beholds in a single year, the sands that had been trodden by her own people for several centuries, turn to gold in the developing hand of the energetic emigrants to whom it was given up. Impoverished, haughty, uneducated, defiant, bigoted, disputatious, without financial credit, beaten in arms, far behind the age in mechanical progress or social civilization and loaded with debt, Mexico presents a spectacle in the nineteenth century, which moves the compassion of reflective men even if it does not provoke the cupidity of other races to wrest from her weak grasp a region whose value she neither comprehends nor develops. This compassion is the result of a genuine sympathy with the true patriots who really love their country and know its worth, but whose numbers are too few to cope with the scandalous intriguers and ambitious soldiers by whom the nation has hitherto been converted into a gambling table and its money and offices into prizes.
In the introductory chapters upon the viceroyal government and revolution of Mexico, and in our remarks upon the growth of parties at the close of the war of independence, we have endeavored to exhibit fairly the existing causes of trouble at those epochs.1 There was an apology for incapability of political self-rule when a bad government or a degrading despotism was suddenly removed. But, since then, twenty-six years have elapsed; and, in more than a quarter of a century, mankind is fairly entitled to demand from Mexico a denial of the sarcasm of her oppressive oidor Bataller "that the worst punishment to be inflicted upon the Mexicans is to allow them to govern themselves!"
Dark as is this picture of neighboring republicans, we should have been loth to paint it had not our careful studies of their statistics and the commentaries of their own citizens justified the sombre coloring. "For our own part we believe,"—says Don Francisco Lerdo, in his Considerations upon the Social and Political Condition of the Mexican Republic in 1847,—"that all this may be explained in a few words. In Mexico there neither is nor can there be what is called national spirit, because there is no nation."2