are free to peril
all--manhood, money, life, hope, every thing but honor and the sense
of freedom. But why speak of peril in this. Peril is every where. It
is the inevitable child of life, natural to all conditions--to repose
as well as action, to the obscurity which never goes abroad, as well
as to that adventure which forever seeks the field. You incur no more
peril in openly braving your tyrant, all together as one man, than you
do thus tamely sitting beneath his footstool, and trembling forever
lest his capricious will may slay as it enslaves. Be you but true to
yourselves--openly true--and the danger disappears as the night-mists
that speed from before the rising sun. There is little that deserves
the name of peril in the issue which lies before us. We are more than
a match, united, and filled with the proper spirit, for all the forces
that Spain can send against us. It is in our coldness that she
warms--in our want of unity that she finds strength. But even were we
not superior to her in numbers--even were the chances all wholly and
decidedly against us--I still cannot see how it is that you hesitate
to draw the sword in so sacred a strife--a strife which consecrates
the effort, and claims Heaven's sanction for success. Are your souls
so subdued by servitude; are you so accustomed to bonds and tortures,
that these no longer irk and vex your daily consciousness? Are you so
wedded to inaction that you cease to feel? Is it the frequency of the
punishment that has made you callous to the ignominy and the pain?
Certainly your viceroy gives you frequent occasion to grow reconciled
to any degree of hurt and degradation. Daily you behold, and I hear,
of the exactions of this tyrant--of the cruelties and the murders to
which he accustoms you in Bogota. Hundreds of your friends and
kinsmen, even now, lie rotting in the common prisons, denied equally
your sympathies and every show of justice, perishing, daily, under the
most cruel privations. Hundreds have perished by this and other modes
of torture, and the gallows and garote seem never to be unoccupied.
Was it not the bleaching skeleton of the venerable Hermano, whom I
well knew for his wisdom and patriotism, which I beheld, even as I
entered, hanging in chains over the gateway of your city? Was he not
the victim of his wealth and love of country? Who among you is secure?
He dared but to deliver himself as a man, and as he was suffered to
stand alone, he was destroyed. Had