THE PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONALIST PARTY COMMENTS ON THE VETO OF THE PROJECT RELATED TO ELECTORAL REPRESENTATION I There exists no legislative power. The legislative initiative shall be law when it suits North American policy, and shall be null when it protects Puerto Rican interests. The nation has been deluded by a brand-new legislature that has served only to provide concessions to the invaders. Faced with that reality of the Governor’s veto, no time is lost in discussing what he is not to approve. In reality, the head of the intervention is the one who truly legislates. The members of the Legislature are entertained, playing with all seriousness at representatives and senators. In vetoing the electoral bill, the head of the intervention has lifted the veil for the naive. The Legislature has ratified its approval by a vote of two-thirds of the members who constitute it. But that does not turn the project into law either! The President of Estados Unidos retains the absolute veto. Even if the Legislature approves a project unanimously, it will not be law if the head of the empire does not feel like it. If that were not enough, the Yankee Congress retains the power to annul each and every one of the laws of Puerto Rico. We are witnessing the most ridiculous and costly legislative farce in history. It is not known why the head of the intervention has vetoed a bill that contains the provisions of his previous recommendations to the Insular Legislature. That retraction is not easily explained. It may be that he acted for personal reasons, by instructions from his government, or that his personal reasons have coincided with the instructions he receives daily from Washington. The President of Estados Unidos, against his will, is going to do us a favor by clarifying that mystery when he issues his resolution when considering the project. The reasoned veto of Colonel Beverley offers a marvelous resemblance to the dissenting opinion of the legislative minority headed by the president of the Liberal Party, Mr. Barceló. We will deal exclusively with the statements in which the Nationalist party is alluded to. The history of militant nationalism is diaphanous and is of public domain. It is a movement that demands the immediate constitution of the Republic. It rejects each and every one of the political panaceas offered to the nation to lull its civic conscience, demoralize its resistance to systematically exploit it. It repudiates executive public offices because it knows that these are used to corrupt political directors. Facing nationalism there exists, as is natural, a governmental political party, which sustains the legitimacy of the regime and swears to defend its policy. Currently the party of the regime is bitterly divided into three factions, the Unión-republicana, the liberals and the socialists, but grouped into two camps, liberals versus coalicionistas (unio-republicans and socialists). These groupings come from the defunct governmental factions unionistas and republican anexionistas. Constitutive of the government party, they have had to face nationalism constantly, when it is not one faction it is the other. Yankee interventionist policy demands the disappearance of its enemy, nationalism, and wants to keep the electorate divided into two camps equally subjected to the regime. However, unionism and its derived aliancismos, and currently liberalism, have revealed themselves as the most fierce and gratuitous enemies against nationalism. And that attitude will seem paradoxical when one hears the protests of their followers of being as nationalistic as the most fervent militant in our ranks. The reason is obvious, nationalism has come to tear down forever the ambidextrous policy, and each one has to define himself, either with the yankis or with us. Unionism today liberalism rose on the basis of that policy of duplicity and today succumbs under the terrible weight of its own sin. To flatter the yanqui, they attack nationalism; and to attract the unwary multitudes they extol its redemptive doctrines. The great master of that policy is Mr. Barceló, currently in the twilight of his public prestige, for the sole reason of his inability to bravely embrace the truth and sustain it as an invariable norm of political action. He is a man who could have done something for his homeland, but his disorientation has led him to inevitable decadence. For the liberal leadership, nationalists, individually, are excellent people, but the Nationalist Party is very bad. It is a formula of the intervening power. The yanki government shielded itself against the independentismo preached by De Diego with the reactionary unionistas and with the annexationist republican faction. Today, in its defense against the overwhelming advance of nationalism, it uses the liberal faction as a parapet, which simulates an independentismo for the last stage. (See the latest report that Colonel Beverley has addressed to his government, where he refers to the political parties). The yanki power cannot use the Coalición against the Nationalismo, because that grouping is nuanced, despite its current 251 regionalist reaction, of a historical annexationism. The Nationalist Party is feared by the liberal leadership because it is strong where the liberal faction has the bulk of its hosts who love independence, and they