What a perspective of power, grandeur, happiness
and prosperity would thus have appeared.
"The concentration of thirty or forty millions of Frenchmen was
completed and perfected. That of fifteen millions of Spaniards was
nearly accomplished. Because I did not subdue the Spaniards, it will
henceforth be argued that they were invincible, for nothing is more
common than to convert accident into principle. But the fact is that
they were actually conquered, and, at the very moment when they escaped
me, the Cortes of Cadiz were secretly in treaty with me. They were not
delivered either by their own resistance or by the efforts of the
English, but by the reverses which I sustained at different points, and,
above all, by the error I committed in transferring my whole forces to
the distance of three thousand miles from them. Had it not been for
this, the Spanish government would have been shortly consolidated, the
public mind would have been tranquilized, and hostile parties would have
been rallied together. Three or four years would have restored the
Spaniards to profound peace and brilliant prosperity. They would have
become a compact nation, and I should have well deserved their
gratitude, for I should have saved them from the tyranny by which they
are now oppressed, and the terrible agitations which await them.
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