Page 340 - Vida y Obra de Vizcardo Guzman - Vol-1

Volumen 1
Miranda, Viscardo y la difusión de la «Carta»

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PROCLAMA DE MIRANDA, EN INGLÉS, DE AGOSTO DE 1806

PROCLAMATION:
No 1.
Don Francisco de Miranda, Commander in Chief of the Colombian
Army, to the inhabitants of Columbian America.
Brave Countrymen and Friends! — Obedient to yours wishes, and
to the repeated requests and calls of the Country, to whose service we have
cheerfully consecrated the greater part of our lives, we have disembarked in
this province Caraccas. The opportunity and the time apper to us highly fa-
vourable for the completion of our designs; and all persons composing this
army are your frieds of Countrymen; all resolved to sacrifice their lives, if ne-
cessary, for your liberty and independence, under the auspices and protection
of this British Navy! With those auxiliares, we can safety, say, that the day will
come, when our America recovering her sovereign independance, her sons
will be able freely to shew to the universe her exalted spirit. The oppresive
unfeeling Government which has obscured our finer qualities, and blackened
with calumnies, our deference and character, managed also to maintain her
abominable system of Administration for three succesive centuries, but was
never abla to eradicate from our hearts those moral and civil virtues wich a
holy religion, and a regular code of laws, incorporated with our customs, and
led to an honest natural course of action.
Let us be worthy them of those admirable qualities that the mean
odius agents of the Court of Madrid being expelled, we may be able quietly to
establish the civil order necessary to the completion of so honorable an un-
dertaking. The recovery of our rights as Citizens, and of our national glory a
Columbian Americans, will be amongst the least benefits we shall derive from
that so just and necessary a determination.
The innocent Indians and other men will consider us all as brother
citizens, and that precedence belongs only to merit and virtue, in which belief
they will primarily obtain, most certainly military and civil recompense, the
reward of merit alone.
If the dutch and Portuguese qere able, in former times, to throw off
the yoke of Spanish oppression; if the swiss, and the americans, our neigbours,

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