the principal powers of Europe. These powers had entered into
treaties of amity, commerce, and navigation with her. They had received
and accredited her ministers and other diplomatic agents at their
respective courts, and they had commissioned ministers and diplomatic
agents on their part to the Government of Texas. If Mexico,
notwithstanding all this and her utter inability to subdue or reconquer
Texas, still stubbornly refused to recognize her as an independent
nation, she was none the less so on that account. Mexico herself had
been recognized as an independent nation by the United States and by
other powers many years before Spain, of which before her revolution she
had been a colony, would agree to recognize her as such; and yet Mexico
was at that time in the estimation of the civilized world, and in fact,
none the less an independent power because Spain still claimed her as a
colony. If Spain had continued until the present period to assert that
Mexico was one of her colonies in rebellion against her, this would not
have made her so or changed the fact of her independent existence. Texas
at the period of her annexation to the United States bore the same
relation to Mexico that Mexico had borne to Spain for many years before
Spain acknowledged her independence, with this important difference,
that before the annexation of Texas to the United States was consummated
Mexico herself, by a formal act of her Government, had acknowledged the
independence of Texas as a nation. It is true that in the act of
recognition she prescribed a condition which she had no power or
authority to impose--that Texas should not annex herself to any other
power--but this could not detract in any degree from the recognition
which Mexico then made of her actual independence. Upon this plain
statement of facts, it is absurd for Mexico to allege as a pretext for
commencing hostilities against the United States that Texas is still a
part of her territory.

But there are those who, conceding all this to be true, assume the
ground that the true western boundary of Texas is the Nueces instead of
the Rio Grande, and that therefore in marching our Army to the east bank
of the latter river we passed the Texan line and invaded the territory
of Mexico. A simple statement of facts known to exist will conclusively
refute such an assumption. Texas, as ceded to the United States by
France in 1803, has been always claimed as extending west to the Rio
Gran