"The question of the proposed reforms is not a matter which at all concerns those who have already established an independent government in Cuba and have resolved to shrink from no sacrifice of property or life in order to emancipate the whole island from the Spanish yoke. If the Spanish residents of the island who are favored by the Spanish government with all sorts of privileges and monopolies, and if the handful of Cubans, too pusillanimous or too proud to acknowledge their error, or a few foreigners guided only by selfish interests, are satisfied that Cuba should remain under Spanish domination, we who fight under the flag of the solitary star, we who already constitute the Republic of Cuba, and belong to a free people with its own government and its own laws, are firmly resolved to listen to no compromise and to treat with Spain on the basis of absolute independence for Cuba. "If Spain has power to exterminate us, then let her convert the island into a vast cemetery; if she has not and wishes to terminate the war before the whole country is reduced to ashes, then let her adopt the only measure that will put an end to it and recognize our independence. Spain must know by this time that while there is a single living Cuban with dignity--and there are many thousands of them--there will not be peace in Cuba, nor even hope of it. "All good causes must finally triumph, and ours is a good cause. It is the cause of justice treated with contempt, of right suppressed by force, and of the dignity of a people offended to the last degree. "We Cubans have a thousandfold more reason in our endeavors to free ourselves from the Spanish yoke than the people of the thirteen colonies had when in 1776 they rose in arms against the British government. COMPARISONS WITH THE AMERICAN COLONIES. "The people of these colonies were in full enjoyment of all the rights of man; they had liberty of conscience, freedom of speech, liberty of the press, the right of public meeting and the right of free locomotion; they elected those who governed them, they made their own laws and, in fact, enjoyed the blessings of self-government. They were not under the sway of a captain-general with arbitrary powers, who at his will could imprison them, deport them to penal colonies, or order their execution even without the semblance of a court-martial. They did not have to pay a permanent army and navy that they might be kept in subjection, nor to feed a swarm of hungry employes yearly sent over from the metropolis to prey upon the country.