FOOTNOTES:

"Thy silver locks, once auburn bright,Are still more lovely in my sightThan golden beams of orient light,My Mary!"For could I view nor them nor thee,What sight worth seeing could I see?The sun would rise in vain for me,My Mary!"Partakers of thy sad decline,Thy hands their little force resign,Yet, gently pressed, press gently mine,My Mary!"

"Thy silver locks, once auburn bright,Are still more lovely in my sightThan golden beams of orient light,My Mary!

"For could I view nor them nor thee,What sight worth seeing could I see?The sun would rise in vain for me,My Mary!

"Partakers of thy sad decline,Thy hands their little force resign,Yet, gently pressed, press gently mine,My Mary!"

Afterward the shuffling old usher turns a key in a green gate, and shows me into the "Wilderness." Here I come presently upon the Temple,—sadly shattered,—and upon the urns with their mouldy inscriptions; I wander through the stately avenue of lindens to the Alcove, and, so true are the poet's descriptions, I recognize at once the seat of the Throckmortons, the "Peasant's Nest," the "Rustic Bridge," and far away a glimpse of the spire of Olney.

Plainly as I see to-day the farm-flat of Edgewood smoking under the spring rains below me, I see again the fat meadows that lie along the sluggish Ouse reeking with the heats of July. And I bethink me of the bewildered, sensitive poet, shrinking from the world, loving Nature so dearly, loving friends like a child, loving God with reverence, and yet with a great fear that is quickened by the harsh hammering of John Newton's iron Calvinism into a wild turbulence of terror. From this he seeks escape in the walks of the "Wilderness," and paces moodily up and down from temple to alcove,—in every shady recess still haunted by "a fearful looking-for of judgment," and from every sunny bit of turf clutching fancies by eager handful, to strew over his sweet poem of the "Task."

A sweet poem, I repeat, though not a finished or a grand one; but there is in it such zealous, earnest overflow of country-love that we farmers must needs welcome it with open hearts.

I should not like such a man as Cowper for a tenant, where any bargains were to be made, or any lambs to be killed; nor do I think that the merememory of his verse would have put me upon that July walk from Newport to Weston; but his letters and his sad life, throughout which trees and flowers were made almost his only confidants, led me to the scene where that strange marriage with Nature was solemnized. And though the day was balmy, and the sun fairly golden, the garden and the alley and the trees and the wilderness were like a widow in her weeds.

Gilbert White, of Selborne, belongs to this epoch; and no lover of the country or of country-things can pass him by without cordial recognition and genial praise. There is not so much of incident or of adventure in his little book as would suffice to pepper the romances of one issue of a weekly paper in our day. The literary mechanicians would find in him no artful contrivance of parts and no rhetorical jangle of language. It is only good Parson White, who, wandering about the fields and the brook-sides of Selborne, scrutinizes with rare clearness and patience a thousand miracles of God's providence, in trees, in flowers, in stones, in birds,—and jots down the story of his scrutiny with such simplicity, such reverent trust in His power and goodness, such loving fondness for almost every created thing, that the reading of it charms like Walton's story of the fishes.

We Americans, indeed, do not altogether recognize his chaffinches and his titlarks; his daws and his fern-owl are strange to us; and his robin-redbreast, though undoubtedly the same which in our nursery-days flitted around the dead "Children in the Wood," (while tears stood in our eyes,) and

"painfullyDid cover them with leaves,"

is by no means our American redbreast. For one, I wish it were otherwise; I wish with all my heart that I could identify the old, pitying, feathered mourners in the British wood with the joyous, rollicking singer who perches every sunrise, through all the spring, upon the thatch of the bee-house, within stone's-throw of my window, and stirs the dewy air with his loudbravura.

Notwithstanding, however, the dissimilarity of species, the studies of this old naturalist are directed with a nice particularity, and are colored with an unaffected homeliness, which are very charming; and I never hear the first whisk of a swallow's wing in summer but I feel an inclination to take down the booklet of the good old Parson, drop into my library-chair, and follow up at my leisure all the gyrations and flutterings and incubations of all thehirundinesof Selborne. Every country-liver should own the book, and be taught from it—nicety of observation.

There was another clergyman of a different stamp,—the Reverend John Trusler of Cobham, Surrey,—who wrote about this time a book on chronology, a few romances, a book on law, and another upon farming. He commenced public life as an apothecary; from his drug-shop he went to the pulpit, thence to book-selling, and finally to book-making. I am inclined to think that he found the first of these two trades the more profitable one: it generally is.

Mr. Trusler introduces his agricultural work by declaring that it "contains all the knowledge necessary in the plain business of farming, unencumbered with theory, speculation, or experimental inquiry";—by which it will be seen that the modesty of the author was largely overborne by the enterprise of the bookseller. The sole value of his treatise lies in certain statistical details with regard to the cost and profits of different crops, prices of food, rates of wages, etc. By his showing, the profit of an acre of wheat in 1780 was £2 10s; of barley, £3 3s6d; of buckwheat, £2 19s; and a farm of one hundred and fifty acres, judiciously managed, would leave a profit of £379.

These estimates of farm-profits, however, at all times, are very deceptive. A man can write up his own balance-sheet, but he cannot make up his neighbor's. There will be too many screws—or pigs—loose, which he cannot takeinto the reckoning. The agricultural journals give us from time to time the most alluring "cash-accounts" of farm-revenue, which make me regard, for a month or two thereafter, every sober-sided farmer I meet as a Rasselas,—"choring" and "teaming it" in a Happy Valley; but shortly I come upon some retired citizen, turned farmer, and active member of a Horticultural Society, slipping about the doors of some "Produce and Commission Store" for his winter's stock of vegetables, butter, and fruits,—and the fact impresses me doubtfully and painfully. It is not often, unfortunately, that printed farm-accounts—most of all, model-farm-accounts—will bear close scrutiny. Sometimes there is delicate reservation of any charge for personal labor or superintendence; sometimes an equally cheerful reticence in respect to any interest upon capital; and in nearly all of them such miniature expression of the cost of labor as gives a very shaky consistency to the exhibit.

Farmers, I am aware, are not much given to figures; but outside "averagers" are; and agricultural writers, if they indulge in figures, ought to show some decent respect for the proprieties of arithmetic. I have before me now the "Bi-Monthly Report of the United States Agricultural Department for January and February, 1864," in the course of which it is gravely asserted, that, in the event of a certain suggested tax on tobacco, "the tobacco-grower would find at the end of the year two hundred and ten percent of his crops unsold." Now I am not familiar with the tobacco-crop, and still less familiar with the Washington schemes of taxation; but whatever may be the exigencies of the former, and whatever may be the enormities of the latter, I find myself utterly unable to measure, even proximately, the misfortune of a tobacco-grower who should find himself stranded with two hundred and ten percent of his crop, after his sales were closed! It is plainly a case involving a pretty largequid pro quo, if it be not a clear one ofnisi quid.

Sir John Sinclair, so honorably known in connection with British agriculture, dealt with an estate in Scotland of a hundred thousand acres. He parcelled this out in manageable farms, advanced money to needy tenants, and by his liberality and enterprise gave enormous increase to his rental. He also organized the first valid system for obtaining agricultural statistics through the clergymen of the different parishes in Scotland, thus bringing together a vast amount of valuable information, which was given to the public at intervals between 1790 and 1798. And I notice with interest that the poet Burns was a contributor to one of these volumes,[D]over the signature of "A Peasant," in which he gives account of a farmers' library established in his neighborhood, and adds, in closing,—"A peasant who can read and enjoy such books is certainly a much superior being to his neighbor, who, perhaps, stalks beside his team, very little removed, except in shape, from the brutes he drives."

