n the 16th of the latter month, he despatched to the
minister of foreign relations and justice a note detailing a plan for
covering the national frontiers, and asserted that Mexico would maintain
her rights by force, or fall in the struggle. "She will not consent,"
says he, "to give up one half of her territory from the base fear of
losing the other!"

Patriotic and stirring as are these declarations, they cannot but be
regarded otherwise than as the most inflated bombast when we recollect
that they were made in defiance of the United States, and after a
failure for seven years to reconquer even Texas, feeble as she was. What
just hope could distracted Mexico reasonably entertain of ultimate
victory? Several years before this period, her discreet statesmen and
reflecting citizens privately acknowledged that Texas was lost forever.
Pecuniary embarrassments, political misrule, and repeated revolutions
had still more impaired her national strength, and yet, an obstinacy as
inveterate as it was silly, forced her to make declarations of intended
hostilities which only served to kindle and spread the excitement among
the masses.

It is just that we should concede to national pride and honor all they
reasonably demand of respect, yet I have greatly misunderstood this
spirit of our century, if it does not require nations to be as
reasonable in their quarrels as individuals. Empires, kingdoms, states,
republics, and men, are equally amenable to the great tribunal of the
world's common sense, and all are obliged, if they consult their
interests, to yield to the force of circumstances they cannot control.
What then becomes of the mere abstract and visionary "right of
reconquest" which Mexico asserted, even if she really possessed it after
the central usurpation, and destruction of the federal system in 1824?
What hope was there in a war with the United States, after a failure in
that with Texas? It is true that Mexico had the power to annoy us, and
procrastinate her fate; she might oppose and resist; she might develope
all the evil passions of her people and let them loose on our armies in
irregular warfare; but these, after all were nothing more than spiteful
manifestations of impotent malice, disgraceful to the nation that
encouraged them. The cause of genuine humanity, which, I believe, in our
age, truly seeks for peace, demanded the pacification of Texas. The
cruelty with which the war was waged, and the brutal treatment rece