Page:The War with Mexico, Vol 1.djvu/215

186 the United States ought by all means to limit itself now to repelling invasion, Personal reasons also led him to deplore the prospect of a conflict in arms. The culmination of his fiery life, the fulfilment of his brilliant dream, had seemed in April to be drawing near. By his convenient method of bending facts and principles to his purpose, as the sparrow makes a nest for herself, he had found it possible to cooperate with the West in spending great sums on internal improvements, and expected in this way to make the Northeast a helpless minority; but he could easily see that war might empty the treasury and bring about new political alignments. For the same reason it looked as if his project of a low tariff also would vanish; and, as we have seen, contemplating the possibility of secession. he did not wish the youth of the southern states {to expend their blood in Mexico.

Before the news of Thornton's encounter arrived he argued with Polk against sending to Congress the proposed Message on our relations with Mexico. During the excitement on that eventful Sunday he not only planned with his partisans in Senate and House to oppose war, but worked for the same purpose with leading Whigs, urging, for example — that Mexico should be given more time to consider the risk of a conflict, as if she had not already been speculating upon it for several years. Then in the Senate he gravely proclaimed the truism that border hostilities do not necessarily constitute war, and turned it into a sophism by applying it in the present case. To compare Arista's attack upon Thornton to an unmeaning border squabble was truly, in view of the long series of preliminaries, ridiculous; and equally ridiculous was the endeavor to support this fallacy with another: that since Congress had not declared war, a state of war with Mexico could not lawfully exist at this time." "Is not Calhoun deranged?" exclaimed our minister at Paris on hearing of this.

To be sure, Congress is the only branch of our central government that can legally declare war; but, for instance, other nations are not hampered by our Constitution, and might attack us in such a manner as to prevent Congress — for a time, at least~from acting. None the less we should fight, and it would be nonsense to describe our resistance as unconstitutional. As a matter of fact Congress did not declare