There is reason to believe that Sir John Sinclair, at one time,—in the heat of the French Revolution,—projected emigration to America; and I find in one of Washington's letters[E]to him the following allusion to the scheme:—"To have such a tenant as Sir John Sinclair (however desirable it might be) is an honor I dare not hope for; and to alienate any part of the fee-simple estate of Mount Vernon is a measure I am not inclined to."

Another British cultivator of this period, whose name is associated with the Mount Vernon estate, was a certain Richard Parkinson of Doncaster, who wrote "The Experienced Farmer," and who not only proposed at one time to manage one of the Washington farms, but did actually sail for America, occupied a place called Orange-Hill, near Baltimore, for a year or more, travelled through the country, making what sale he could of his "Experienced Farmer," and on hisreturn to England, published "A Tour in America," which is to be met with here and there upon the top-shelves of old libraries, and which is not calculated to encourage immigration.

He sets out by saying,—"The great advantages held out by different authors, and men travelling from America with commission to sell land, have deluded persons of all denominations with an idea of becoming land-owners and independent. They have, however, been most lamentably disappointed,—particularly the farmers, and all those that have purchased land; for, notwithstanding the low price at which the American lands are sold,the poverty of the soil is suchas to make it not to pay for labor; therefore the greater part have brought themselves and their families to total ruin."

He is distressed, too, by the independence of the laborers,—being "often forced to rise in the morning to milk the cows, when the servants were in bed."

Among other animals which he took with him, he mentions "two race-horses, ten blood mares, a bull and cow of the North Devon, a bull and cow of the no-horned York, a cow (with two calves and in calf again) of the Holderness, five boar- and seven sow-pigs of four different kinds."

On arriving at Norfolk, Virginia, in November, he inquired for hay, and "was informed that American cattle subsisted on blades and slops, and that no hay was to be had." He found, also, that "American cows eat horse-dung as naturally as an English cow eats hay; and as America grows no grass, the street is the cheapest place to keep them in." This sounds very much as if it had been excerpted from the scientific column of the London "Athenæum." Again he says, with a delightful pointedness of manner,—"No transaction in America reflects any discredit on a man, unless he loses money by it.... I remember an Englishman, after repeating all the things that could fill a stranger's mind with trouble and horror, said, with a very heavy sigh, as he was going out of the house, 'It is the Devil's own country, to be sure!'"

The "Times" newspaper never said a prettier word than that!

Mr. Robert Brown was a worthier man, and, I suspect, a better farmer; he was one of the earlier types of those East-Lothian men who made their neighborhood the garden of Scotland. He was also the author of a book on "Rural Affairs," the editor for fifteen years of the well-known "Edinburgh Farmers' Magazine," and (if I am not mistaken) communicated the very valuable article on "Agriculture" to the old "Encyclopædia Britannica."

At this period, too, I find an Earl of Dundonald (Archibald Cochrane) writing upon the relations of chemistry to agriculture,—and a little later, Richard Kirwan, F.R.S., indulging in vagaries upon the same broad, and still unsettled, subject.

Joseph Cradock, a quiet, cultivated gentleman, who had been on terms of familiarity with Johnson, Garrick, and Goldsmith, published in 1775 his "Village Memoirs," in which Lancelot Brown has a little fun pointed at him, under the name of "Layout," the general "undertaker" for gardens. Sir Uvedale Price, too, a man of somewhat stronger calibre, and of great taste, (fully demonstrated on his own place of Foxley,) made poor Brown the target for some well-turned witticisms, and, what was far better, demonstrated the near relationship which should always exist between the aims of the landscape-painter and those of the landscape-gardener. I am inclined to think that Brown was a little unfairly used by these new writers, and that he had won a success which provoked a great deal of jealousy. A popularity too great is always dangerous. Sir Uvedale was a man of strong conservative tendencies, and believed no more in the levelling of men than in the levelling of hills. He found his love for the picturesque sated in many of those hoary old avenues which, under Brown, had been given to the axe. I suspect he would have forgiven the presence of a clipped yew in a landscape whereit had thriven for centuries; the moss of age could give picturesqueness even to formality. He speaks somewhere of the kindly work of his uncle, who had disposed his walks so as to be a convenience to the poor people of an adjoining parish, and adds, with curiousnaïveté,—"Such attentive kindnesses are amply repaid by affectionate regard and reverence; and were they general throughout the kingdom, they would do much more towards guarding us against democratical opinions than 'twenty thousand soldiers armed in proof.'"

Richard Knight (a brother of the distinguished horticulturist) illustrated the picturesque theory of Price in a passably clever poem, called "The Landscape," which had not, however, enough of outside merit to keep it alive. Humphrey Repton, a professional designer of gardens, whose work is to be found in almost every county of England, took issue with Price in respect to his picturesque theory,—as became an independent gardener who would not recognize allegiance to the painters. But the antagonism was only one of those petty wars about non-essentials, and significance of terms, into which eager book-makers are so apt to run.

In the course of one of my earlier Wet-Days I took occasion to allude to the brave old age that was reached by the classic veterans,—Xenophon, Cato, and Varro; and now I find among the most eminent British agriculturists and gardeners of the close of the last century a firm grip on life that would have matched the hardihood of Cato. Old Abercrombie of Preston Pans, as we have already seen, reached the age of eighty. Walpole, though I lay no claim to him as farmer or gardener, yet, thanks to the walks and garden-work of Strawberry Hill, lived to the same age. Philip Miller was an octogenarian. Lord Kames was aged eighty-seven at his death (1782). Arthur Young, though struggling with blindness in his later years, had accumulated such stock of vitality by his out-door life as to bridge him well over into the present century: he died in 1820, aged seventy-nine. Parson Trusler, notwithstanding his apothecary-schooling, lived to be eighty. In 1826 died Joseph Cradock of the "Village Memoirs," and a devoted horticulturist, aged eighty-five. Three years after, (1829,) Sir Uvedale Price bade final adieu to his delightful seat of Foxley, at the age of eighty-three. Sir John Sinclair lived fairly into our own time, (1835,) and was eighty-one at his death.

William Speechley, whom Johnson calls the best gardener of his time, and who established the first effective system of hot-house culture for pines in England, died in 1819, aged eighty-six; and in the same year, William Marshal, a voluminous agricultural writer and active farmer, died at the age of eighty. And I must mention one more, in Dr. Andrew Duncan, a Scotch physician, who cultivated his garden with his own hands,—inscribing over the entrance-gate, "Hinc salus,"—and who was the founder of the Horticultural Society of Edinburgh. This hale old doctor died in 1828, at the extreme age of eighty-four; and to the very last year of his life he never omitted going up to the top of Arthur's Seat every May-Day morning, to bathe his forehead in the summer's dew.