fear that one day the blindfold will fall off so many good people miserably deceived until now. Thus, when the Nationalist Party registered, it could only do so in the districts of greatest liberal strength, Humacao, Guayama, San Juan and Arecibo. The nationalist registration failed in the districts where the Coalición is preponderant, Ponce, Mayagüez and Aguadilla. The liberal leadership really wants the coalicionistas to approach nationalism, but, of course, it does not want to allow liberal voters to join the Nationalist Party. Therein lies the key to their opposition. If this were frankly exposed, it would be respectable. The liberal leadership in its blind attack against nationalism repeats almost word for word the declarations of Colonel Beverley. It is the peregrine yanki theory that minorities should be defenseless before the majorities; that representation with voice and vote in the Insular Board of Elections should be reserved for the two strongest parties, and the others should be placed at the mercy of their will. That a certain president of a so-called liberal party commit such a blunder is not strange if we know the ends that are pursued. When the liberal faction, by virtue of its registration by petition, obtained representation with voice and vote in the Insular Board of Elections, the presence of the Nationalist Party in that body was not counted on. There was a deliberate plan in place to eliminate general sub-candidacies filed with the Executive Secretariat. When the liberal leadership obtained its representation, the unexpected opinion of the Attorney General appeared revoking another opinion of the same official. By virtue of that revocation, the registration of the Nationalist Party was annulled. Beverley and Barceló smiled. We appealed to the Legislature, Barceló, liberal leader, and Iglesias, socialist leader, joined their hosts to prevent nationalism from being granted an observer without a vote in the electoral bodies, Beverley, Barceló and Iglesias smiled. It was the time before the Coalición. Barceló and Iglesias were allies in politics against nationalism. The Unión Republicana made a gesture to recognize our right but failed before the liberal-socialist combination. The governmental combination believed impossible the registration by petition of the Nationalist Party, but these gentlemen had forgotten that in Puerto Rico there is still shame, and, even the liberal electorate repudiated the acts of its directors. Before the nationalist representation entered the Insular Board of Elections, the Governor was going to be the arbitrator in case of a tie. It was foreseen that this would be chronic. Colonel Beverley would dictate in the fortress his own scrutiny. Nationalism freed the nation from this shame by becoming the arbitrator of the electoral result. 252 The performance of the nationalist representation in said body was always juridical before political, and to our worst enemies, the liberals, we recognized as much right as they claimed in justice. Two senators, a representative, and a mayor of the liberal faction owe their positions to the nationalist vote. Currently, Mr. Barceló has a greater need to submit to the regime so that they give him something. The pass card is an attack on nationalism. Therefore, he is unable to recognize the greatness of our actions. God grant that he gets something from the budget so that he calms down a bit. His blunders against the Nationalist Party coincide with the exposition that the man of government, the necessary man of the liberal faction, Mr. Martín Travieso, has just made in Estados Unidos. The exposition of the practical doctrines and resources of the liberal leadership has been formulated by Travieso in the yanki Press with great mastery. Let us hear the solemn words of the honorary president of the Liberal Party: “I am pro-American, anti-independentista, conservative, and I belong to a party that is called liberal and that consigns independence in its program.” Wonderful synthesis worthy of Barceló as well. The liberals maintain that it is necessary to sustain Travieso because it is necessary to sneak him into some important executive position. What a school, gentlemen! This declaration has been necessary to refute once again the juggling teachers of rotten colonial politics. Now, nationalism is not concerned with any electoral law. Its ascending march is imposed by the sovereign will of the Puerto Rican Nation. P. ALBIZU CAMPOS 253 DAY OF THE CONSECRATION OF THE FLAG OF PUERTO RICO 82 SPEECH BY ALBIZU CAMPOS NATIONALITY “The most difficult task that a people who has lost its freedom has, is the task that the notion of nationality imposes on it. To know what a nation is, is to know what a citizen is, to know what a family is and to know what a society is. When a people is to be enslaved, the notion of citizenship is broken, so that it confuses the slave with the free man; the family is broken and the notion of society is broken so that it confuses a society with a herd of slaves subject to exploitation. “The work of national reconquest is the work of the reconquest of citizen consciousness, of family consciousness and of the consciousness of a society. The first analysis that every director makes committed to reconquering his homeland for its independence is the notion of homeland. And so much has been said in Puerto Rico about