ked, defeated, disgraced on the very threshold of his
undertaking, his chosen and hitherto invincible legions, furnished with
all the appliances of warlike invention, and perfected in the boasted
French skill and discipline, baffled and routed by the half-civilized
Mexicans, to whose very capital our own raw volunteers marched in a
single season, he will be by no means anxious to measure his strength
with ours when we shall have emerged from a war in which the lessons of
military science, learned by hard experience, have been widely diffused
among our hitherto peaceful people, and when we shall have nearly a
million of trained troops ready to spring to arms at an hour's call;
troops who will fight a foreign foe with double the courage and
desperation which has characterized the present war. If he cannot subdue
the rude Mexicans, can he conquer us?

The development of those latent resources of which even ourselves were
ignorant, the display of wealth and power at which we are astonished no
less than foreign nations, the energetic prosecution of more than two
years of war on such a magnificently extended and expensive scale,
without even feeling the drain upon either our population or treasure,
have taught Great Britain a lesson which she will not soon forget, and
of which she will not fail to avail herself. What nation ever before,
without even the nucleus of a standing army, raised, equipped, and put
into the field, within a brief six months, an army of half a million of
men, and supported it for such a length of time, at the cost of a
million dollars per day, while scarcely increasing the burden of
taxation upon the people? And yet this was done by a portion only of our
country--the Northern States; and that, too, by a people totally of and
hitherto unaccustomed to warlike pursuits. If such are our strength and
resources when divided, what will they be united and against a foreign
foe? England cannot fail to see the question in this light, and in the
future she will find her interest in courting our friendship and
alliance, rather than in continual encroachment and exasperation. We
shall hear no more of Bay Islands or northwestern boundaries, of San
Juan or rights of search; and the Monroe doctrine will perforce receive
from her a recognition which she has never yet accorded to it. She will
recognize as the fiat of destiny our supremacy on the western
hemisphere. Foreign nations have respected us in the past; they must