As a country-liver, I like to contemplate and to boast of the hoary age of these veterans. The inscription of good old Dr. Duncan was not exaggerated. Every man who digs his own garden, and keeps the weeds down thoroughly, may truthfully place the same writing over the gate,—"Hinc salus" (wherever he may place his "Hinc pecunia"). Nor is the comparative safety of active gardening or farming pursuits due entirely to the vigorous bodily exercise involved, but quite as much, it seems to me, to that enlivening and freshening influence which must belong to an intimate and loving and intelligent companionship with Nature. It may be an animal view of the matter,—but, in estimating the comparative advantages and disadvantages of a country-life, I think wetake too little account of that glow and exhilaration of the blood which come of every-day dealings with the ground and flowers and trees, and which, as age approaches, subside into a calm equanimity that looks Death in the face no more fearingly than if it were a frost. I have gray-haired neighbors around me who have come to a hardy old age upon their little farms,—buffeting all storms,—petting the cattle which have come down to them from ten generations of short-lived kine, gone by,—trailing ancient vines, that have seen a quarter of a century of life, over their door-steps,—turning over soil, every cheery season of May, from which they have already gathered fifty harvests; and I cannot but regard their serene philosophy, and their quiet, thankful, and Christian enjoyment of the bounties of Nature, as something quite as much to be envied as the distinctions of town-craft. I ask myself,—If these old gentlemen had plunged into the whirlpool of a city five-and-fifty years ago, would they have been still adrift upon this tide of time, where we are all serving our apprenticeships?—and if so, would they have worn the same calm and cheerful equanimity amid the harvests of traffic or the blight of a panic?—and if not adrift, would they have carried a clearer and more justifying record to the hearing of the Great Court than they will carry hence when our village-bell doles out the funeral march for them?

The rain is beating on my windows; the rain is beating on the plain; a mist is driving in from the Sound, over which I see only the spires,—those Christian beacons. And (by these hints, that always fret the horizon) calling to mind that bit of the best of all prayers, "Lead us not into temptation," it seems to me that many a country-liver might transmute it without offence, and in all faith, into words like these,—"Lead us not into cities." To think for a moment of poor farmer Burns, with the suppers of Edinburgh, and the orgies of the gentlemen of the Caledonian hunt, inflaming his imagination there in the wretched chamber of his low farm-house of Ellisland!

But all this, down my last half-page, relates to the physical and the moral aspects of the matter,—aspects which are, surely, richly worthy of consideration. The question whether country-life and country-pursuits will bring the intellectual faculties to their strongest bent is quite a distinct one. There may be opportunity for culture; but opportunity counts for nothing, except it occur under conditions that prompt to its employment. The incitement to the largest efforts of which the mind is capable comes ordinarily from mental attrition,—an attrition for which the retirement demanded by rural pursuits gives little occasion. Milton would never have come to his stature among pear-trees,—nor Newton, nor Burke. They may have made first-rate farmers or horticulturists; they may have surpassed all about them; but their level of action would have been a far lower one than that which they actually occupied. There is a great deal of balderdash written and talked upon this subject, which ought to have an end; it does not help farming, it does not help the world,—simply because it is untrue. Rural life offers charming objects of study; but to most minds it does not offer the promptings for large intellectual exertion. It ripens healthfully all the receptive faculties; it disposes to that judicial calmness of mind which is essential to clearness and directness of vision; but it does not kindle the heat of large and ambitious endeavor. Hence we often find that a man who has passed the first half of his life in comparative isolation, cultivating his resources quietly, unmoved by the disturbances and the broils of civic life, will, on transfer to public scenes, and stirred by that emulation which comes of contact with the world, feel all his faculties lighted with a new glow, and accomplish results which are as much a wonder to himself as to others. The pent river is at length set loose,—the barriers broken by the wear of mingled waters, and the force and the roar of it are amazing.

I have alluded to the poet-farmer Burns,—a capital ploughman, a poor manager, an intemperate lover, a sad reveller, a stilted letter-writer, a rare good-fellow, and a poet whose poems will live forever. It is no wonder he did not succeed as farmer; Moss-giel had an ugly, wet subsoil, and draining-tiles were as yet not in vogue; but from all the accounts I can gather, there was never a truer furrow laid than was laid by Robert Burns in his days of vigor, upon that same damp upland of Moss-giel; his "fearings" were all true, and his headlands as clear of draggled sod as if he had used the best "Ruggles, Nourse, and Mason" of our time. Alas for the daisies! he must have turned over perches of them in his day; and yet only one has caught the glory of his lamentation!

Ellisland, where he went later, and where he hoped to redeem his farm-promise, was not over-fertile; it had been hardly used by scurvy tenants before him, and was so stony that a rain-storm made a fresh-rolled field of sown barley look like a paved street. He tells us this; and we farmers know what it means. But it lay in Nithsdale; and the beauty of Nithsdale shed a regal splendor on his home. It was the poet that had chosen the farm, and not the grain-grower.

Then there were the "callants" coming from Edinburgh, from Dumfries, from London, from all the world, to have their "crack" with the peasant-poet, who had sung the "Lass of Ballochmyle." Can this man, whose tears drip (in verse) for a homeless field-mouse, keep by the plough, when a half-score of good-fellows are up from Dumfries to see him, and when John Barleycorn stands frothing in the cupboard?

Consider, again, that his means, notwithstanding the showy and short-lived generosity of his Edinburgh friends, enabled him only to avail himself of the old Scotch plough; his harrow, very likely, had wooden teeth; he could venture nothing for the clearing of gorse and broom; he could enter upon no system of drainage, even of the simple kind recommended by Lord Kames; he had hardly funds to buy the best quality of seed, and none at all for "liming," or for "wrack" from the shore. Even the gift of a pretty heifer he repays with a song.

Besides all this, he was exciseman; and he loved galloping over the hills in search of recreants, and cozy sittings in the tap of the "Jolly Beggars" of Mauchline, better than he loved a sight of the stunted barley of Ellisland.

No wonder that he left his farm; no wonder that he went to Dumfries,—shabby as the street might be where he was to live; no wonder, that, with his mad pride and his impulsive generosity, he died there, leaving wife and children almost beggars. But, in all charity, let us remember that it is not alone the poor exciseman who is dead, but the rare poet, who has intoned a prayer for ten thousand lips,—

"That He, who stills the raven's clamorous nest,And decks the lily fair in flowery pride,Would, in the way His wisdom sees the best,For them and for their little ones provide,But chiefly in their hearts with grace divine preside."

Let no one fancy that Burns was a poor farmer because he was a poet: he was a poor farmer simply because he gave only his hand to the business, and none of his brain. He had enough of good sense and of clear-sightedness to sweep away every agricultural obstacle in his path, and to make Ellisland "pay well"; but good-fellowship, and the "Jolly Beggars," and his excise-galloping among the hills by Nithsdale made an end of the farmer,—and, in due time, made an end of the man.

Robert Bloomfield was another poet-farmer of these times, but of a much humbler calibre. I could never give any very large portion of a wet day to his reading. There is truthfulness of description in him, and a certain grace of rhythm, but nothing to kindle any glow. The story of Giles, and of the milking, and of the spotted heifers, may be true enough; but every day, in my barn-yard,I find as true and as lively a story. The fact is, that the details of farm-life—the muddy boots, the sweaty workers, the amber-colored pools, the wallowing pigs—are not of a kind to warrant or to call out any burning imprint of verse. Theme for this lies in the breezes, the birds, the waving-wooded mountains (Νηριτον εινοσιφυλλον), the glorious mornings

"Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy,"

—and for these the poet must soar above the barn-yard and the house-tops. There is more of the spirit of true poesy in that little fragment of Jean Ingelow's,[F]beginning,—

"What change has made the pastures sweet,And reached the daisies at my feet,And cloud that wears a golden hem?"

than in all the verse of Bloomfield, if all of Bloomfield were compressed into a single song.

