366 PEACE PROPOSITIONS INTERNAL TROUBLES. 



been beaten or victorious. The few trophies, taken in the saddest 

 moments of the action, were sent in triumph to the interior and 

 paraded as the spolia opima in San Luis and the city of Mexico. 

 The public men of the country knew that Angostura had in reality 

 been lost, and Minon who was seriously assailed in the press by 

 Santa Anna for not co-operating at the critical moment, published 

 a reply in which he treated Santa Anna in the plainest terms and 

 denounced, as false, the general's statement that his troops were 

 famishing for food on the 24th of February, and that his failure to 

 destroy Taylor's army was only owing to this important fact! 

 This system of mutual denunciation and recrimination was quite 

 common in Mexico, whenever a defeat was to be accounted for or 

 thrown on the shoulders of an individual who was not in reality 

 answerable for it. 



When Santa Anna returned to San Luis Potosi, he entered that 

 city with not one half the army that accompanied him on his de- 

 parture to the north. It was moreover worn out and disorganized 

 by the long and painful march over the bleak desert, and had en- 

 tirely lost its habit of discipline. Such was the condition of things 

 at San Luis in the month of March, when Santa Anna found him- 

 self compelled to organize another force to resist the enemy on the 

 east; but whilst his attention was diligently directed to this subject 

 the sad news reached him, that Mexico was not only assailed from 

 without, but that her capital was torn by internal dissensions. 



The peace between the president, and the vice president, Don 

 Valentin Gomez Farias, had been cemented by the good offices 

 of mutual friends, though it is not likely that any very ardent friend- 

 ship could have sprung up suddenly between men whose politics 

 had always been so widely variant. Nor was there less difference 

 between the moral than the political character of these personages. 

 Santa Anna, the selfish, arrogant military chieftain, — a man of 

 unquestionable genius and talent for command, — had passed his 

 life in spreading his sails to catch the popular breeze, and by his 

 alliances with the two most powerful elements of Mexican society, 

 — the army and the church, — had always contrived to sustain his 

 eminent political position, or recover it when it was temporarily 

 lost. Such was the case in his return to power after the invasion 

 of the French, in the attack upon whom he fortunately lost a limb 

 which became a constant capital upon which to trade in the cor- 

 rupt but sentimental market of popular favor. Valentin Gomez 

 Farias, on the contrary was a pure, straightforward, uncompro- 

 mising patriot, always alive to the true progressive interests of the 



