Every battle-field is necessarily one of horrors ; but, as the sufferers are those who came, there to inflict upon others the very fate of which they are themselves the victims, they claim and excite less of our sympathy than the mothers and their mangled infants of Vera Cruz, whose shrieks of agony swelled the triumphal shout which greeted the American General. ^ In all our conflicts in Mexico, the slaughter of the enemy has been tremendously aggravated, by their natural and mihtary imbecility. Mr. Thompson, our former Minister, in his work on Mexico, remarks : "I do not think that the Mexican men have much more strength than our women. They are generally of diminutive "stature, and wholly unaccustomed to labor or exercise of any sort. What must be the murderous inequality be- tween a corps of American cavalry, and an equal number of Mexicans ?" He regards the superiority of Americans to Mexicans as " five to one at least in individual combats, and more than twice that in battle." Hence it is, that the Mexican loss in battle has been prodigious. It is * A letter from a Mexican published in the newspapers, says : " In some cases whole blocks were destroyed, and a great number of mQXi, women, and childreii,'k\idd. and wounded. The picture was awful. One deafening roar filled our ears—one cloud of smoke met our eyes, now and then filled with flame ; and amid it all, we could hear the shrieks of the wounded and dying. Altogether, we cannot count our killed, wounded, and missing, at less than four thousand, among whom are many women and children."
impossible to ascertain the amount of that loss with any precision, but there is little hazard in asserting that the action of Congress in May, 1846, has consigned fifty thousand Mexicans to a i^remature grave, and ten times that number to poverty and wretchedness.
In the vast number of falsehoods of which this war has been so prohfic, may be included the general unqualified eulogiums passed by its advocates upon the humanity of the American soldiery. We are not aware of any peculiar trait in our national character, that would rendei* our sol-