And yet, if we had lived in those days, we should all have subscribed for the book of the peasant-bard, perhaps have read it,—but, most infallibly, have given it away to some country-cousin.

I will not leave the close of the last century without paying my respects to good Mrs. Barbauld,—not so much for her pleasant "Ode to Spring," about which there is a sweet odor of the fields, as for her partnership in those "Evenings at Home" which are associated—I scarce can remember how—with roaring fires and winter nights in the country; and not less strongly with the first noisy chorus of the frogs in the pools, and the first coy uplift of the crocuses and the sweet violets. There are pots of flowers, and glowing fruit-trees, and country hill-sides scattered up and down those little stories, which, though my eye has not lighted on them these twenty odd years past, are still fresh in my mind, and full of a sweet pastoral fragrance. The sketches may be very poor, with few artist-like touches in them; it may be only a boyish caprice by which I cling to them; but what pleasanter or more grateful whim to cherish than one which brings back all the aroma of childhood in the country,—floating upon the remnant-patches of a story that is only half recalled? The cowslips are there; the pansies are there; the overhanging chestnuts are there; the dusty high-road is there; the toiling wagons are there; and, betimes, the rain is dripping from the cottage-eaves—as the rain is dripping to-day.

And from Mrs. Barbauld I am led away to speak of Miss Austen,—belonging, it is true, to a little later date, and the tender memory of her books to an age that had outgrown "Evenings at Home." Still, the association of her tales is strongest with the country, and with country-firesides. I sometimes take up one of her works upon an odd hour even now; and how like finding old-garret clothes—big bonnets and scant skirts—is the reading of such old-time story! How the "proprieties" our grandmothers taught us come drifting back upon the tide of those buckram conventionalities of the "Dashwoods"![G]Ah, Marianne, how we once loved you! Ah, Sir John, how we once thought you a profane swearer!—as you really were.

There are people we know between the covers of Miss Austen: Mrs. Jennings has a splutter of tease, and crude incivility, and shapeless tenderness, that you and I see every day;—not so patent and demonstrative in our friend Mrs. Jones; but the difference is only in fashion: Mrs. Jennings was in scant petticoats, and Mrs. Jones wears hoops, thirty springs strong.

How funny, too, the old love-talk! "My beloved Amanda, the charm of your angelic features enraptures my regard." It is earnest; but it's not the way those things are done.

And what visions such books recall of the days when they were read,—the girls in pinafores,—the boys in roundabouts,—the elders looking languishingly on, when the reader comes to tender passages! And was not a certain MaryJane another Ellinor? And was not Louisa (who lived in the two-story white house on the corner) another Marianne,—gushing, tender? Yes, by George, she was! (that was the form our boyish oaths took).

And was not the tall fellow who offered his arm to the girls so gravely, and saw them home from our evening visits so cavalierly,—was he not another gay deceiver,—a Lothario, a Willoughby? He could kiss a girl on the least provocation; he took pay out, for his escort, that way. It was wonderful,—the fellow's effrontery. It never forsook him. I do not know about the romance in his family; but he went into the grocery-line, and has become a contractor now, enormously rich. He offers his arm to Columbia, who wishes to get home before dark; and takes pay in rifling her of golden kisses. Yes, by George, he does!

FOOTNOTES:[A]By an odd coincidence, I observe that Washington made one of his first shipments of tobacco (after his marriage with Mrs. Custis) upon a vessel called "The Fair American." Did the ship possibly give a name to the novel, or the novel a name to the ship?[B]Practical Farmer, by William Ellis. London, 1759.[C]The eminent geologist, Robert Bakewell, who lived many years later, wrote of the "Influence of the Soil on Wool," and for that reason, perhaps, is frequently confounded by agricultural writers with the great breeder.[D]Third volumeStatistics, p. 598.[E]Dated December, 1796. Sparks'sLife and Letters, Vol. XII. p. 328.[F]A poetess whose merits, as it seems to me, are, as yet, only half acknowledged.[G]Sense and Sensibility.

[A]By an odd coincidence, I observe that Washington made one of his first shipments of tobacco (after his marriage with Mrs. Custis) upon a vessel called "The Fair American." Did the ship possibly give a name to the novel, or the novel a name to the ship?

[B]Practical Farmer, by William Ellis. London, 1759.

[C]The eminent geologist, Robert Bakewell, who lived many years later, wrote of the "Influence of the Soil on Wool," and for that reason, perhaps, is frequently confounded by agricultural writers with the great breeder.

[D]Third volumeStatistics, p. 598.

[E]Dated December, 1796. Sparks'sLife and Letters, Vol. XII. p. 328.

[F]A poetess whose merits, as it seems to me, are, as yet, only half acknowledged.

[G]Sense and Sensibility.

Had the question been asked, forty years ago, what country, beside our own, possesses the greatest natural advantages, and gives the best promise of future growth and prosperity, very likely the answer would have been, Mexico, which had then just thrown off the Spanish yoke and achieved national independence. Cast aside for a moment all modern ideas, derived from her known weakness and anarchy, and see how great and manifold those apparent advantages and prospects were.

Situated where the continent of North America is narrowing from the immense breadths of the United States and British America to that thread of communication between continents, the Isthmus of Panama, on the one side its shores are washed by the waters of the Gulf of Mexico for more than sixteen hundred miles, and on the other by the tranquil Pacific for four thousand more. Yet the distance from her great eastern port, Vera Cruz, to the old Spanish treasure-depot, Acapulco, on the western coast, was not, as the bird flies, more than three hundred miles: a distance scarcely greater than that from Boston to New York, and which, with modern means of transit, might be traversed between sunrise and sunset. Thus with one hand she seemed ready to grasp the wealth of the Indies, while with the other she welcomed all the products of European skill. This wonderful geographical advantage had, indeed, been rendered futile in the past by the jealous spirit and the exclusive enactments of her oppressor. But what might not be hoped in the future from a free people, quickened into fresh life by the breath of liberty?

Then the marvellous resources of every description which Nature had crowded into her soil. Perhaps there is not on the whole earth another strip of country, extending north and south only a thousand miles and varying in width from one to five hundred miles, where side by side are all climates and all their products. On the coasts the land is low, hot, vaporous, and luxuriant,—the native home of the richest tropical growths. Travel inland but a few leagues, and you rise to a greater elevation, and find yourself beneath almost Italian skies and inhaling Italian airs; while all around is a new vegetation,—the vine, the olive, the tobacco, the banana, itself perhaps the most prolific and nourishing of all plants, and which, on the space where Indian corn would sustain but three human lives, will nourish with its free bounty more than fifty. A few miles more, and you stand on that great plateau, elevated with but little variation six or seven thousand feetabove the level of the sea, and stretching on every side we know not over how many hundred thousands of square miles. There, under the tropics and beneath a tropical sun, is a temperate atmosphere, cool, salubrious, and bracing. There, almost within sight of the deadly miasma of the coast, is a new climate, which deals kindly even with a European constitution. There all the great cereals of the North, the wheat, the barley, the corn, come to their most luxuriant perfection. And so it is literally true, that, travelling a few hundred miles from Gulf to Ocean, you pass through more climates and see a wider variety of vegetation than if you traversed our whole country from the great lakes in the North to the southernmost cape of Florida. Nay, so striking is this contact of the zones, that in that table-land itself are, it is said, deep valleys, where with one glance the eye may behold far up the deep shades of the pine, while below waves the feathery grace of the palm,—or where one may walk amid familiar waving grain, and see beneath him, descending in beautiful gradation, the corn, the olive, the sugar-cane, down to depths where a torrid clime lavishes its full wealth of verdure.

