"I do not deceive myself, my brother, when I feel confident that Spain is hungry and thirsty for justice; that she feels the 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.