person of distinction and confidence, who performed some of the duties of the situation as a commissioner, without any judicial authority.—His duties were to give passports to those who wished to leave the Capital,—to examine those who entered it,—to watch over clandestine Juntas, or meetings, and to arrest all suspicious persons, delivering them over to the competent judge within forty-eight hours after their detention, as provided by the law.—The Ayuntamiento could not brook a measure that threatened to derange those agreeable prospects, which the exclusive direction of the police opened to its bad faith;—and it took advantage of the letter of the Constitutional law, to protest, in a very high tone, against the new regulation,—not from any real zeal in support of the law, but because, by retaining in its own hands the police, and the investigation of crimes, in which not a few of its own members were implicated, it would have been easy for them to continue, without fear of interruption, their perfidious intrigues, and to prevent their friends and colleagues from being detected in similar crimes.—This measure I likewise sustained with equal firmness, and I represented to the Regency the impossibility of providing for the security and preservation of the country, while every day some new legal disqualification was added to those, which had already compelled me to abandon so many of those interesting and delicate points, for which I was nevertheless held responsible.
But the most serious and important point of all, was the establishment of the political superiority of the Viceroy throughout the kingdom, and the immediate dependence of the Provincial Deputations upon him. The most complete division and anarchy menaced these dominions, had I not fixed a central point in their common Chief; for without regarding the decrees of the Cortes respecting the powers of the Viceroy, every Political Chief believed himself endowed with independent powers in his province, and every Provincial Deputation, absolute in its own district, and without any obligation to contribute, by order of the Viceroy, towards the common support of the army. It was impossible in this way to attempt any farther resistance, or to prevent the provinces from falling into the hands of the Insurgents in detail.