Here, too, is the true Ophir; here, the rivers that roll down their yellow sands. For here are the veins of gold that attracted the Spaniard with his fatal greed, and the mines of silver that for three hundred years have been yielding untold treasures, and to-day are as ready as ever to yield untold treasures more. With such germs of wealth hidden in her soil, what was needed to make Mexico one of the master-nations but men? What, to crowd her ports with ships, to make her borders pleasant with the hum of industry, and to fill her storehouses with its products, but the same sagacity and energy which have made the sterile hills of New England populous, and which are now transforming the prairies of the West into one broad cornfield? Was it surprising, then, that fifty years ago men were dreaming great things of Mexico?

And it will not be denied that into men's estimate of her future some elements of romance entered, to blind their eyes and to distort their judgment. This was the land of Cortés and Montezuma. Here it was that the Spaniard, fresh from the conquest of fair Granada, found in the depths of the New World a barbarian civilization which mocked the pomp and luxury of the Moor. Here, on these plains, beneath these mountains, on the bosom of these tranquil lakes, was transacted that marvellous episode in history, which, on the pages of Prescott, looks like the creations of the fabled Genii. Here an aboriginal race rose to more than aboriginal splendor; and here, beneath the conqueror's heel, they sank to unsounded depths of misery and servitude. He must have a prosaic nature to whom the memories and associations of such a land do not come glowing with the warm flush of sentiment and romance.

There was much, too, in the long and bitter struggle by which this people were winning their independence, which appealed to the sympathy of men who had just achieved their own freedom. Very likely, as we read now the history of that struggle,—as we see how little of any broad and generous patriotism entered into it,—as we mark how every step was stained with blood and darkened by cruel passions,—as we behold on every field the selfish ambition of petty men taking the place of the self-devotion of great souls, it will not look heroic. But it did once. Men saw it from afar off. They beheld in it the ancient conflict between liberty and oppression. It was the time-worn story, of men in poverty, of men in exile, of men dying for freedom.

Thus, from one cause or another, from reasons of utility or from reasons of sentiment and imagination, it is certain that many cherished the highest hopes for Mexico, and saw before her a long future of rare prosperity and honor. "It is to Mexico," writes a glowing admirer, "that we turn and turn again with fond delight. We invoke the reader to ponder her present position, her capacity for futuregreatness, the career she has yet to commence and run. We look toward her, and we see the day-spring of a glorious national existence arising within her bounds."

When we look at this picture, drawn by hope and fancy, and then turn to the reality,—when we see Mexico as she is, the blankest failure of the century,—when we run over her forty years of anarchy, with its four constitutions and twenty-seven plans of government, with its bewildering array of presidents and dictators that come and go until the eye is wearied and the memory fails to preserve even their names,—when we behold her the helpless victim of any power that chooses to assail her,—when, in short, we compare the Mexico that is with the Mexico that was to be,—we ask ourselves, What are the causes which have made so many advantages worse than futile?—what fate has ordained that so much sacrifice and so much blood should be lavished, and in vain? That is the very question we seek to answer.

We begin with what is the true foundation of all national fortunes, the character and social relations of the people. It is the profound remark of a profound man, that "you can create no national spirit where no nation is." That is at the root of Mexico's troubles. She is not in any proper sense a nation. All her sufferings have not as yet moulded her diverse elements into any real and efficient unity. Modern Mexico, dating from the Conquest, was founded, not upon social unity, but upon the widest social divergence. At one end of the scale, high up in luxury and pride, was the Spanish Conqueror and oppressor. At the other, deep down as degradation could go, the crushed and cowering descendant of the native races. Between them the half-bloods, with the vices of both and the virtues of neither. The Spaniard did all that he could to dig deep and broad this gulf of separation between the classes, and to make it perpetual. As if to stamp inequality in biting phrase upon men's speech, he called the whites people with reason, the Indians people without reason.

Look, then, first at the condition of the native races under this Colonial authority. In the beginning, they were literally slaves, bound to the withering toil of the mines. Then they became serfs, mere appendages to estates. And when the progress of light swept away this institution, and gave them a nominal freedom, still they were in the eye of the law in a state of perpetual minority. They were simply grown-up children. They were confined in villages, out of which they could not go, and into which the white could not come. They were held to be incapable of making contracts above a sum equal to five of our dollars. The very men who were set to watch over their interests, by enticing them into debts which they would not pay, changed their legal freedom into a peonage, which was actual, and too often life-long, slavery. Says Chevalier,—"These functionaries acquired for themselves troops of slaves. They constituted themselves arbitrarily creditors of the Indians by forcing them to buy, at unreasonable prices, horses, mules, and clothing. The Indians, never being able to pay, were forced to work for them, and this obligation to work, or, to speak more clearly, this servitude, once contracted, was easily made perpetual." Here, then, we have in Colonial Mexico, at the foundation of the State, the Indian, whom oppression had made but half a man.

Just above them were the half-bloods. These were not slaves. They were not serfs. They were not considered to be children of a larger growth. It was expressly said of them that they were "rational people." But they had burdens of their own. Having little social position and less education, incapable by nature of that sullen patience which kept the Indian from chafing under his yoke, they were both more unhappy and more demoralized. The crimes against property, the robberies on the highway, could for the most part be traced to the half-breeds."Are there any robbers on this route?" asked Baron Deffandis, as he travelled in the North of Mexico. "Oh, no!" was the answer; "you have nothing to fear; in this part of the country there are no rational people,"—the speaker remaining all unconscious of the bitter satire which was hidden in his words.

Above the half-bloods were the Creoles, the children of white parents and born in the Colony. Even they were doomed to feel the sting of inferiority. They had no real political liberty, and no place in the State. No royal trust was ever committed to them. The places of public emolument were closed against them. All were reserved for Spaniards, born in Spain. Of fifty-six Mexican viceroys but one was a Creole, and he a Creole of Peru. It is the boast of a Frenchman, that in his country, in its most despotic days, the people have always had their songs, and that their writers have dared to breathe forth their maledictions upon the oppression which has loaded them with exactions. But in Spain and her colonies the Inquisition weighed heavily upon free speech, and enforced upon all the higher subjects of human thought a silence like the grave. The Creole scarcely knew that there was any world beyond his horizon, or that there could be a better than his empty and barren life; or if he did know more, he must keep that knowledge in the solitude of his own breast. All that the Spaniard vouchsafed to him was the liberty to achieve wealth, which opened to him no career of usefulness and distinction. At most, he loaded himself with cheap decorations, to which there was no answering position of responsibility. "One is surprised," says a tourist, "to see all the traders turned into colonels and captains, and to find officers of the militia in full uniform, and decorated with the badge of the order of Charles III., seated in their shops, weighing out sugar, coffee, and vanilla." But as for any real distinction, the Creole had none. These empty titles sufficed to separate him in feeling yet more from the great mass of his countrymen, but they did not satisfy those aspirations for real dignity and freedom which cannot quite die out in any breast.

