The Laws of Texas, 1822-1897 Volume 1 Page: 1,064

                                
The Declaration of Independence.
4
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being regarded, the agents who bear them are thrown into dun-
geons, and mercenary armies sent forth to enforce a new govern-
ment upon them at the point of the bayonet.
When, in consequence of such acts of malfeasance and abduc-
tion on the part of the government, anarchy prevails, and civil so-
ciety is dissolved into its original elements, in such a crisis, the first
law of nature, the right of self-preservation, the inherent and in-
alienable right of the people to appeal to first principles, and take
their political affairs into their own hands in extreme cases, enjoins
it as a right towards themselves, and a sacred obligation to their
posterity, to, abolish such government, and create another in its
stead, calculated to rescue them from impending dangers, and to
secure their welfare and happiness.
Nations, as well as individuals, are amenable for their acts to
the public opinion of mankind. A statement of a part of our griev-
ances is therefore submitted to an impartial world, in justification
of the hazardous but unavoidable step now taken, of severing our
political connection with the Mexican people, and assuming an in-
dependent attitude among the nations of the earth.
The Mexican government, by its colonization laws, invited and
induced the Anglo American population of Texas to colonize its
wilderness under the pledged faith of a written constitution, that
they should continue to enjoy that constitutional liberty and re-
. publican government to which they had been habituated in the
land of their birth, the United States of America.
In this expectation they have been cruelly disappointed,
inasmuch as the Mexican nation has acquiesced to the late changes
made in the government by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna,
who, having overturned the constitution of his country, now offers,
as the cruel alternative, either to abandon our homes, acquired by
so many privations, or submit to the most intolerable of all tyranny,
the combined despotism of the sword and the priesthood.
It hath sacrificed our welfare to the state of Coahuila, by which
our interests have been continually depressed through a jealous and
partial course of legislation, carried on at a far distant seat of gov-
ernment, by a hostile majority, in an unknown tongue, and this
too, notwithstanding we have petitioned in the humblest terms for
the establishment of a separate state government, and have, in ac-
cordance with the provisions of the national constitution, present-
ed to the general congress a republican constitution, which was,
without a just cause, contemptuously rejected.