urgent
and imperious necessity of a government, worthy and energetic,
severe and respected; and that she anxiously wishes that the law to
which we all, great and small, should be subject, should reign with
undisputed sway.

"Spain is not willing that outrage or offence should be offered to
the faith of her fathers, believing that in Catholicity reposes the
truth she understands, and that to accomplish to the full its
divine mission, the Church must be free.

"Whilst knowing and not forgetting that the nineteenth century is
not the sixteenth, Spain is resolved to preserve from every danger
Catholic unity--the symbol of our glories, the essence of our
laws, and the holy bond of concord between all Spaniards.

"The Spanish people, taught by a painful experience, desires the
truth in everything, and that the King should be a king in reality,
and not the shadow of a king; and that its Cortes should be the
regularly appointed and peaceful gathering of the independent and
incorruptible elect of the constituencies, and not tumultuous and
barren assemblies of office-holders and office-seekers, servile
majorities and seditious minorities.

"The Spanish people is favourable to decentralisation, and will
always be so; and you know well, my dear Alfonso, that should my
desires be carried out, instead of assimilating the Basque
provinces to the rest of Spain, which the revolutionary spirit
would fain bring to pass, the rest of Spain would be lifted to an
equality in internal administration with those fortunate and noble
provinces.

"It is my wish that the municipality should retain its separate
existence, and the provinces likewise, proper precautions being
employed to prevent possible abuses.

"My cherished thought as constant desire is to give to Spain
exactly that which she does not possess, in spite of the lying
clamour of some deluded people--that liberty which she only knows
by name; liberty, which is the daughter of the gospel, not
liberalism, which is the son of disbelief (_de la protesta_);
liberty, in fine, which is the supremacy of the laws when the laws
are just--that is to say, conformable to the designs of nature and
of God.

"We, descendants of kings, admit that the people should not exist
for the King so much as the King for the people; that a king should
be the most honoured man amongst his people, as he is the first
caballero; and that a king for the future should glory in the
special title of 'father o