modern nations, under critical circumstances, affords many examples.
249.—The wisdom of the august Congress must prepare the way for the happiness which it is desirous to bestow upon this people, by removing, with a strong arm, the obstacles which their perversity has, hitherto, opposed to its introduction.
251.—Besides supplying a physical force sufficient to replace the moral force which has been lost, under circumstances of such extreme difficulty and distress, it is indispensably necessary to suspend all measures likely to diminish the new impulse that must be given to the Government, and, amongst others, the principal, and most beneficent of all,—the Constitution itself.
253.—The disaffected here have converted this Constitution into a mere tool for their perfidious designs: We repeat, once more, that sentiments of public good have no sort of influence over these men;—that gratitude is unknown to them, and that the majority, without a single political idea, have lent themselves with pleasure, and even with fury, to any and every change that afforded them the prospect of indulging their natural propensity to plunder and vice. The direction of a machine, moved by such springs as these, can neither be doubted, nor resisted:—Every thing must be sacrificed, therefore, or the application of the machine, for a time, given up.
254.—Yes, Sire;—Let those men, who, without faith or country, maintain in secret the same treasonable principles as the rebels themselves, declaim against the proposal; let them continue, under the mask of patriotism, to combat with arms only the more dangerous because they are more polished, that authority which the rebels openly defy; let them protest an attachment which they do not feel to the new institutions, and invoke the Constitution in order the better to destroy it, and their country together; let them endeavour, in fine, to ruin this tribunal, by undermining the credit of its members; still the Audiencia, firm alike in its loyalty and its principles, must state, with all respect to your Majesty, that, it being impossible to carry the Constitution into effect, in the midst of a permanent conspiracy, which is sapping the very foundations of the State, it appears to them absolutely necessary to suspend it as long as such a state of revolution and disorder continues.
