[clxvii. 70]

1821 Aug. 4

Rid Yourselves

Anti. Cost. Evils

Lett. Foreigners in Cortes

While it swallows camels, Your Constitution strains out gnats. It forces you to receive as sovereign arbiters of your destiny, whether you will or no a set of men who, supposing their constituents fairly dealt with, and not plundered for your profit, are kept for your sake from thriving and breeding, would outnumber your representatives, and thus have it in their power to retaliate upon you that oppression which your rulers with their Code have striven to impose on them. It renders impossible for any of you were you ever so desirous to call in the assistance of so much as one single foreign mind. Now suppose that from the Anglo-American United States, from England, from France, from Piedmont, from Poland - from Portugal I range them alphabetically from each of those political states, you the constituents were amongst you to choose each of you one or more Representatives, what harm would you have to fear from them? What likelyhood that they should be ill disposed toward those by whom they had been sohighly honoured? supposing those were so ill-disposed towards you what mischief /evil/ in numbers such as theirs could any one could all together do to you? Well - and the men whom you have been reduced to choose are they all of them so well informed on the subject of legislation, whether by book or practice, as to have nothing to learn from any other quarter.

Thus while it forces you under the absolute government of foreigners with adverse interests it suffers you not to have the assistance of so much as one foreigner with accordant interests.

Spaniards! it is not personal interest - it is not disappointed ambition - that thus speaks in me. My labours my faculties such as they are belong to the whole species, not exclusively to any part of it.

To you in particular, I am rendering at this moment more service in this my Hermitage than I could if in your Cortes.