We see, then, what a fatal legacy the mother-country left to her rebellious child: four castes,—the Spaniard, hated by all; the Creole, proud, hospitable, and brave, but by his very training incapable of persistent energy; the half-breed, wild and untamable, a natural brigand and guerrilla; and the Indian, subdued, sad, and patient, yet with a drop of the fierce and cruel blood of his Aztec progenitor coursing in his veins.

The first act in the drama of the Mexican Revolution showed how great an obstacle to national unity this sentiment of caste was. When the priest Hidalgo in the year 1810 raised the standard of rebellion, though the Creole heart was throbbing almost to bursting with the desire for freedom, yet the Creole population nearly in a body sided with the Government. Do you ask why? The answer is simple. Hidalgo's followers were Indians. And all through that prolonged struggle of ten years under Morelos, Vittoria, Teran, and countless other partisan leaders, even to that hour when the rebellion was extinguished in its own blood, it was the Creole who stood between the Spaniard and destruction, and who, through his fear and jealousy of the native races, was the accomplice in binding heavier chains on his own limbs. When in 1820 the revolt passed out of the hand of the Indian into that of the native white, the struggle was over. The hundred thousand foreigners were impotent, when they stood alone.

We do not say that this jealousy and dislike have not been greatly modified by the lapse of years and by the endurance of common sufferings. No doubt there has been a great improvement. There would be small hope for the country, if it were not so. But these feelings have not by any means been altogether eradicated. An intelligent writer, as lately as last year, speaking of the difficulties which the Liberal Government, now overthrownby the French, had to encounter, says that they were not a little aggravated by the fact that Benito Juarez, its head, was an Indian. Though he was one of the most remarkable men who have risen to power, the haughty Creole could not brook the thought that an Indian should climb from hisadobehut to be the first personage in the State. Nor is the fire quite quenched in the Indian's breast. Under a grave taciturnity he hides burning memories. An acute observer of the native character remarks,—"I have myself frequently heard Indians, when their ordinary reserve has been overcome by spirituous liquors, declare that they were the true owners of the soil, and all others foreign intruders,—and that, if the Creoles could expel the Spaniards, they themselves had a far better right to expel the Creoles." We say, then, emphatically, that the first and perhaps the greatest cause of Mexican anarchy is that the Mexicans are not as yet a people. Their diverse elements have not as yet been fused into a living and conscious nationality.

Another striking cause is the popular ignorance. We are coming more and more to understand that it is not enough to have the shape and thews of a man,—that, to be fit for freedom, or long to retain it, a people must have mental and moral intelligence sufficient to teach them self-control, and to enable them to judge wisely of public men and public measures. Now in Mexico there is very little of the regulating force of a just popular sentiment. You never catch the thunder of the people's voice, before whose majesty base men and base plans must bow. This destitution is not a matter of chance. It is another fatal legacy of the mother-country. Spain steadily resisted all generous culture of her colonists. She did not hesitate to declare that it was not expedient that learning should become general in America. A viceroy said, with more bluntness than courtesy, that "in America education ought always to be confined to the Catechism." Under one pretence or another, a college established for the instruction of Indians, in the better days of Spanish domination, was broken, up. No book was permitted to be printed in Mexico, or to be imported from abroad, without the consent both of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities. Under this rule the actual literature of the country was sufficiently dry and barren. A bishop writes that the deplorable condition of the Indians has produced such sluggishness of mind and such absolute indifference and apathy, that they have no feelings either of hope or of fear. And he predicted the very results, which then were prophecy, but now are history.

How entire this ignorance was, when the colonial tie was sundered, we cannot definitely determine. But we have the testimony of one who had ample opportunity for observation, and who made the most extended personal inquiries, that, twenty-five years afterwards, only two per cent. of the Indians, and only twenty per cent. of the whites and half-breeds, could read and write; and in 1856, actual statistics showed that but one in thirty-seven attended school. When we consider that in Massachusetts one in every five and a third of our population enjoys school-privileges, we shall comprehend how large a portion of the youth of Mexico are even now growing up in utter ignorance.

One of the direct results of this popular ignorance is, that the conduct of affairs has virtually passed out of the hands of the people. To a considerable extent, it may be affirmed that the strifes which divide and desolate Mexico do not rise to the dignity of civil wars. They are not so much the conflicts of a divided people as the disgraceful brawls of ambitious demagogues and their adherents. Every traveller notes with astonishment how little these great changes, which ought to stir to its depths the national heart, ruffle even the surface of society,—how the great mass sit undisturbed, while events big with importance are transacted before their eyes,—how a few ambitiousleaders, or a few military chieftains, with their mercenary bands, are permitted to uphold or betray, to advance or trample under foot, great principles which with us excite every mind and arouse every heart. We believe it to be strictly true that a large portion of the Mexican people have not enough mental and moral activity to take an interest of any kind in these desolating wars,—much less to exercise that repressing influence by which the criminal ambition of the few must bow to the rights of the many. There could not be a worse sign. Popular ignorance, therefore, leading to popular apathy, must be put down among the influential causes of Mexican sorrows.

A third cause is that indifference to blood which appears to be characteristic of the Mexican people, or at least of that portion of them who have concerned themselves with public commotions. Some terrible elements have entered into this Mexican stock. The Spaniard, one of its sources, has written his name in blood in the history both of the Old and the New World. Whether hunting out the remnants of the unhappy Moriscos from the fastnesses of their native hills,—or torturing the Jews in the dungeons of his Inquisition,—or with lust and murder filling to the brim the cup of horror and misery for the captive cities of Holland,—or exterminating, in the pitiless labor of the mines, the peaceful aborigines of San Domingo,—or with Cortés putting to slaughter a whole city on mere suspicion,—everywhere the Spaniard has recorded great deeds with a pen of iron dipped in blood. And the Aztec, the other source of that stock, had, if we are to credit his conqueror, a cruel and merciless side to his character, which made him the peer of his oppressor.

The Mexican Revolution had its horrible chapters. And impartial truth demands that we should say that both sides made fearful contributions to those chapters. Hidalgo, the first popular leader, wrote to his lieutenant these terrible words:—"If you suspect your prisoners of entertaining restless or seditious ideas, bury them in oblivion at once by putting them to death in some secret and solitary place, where their fate may remain forever unknown." His practical commentary was a permission to his followers to slay every white whom they could find in the first stronghold which they stormed, and afterwards many a midnight execution in the gloomy ravines of the mountains. On the other hand, Calleja, the King's general, boasts that after the Battle of Aculco he put to death five thousand insurgents in cold blood. And Iturbide, then a Government general, writes, under date, "Good-Friday, 1814, In honor of the day I have just ordered three hundred excommunicated wretches to be shot":—a missive in which we know not which to admire most, the hideous brevity, the blasphemy, or the cruelty. One act of noble clemency stands out in peculiar sweetness from this background of horror. When Morelos had given to his lieutenant, Bravo, three hundred of the King's soldiers to be used as a ransom for his father, who was a prisoner in the hands of the Royalists, and when the viceroy, Venegas, scornfully rejected the offer, and ordered his victim to immediate execution, Bravo instantly set at liberty the soldiers:—"For I would wish," he said, "to put it out of my own power to avenge on them the death of a parent, lest, in the first moments of grief, the temptation should prove irresistible." The experiences of the Texan War, whose massacre of Alamo was the battle-cry of the borderers in all succeeding conflicts, and whose martyrdom at Goliad, where three hundred and fifty unarmed prisoners, trusting in the pledged faith of their captors, were led out in squads and shot, would seem to show that the tendencies of Mexican leaders and soldiers had not greatly changed in later times. What can result from such examples but utter carelessness of human life? But to destroy among any people the sacredness of life is to erase one of the safeguards of peace and order. The nation which doesnot shrink from carnage, which is not ready to sacrifice everything but principle to avert it, will be the nation of all others to risk everything, honor, safety, social stability, for a whim. Beyond a doubt, too great indifference to blood has been a fertile source of unnecessary agitations, and so of weakness and anarchy.

