Page:The War with Mexico, Vol 1.djvu/249

220 Santa Anna did not merely enjoy an occasional game of chance; he was a gambler through and through. He did not merely stoop now and then to see two game birds prove their mettle; he was essentially a "sporting man." Not without reason did the London Atlas refer to him as "that very sorry hero but most determined cock — ﬁghter." Possessing the strong, he possessed also the weak points of this type, He was not only uneducated, but incapable of study. He could improvise Variations on a given theme with astonishing volubility, throwing back — wonderfully elaborated — an idea suggested to him; but he, was not a thinker. He could shuffle and deal current political notions most shrewdly, but his only principle, either political or moral, was that having accidentally proclaimed the republic of Mexico, he owned it. He understood the shallow and selfish manoeuvres in the midst of which he lived, but had no deep insight, and found it much easier to do things than to perceive what needed to be done. His power to dupe others grew mainly, perhaps, from being a dupe himself. He was in statesmanship only by force of circumstances; and he always hated a business like that, for it perplexed and wearied his passionate, untrained character. In a critical Mexican situation his narrow but intense perspicacity, his unreflecting but unequalled quickness, his reckless but ingenious adaptation of means to ends, and his magnetic skill in "reaching" and combining men governed by self-interest gave him for the time being an immense advantage, and, when viewed under the dazzling arc lights of prestige and power, seemed truly brilliant; but his ability was essentially thin, short-sighted and weak. Indeed Consul Campbell, who saw him at Havana without his trappings, declared that in any American village of a thousand persons he would be thought intellectually feeble. Intellectually undeveloped he certainly was.

In the present instance he had supposed in the Mexican style that a phrase was a philosophy, that a catchword was a magical formula, that an eloquent peroration would be as mighty after he had been found out as it had been before, that a profession of repentance would erase long years of deliberate bad conduct; and from the hour of setting foot upon Mexican soil his mistake had been growing every hour