Page:The War with Mexico, Vol 1.djvu/83

54 that Santa Anna, whose particular talent lay in discovering the direction of political currents, should have lost so suddenly his tremendous power. But the explanation is readily found. Without a doubt he was the foremost Mexican of his time. Seen at the head of a ragged, undisciplined mob called a regiment, inspiring them with eye. gesture and words, and leading them on with almost electrical energy; Seen at a banquet, where he could show himself—despite the six colonels erect and stilt behind his chair—merely a prince of good fellows, dignified but cordial, courtly but unrestrained, brilliant yet apparently simple; seen at the council board, seizing upon a shrewd idea expressed by one of his associates and developing, illustrating and applying it in a way that made its real author marvel at his chief's wisdom; seen in one of his outbursts of Jacksonian rage, as when he threatened at a diplomatic reception to run the boundary line between Mexico and the United States at the cannon's mouth; seen at the opera house, in a crimson and gold box with a retinue of crimson and gold ofﬁcers, dressed in the plainest of costumes himself. and wearing on his countenance an interesting expression of gentle melancholy and resignation, as if he were sacrificing himself for the nation and shrank from the gaze of an adoring public 1 seen in these and other phases he appeared remarkable, and even, as combining them, extraordinary.

But in reality he was a charlatan. Though head of an army, he knew nothing of military science; though head of a nation, he knew nothing of statesmanship. By right of superiority and by right of conquest Mexico seemed to be his; and, with What Burke described as "the generous rapacity of the princely eagle," he proposed to take the chief share of wealth, power, honor and pleasure, leaving to others the remnants of these as a compensation for doing the work, It was a cardinal principle with him that the masses could be ignored; and in 1844, having reduced the Church to subservience and formed a combination with the military and the ﬁnancial men, based on a community of interest in exploiting the national revenues, he deemed himself invulnerable, the more so because the coterie of base ﬂatterers that he loved to have about him reﬂected this conviction. of a true national uprising he had no conception; and when this came. ﬁnding himself in the