donado and Salvador de San Martin, prebendaries of Guadalajara; and Octaviano Obregon, an oidor of Mexico.[1] In due time proprietary representatives from New Spain and other Spanish American and Asiatic provinces also presented themselves. All the members had to take an oath to support the catholic religion, to the exclusion of all other creeds; to maintain the integrity of the Spanish nation; to preserve all her dominions for Fernando VII., then a prisoner of Napoleon in France; and to observe the laws of Spain; reserving the right to modify or alter them when deemed conducive to the national welfare. Some days later the five regents of the kingdom resigned, and three were appointed in their stead by the córtes, namely, General Blake, and two naval officers, Císcar and Agar; the last named, being a native of Venezuela, had been specially selected that he might represent America in the regency.
The grave question of freedom of the press was soon on the tapis, giving rise to heated debate, and to the organization of parties which kept up constant warfare during the term. In favor of reform, and of a change in the principles of government hitherto accepted in Spain, were the young deputies, several professors, and all the priests supposed to be partisans of Jansenism. They constituted the liberal party. The others looked unfavorably on innovation, and urged the slow adoption of such measures only as necessity demanded. For a time the conservatives had no particular appellation, but at last the epithet of servil was applied to them.[2] The deputies of the ultramarine
- ↑ Most of the representatives of the provinces in Spain, both proprietary and substitutes, were professors, lawyers, or ecclesiastics among these last, a number were said to be jansenists —public officials, and some young men who had read the French philosophers of the previous century, and were therefore imbued with the ideas and principles of the French revolution. The American suplentes were mostly lawyers, and priests who had gone to Spain after preferment from the royal court, with a sprinkling of military men who had served in America but had been long established in Spain, and a few employés of the government.
- ↑ Servile; or worse still, as one of the opponents treated them by detaching the syllables, thus, ser vil, to be vile, or a vile being.