homeland, that nobody knows what it means anymore. The homeland is citizenship; the homeland is the family and the homeland is the great fraternal society of all Puerto Ricans. But to infiltrate that notion into us, nationalism has fought hard. We have had to repatriate Puerto Ricans. Many of you will tell me: “we have never been Puerto Rican emigrants; many of us have never left Puerto Rico”. True. That is in the physical order. Many of you have not seen the entrance of the Morro, neither to leave nor to enter. That is very true, but morally, spiritually, many of you have been foreigners in Puerto Rico and unfortunately many Puerto Ricans do not feel Puerto Ricans. He is in the homeland, he is repatriated and he is in the soul of the homeland only he who feels like a good Puerto Rican.” LIBERTY “The price of liberty is cheap. It is only the contempt for slavery. When you despise slavery, when each of you know what it is to be a citizen of Puerto Rico, that day slavery will end in Puerto Rico.” WORK OF NATIONALISM “Nationalism has repatriated all Puerto Ricans. We have reintegrated the Puerto Rican family. Puerto Rican citizenship, gentlemen, is the highest political dignity there is on earth. We have forged the Puerto Rican society anew, and any opposition, any oppression, any form of extermination will be impotent to reduce to slavery a nationality like ours.” THE RECONQUEST OF WHAT IS OURS “We have restored the Puerto Rican consciousness, and now we are going to conquer what is ours. And what is the first value that nationalism places before the Puerto Rican citizen consciousness for the reconquest of the most valuable thing in Puerto Rico? Are they perhaps its lands, fertile and beautiful; are they perhaps its mines; are they perhaps its ports that look to the four winds, to the four cardinal points, as a symbol of the power of a free nation? Is it, perhaps, its commerce, its industry, its culture? Great as all those values are, the first reconquest that nationalism imposes on this generation is the reconquest of the ashes of the great martyrs of the homeland, because peoples are slaves while peoples allow the holy fields where the ashes of their grandparents lie to be converted into pieces of sugar cane by the invaders who tread the Puerto Rican homeland. And we do not say cemetery. We say holy field; holy field, where are the holy ashes of the generative forces of the great nation that is the people of Puerto Rico, and we are going to seek in the respect, in the transcendence of those ashes, the respect for our own blood, because he who denies his own mother, who denies his progenitors, is a slave, and everyone who denies Puerto Rican citizenship, Puerto Rican society and patriotic independence, is because he does not know the moral and spiritual value of his own progenitors.” CULT TO IMMORTALITY: “We do not restore the cult of the dead. Peoples who look into the tomb are dead peoples. We restore the cult to immortality, which on earth is symbolized by the venerable ashes of our ancestors. When each of you know where the ashes of your grandparents are; when each of you go to mediate on the moral, cultural and physical values of your ancestors, he will immediately carry the pride of being Puerto Rican and will be nothing else but Puerto Rican, because those who deny their origin are despicable beings condemned to the ignominy of slavery.” 255 RESPONSIBILITY OF THE PUERTO RICAN: “His first responsibility is not to be a slave; his second responsibility is not to procreate a slave posterity, and there is no force on the planet capable of reducing a people that sustains itself on those principles. The fearful, the cowards, those who traffic with their own decorum, do not know of that force, and they confuse and fear brute force, not the power of law but brute force, but the Goddess of brute force is a very frivolous Goddess, is a Goddess who one day crushes those who surrender to her cult, and all the peoples who have surrendered to the cult of the Goddess of brute force have ended up receiving the contempt of history. We remain unshaken, as is the divine power of the law that the Puerto Rican nation has to be the owner of its destinies, and we challenge all the powers of the earth that pretend to keep us in slavery.” CULT TO VALOR “We have faith in the victory of our cause because we have valor, and valorous men and women were never slaves of anyone. That is why nationalism is the cult to valor. We have faith in our right; we have faith in the restoration of our liberty, because we have faith in the citizen consciousness of Puerto Rico. The reconquest of Puerto Rico has begun with the reconquest of its ashes and has also begun with the reconquest of the symbols of its sovereignty. We have here the two symbols of the sovereignty of Puerto Rico: the patriotic flag and the cross of the homeland. And that was the “little flag”. Slaves profane all values including their own dignity. Today is the Flag of Puerto Rico and this day we have called the day of Consecration to the Flag, because it is necessary that each of you be consecrated to the symbol that represents the political power of the homeland: its Flag” DE DIEGO AND THE MARTYR “De Diego sang to it with all his inspiration and his last prayer was to one day rise above his tomb and wave that flag in the sky. But that flag has something even greater