"Notwithstanding so much insult, robbery, and ingratitude, Venezuela maintained her resolution, not to vary the principles she had traced out for her conduct; the sublime act of her national representation was proclaimed in the name of Ferdinand VII.; under his phantasmagorical authority all the acts of our government and administration were maintained, though they required no other origin than the people who had constituted them. By the laws and regulations of Spain a horrible and sanguinary gang of European conspirators were tried, and these laws were mercifully infringed to save their lives, in order that the philanthropic memory of our revolution might not be stained with the blood of our brethren, although they were perfidious. Under the name of Ferdinand, and through the interposition of the bonds of fraternity and patriotism, endeavours were used to inform and reduce the imperious mandataries of Coro and Maracaibo, who kept separated from our interests our brethren of the west; under the auspices of reciprocal interests, we triumphed over the oppressive acts of Barcelona, and under the same we will conquer Guayana, twice snatched from our confederation, as was Maracaibo, against the general wishes of its inhabitants.
"It would appear as if nothing now remained to be done to secure a reconciliation with Spain, or the entire and absolute separation of America, equally as ruinous and calamitous to the one, as it was ungratefully despised by the other party; but Venezuela was desirous of draining every means left within her reach, in order that justice and necessity should leave her no other alternative than that of total independence, which ought to have been declared on the fifteenth of July, 1808, or on the nineteenth of April, 1810. After appealing to sensibility and not to vengeance, in the horrid scenes that took place at Quito, Pose, and La Pas; after beholding our own cause supported by the uniformity of opinions in Buenos Ayres, Santa Fé, the Floridas, Mexico, Guatemala, and Chile; after obtaining an indirect guarantee on the part of England; after having our conduct applauded by impartial individuals in Europe; after seeing the same principles triumph from the Orinoco to the Magdalena, and from Cape Codero to the Andes; we have still to endure fresh insults, before we fly to the extreme of breaking with our brethren for ever.
"Caracas, without having done more than imitate the conduct of many of the provinces of Spain, and practised the rights that the regency declared to appertain to America; without having had in this conduct other designs than those inspired by the necessity of not being involved in an unknown fate, and to relieve the regents from attending to the government of countries as remote as they are extensive, at the same time they protested to attend to nothing but the expulsion of the French from Spain; without having rent her unity and political integrity with Spain; without having disowned as was possible and proper the lame rights of Ferdinand; the regency, far from applauding on the right of convenience, if not of generosity, so just, modest and necessary a resolution, and without even answering or submitting to the judgment of the nation our complaints and our claims: Caracas is declared in a state of war, her inhabitants are proclaimed rebels and unnaturalized, every communication with her brethren is cut off, England is deprived of her trade, the excesses of Melendes are approved of, and he is authorized to commit whatever the malignity of his heart may suggest to him, however opposed to reason and to justice; all this is proved by the order of the fourth of September, 1810, unparalleled for its enormity even among the despots of Constantinople or Indostan; and not to deviate in the least from the plots of the conquest, a new encomendero is sent out, under the title of a pacificator, (pacificador) who with more prerogatives than conquerors and settlers themselves, was to fix his residence in Puerto Rico, and thence to threaten, rob, pirate, promise, deceive, excite civil disturbances, and all in the name of the beloved Ferdinand VII.
"Till then the progress of the system of subversion, anarchy, and depredation, which the regency proposed to itself on hearing of the movements of Caracas, had been but slow; now the principal fears of civil war being transferred nearer to us, the subaltern agents acquired more strength, the flames of passion were increased, as well as the efforts of the parties guided by the directions of Cortavarria and Melendes. Hence originated the incendiary energy acquired by the ephemeral sedition of the west; hence the flame of discord, newly formed by Myares, rendered vain and arrogant by the imaginary and promised captain-general-ship of Venezuela; hence the American blood spilled in spite of ourselves on the plains of Coro; hence the robberies and assassinations committed on our coasts by the commissioned pirates of the regency; hence that miserable blockade, intended to reduce and disaffect our settlements on the coast; hence the insults committed on the English flag; hence the falling off of our trade; hence the conspiracies of the valleys of Aragua and Cumaná; hence the horrid perfidy in Guayana; and the insulting transportation of its leading characters to the Moorish dungeons of Puerto Rico—dungeons constructed like those of Tunis and Algiers; hence the generous and impartial offices of reconciliation sincerely interposed by a representative[3] of the British government in the Antilles, and rejected by the pseudo pacificator; hence, in fine, all the evils, all the atrocities, and all the crimes which are and ever will be attached to the names of Cortavarria and Melendes in Venezuela, and which have impelled her government to exceed what was proposed when it took upon itself the fate of those who honored it with their confidence.
