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of nature, which did not create an entire world to subject it to following the fate of a small piece of Europe, the least extensive part of our antipodean hemisphere.
It remains for us only to make this illusion of a loyalty oath disappear, an oath that has been used so much to frighten the timid consciences and bewilder the minds of ignorant men. This oath is compulsory and necessarily conditional, that is to say, the people are obliged to obey the decisions of the government so long as they are beneficial to the community and fulfill their promise. If either of these two things is absent, the government’s right to command and the peoples’ obligation to obey terminate, and the social contract is dissolved. Every act emanating from a government that cannot or will not provide for the happiness of the people that has put its trust in it is null, unlawful, of no value, and, for this very reason, unworthy of being obeyed, and this is precisely the situation in which the Americas find themselves with respect to the Spanish government. Open the Constitution of the Spanish monarchy, and the slightest and most superficial examination will be enough to make clear the commitment of its authors to diminish American representation and obstruct the influence that the native born of those countries could and should have in the government established on the Peninsula. At each step, one comes across articles that confirm this truth, and this code, justly admired for the good judgment, common sense, and wisdom of all its measures in what pertains to Spain, does not lack for injustices, inconsistencies, and puerilities in what concerns America. But let us grant that the constitutional charter contains nothing contrary to the interests of America, that all and each one of the articles sanctioned in it are manifestly beneficial, and, if you wish, that they alone are capable of providing their happiness. It seems that no more can be conceded. Nonetheless, Spain’s cause has not been improved by this. And why? Because despite the continuous and energetic demands that have been made to enforce their observance, nothing has been accomplished; our efforts have been useless, merit has been forgotten, virtue has been beaten down, incompetence positioned in high posts, and the outcries of a people reduced to misery disregarded. Well, now, either the Spanish government has tried to deceive us, observing a conduct entirely contrary to what is provided for in the text of the laws, or it has not had energy sufficient to see that they are observed. In either case we are absolved of the oath of loyalty because in neither have the conditions
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been fulfilled under which this oath was offered, conditions that are the bond of union between the people and the government, essentially embedded in the nature of these contracts and the fundamental principle of every social contract.
Given that neither Spain nor any other power has a right to the land we occupy, we must make clear that this right resides in the general body of the Mexican people; that is to say, in the individuals born and lawfully domiciled in the empire.
The right of the peoples to possess the land they occupy must necessarily originate in one of these three principles: origin, birth, or residence, because the donation or purchase, if it is of occupied land, can be made legal only by the will of the proprietors, and if the land is unoccupied, no right whatsoever authorizes the donor or seller to transmit to the purchaser or recipient a right it does not have.
A generally accepted truth is that the legitimate possessor of unencumbered assets can transfer the dominion he enjoys to his sons and constitute them lawful masters of the paternal inheritance, and this is what we understand by right of origin or filiation. In the same way, every individual human being has the right to live in the country where he was born and, if he submits to the laws established by the appropriate authority, to enjoy the comforts that the society occupying the land offers; and this is what we know as right of birth. Finally, every foreigner settled in a society, with the expressed or tacit consent of the individuals who constitute that society, can acquire property, enter into the enjoyment of all the comforts the citizens of the state enjoy, and acquire a right we call residency. Because the right of society to the land it occupies is not nor can be anything more than the sum of the individual rights, one unquestionable conclusion follows by deduction: that the citizens of the state, which consists of all of them together being its lawful proprietors, must have a true dominion over the occupied land. Well, now, the citizens who make up the Mexican Empire fall into three classes: the descendants of the old inhabitants, the children of foreign origin in the country, and the Spaniards and other foreigners all living together there. Each one of them is the lawful proprietor of a part of the land, and this the Spanish government has never questioned. So the empire, which represents the totality of all of them, is the owner and absolute master of the territory they possess.
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2. But if the Mexican people, or what is the same, the people who make up Mexico, are the lawful masters of the land they occupy, it is no less certain that they are sufficiently enlightened to know their rights and the great benefits independence carries with it, and if there were no other evidence of this truth than the many and great sacrifices they made to achieve independence, these alone would make it clear in a conclusive and decisive way. Eleven years of espionage, prisons, scaffolds, and uninterrupted defeats demonstrate the difficulty of the endeavor and the perseverance of the Mexican people, which has known how to sacrifice its most precious interests in order to achieve liberty. And this immutable steadfastness, this invincible perseverance in confronting such powerful obstacles, are they not proofs guaranteeing that there exists in the general body of the nation an intimate conviction that everything must be sacrificed to the interests of liberty? Has their conduct not demonstrated that they prefer death to servitude and that they are firmly resolved to die free rather than live as slaves? But if, despite all this, even their enlightenment is doubted, peruse their writings published since the year 1810 in England, France, Spain, North America, in Mexico in the presence of masters, and not only will one find many documents that would do honor to some nations that pass for enlightened, but also a total and absolute uniformity with respect to the principal point; that is to say, each one cooperating, by the means in his grasp, in the great work of emancipating the Mexican Empire.
Take in your hands this precious code sanctioned amidst the noise and clamor of arms in the town of Apatzingán. Examine it impartially and you will find inscribed in it all the principles characteristic of the liberal system: sovereignty of the people, the division of powers, the appropriate jurisdiction of each of them, liberty of the press, mutual obligations between the people and the government, the rights of free man, and the means of defense that must be provided to the criminal. In a word, you will find, delimited with sufficient precision and accuracy, the limits of each established authority and, perfectly combined, the liberty of the citizen and the supreme power of the society. So we do not hesitate to affirm resolutely that this code, with some slight adjustments, would have produced our independence and liberty from the year 1815 if the insidious maneuvers of the Spanish government, calculated to divide us, had not produced the pernicious consequence of separating from
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the common interests a portion of citizens who, although very small compared with the rest, was the most necessary because it had taken up arms.
But the happy day arrived when the dawning light of citizenship broke throughout the land of Moctezuma, and the activity of this light penetrated the body of the Mexican army. The memorable twenty-fourth of February arrived, and the fields of Iguala repeated the echoes of the liberty pronounced by the immortal Iturbide. At that voice, the chains that bound our hemisphere and another were broken, and, free of them, we put into place, in the