Page:Mexico, Aztec, Spanish and Republican, Vol 2.djvu/182

156 the fruits and grains of the temperate and tropical zones. Throned on mines, she is a borrower at exhorbitant usury. Washed by the two great oceans of the globe, her mariners are fishermen and her vessels skiffs. Ready at all times to borrow from every capitalist, she sees her opulent citizens send their wealth abroad for investment in spite of the tempting interest she promises to pay. Boasting of faith, she is without credit. At peace with mankind and fortified by nature, she is forced to maintain an army either to protect her from herself or to bribe the innumerable remnants of her military politicians into peace. Endowed with a constitution and enjoying the name of a republic, she beholds that constitution violated or overthrown by her army without even demanding the consent of the people. Vaunting, in the most grandiloquent language, her intelligence, glory and resources, she exhibits not a single evidence of that patriotic unity and order which would entitle her to domestic confidence and foreign respect. Owning an extensive territory which is attractive not only for its essential qualities but for its magnificent beauty and grandeur, she has drawn to her shores, since the conquest, only a million of white men. Losing Texas, which in her hands had been, for all this time, a howling wilderness possessed by beasts and savages, she sees that state become, under the magic influence of another race, an independent nation, a maritime power, a commercial territory yielding millions annually for the trade of the world. Surrendering California as a boon for peace, she beholds in a single year, the sands that had been trodden by her own people for several centuries, turn to gold in the developing hand of the energetic emigrants to whom it was given up. Impoverished, haughty, uneducated, defiant, bigoted, disputatious, without financial credit, beaten in arms, far behind the age in mechanical progress or social civilization and loaded with debt, Mexico presents a spectacle in the nineteenth century, which moves the compassion of reflective men even if it does not provoke the cupidity of other races to wrest from her weak grasp a region whose value she neither comprehends nor develops. This compassion is the result of a genuine sympathy with the true patriots who really love their country and know its worth, but whose numbers are too few to cope with the scandalous intriguers and ambitious soldiers by whom the nation has hitherto been converted into a gambling table and its money and offices into prizes.

In the introductory chapters upon the viceroyal government and revolution of Mexico, and in our remarks upon the growth of par ties at the close of the war of independence, we have endeavored