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128, assert their right to determine what should be considered as a fit substitute for his authority, (as the Spanish people had done in their own case,) instead of admitting the claims of Provincial Delegates, (representing at best but a fraction of the Royal power, and that in virtue of a most irregular popular election,) to exercise the King's Prerogative, in its fullest extent, in the vast possession of Ultramar.

Yet such were the pretensions of each, and all of the ephemeral Juntas, that started up in the Peninsula. Commissioners from Asturias, and Seville, (the two first Juntas established in the Mother country,) arrived, almost at the same moment, in the Colonies, equally exclusive in their pretensions, and authoritative in their demands. In the impossibility of reconciling their rival claims, the attention of the Creoles was naturally turned to the source from which they emanated, and to the means by which the vacuum in the frame of the government, occasioned by the captivity of the Sovereign, had been filled up in the Peninsula. They saw every where delegates chosen by the people exercising authority under the denomination of Juntas; and