156 



REVIEW OF HER CONDUCT AND CHARACTER. 



the fruits and grains of the temperate and tropical zones. Throned 

 on mines, she is a borrower at exhorbitant usury. Washed by the 

 two great oceans of the globe, her mariners are fishermen and her 

 vessels skiffs. Ready at all times to borrow from every capitalist, 

 she sees her opulent citizens send their wealth abroad for invest- 

 ment in spite of the tempting interest she promises to pay. Boast- 

 ing of faith, she is without credit. At peace with mankind and 

 fortified by nature, she is forced to maintain an army either to pro- 

 tect her from herself or to bribe the innumerable remnants of her 

 military politicians into peace. Endowed with a constitution and 

 enjoying the name of a republic, she beholds that constitution vio- 

 lated or overthrown by her army without even demanding the con- 

 sent of the people. Vaunting, in the most grandiloquent language, 

 her intelligence, glory and resources, she exhibits not. a single evi- 

 dence of that patriotic unity and order which would entitle her to 

 domestic confidence and foreign respect. Owning an extensive 

 territory which is attractive not only for its essential qualities but 

 for its magnificent beauty and grandeur, she has drawn to her 

 shores, since the conquest, only a million of white men. Losing 

 Texas, which in her hands had been, for all this time, a howl- 

 ing wilderness possessed by beasts and savages, she sees that state 

 become, under the magic influence of another race, an independent 

 nation, a maritime power, a commercial territory yielding millions 

 annually for the trade of the world. Surrendering California as a 

 boon for peace, she beholds in a single year, the sands that had 

 been trodden by her own people for several centuries, turn to gold 

 in the developing hand of the energetic emigrants to whom it was . 

 given up. Impoverished, haughty, uneducated, defiant, bigoted, 

 disputatious, without financial credit, beaten in arms, far behind the 

 age in mechanical progress or social civilization and loaded with 

 debt, Mexico presents a spectacle in the nineteenth century, which 

 moves the compassion of reflective men even if it. does not provoke 

 the cupidity of other races to wrest from her weak grasp a region 

 whose value she neither comprehends nor develops. This com- 

 passion is the result of a genuine sympathy with the true patriots 

 who really love their country and know its worth, but whose num- 

 bers are too few to cope with the scandalous intriguers and ambi- 

 tious soldiers by whom the nation has hitherto been converted into 

 a gambling table and its money and offices into prizes. 



In the introductory chapters upon the viceroyal government and 

 revolution of Mexico, and in our remarks upon the growth of par- 

 ties at the close of the war of independence, we have endeavored 



