unctionaries will receive their orders for military
service from their respective administrative chiefs.

7. From this date no one capable of bearing arms is allowed to
leave these Islands. This prohibition does not apply to those
who are seriously ill.

_Proclamation_

_Spaniards_:--

Between Spain and the United States of North America hostilities
have broken out.

The moment has arrived to prove to the world that we possess
the spirit to conquer those who, pretending to be loyal friends,
take advantage of our misfortunes and abuse our hospitality, using
means which civilized nations consider unworthy and disreputable.

The North American people, composed of all the social excrescences,
have exhausted our patience and provoked war with their perfidious
machinations, with their acts of treachery, with their outrages
against the law of nations and international treaties.

The struggle will be short and decisive. The God of Victories
will give us one as brilliant and complete as the righteousness
and justice of our cause demand. Spain, which counts upon the
sympathies of all the nations, will emerge triumphantly from
this new test, humiliating and blasting the adventurers from
those States that, without cohesion and without a history, offer
to humanity only infamous traditions and the sorry spectacle
of Chambers in which appear united insolence and defamation,
cowardice and cynicism.

A squadron manned by foreigners, possessing neither instruction
nor discipline, is preparing to come to this Archipelago with
the blackguardly intention of robbing us of all that means life,
honour, and liberty. Pretending to be inspired by a courage of
which they are incapable, the North American seamen undertake
as an enterprise capable of realization the substitution of
Protestanism for the Catholic religion you profess, to treat you
as tribes refractory to civilization, to take possession of your
riches as if they were unacquainted with the rights of property,
and to kidnap those persons whom they consider useful to man their
ships or to be serviceable in agricultural or industrial labour.

Vain designs! Ridiculous boastings!

Your indomitable bravery will suffice to frustrate the attempt
to carry out their plans. You will not allow the faith you
profess to be