n
America notices that the emancipation of the thirteen American
colonies, which constituted so many states and an independent nation,
instead of being the result of the alleged political grievances, was
rather the impulsive force of expansion, which encountered insuperable
obstacles while the states were colonies subordinate to a European
nation. They were retarded in their advances by relations and
compromises with other nations. The Anglo-Saxon, when translated to the
wilds of America, needed only a stopping-place in order to found a
peculiar and exclusive polity, which should enable him to march ever
onward in his aggressions and usurping institutions.

"The United States of America lost no time in making themselves
powerful; a nation rich in its industry, enviable in its commerce,
respectable in its social organization, which are so favorable to the
advancement of the condition of man. When the government had regulated,
with great prudence and wisdom, the interior system of the states, it
placed itself upon the watch for the compromised circumstances of
embarrassed European states that possessed colonies on the American
continent. Some of these colonies were contiguous to the limits which
the United States had acquired definitely by the treaty of peace of
1783. In order to augment, at the expense of her neighbors, her
possessions, already immense, and not yet well populated, she set about
acquiring territory by astuteness, by cunning, by violence, and also by
justifiable means, when such were available. Spain first, and Mexico
afterward, have been her victims; and to-day these rich and powerful
states display the spoils, for such they are in reality, which they
have wrested from us. Such are the people that already rival those
nations of Europe whose territories are the most extensive, and whose
commerce is spread over all the seas."

WEAKNESS OF THE SPANISH TITLE.

My limits will not permit me to follow General Tornel through his
statement of the manner in which Louisiana, Florida, and Texas were
acquired, and to notice his complaints of the injustice committed by
the Americans in all these acquisitions. He loses sight of the fact
that Spain had no title to her possessions in America but that of
discovery, and that very doubtful claim had not, in a period of 300
years, been strengthened by actual settlement. Three or four
dilapidated mud forts, and as many more feeble missions, constituted
the sum total of t