if he believes that men,
at least in civilized society, are independent beings, by right entitled
to, and by nature capable of, the exercise of popular self-government,
and that if they have not this power in exercise, it is because they
have been deprived of it by somebody's fraud or violence, which ought to
be detected and remedied, as we abate a public nuisance in the highway;
if a man thinks that overturning a throne and erecting a constitution
will answer the purpose;--if these are his opinions as to men and
society, his plan for Cuba, and for every other part of the world, may
be simple. No wonder such a one is impatient of the inactivity of the
governed masses, and is in a constant state of surprise that the fraud
and violence of a few should always prevail over the rights and merits
of the many--when they themselves might end their thraldom by a blow,
and put their oppressors to rest--by a bare bodkin!

But if the history of the world and the observation of his own times
have led a man to the opinion that, of divine right and human necessity,
government of some sort there must be, in which power must be vested
somewhere, and exercised somehow; that popular self-government is rather
of the nature of a faculty than of a right; that human nature is so
constituted that the actual condition of civil society in any place and
nation is, on the whole, the fair result of conflicting forces of good
and evil--the power being in proportion to the need of power, and the
franchises to the capacity for using franchises; that autocrats and
oligarchs are the growth of the soil; and that every people has, in the
main, and in the long run, a government as good as it deserves; if such
is the substance of the belief to which he has been led or forced, he
will look gravely upon the future of such people as the Cubans, and
hesitate as to the invention and application of remedies. If he
reflects that of all the nations of the southern races in North and
South America, from Texas to Cape Horn, the Brazilians alone, who have a
constitutional monarchy, are in a state of order and progress; and if he
further reflects that Cuba, as a royal province, with all its evils, is
in a better condition than nearly all the Spanish republican states, he
may well be slow to believe that, with their complication of
difficulties, and causes of disorder and weakness--with their half
million or more of slaves and quarter million or less of free blacks,
wit