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572 provinces, as a permanent supplement to the deficient regulars, for guarding the border and repelling Indian raids.

The northern frontier had become more than ever the object of anxious care, less because of the closer approximation of a feared neighbor than because of the growing inroads of wild Indians. The treaty of Guadalupe provided that the United States should assist in checking this evil, since the source of invasion lay within their territory; but the border was too extensive to be guarded in any adequate manner, and their efforts to suppress the turbulent savages only tended to drive them southward into the less protected Mexican provinces, where the superior arms furnished by unscrupulous United States traders gave them great advantages. Vast uninhabited tracts here favored them, and colonization had long suggested itself as a remedy; but who would settle in a country so subject to political disorders and civil war, so maleadministered and oppressed by arbitrary taxes and restrictions, where the enactments by one congress were on the morrow annulled by another, where lawlessness and insecurity went hand in hand? The inducements were slight, particularly when equally rich lands in the adjoining northern republic were offered free, with every advantage and protection. The efforts so far made in this direction had brought insignificant fruit; partly because of their spasmodic, illiberal, and inconsistent nature, and of the not unreasonable fears grown out of the Texan experiment.