than that generation. That flag is the consecration of the purest blood of an adolescent. I have said on other occasions that great values are forged in great sacrifices, and for the sacrifice to be a sacrifice, it has to be the offering of the purest thing in the entrails of the homeland. Let us salute this afternoon, gentlemen, the venerated figure of the first martyr mother of the homeland of this generation, Doña Amparo Díaz who is present.” PUERTO RICAN MATERNITY: “The audacity of the yanki invaders has reached the extreme of wanting to profane Puerto Rican maternity; of wanting to invade the 256 very entrails of nationality. When our woman loses the transcendental and divine concept that she is the mother not only of her children, but the mother of all the future generations of Puerto Rico, if she loses that notion,” Puerto Rico disappears in a single generation. The Puerto Rican mother has to know that above all she is a mother and that motherhood is the greatest privilege that God has given to the human species. That there is oppression, that there is pain, that there is hunger, that there is death, we know; but neither pain, nor hunger, nor death are remedied by assassinating nationality in its own entrails.” PUERTO RICO “Puerto Rico is the highest political dignity on earth. We are a society, because Puerto Rican society is the union of all Puerto Rican hearts, and we are a defined nationality, because we are a great society and our aim is respect for the law, our respect for the law that also gives us the right to impose the duty on foreigners to respect the independence of the homeland.” THE EXAMPLE OF CIVISMO: “It is the day of consecration to the flag, and we would not celebrate these ephemerides of proceres such as De Diego, and Suárez Diaz, if we did not have the firm will to be their worthy emulators. We do not celebrate these acts to make a beautiful parade, great, glorious, beautiful like this one. We celebrate it to swear that we will be worthy emulators of the men whose names we pronounce.” THE RESTORATION OF THE HOMELAND “We have made the restoration of the ashes; we have made the restoration of the flag; we have made the restoration of the cross, and, gentlemen, having conquered the greatest values, it is immediately up to us to take possession of our lands, by force, if necessary. No one has the right to possess a piece of land in Puerto Rico, if he is not a Puerto Rican. No one has the right to possess anything in Puerto Rico, if he is not Puerto Rican; neither commerce, nor industry, nor banking, nor lands, nor ships, nor franchise, nor corporations, and we have to go by force, if necessary, against those who pretend that our homeland becomes a house of slaves. And that is our right, and whoever is offended by our right, let him leave our homeland. And we have to go head-on, head-on, and for that we have raised these bodies and it is up to you, our youth, to be worthy bearers of that flag. We do not want cowards in our ranks, not a single one. We do not want undisciplined people in our ranks, because indiscipline is a cancer worse than betrayal. The men and women who do not know how to obey, do not know how to command either. The work of a 257 people is forged with work, with virtue, and with valor, and that is the message that the names of De Diego and Suárez Díaz leave us.” The speech of Mr. Albizu Campos was repeatedly interrupted by long and thunderous applause. After the act, the numerous forces of Cadetes de la República who had come from the interior marched to their respective municipalities amid cheers and enthusiasm. J. PANIAGUA SERRACANTE In San Juan, Puerto Rico 258 Homage to the young Francisco Pagán Rodríguez, President of the Federación Nacional de Estudiantes Puertorriqueños celebrated at the Hotel Condado in the month of July of 1933. THE VETO OF PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT TO THE ELECTORAL LAW DECLARATIONS MADE TO THAT EFFECT BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONALIST PARTY 83 “There is no Legislature in Puerto Rico. The legislative power is a myth. The electoral struggle is a periodic farce to keep the Puerto Rican family divided. Playing at senators and representatives in a fantastic parliament is now more than just comedy. The Puerto Rican nation has been subjected to that constant mockery during the yanki intervention. Nationalism has pointed out that one cannot speak of legislative powers when the absolute veto gravitates over every legislative resolution. Deep down, everyone has understood it that way, and the Legislature did not bother to reconsider the projects vetoed by the Governor, the representative of the intervention, aware that his boss, the President of the empire, reserved the absolute and irrevocable veto, and that he would never disapprove his own representative, the Governor. The naive believed that Colonel Beverley’s veto obeyed personal whims rather than a determined imperial policy. There were those who hoped that since the current governor, Colonel Beverley, was an affiliate of the norteameircano Republican party, and the president dictator of Estados Unidos, Roosevelt, the head of the yanki Democratic party, that the President of Estados Unidos would revoke the veto of the representative of his Republican predecessor, Hoover. North American policy is simply a calculated, deliberate, and