Page:Memoir of a tour to northern Mexico.djvu/84

[ 26 ] amongst the great mass of the people; they had neither time nor money for it, and it did partly not suit their ambitious plans to govern a more enlightened people.

Where shall the enlightening of the masses and the stability of government now come from? I cannot help thinking that if Mexico, debilitated by the present war, should afterwards be left to itself, the renewal of its internal strifes will hurry it to its entire dissolution; and what the United States may refuse at present to take as the spoils of the war, will be offered to them in later years as a boon.

The fate of Mexico is sealed. Unable to govern itself, it will be governed by some other power; and if it should not fall into worse hands than those of the United States, it may yet congratulate itself, because they would respect at least its nationality, and guaranty to it what it never had before, a republican government.

That the whole of Mexico would as well derive advantage from such a change as the whole civilized world, if this wonderful country should be opened to the industry of a more vigorous race, there is no doubt in my mind; but I doubt the policy on the part of the United States to keep the whole of Mexico in their possession, even if they could, because a heterogeneous mass of seven or eight millions of Mexicans, who have to be converted from enemies into friends, and raised from an ignorant and oppressed condition to the level of republican citizens, could not be as easily assimilated to the republic as a similar number of European immigrants, that arrive here in great intervals of time, with more knowledge, and with the fixed intention to live and die as Americans.

At the end of this war the United States will probably be bound to indemnify themselves for the large expenses of the war, by some Mexican provinces; but the more valuable the territory and the fewer Mexicans they acquire in this way, the more will the new acquisition be useful to the United States. In the northern provinces of Mexico both those conditions are united.

Let us suppose, for instance, that from the mouth of the Rio Grande a boundary line should be drawn up to Laredo, the headpoint of steam navigation on the Rio Grande, and in the latitude of Laredo a line from thence west to the gulf of California, that territory would embrace, besides the old province of Texas, a small portion of the States of Tamaulipas and Coahuila, the greatest part of the State of Chihuahua, the State of Sonora, New Mexico, and both Californias. The Mexican population of those States–if we except the highest probable estimates, and include, instead of the small slice of Tamaulipas and Coahuila, the whole population of the State of Chihuahua–is the following:

The whole population of those States amounts, therefore, only to about 400,000 souls, while this territory, according to the usual Mexican