offer, and ordered his victim to immediate
execution, Bravo instantly set at liberty the soldiers:--"For I would
wish," he said, "to put it out of my own power to avenge on them the
death of a parent, lest, in the first moments of grief, the temptation
should prove irresistible." The experiences of the Texan War, whose
massacre of Alamo was the battle-cry of the borderers in all succeeding
conflicts, and whose martyrdom at Goliad, where three hundred and fifty
unarmed prisoners, trusting in the pledged faith of their captors, were
led out in squads and shot, would seem to show that the tendencies of
Mexican leaders and soldiers had not greatly changed in later times.
What can result from such examples but utter carelessness of human life?
But to destroy among any people the sacredness of life is to erase one
of the safeguards of peace and order. The nation which does not shrink
from carnage, which is not ready to sacrifice everything but principle
to avert it, will be the nation of all others to risk everything, honor,
safety, social stability, for a whim. Beyond a doubt, too great
indifference to blood has been a fertile source of unnecessary
agitations, and so of weakness and anarchy.

* * * * *

We have postponed to this stage of our inquiry the consideration of that
rock upon which the Mexican State has finally split,--party-spirit.
During the forty stormy years of its existence, that ancient conflict,
ever old and ever new, between conservatism and radicalism, has been
going on. A statistician records that Mexico has had twenty-seven new
constitutions, or at least modifications of old ones, or final plans of
settlement. It has been too much the custom to talk of these as though
they were utterly meaningless. They are full of meaning. They mark the
flux and reflux of this great battle. They stand for the victories or
defeats of one or the other of these great principles.

It is not probable, that, at the outset of the Revolution, the Creoles
had any thought of separating from the mother-country. They professed
the greatest loyalty. And they proved it by unshaken fidelity on many a
bloody field. Their only request was, that some constitutional features
might mitigate the despotism under which they groaned. Even after eleven
years' struggle, what they settled upon was a limited monarchy, with the
King's son at its head,--or, if he refused, then some scion of another
royal house. And e