It was true, and was more to the point than most of their other citations, that every one of these Spanish-American republics assumed its debt, that most of them did it before their independence was recognized, and that they gave these…
Whitelaw Reid
The Public Record
Whitelaw Reid was an American politician, diplomat and newspaper editor, as well as the author of Ohio in the War, a popular work of history.
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Any honest administration had ample revenues for all legitimate expenses, and a surplus; and this surplus seems not to have been used for the benefit of the island, but sent home.
The debts created by the exactions of Spain and of the revolutionary party alike were, mainly if not entirely, obligations due to the people of the colonies themselves.
As to the Napoleonic treaties cited by the Spanish Commissioners, they were mere matters of covenant in a special case, and were not, in my judgment, the result of any anterior national obligation.
A failure to provide for them would be a public scandal throughout civilization; it would cause a wide-spread and profound shock to the sense of security in national obligations the world over, besides incalculable injustice and individual…
All the later lenders and many of the early ones knew, also, that it was pledged for money to continue Spain's efforts to subdue a people struggling to free themselves from Spanish rule.
The one thing they ought not to have relied upon was that the island they were furnishing money to subdue, if it gained its freedom, would turn around and insist on reimbursing them!
The Spanish contention that it was in their power, as absolute sovereign of the struggling island, to fasten ineradicably upon it, for their own hostile purposes, unlimited claims to its future revenues, would lead to extraordinary results.
Under that doctrine, any hard-pushed oppressor would have a certain means of subduing the most righteous revolt and condemning a colony to perpetual subjugation.
He would only have to load it with bonds, issued for his own purposes, beyond any possible capacity it could ever have for payment.
Under that load it could neither sustain itself independently, even if successful in war, nor persuade any other Power to accept responsibility for and control over it.
It will make an end forever of Spain in this hemisphere.