instance of a bombardment. In Europe, it has long been a rule of
military morals, that no open city shall ever be bombarded. We believe
it to be the boast of the first living soldier in the world--and we
could have no more honourable one--that he never suffered a city to be
bombarded; from the obvious fact, that the chief victims were the
helpless inhabitants, while the soldiery are sheltered by the casemates
and bomb-proofs.

At all events, we must regard the contest as decided. The Government has
exhibited nothing more than a sullen resolution; and the people little
more than the apathy of their own cattle; the troops have exhibited no
evidence of discipline, and the only resource of the Finance has been in
the wild projects of an empty Exchequer. Whether the United States will
be the more prosperous for this conquest, is a question of time alone.
Whether the facility of the conquest may not make the multitude frantic
for general aggression,--whether the military men of the States may not
obtain a popularity and assume a power which has been hitherto confined
to civil life,--whether the attractions of military career may not turn
the rising generation from the pursuits of trade and tillage, to the
idle, or the ferocious life of the American campaigner,--and whether the
pressure of public debt, the necessity for maintaining their half-savage
conquests by an army, and the passion for territorial aggrandisement,
may not urge them to a colonial war with England,--are only parts of the
great problem which the next five-and-twenty years will compel the
American Republic to solve.

At the same time, we cannot avoid looking upon the invasion of Mexico as
a portion of that extraordinary and mysterious agency which is now
shaking all the great stagnant districts of the world; which has already
awaked Turkey in Europe and in Asia Minor; which has brought Egypt into
civilised action; which has broken down the barbarism of the Algerines,
and planted the French standard in place of the furies and profligacies
of African Mahometanism. Deeply deprecating the guilt of those
aggressions, and condemning the crimes by which they have been
sustained, we cannot but regard changes so unexpected, so powerful, and
so simultaneous, as the operation of a higher power than man's, with
objects altogether superior to the shortsightedness of man, and amply
bearing the character of working good out of evil, which belongs to the
history of Divine