"The mission of Cortavarria in the nineteenth century, and the state of Spain which decreed it, compared with America, against whom it is directed, evinces to what an extent the illusion of ambition blinds those who found all the origin of their authority on the depravity of the people. This act alone sufficed to authorize our conduct. The spirit of Charles V., the memory of Cortes and Pizarro, and the names of Montesuma and Atahualpa, are involuntarily reproduced in our imagination, when we see the adelantados, the pesquisadores, and the encomenderos, officers peculiar to the first settlement of America, renewed in a country which, having suffered three centuries of sacrifice and debasement, had promised to continue faithful on the only condition of being free, in order that accidents of slavery might not tarnish the merit of fidelity. The scandalous plenitude of power conferred on a man who is authorised by an intrusive and illegitimate government, under the insulting name of pacificator, to tyrannize and plunder, and to crown the vexation, that he might pardon a noble, generous, tranquil, innocent people, who were masters of their own rights, could only be credited in the impotent delirium of a government that tyrannizes over a disorganized nation, stunned by the fury of the tempest that reaches her; but as the evils of this disorder, and the abuses of such an usurpation might be considered as not derived from Ferdinand, already acknowledged in Venezuela, at the time that he was unable to prevent such accumulated insults, such excesses, and so much violence, committed in his name, we consider it necessary to retrace the origin of these rights, that we may descant on the nullity and invalidity of our generous oath, by which we acknowledged him conditionally; notwithstanding, we have in spite of ourselves to violate the spontaneous silence we had imposed upon ourselves respecting every thing that occurred prior to the affairs at the Escurial and Aranjues.
"The fact, that America does not belong to the territory of Spain is self-evident, and it is equally evident that the right which the Bourbons justly or unjustly exercised over it, and notwithstanding this was hereditary, yet it could not be disposed of without the consent of the people, and particularly of those of America, who, on the election between the French and Austrian dynasties, might have acted in the seventeenth century as they now have done in the nineteenth. The bull of Alexander VI., and the titles which the house of Austria alleged in the American code had no other origin than the right of power and conquest, partially ceded to the conquerors and to the settlers for their assistance rendered to the crown in extending its dominion in America. Without taking into consideration the scanty population of the country, the extermination of the natives, and the emigration which the self-called mother country sustained; it appears that when the fury of conquest had ceased—when the thirst for gold was satisfied—when the continued equilibrium was declared in favour of Spain, by the advantageous acquisition of America—the feudal government destroyed and rooted out from the time of the Bourbons in Spain, and every right extinct that did not originate in the new concessions or commands of the prince, the conquerors and the settlers then became absolved of theirs. As soon as the faultiness and invalidity of the rights which the Bourbons have arrogated to themselves are demonstrated, the titles by which the American descendants of the conquerors possessed these countries revive—not to the detriment of the natives and primitive proprietors, but to equalize them in the enjoyment of liberty, property, and independence, which they always held by a right stronger than that of the Bourbons or any other person or persons to whom they may have ceded America, without the consent of its natural owners, the Americans.
"That America does not belong to the territory of Spain is a principle of natural, and a law of positive right. No title just or unjust which exists of American slavery can belong to the Spaniards of Europe, and all the liberality of Alexander VI. could only declare the Austrian kings promoters of the faith, in order to find out for them a preternatural right by which to make them lords of America. Neither the pre-eminence of the parent state, nor the prerogative of the mother country, could at any time constitute the origin of lordship on the part of Spain. The first was lost the moment the monarch who was acknowledged by the Americans left his country and renounced his rights; and the second never was more than a scandalous abuse of words, as great as that of calling our slavery felicity; that of calling the fiscals protectors of the indians; and that of saying that the sons of Americans were divested of every right and civil dignity. By the mere act of even passing from one country to another to settle in it, those who do not leave their homes acquire no property, nor do they expose themselves to the hardships of emigration. Those who conquer and obtain possession of a country by means of their labour, industry, cultivation, and connection with the natives thereof, are the individuals who have a right of preference in preserving it, which right they transmit to their posterity born therein; for if the country where one is born possessed the origin of sovereignty, or gave the right of acquisition, the general will of nations, and the fate of the human race, would then be riveted to the soil, as are the trees, mountains, rivers, and lakes.
"Neither could it ever be considered as a title of property to one part of a nation, the other having gone to another country to settle in it; for by such a right Spain would belong to the Phœnicians, or their descendants, or to the Carthagenians, wherever these may be found; even the whole of the nations of Europe would have to change their abodes to make room for and re-establish so singular a territorial right; home would then become as precarious as are the wants and caprices of men. The moral abuse of the maternity of Spain, with regard to America is still more insignificant, for it is well known that in the natural order of things, it is the duty of the father to emancipate the son, so soon as his minority expire, and he is able to use his strength and reason in providing for his subsistence; and also that it is the duty of the son to emancipate himself, whenever the cruelty or extravagance of the father or tutor endanger his welfare, or expose his patrimony to become the prey of a miser, or an usurper. Under these principles let a comparison be made of the three hundred years of our filiation to Spain; and even when it is proved, that she was our mother, it still remains to be proved that we are yet her minors or pupils.
"At any period when Spain has entertained any doubt of the rights of the Bourbons, or of any other dynasty, the only source, and that not a very clear one, of the Spanish dominion in America, it would appear that the Americans were excluded from alleging any reasons that might destroy such claims, though doubtful from their very origin; but as Venezuela may hereafter be reproached for the conditional oath by which the representative body that now declares its absolute independence of any foreign power previously acknowledged Ferdinand VII., the same august body feels anxious that no room should be left for scruples of conscience, for the illusions of ignorance, and for the malice of wounded ambition, whereby to discredit, calumniate, and weaken a resolution, taken with such maturity and deliberation as best suited its magnitude and importance.