cold system, aimed at displacing us in our own homeland. There is no disparity of criteria or procedures between the yanki political parties in what affects the North American intervention in Puerto Rico. Republicans or Democrats, all are worse, as a good jíbaro would say. The situation has also been clarified for the naive who in Puerto Rico aspire to convert their homeland into a yanki province (“estado” sic). The Democratic party, which says in its program that it will convert Puerto Rico into a province of the North American empire (“estado” sic), currently governs Estados Unidos, and here the majorities are dominated by a coalition that aspires to that political solution. The coincidence could not be more perfect. However, the electoral law that this coalition approves is rejected by the yanki president. What can the Coalición expect from a North American republican administration already defined against that political status? For a definitive constitutional lesson, the anexionistas must see that the provinces (“estados” sic.) and the same yanki national Congress have disappeared from the North American political reality. It is anachronistic to speak of the sovereignty of the “estados”, with which the defenders of statehood were deceived. Estados Unidos currently lives under the strongest personal dictatorship that could ever have been conceived. No less interesting before that imperial úkase is the situation of the other governmental faction, with the friendly name of liberal, but in every way invoking the use of foreign tyranny against their homeland. The leadership of that grouping is boasting and rejoicing that due to its efforts in Washington, with memorials to the President and the Secretary of War of Estados Unidos, the imperial veto annulling the legislative will has been achieved. The sensible country will never cease to be amazed at that “liberal” action, of that leadership that, although no one believes its protests of independentismo to be sincere, nevertheless, there was some hope in its regional sentimentalism. The unionistas of yesterday, today liberals who had spent their lives criticizing identical actions of the declared annexationists before the same enemy powers, are the current spokesmen of the exercise of a frank tyranny in their homeland, if with it some of the budget falls into their hands. It can be seen in the statements of the director of that grouping himself that this concern overwhelms him. It will never be possible to explain why the leadership has taken before the foreign enemies who have erected themselves as masters of the patriotic destinies, all the scourges, gossip, and pestilences of this miserable partisanship fomented for their own profit by the same yanki invaders, before whose chief the leadership of the liberal grouping has appeared with its
a file of Boricua entanglements. The dictator Roosevelt must have smiled to see this formal recognition from both sides, liberals and coalitionists, who recognize in him the legitimate arbiter of our destinies. The political history of the world does not know a more shameful spectacle. Dirty linen is washed at home, says an old adage, which deserves compliance in politics as well, especially when it comes to the rights of a nation intervened in like ours by a foreign enemy power like the Yankee empire. However, the liberal leadership is naive in believing that through its officious management, the Yankee dictator has decreed the absolute veto to the electoral bill. We remind them that foreign despotism is exercised with exclusive regard to its own good, which necessarily results in harm to the intervened nation. The submissive liberal petition has had no influence whatsoever on the noted result, except perhaps to serve as a pretext for the head of the enemies of the Homeland for his act of tyranny. Every trip to Washington made by the liberal leadership has been fatal for their party: 261 To justify its repudiation of independence, it presented itself with a “bill campbell,” whose whereabouts no one was informed of; to glorify the fusion of Unionism with annexationist Republicanism, it returned from Washington with the marvelous formula of “sovereignty within sovereignty”; and now, without knowing for what purpose, from the Yankee Capitol, it derived the political remedy of “evolutionary” independence, without anyone knowing what was meant by that, and which has turned out to be, in a few days, the maintenance of Yankee tyranny, through the absolute imperial veto on any resolution or act of the Legislature. The reason for Mr. Roosevelt’s irrevocable veto is none other than to maintain absolute control of the electoral result. This is provided for in the military regulations with which it is intended to bribe this country and which is called the Organic Act. In the past elections, for the first time during the Yankee military intervention, it was in the hands of the Puerto Ricans to be the sole arbiters of the electoral result. In principle, it was recognized in the bill that President Roosevelt has just thrown into the trash can. That the bill had its defects was undeniable, but the fact that it was Puerto Ricans who would have the electoral power in their hands was enough for no one in Puerto Rico to lend themselves to the Yankee government’s maneuver to find a pretext to annul it. The current constitution of