Spaniards!  Hostilities have broken out between Spain and the United States.  The moment has arrived for us to prove to the world that we possess the spirit to conquer those who, pretending to be loyal friends, have taken advantage of our misfortune and abused our hospitalities, using means which civilized nations count unworthy and disreputable.

The North American people, constituted of all the social excrescences, have exhausted our patience and provoked war with their perfidious machinations, with their acts of treachery, with their outrages against laws of nations and international conventions.  The struggle will be short and decisive, the God of victories will give us one as brilliant and complete as the righteousness and justice of our cause demand.  Spain, which counts on the sympathies of all the nations, will emerge triumphantly from the new test, humiliating and blasting the adventurers from those states that, with out cohesion and without history, offer to humanity only infamous tradition and the ungrateful spectacle of chambers in which appear united insolence, cowardice and cynicism.  A squadron, manned by foreigners possessing neither instructions nor discipline, is preparing to come to this archipelago with the ruffianly intention of robbing us of all that means life, honor and liberty.

Pretending to be inspired by a courage of which they are incapable, the North American seamen undertake as an enterprise capable of realization the substitution of protestantism for the Catholic religion you profess, to treat you as tribes refractory to civilization, to take possession of your riches as if they were unacquainted with the rights of property, and kidnap those persons whom they consider useful to man their ships or to be exploited in agricultural or individual labor.  Vain design!  Ridiculous boasting!  Your indomitable bravery will suffice to frustrate the attempt to carry them into realization.  You will not allow the faith you profess to be made a mockery, impious hands to be placed on the temple of the true God, the images you adore to be thrown down by unbelief.  The aggressors shall not profane the tombs of your fathers.  They shall not gratify their lustful passions at the cost of your wives’ and daughters’ honor or appropriate the property that your industry has accumulated as a provision for your old age.  No!  They shall not perpetrate the crimes inspired by their wickedness and covetousness, because your valor and patriotism will suffice to punish and abase the people that, claiming to be civilized and cultivated, have exterminated the natives of North America instead of bringing to them the life of civilization and progress.  Men of the Philippines, prepare for the struggle, and united under the glorious Spanish flag, which is ever covered with laurels, let us fight with the conviction that victory will crown our efforts, and to the calls of our enemies let us oppose with the decision of the Christian and patriotic cry of “Viva Espana.”  Your governor,