"Every day discovered more and more the nullity of the acts of Bayonne, the invalidity of the rights of Ferdinand, and of all the Bourbons who were privy to the arrangements; the ignominy with which they delivered up as slaves those who had placed them on the throne in opposition to the house of Austria; the connivance of the head functionaries in Spain to the plans of the new dynasty; the fate that these same plans prepared for America, and the necessity of forming some resolution that might shield the new world from the calamities which from its relations with the old were about to visit it. All saw their treasures buried in the unfathomable disorders of the peninsula; they wept for the blood of Americans spilt in defence of the enemies of America, in order to support the slavery of their own country. Notwithstanding the vigilance of the tyrants, all saw the very interior of Spain, where they beheld nothing but disorder, corruption, factions, misfortunes, defeats, treacheries, dispersed armies, whole provinces in the hands of the enemy and their disciplined troops, and at the head of all a weak and tumultuary government formed out of such rare elements. "Dismay was the general and uniform impression observed in the countenances of the people of Venezuela by the agents of oppression sent from Spain to support at any hazard the infamous cause of their constituents; a word might cause proscription, or a discourse banishment to the author; and every attempt to do in America what was done in Spain, if it did not shed the blood of the Americans, it was at least sufficient to occasion the ruin, infamy, and desolation of many families, as may be seen by the act of proscription of several officers and citizens of rank and probity, decreed on the twentieth of March, 1810, by Emparan.[1] Such a miscalculation could not fail to produce or multiply the convulsions, to augment the popular reaction, to prepare the combustible, and dispose it in such a manner that the least spark would kindle it, and create a blaze that would consume, and even efface every vestige of so hard and melancholy a condition. Spain needy and almost desolate, her fate dependent on the generosity of America, and almost in the act of being blotted out from the list of nations, appeared as if transported back to the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, she again began to conquer America with arms more destructive than iron or lead; every day gave birth to some new proof of the fate that awaited us, a fate that would place us in the sad alternative of being sold to a foreign power, or obliged to groan for ever under a fresh and irrevocable bondage, whilst we alone were expectant on the happy moment that might bring our opinions into action, and join us in such a manner that we could express them, and support them.