This imprudent disavowal of a measure, by which one great cause of the dissatisfaction of the Creoles would have been removed—known, as it was, to have been forced upon the Government by the very men, whose interests it alone consulted—(the merchants of Cadiz,) naturally tended to convince the Colonies that they had but little practical relief to expect from Spain; and that political freedom alone could emancipate them from those commercial restrictions, by which their natural resources had been so long paralized.[1] It led them to doubt the sincerity (or the value, at least,) of every other concession; to insist upon perfect equality of representation in the Cortes, by which they hoped to acquire, (and would, undoubtedly, have acquired, ultimately,) an equality upon all other points; and, when this was denied them, to seek, by the direct road of independence, those rights which it was almost impossible to withhold, from the moment that they became sensible of their importance.
Vain were the endeavours of the Regency to soothe or cajole them; vain the admission of errors, and the promises of amendment; although the first were carried so far as to allow, "that, for upwards of twenty years, the door to preferment,
- ↑ Things were carried so far, with respect to the Decree of the 17th of May, that the Minister and several clerks of the Colonial department were put under arrest, when it was repealed, in order to induce the public to believe that it had not, in fact, received the sanction of the Regency