We have postponed to this stage of our inquiry the consideration of that rock upon which the Mexican State has finally split,—party-spirit. During the forty stormy years of its existence, that ancient conflict, ever old and ever new, between conservatism and radicalism, has been going on. A statistician records that Mexico has had twenty-seven new constitutions, or at least modifications of old ones, or final plans of settlement. It has been too much the custom to talk of these as though they were utterly meaningless. They are full of meaning. They mark the flux and reflux of this great battle. They stand for the victories or defeats of one or the other of these great principles.

It is not probable, that, at the outset of the Revolution, the Creoles had any thought of separating from the mother-country. They professed the greatest loyalty. And they proved it by unshaken fidelity on many a bloody field. Their only request was, that some constitutional features might mitigate the despotism under which they groaned. Even after eleven years' struggle, what they settled upon was a limited monarchy, with the King's son at its head,—or, if he refused, then some scion of another royal house. And even when this project failed, they raised to the vacant throne their own general, Iturbide. So strong in the beginning was the element of conservatism, or reaction, as they term it now, in Mexican affairs.

In 1823, however, the Liberal party obtained the supremacy, and under the lead of Santa Aña, who then first came into prominence, drove Iturbide from the throne, and put into operation a constitution patterned after our own. It is not too much to say, that, from that day to the hour when the allied troops landed at Vera Cruz, the conflict between two parties, two principles, two methods of government, has been waged with ever increasing bitterness and ever changing fortunes. It is probable that the Liberals have always been numerically the stronger. But the reactionary party has had its advantages. The rich and aristocratic have been with it. To a great extent the army, ever partial to the iron hand, has given it the support of its great power. And the Church, which has possessed perhaps one-quarter of the whole wealth of the country, and whose income has often far exceeded that of the State, has always plotted for the downfall of the Liberals.

In 1835 the power of these combined forces was so great that they were able to overthrow the constitution of 1824, and put into operation a new one on the plan of centralization. By this plan all federal representation ceased, and popular freedom was subject to unaccustomed restraints. The most noteworthy fact connected with this change was the Texan Rebellion, and consequent upon it our own Mexican War. But of these we shall speak hereafter. It was not until 1857 that the Liberals won back all that they had lost,—and more; for they replaced the old constitution by a new and freer one, and, as if by one stroke to inflict a final blow upon their adversaries, decreed the confiscation of all Church property. The Reactionists had at least vitality enough to make a death-struggle. Leagued with the army, they drove Comonfort from the presidency, and his party from the city of Mexico. For three years there were two presidents and two sets of officers of all sorts, and a civil war. The Liberals, under the Indian Benito Juarez, held Vera Cruz and the larger part of the country. At the end of this period the Liberal chieftain, with an unexpected energy, drove the opposing party out of the city of Mexico, and its leaders into exile, carried into effect the decree for the confiscation of Church property,and wellnigh crushed out organized resistance.

Not only, then, did this sorely tried Republic begin its precarious existence with a people wholly unapt for freedom and embittered by caste-feeling, but, from the outset, it was so divided by a broad gulf of political dissension, that the whole body politic has ever since been in reality cloven asunder.

We have omitted from their proper place the Texan War and its consequences, which in their turn have done more than any one cause to weaken and dishonor Mexico,—not so much because they took away from her valuable districts as because they advertised to the whole world what feebleness was behind great apparent power. We tread now upon the embers of an extinguished controversy. And while around us blaze the lurid flames of a mightier conflagration, which it helped to kindle, we could not wish to stir again its ashes. But seeking the causes of the downfall of Mexico, we can hardly omit the weightiest cause.

The Texans were, as we all know, a people who came for the most part from the United States, and who were drawn southward by the combined influence of a genial climate and liberal gifts of land. These attractions had but one drawback, and that was of a religious nature. By the very terms of the gift, all emigrants were, or became, or professed to become, Roman Catholics. In many cases marriages of long standing were reconsecrated with Catholic ceremonies, while the children were baptized at Catholic altars. Until the year 1835 the Texans had been citizens of Mexico,—the district which they inhabited, together with Coahuila, making a sovereign state and constituent part of that federal republic. Though the Texans had thus lived for many years under the protection of Mexican law, it would not be true to say that they had done so always cheerfully or even peaceably. There had been much smothered discontent, and some open violence. The reasons were various. The vexations, and perhaps oppression, incident to the rapid and violent changes of the Mexican government, led to much ill feeling, and engendered controversies not easily put to sleep. The natural averseness, too, of a people of Anglo-Saxon origin to yield obedience, however legitimate, to a mixed race like the Mexicans, created bitterness, which was intensified by the arrogant and reckless temper characteristic of no small part of the Texan people. Last, but not least, their irritation at those laws which abolished slavery, and which from the beginning they had always broken and always meant to break, would have sundered a far stronger chain than ever bound them to the land of their adoption. When the centralized constitution of 1835 came into force, their discontent ripened into open rebellion. In the light of our own bitter experience, with the inception and growth of our own civil war open for our instruction, few Northern men will doubt that this was the infant Secession whose full-grown power we are breasting. That there were some real grievances we may allow; for, with so many shifting governments, there could hardly have failed to be some injustice and some oppressive measures or deeds. That, with the essential difference of feeling, character, and habits which existed between the two people, disturbances must sooner or later have arisen, we may also allow. But, after all, one of the most powerful motives for rebellion was love of slavery. Mexico stood a bar to the establishment of that new and powerful Slave State which was the dream not only of the Texan, but perhaps even more of the statesmen and leaders of the extreme South. If Mexico became a powerful government, all the more would she be an insuperable bar to such a project. However much, then, the Texans may have desired a separate State existence, and however little they may have liked the establishment of a great central power, their fear was not so much that the strong government would oppress them as that it might grow strong enough to force them to cease oppressingothers. There were Mexican laws which they never had obeyed, never intended to obey, and which by the aid of State existence they had always succeeded in evading. And now, when the progress of events and the strengthening of the central authority threatened as never before the cherished institution, like their compeers, they took their stand on the same battle-ground of State Rights. We repeat, that other influences and real wrongs no doubt helped them to this conclusion. What was the exact power of each particular influence no one can tell. But, back of all influences, a baneful spirit and motive, was the love of slavery and the desire to perpetuate it. Their independence achieved, the Texans did not know what to do with it. Few in numbers, burdened with debt, harassed on the one side by the wild Camanches and Apaches, and on the other by the Mexican guerrillas, pressed by the British and French governments, who wished to abolish slavery and establish a protectorate, they sought annexation to the United States, which, after a severe Congressional struggle, was accomplished early in the year 1845.

