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197 Regretful, like every good Mexican, for the series of calamities that have afflicted the country since the time of our political emancipation, wishing to ascertain the causes that have provoked those ills, and, most of all, anxious to dam up so much disaster, attacking the illness at its source, we proposed, in our editorial of January 21, to ascertain the causes of the ills we have suffered, and to do that we tried to analyze the facts and delineate the state in which the country found itself at the beginning of its new course as an independent nation. Our article has suffered the severe censure of our illustrious antagonists, the gentlemen editors of El Universal. These gentlemen have done us the honor of believing our observations just but have judged as spurious our arguments; they have agreed on the facts but not on the consequences we deduced from them. We pursue this question because it seems to us of vital importance and because we are not yet convinced of the truth of our adversaries’ opinions; and one should not understand by this that we gainsay the persuasive eloquence that reigns in their luminous writings; no, sir, we are not yet convinced, because . . . what is one to do? . . . Our concerns , the obligations to our ideas, and who knows how many other motives hinder our desire to get to the truth, which, finally and at last, we will have to acknowledge when we come to understand the lamentable error writers on topics of public interest have made with the strange notion of believing and saying that civil societies have had the social pact as their original foundation. But let us get to our topic. We will begin by frankly demonstrating to our adversaries that we refuse to believe they have so poor an opinion of us when they ascribe to us lamentable ignorance regarding the principal and most important 3 What Might Be the Causes of Our Ills, Second Article Original title: “Polémica entre El Universal, El Siglo XIX, y El Monitor Republicano, entre 1848 y 1849: ‘Cual sea la causa de nuestros males’” [segundo artículo]. Source: El Universal, Mexico, February 3, 1849. 198 : polemiC, 1848–1849 facts of our own history. We said, and we repeat today, that the cry of liberty that resounded throughout Europe had echoes in our patria; but we do not say with assurance, nor do we think of saying with assurance, that the masses that arose at the voice of the parish priest of Dolores were moved by that cry, which they neither heard nor could understand . We know, at least as well as our illustrious antagonists, that not the name of liberty, but others very different, among them that of theVirgin of Guadalupe, were the ones invoked the memorable night of September 15, 1810. We know equally well that if the caudillos of that glorious revolution, in declaring war on the Spanish power, had thrown forth the names of liberty and independence, they probably would have achieved nothing; those watchwords would have died without finding echoes in the multitude for which they had no significance whatsoever.We know, lastly, that the revolution was completed thanks to the Plan of Iguala, one of whose bases was the transfer to America of Ferdinand or other individuals of the reigning house; but we know also that the leaders of the revolution, in its first and last epoch, used the watchwords they invoked only to move the multitude. We know as well that the merit of the famous Plan of Iguala, whose realization is the holy grail of our very esteemed compatriots and colleagues, the gentlemen of El Universal, did not consist in its intrinsic goodness, but rather in having been the most convenient, the most suitable to the circumstances, because only by unifying the opposing interests that divided public opinion could one direct this public opinion to a single end. This the author of the above-mentioned plan tried, and he attained it, as was to be expected. But it will not appear that we have known all this after the gentlemen of El Universal undertook the enormous task of digging up the documents of the history of our country to throw in our faces the lamentable ignorance in which we find ourselves with respect to the most important facts of history. We will explain, then, in what sense we said that the cry of liberty that resounded throughout all Europe had echoes in our...

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