Page:The War with Mexico, Vol 2.djvu/291

Rh many, excited sharp resentment. Overwhelming the country all at once with such a combination of new laws — a warehouse act, a sub-treasury bill and a "free-trade" tariff — was denounced as an unspeakable outrage, and each of those measures amounted in the opinion of many to a crime. Gideon Welles thought the idea of reducing our tariff during the war an "insane project"; and the measure as framed, a compromise between theory and expediency, satisfied hardly any one. Real free-traders complained because their principles had been sacrificed, and the New Englanders because those principles had not been sacrificed enough. The iron and coal state raged and wept by turns: she had been betrayed, and "her groans were music" to the arrogant low-tariff section cherished by the government. Only corruption and intimidation could have carried such a monstrosity through Congress; and, worse yet, "Sir Robert Walker" had been truckling to England. "British all over," scribbled the American Sentinel on the warehousing system; and the tariff was trailed to a British lair packed with British statesmen, British capitalists, British manufacturers and British merchants. To please them our wheels of production were to stop, our banks close, and the industrious North fall in despair at the feet of an implacable South. "'To your tents, O Israel!'" cried the National Intelligencer.

In countless eyes the war itself soon lost its glamour. Imagining that our advance to the Rio Grande had been the cause of it, many felt bound to denounce it as unauthorized, unconstitutional, unjust, aggressive; and not a few, in dense ignorance of the history, character and views of the Mexicans, thought, like Professor Kent of Harvard University, that it was "demoniacal" to make war upon those poor innocents, as if they had not been shooting one another pretty continuously and also aching to shoot us. Not reflecting that nations begin to think of indemnities as soon, at least, as they begin to fight, and that legitimate advantages might accrue from occupying Mexican territory, people viewed suspiciously the operations of Taylor, Wool, Kearny, Stockton and Stevenson, threw up their hands, and exclaimed, "Conquest!" as if the ground they stood upon and half the world besides had not been gained by the sword. "Cormorants of territory!" hissed a Thersites. "Sages and Heroes of the Revolution, lo, the consummation of your labors!"