"Human reason revolts against the idea that the social and political condition of a people can be indefinitely prolonged, in which man, stripped of all rights and guarantees, with no security of person or property, no enjoyment in the present, no hope in the future, lives only by the will, and under the conditions imposed by the pleasure of his tyrants; where a vile calumny, a prisoner's denunciation, a despot's suspicion, a word caught up by surprise in the sanctuary of home, or from the violated privacy of a letter, furnishes ample grounds for tearing a man from his hearth, and casting him forth to die of destitution or despair in a foreign soil, if he escapes being subjected to the insulting forms of a barbarous and arbitrary tribunal, where his persecutors are themselves the judges who condemn him, and where, instead of their proving his offence, he is required to prove his innocence. "A situation so violent as this, Cuba has been for many years enduring; and, far from any promise of remedy appearing, every day adds new proof that the policy of the mother-country and the ferocity of her rulers will grant neither truce nor rest till she is reduced to the condition of an immense prison, where every Cuban will be watched by a guard, and will have to pay that guard for watching him. In vain have this people exhibited a mildness, a prudence, and even a submission and loyalty, which have been proverbial. "When the iniquity of the government has not been able to find any ostensible grounds for persecution, it has had recourse to cowardly arts and snares to tempt its victims into some offence. Thus were various individuals of Matanzas entrapped into an ambuscade of the soldiery, by the pretext of selling them some arms, under circumstances which made them believe those arms were necessary for self-defence, against threatened attacks from the Peninsulars. Thus have sergeants and even officers been seen to mingle among the country people, and pass themselves off as enemies of the government, for the purpose of betraying them into avowals of their sentiments to the ruin of many persons so informed against as well as to the disgrace of military honor on the part of those who have lent themselves to so villainous a service. "If the sons of Cuba, moved by the dread of greater evils, have ever determined to employ legitimate means of imposing some law, or some restraint upon the unbridled excesses of their rulers, these latter have always found the way to distort such acts into attempts at rebellion.