CHAP. XXXVIII.

ested friendship, it will never be admitted by the generality of Mexicans with the character and conditions which it now imposes on them.

PROCLAMATION.

ARTICLE 1. The constitution of 1854 shall cease to reign in the Republic of Mexico, and the Government emanating from it.

ART. 2. We proclaim the senior-general of division, Don Jose Maria Cobos, chief of the forces, to carry out this plan, who shall dictate the necessary means for making it generally adopted in the rest of the Republic.

ART. 3. In adhering to it, the people will transmit to the said chief the respective act of proclamation.

ART. 4. The aforesaid general-in-chief shall immediately convene a meeting of the people of Matamoras, which, upon voting, shall form a junta, composed of five individuals of wisdom and discretion, to propose without delay a plan which shall have for its object the constitution of a provisional government, which shall have the direction of public administration, and advance the necessary means for the defense of our venerated independence.

ART. 5. In the meantime the collection of taxes which may have been made, belonging to the public treasury, shall be placed in safe custody, taking only what may be necessary for the expenses of war and of office; they shall also reserve a corresponding portion for foreign contracts.

[Inclosure Numbers 3.]

ACT.

In the heroic city of Matamoras, on the 7th day of the month of November, 1863, the garrison of this place reunited themselves en masse under the command of Colonel Juan N. Cortinas, chief of the armies, as well as the people convened to the effect.

In consideration that the State has long suffered and bewailed the effects of the declaration of siege in which the decree of January 4, 1862, has placed it, the more that it has failed to accomplish the object for which it was dictated, for the reason that the Senate and its sons have always contributed for the national defense, not stinting the Supreme Government either in men or means, yet it thinks it can do more under the influence of its tutelary institutions, as they are derived from the general constitution of 1857; they facilitate all the means which can be offered to meet a similar emergency, leaving to public and private citizens more liberty and desire to fulfill their obligations in accordance with its true wishes, which comes to destroy itself when it enters in a situation like that in which the said decree has placed the State by declaring it in a state of siege, as it already causes the suspension of some guarantees, and because the most disappear when authority has concentrated itself in the hands of functionaries who, in exercising it, bring upon themselves, almost without thinking of it, a general animal-version, whatever may have been the prudence and skill they have exercised in their official acts.

Considering that the State has never been really in a condition when it could with justice be declared in a state of siege, but at most in that of war, according to the opinion of distinguished public men, as the foreign invasion which threatened it before, and from which it actually, suffers, does not pass, nor has it ever passed, one of its gates, as it notoriously has that of Tampico.