The Free Sea

injury convey any right? In this dispute, we submit our calculation to those who, among the Spaniards themselves, are the foremost masters of divine and human law; finally, we appeal to the laws peculiar to Spain itself. If this does not help, and if greed prevents those whom certain reason convinces from desisting, we appeal to your majesty, princes, and to your faith, as many of you as are nations everywhere. We are not moving a perplexed or intricate question. We are not speaking of ambiguous articles in religion, which seem to hold the most obscurity, and which, having been debated for so long by such great minds, have left this much almost certain among the wise: that truth is found nowhere less than where assent is forced. We are not speaking of the status of our republic and a liberty not gained by arms but claimed the Latin "vindicata" here carries the sense of asserted or reclaimed legal rights; regarding which only those who have accurately known the laws of the Belgian fatherland, the ancestral customs, and a regime established not into laws for the kingdom, but a principate from the laws, can rightly decide. In this question, however, for fair judges, the necessity of repelled extreme servitude,