the Insular Board of Elections was respected, with a representative of the empire, and a delegate from each of the parties with public force and opinion: Nationalism, the Republican Union, Liberals, and Socialists. The Liberal party is called upon to publicly recognize that this board, thus constituted, guaranteed all its acquired rights. Certainly, nationalism retained the power of arbiter, but let its gratuitous enemies of the liberal leadership be honest, that this power was exercised in a strictly legal sense and never with the aim of partisanship, which, in principle, are alien to the nationalist mentality, which was conscious at all times of the enormous power that it had snatched from the head of the Yankee intervention. Moreover, we believe that a political party that feels defenseless in the face of this legal situation, when it has one hundred and seventy thousand voters (170,000), should dissolve itself, if in order to come to power to destroy that miserable budget that does so much harm to the civic conscience, it has to resort to begging the North American dictator to exercise the tyranny granted to him by the military regulations with which it is intended to subjugate the Homeland. In the current situation, the representative of the intervention, the delegates of the liberals and the Republican Union have a vote in the Insular Board of Elections. The head of the intervention has reconquered that power of absolute arbiter. During the ugly controversy that the liberals and coalitionists were carrying on in Washington, we remained reserved so that the blow would fall on the country in cold blood, so that it would awaken to the reality that the electoral struggle is a farce as useless as it is disorienting; that there is no legislature in Puerto Rico, nor any judicial or administrative body under the dominion of the Puerto Ricans; and, that the conservatives who have not 262 just lined up in nationalism realize that they live in full foreign tyranny, and sanctioned in advance, by what is supposed to be a constitutional charter. Now, by virtue of Roosevelt’s ukase, the head of the intervention retains the electoral result. Unionism, today liberalism, knows what that means, and will again be its propitious victim at the first opportunity that suits the empire. As long as liberalism lends itself to the demolition policy against our Homeland, it will be pleased; if one day it wants to react, it will stumble upon the good-natured but contemptuous smile of the Yankee despot, whom it now deifies as an arbiter of justice. One reaches the despot peacefully only through flattery and always to serve him. Faced with this harsh reality, clarified by Mr. Roosevelt, the Puerto Rican nation knows that any party that promises to govern it under this Yankee intervention is deceiving it, because only the despot who represents it governs under foreign absolutism. It is the national hour, Puerto Ricans!! The only arbiter of our destinies is the sovereign will of the Homeland. 263 P. ALBIZU CAMPOS “BARCELO ESTABLISHES A THEORY IN CONSONANCE WITH HIS POLICY OF SUBMISSION TO THE REGIME” SAYS THE NATIONALIST PRESIDENT 84 Yankee tyranny against Puerto Rico is exercised, by virtue of the Organic Act, by the President of the United States, DIRECTLY in the appointment of federal and insular judicial and administrative positions of the highest importance, by virtue of his absolute and irrevocable veto over any bill approved by the legislature. INDIRECTLY through his mandatary, the Governor, local head of the intervention who designates the judicial and administrative officials of secondary importance, and who watches, as is natural, not to put into effect any law that harms Yankee interests. For better protection, the empire, through its Congress, reserves the power to annul, without prior consultation with anyone, each and every one of the laws in force; and its courts of appeal can revoke all the sentences of the existing interventionist courts. It is organized despotism. Injustice imposed without considerations of any kind for the Puerto Ricans. And it is so, because foreign despotism is exercised with exclusive attention to its own interests. All its acts constitute an aggression against a nation that does not even defend itself. To affirm that the veto of the electoral law, of the current dictator that the North American people suffer, “is a triumph of public morality, of justice and of decency” - textual words of the President of the liberal group - we will say that it is childishness so as not to qualify the fact in the artillery terms that concern Mr. Barceló. We will serve him the truth in the most meringue-like and easily digestible form for a newborn in politics. We have not held the liberal leadership responsible for the implementation of the Yankee regime. Mr. Barceló did not need to defend himself from that supposed imputation. However, he has serious responsibility in the consolidation of Yankee oppression, but that is not a matter to be dealt with at this time. Let’s go directly to the question of principle raised by the liberal director in serving as a dupe to Mr. Roosevelt to veto the electoral law. We will try to explain all this with the greatest tenderness we have at our disposal. As Mr. Barceló shuns, as is natural, the question of principle raised by our statements yesterday, it must be revived. 264