-because one general had less prudence and another less good fortune? Much, Spaniards, is to be attributed to our inexperience, much tớ circumstances-but nothing to our m tention; that ever has been to deliver our unfortunate King from slavery, and to preserve to him a throne for which the Spanish people has made such sacrifices, and to maintain it free, independent, and happy. We have from the time of our institution promised him a country; we have decreed the abolition of arbitrary power from the time we announced the re-establishment of our cortes. Such is, O Spaniards, the use we have made of the unlimited power and authority confided to us; and when your wisdom shall have established the basis and form of government most proper for the independence and good of the state, we will resign the authority into the hands you shall point out, contented with the glory of having given to the Spaniards the dignity of a nation legitimately constituted. May this solemn and magnificent assembly be productive of efficacious means, energy, and for