The farther the lapse of years removes us from the passions and pride of the hour, perhaps the less reason shall we find for entire satisfaction with our course, both as regards this act of annexation and the war with Mexico by which it was succeeded. While the feelings with which we now contemplate the French aggressions in Mexico show us that there were other and good reasons besides love of slavery why we might wish to keep this new and feeble Gulf State out of foreign hands,—while we cannot fail to regard with admiration the courage and skill with which our gallant army won its way to the very capital of a hostile State,—while, too, the progress of events has given us no cause to regret that sleeping California was given up to the fresh energy of the Anglo-Saxon,—while we rejoice to believe that this present war will result in adding to the manifold resources of Texas the crowning blessing of freedom,—while, in short, we see that what men call circumstance, but which is God's majestic Providence, is turning our errors into good,—yet the final verdict of impartial truth must be, that it was neither in the spirit of wisdom nor of justice that we strengthened the power which even then waited to slay us, and that in our pride and impatience we showed too little consideration to that State at the root of whose greatness we were laying the axe.

Those who delight in historical parallels will remember that this very tract, from the Sabine to the Rio Grande, which was included in Texas, was the same territory which was in controversy between us and Spain at the beginning of the century,—and that as in 1846 the advance of the Mexican general across the southern boundary of the controverted district brought on the Mexican War, so, forty years before, the advance of an American general across the northern boundary of the same district brought us to the verge of a Spanish war.

But whatever any one may think of the nature and justice of the Mexican War, no one can doubt that its result was the infliction of the severest of blows upon a sister-republic. And the severity consisted, we repeat, not so much in the territory which she relinquished as in her entire loss of prestige among the nations. We took away, indeed, more than eight hundred thousand square miles. We left her hardly seven hundred thousand square miles. But had there been any recuperative energy, perhaps the State, so much more compact in territory, and so little diminished in population, would have been stronger rather than weaker by the process.

We return to our narrative. The spring of 1861 found the Liberal party triumphant. Never had it seemed so firmly rooted. Never had its opponents been so cast down. Well does the Scripture say, "Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall." All through the spring and summer of 1861, the leaders of the Church party were flitting fromParis to Madrid, and from Madrid to Paris again, weaving what webs of intrigue, seeking what forms of intervention, none but the arch-plotter of the Tuileries can tell. There were floating about that summer rumors of intervention, coming through what avenues, or to whom traceable, nobody knew. Did any one wish to intervene, there were certainly ostensible reasons enough. In that long agony of anarchy, Mexico had inflicted, through one or another of her jarring parties, insults and injuries, in robberies, in murders, in forced loans, in illegal taxes, in neglected debts, sufficient to give an apparent justification to any violence of policy in a foreign power. The British minister, under date of June 27, 1861, transmitted to Lord John Russell a fearful list of outrages against English subjects. In that list were included three murders committed, or permitted, by Government officials, and twenty-four robberies, forced loans and the like, some of them to the amount of twenty-five and even sixty thousand dollars. These he styles "British claims of the small and distressing class." One fact disturbs the force of this impeachment of the Liberal government. Almost without exception, these outrages were confessedly the work of the conservative party, which had just been expelled after an open rebellion of three years against the legitimate authorities. It was as though England should enter complaint against our Government for property destroyed by the Alabama, or for insults and injuries inflicted upon British subjects in the streets of Richmond. No doubt, the form of law was with her, but hardly substantial justice. As the French have progressed, we have seen still stranger anomalies. The leaders of this very conservative party, who more than all others were responsible for the state of irritation which produced the conflict, have appeared in the ranks of the French army, thus acting the part of public prosecutors, and convicting and condemning innocent people for their own sins.

But it remained for Juarez himself, driven by necessity, to commit the act which settled the fortunes of his country. On the 17th of July, 1861, he published a decree announcing that for the term of two years all payments on debts would be suspended, expressly including foreign bonds. From that moment Mexico was doomed. The British and French ministers at once sent in sharp protests. The reply of the Mexican cabinet-minister is pitiful to read. His excuse is absolute necessity. The mismanagement of his predecessors has made it impossible that he should carry on the Government, and at the same time pay its debts. After some further correspondence, apologetic on the part of Mexico, sharp and bitter on the part of the foreign ministers, diplomatic intercourse ceased. The Mexican minister at Paris, in obedience to orders, sought an interview with M. Thouvenal. He began by saying that "he was instructed to give the most ample explanations." Whereupon M. Thouvenal interrupted him, exclaiming, "We will not hear any explanations; we will receive none"; adding, in great excitement, "We have fully approved the conduct of M. Saligny. We have issued orders, in concert with England, that a squadron composed of vessels of both nations shall exact from the Government of Mexico due satisfaction, and your Government will learn from our minister and our admiral what are the claims of France." We have quoted thus fully from official documents to show that the emergency found France armed and ready, if not glad, to pursue the quarrel to the end.

What was that end? As it stood on paper, simply to take possession of the ports of Mexico, and sequestrate their customs to pay the interest on foreign debts. This is stated over and over again by every party in all possible forms of distinctness. By no means is any interference to be permitted in the internal affairs of that country. In November, 1861, Lord John Russell writes to the British minister at Mexico in these unmistakableterms:—"You must be careful to observe with strictness Article Two of the Convention, signed yesterday between Great Britain, France, and Spain, by which it is provided that no influence shall be used in the internal affairs of Mexico, calculated to prejudice the right of the Mexican nation freely to choose its own form of government. Should any Mexican, or any party in Mexico, ask your advice on such subjects, you will say that any regular form of government, which shall protect the lives and properties of natives and foreigners, and shall not permit British subjects to be attacked or annoyed on account of their occupation, their rights of property, or their religion, will secure the moral support of the British Government." The statement of France was just as clear, only shorter. M. Thouvenal said to Mr. Dayton that "France could do no more than she had already done, and that was to assure us of her purpose not to interfere in any way with the internal government of Mexico; that their sole purpose was to obtain payment of their claims and reparation for the wrongs and injuries done them." The language of Spain, if anything, was shortest and clearest of all. She assured Mr. Schurtz, that, "if Spain did take part in this intervention, it would be solely for redress of her grievances, and not for the purpose of imposing new institutions upon Mexico." So it was clear, after all, that this was nothing but a grand naval excursion for the collection of just dues from a reluctant or dishonest debtor! Nothing more! No intention whatever of intruding upon the poor man's castle!

Was it not surprising, now, that, with everything so transparent, nobody had any faith? Almost simultaneously, from Mr. Adams at London, from Mr. Dayton at Paris, from Mr. Schurtz at Madrid, and from Mr. Corwin at Mexico, came missives, couched in different language, but all conveying the same lesson: England meant what she said, and France and Spain did not. All at once, too, the air was full of rumors. The conservative party was to be restored by force. A monarchy was to be set up. Prince Maximilian was to be invited to the throne of Mexico. As before, nobody could trace these rumors to any trustworthy source. But everybody believed them. And every one of them has proved to be true. About this time there appeared in Paris a striking book, part history, part philosophy, part prophecy, entitled, "Mexico, Ancient and Modern," by Michel Chevalier. What is peculiar about the book, so far as it relates to present affairs, is, that it says but little in regard to the collection of dues, much concerning the necessity of reorganizing Mexico, much as to the duty of France to uphold the interests of the Latin races, much more concerning the wisdom of establishing a strong barrier against the ambition of the United States.

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