Acquisition of Mexico—Filibustering [pp. 613-626]

DE BOW'S REVIEW.
ESTABLISHED JANUARY 1, 1846.
DECEMBER, 1858.
VOL. XXV., O. S.] ENLARGED SERIES. [VOL. I., No. 6.
ART. I.-ACQUIS1TION OF MEXICO-FILIBUSTERING.
FOR nearly forty years Mexico hlas been in a state of continually recurring revolution, of mrnisrule, and almost of anarchy.
She has shown that, left to herself, she is wholly incapable of
organizing and sustaining any permanent form of government.
Her highways are infested with robbers, whose known crimes,
so far from being punished by public auth6rity, do not affect
their social grade, nor exclude them from what is called good
society, in the capital. The Indians on her northern frontier
are making continual predatory incursions into her territory,
and she is powerless to repel them. Her mixed population has
all the vices of civilization, with none of its virtues!; all the
ignorance of barbarism, with none of its hardihood, enterprise,
and self-reliance. It is enervate, effeminate, treacherous, false,
and fickle. Like the savage and the beasts of the forests, its
love of liberty is but impatience of control, and hatred of law
and government. If not in some way acquired by us, or by
some nation of Europe, it will fall a prey to the Indians that
infest and surround it. Its state of civilization, its morality,
and its courage, are far inferior to that of the Roman Empire,
when the northern host
"Came like a deluge on the South, and spread
Beneath Gibraltar, to the Lybian sands."
A semi-civilization, if stationary or decaying, is unable to
cope with downright barbarism. Hence China, with her immense population, built a wall to keep off the incursions of
the Tartars, and hence Europeans have ever found it far easier
VOL. I.-NO. VI.
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