CONFIRMATION OF ARMY ITS POLITICAL USE. 117 



tic foes. Men who had been accustomed for so long a period to 

 military rule did not immediately acquire the habit of self-govern- 

 ment. National police required a national army. Officers who had 

 distinguished themselves in an epoch when laws were silent and the 

 only authorities recognized wore the insignia of military life, did not 

 forsake willingly the power they enjoyed. Indeed, they were the 

 only authentic personages capable of enforcing obedience; and their 

 adherents were soon armed against each other in all the contentions 

 for political position which vexed the republic during the dawn 

 of its national existence. Civil wars became habitual. An army 

 was an element of strength and success which no military chieftain 

 thought proper to crush. Rallying his disciplined partizans, as long 

 as his friends or his fortune supplied their support, he was ready 

 at a moment to take the field either for the maintenance of a leader's 

 cause or to secure his own elevation. Nor was this mode of life 

 disagreeable to the body of the army and inferior officers who were 

 lodged and fed at the public expense during a period when it was 

 difficult to find easy or agreeable civil employments in the distracted 

 realm. Each petty subaltern and even every common soldier, clad 

 in the livery of the state and carrying arms, was regarded by the 

 unshod leperos and homeless vagrants as a personage of superior 

 position ; and thus, whilst the army became at that epoch popular 

 with the people it had liberated from Spanish bondage, it ripened 

 into a necessity of the aspiring politicians who craved a speedier 

 access to power than by the slow and toilsome process of a repub- 

 lican canvass. The state, itself, perceiving these manifold causes 

 of military favor, utility, and supposed need, preserved the army 

 from all assaults by patriotic congressmen, and thus the greatest 

 curse and burthen of the nation, — the origin and means of all its 

 woes and all its despots, — was, from the first, riveted to the body 

 politic of Mexico. 



It must not be supposed, however, that in speaking of the Mexi- 

 can army we design to compare it, either in detail or as an or- 

 ganized body, with the troops of this country or of Europe. 

 Neither in the mass of its materiel, nor in its officers, does it vie 

 with the trained and disciplined forces of other civilized countries. 

 Soldiers in Mexico are rather actors in a political drama, — dressed 

 and decorated for imposing display, — than efficient warriors whose 

 instruction and power make them irresistible in the field. In all 

 the engagements, or attempts to engage, which occurred in Mexico 

 since the termination of the war of independence, there has been a 

 laudable desire, at least among the troops, to avoid the shedding of 



