further discussion. A commission, nominated by Iturbide himself, was appointed to examine and report on his plan, and on the 17th the junta, which had been assisted by the regency in its deliberations, arrived at its decision. The result was that Iturbide's plan was adopted in all the main points. It was made obligatory in those provinces which, sent up four or more deputies that three of these, but no more, should be respectively a church man, a military officer, and a magistrate or lawyer.
It was also made compulsory that the agricultural, mining, commercial, and artisan classes should be represented; the provinces in which these pursuits respectively predominated were designated and the number of corresponding deputies to be elected assigned. The total number of representatives was fixed at 162.[1] During these proceedings Iturbide was very humble and unassuming in his protestations to the public. Neither his colleagues in the regency, his military comrades, nor himself, he proclaimed, were other than devoted subjects of the sovereign people.[2] The public weal was the loadstar of his aspirations, and he would withdraw to the retirement of private life if such were his country's wish. Nevertheless, no one was deceived by these asseverations.
- ↑ Gac. Imp. Mex., i. 217-30. The apportionment was as follows: The intendencias Mexico, including Querétaro, 28; Guadalajara, 17; Puebla, Oajaca, and Valladolid, each 14; Vera Cruz, Guanajuato, and San Luis Potosí, 7 each; Mérida, 11; Zacatecas, 4; Tlascala, 1. The provincias internas de Oriente—Nuevo Leon, Nuevo Santander, Coahuila, and Texas, each 1. The provincias internas de Occidente—Durango, 23; Arizpe, 8; New Mexico, 1; Upper and Lower California, each 1. Id., 231.
- ↑ See his proclamation in Még. Bosquejo Rev., 130-3. This work, issued under the nom de plume 'Un Verdadero Americano,' was published in Philadelphia in 1822, and attributed to Rocafuerte. The writer was of strong republican tendencies and a denouncer of Iturbide; he states that he left Mexico and retired to the United States in order that he might not be a witness of the tyranny with which he saw his country was going to be oppressed. His book contains a valuable selection of proclamations, government papers, and discourses of the time, which the author deemed it necessary thus to preserve while they still existed, since it would be easy for the supreme power to collect and destroy such disgraceful documents, and thereby hide the traces of the path pursued in the attainment of the most shameless ambitious aspirations.
and so forth being the electors. Id., 12th Nov. 1821, 3-4. No more arbitrary plan could well be designed.
