by the infusion of a
vigorous stock. The law of sexuality in plants leads to the
intermarriage of the vigorous with the decaying and the intermixture of
blossoms; nor can human plants long vegetate together without
intermarriages, which ingraft the vigorous constitutions with the virus
of the old and decaying.

PROSPECTS OF MEXICO.

If, then, I have correctly enunciated the law of migration of men,
animals, and plants, and if the law of intermixture of distinct races,
or distinct species of the race, has been truly stated, the important
argument to be drawn from it, which interests all Americans inquiring
into the future of Mexico, is, that the present incongruous fragments
of population which the internal disorders of Spain have set loose in
Mexico can never be transformed into a homogeneous nationality, nor can
sufficiently permanent elements of strength be found in this political
chaos to constitute a permanent government. The degraded condition to
which labor is reduced forbids the idea of an immigration of foreign
laborers, while the miserable scale of wages--a quarter of a dollar a
day upon the estates, payable out of the plantation store, or three
shillings in the towns--holds out no inducement for poor men of a
healthy race to abandon their own country and migrate to Mexico in
sufficient numbers to form a substratum of society which ultimately
might rise into a nationality.

A still more important question is disposed of by the facts stated in
this chapter, viz., that there is no possibility of the present
inhabitants of Mexico ever successfully driving back the Apaches and
reconquering the northern provinces. Her title to the wild regions of
the north, which rests on discovery and colonization, is lost by her
utter inability to subdue the Indians and to colonize, after a
probation of three hundred years. At this day the whole of the northern
provinces lie, like waifs, open to any civilized people to take
possession who require an additional territory. But nothing is so
absurd as the American process of acquisition by treaty of territories
which already are, or soon will be, covered all over by immense
land-claims, in districts subjugated by the Indians, instead of
acknowledging the title of the Apaches to the lands they have conquered
from Mexico, and long held in possession, and purchasing of those who
are the real sovereigns of Northern Mexico.

[60] An attempt was made to explain away the story