Page:The War with Mexico, Vol 2.djvu/313

Rh part of the respectable male population," and Britannia outdid this excellent jest by telling of "majors who serve out beer, and colonels who rub down the heels of one's horse." Literary men were angered by our failure to amend the copyright law as they desired; and our pronounced republicanism, trumpeted by Polk in his annual Message of 1845, irritated almost everybody. The plain intimation of the same Message that European monarchies were not expected to interfere in America seemed even worse; and the President was represented as meaning that we intended to get Mexico into a dark alley alone, and rob her. The annexation of Texas, which England had exerted all her diplomatic strength to prevent, could not be forgiven, and the Oregon difficulty threatened war.

Even Englishmen who believed in the rights of the people, said the Times, turned from us with "indignant scorn;" and in another of its many outbursts, which would have been terrible had they not been ludicrous, that paper warned us that, as we followed the example, we invited the punishment of self-willed Corcyra. "The most impudent, bullying, boasting nation of mankind," was Britannia's genial description of us; and she loved to parade "our national scorn of America and her statesmanship." In short, McLane, the American minister at London, reported privately with some exaggeration, one desires to believe that a deep-seated dislike, "amounting almost to hate, of our people, of our country and of our Institutions," prevailed universally in England. 3 On the continent these opinions were more or less distinctly reflected. In France the heart of the people beat warmly for us and against their neighbors across the Channel; but the court and the government, regarding a close alliance with Great Britain as. of cardinal importance, and the newspapers which, like the Journal des Débats, represented them with more or less fidelity, exerted a strong influence the other way. At the end of 1845 Polk deepened this, for his Message referred in cutting terms to the interference of that country on the side of Great Britain in our business of absorbing Texas.

The French government occupied a weak position in reference to that affair, for Guizot, the chief minister, believing that Henry Clay would be elected President and shelve it,