Sketches of the campaign in northern Mexico : in eighteen hundred forty-six and seven / by an officer of the First Regiment of Ohio volunteers.

268 SUFFERING OF THE TROOPS.
We lay in our position near Saltillo, from the 19th of December until the 1st of January, 1847, suffering much from
the inclemency of the season. In the hurry of our departure from San Domingo, much of our camp equipage had
been lost, and some of our troops were compelled to dig holes
in the ground, in which to shelter themselves from the piercing blasts that nightly swept across the open plain. Fuel
was more scarce, in that region, than water; a single wagonload of wood, brought from a distance of twenty miles, being
distributed each day for cooking purposes, among the companies in camp. Many poor inhabitants of that country obtain
their subsistence by daily carrying small faggots on their
backs to the Saltillo market.
The soldiers off duty, often engaged in such athletic sports,
as aided them in resisting the severity of the climate. A
tion, is even more strong than that of the Spaniards. While the government in its
enactments and practice, has shown itself far more hostile to commerce than to
crime, traffic has been more oppressed than vice, and merchants more rigidly fined
than murderers. The repeated revolutions have left those who gain power, no
other prospect than to get rich by peculation; and it has become a seemingly well
understood system, that those going out of power should empty the treasury, and
leave their successors to fill theirs by the most approved system of' plunder. The
readiest mode of replenishing the treasury and feeding the cupidity of the officers,
has been found in the prohibitive tariff system; because, while under pretense of
encouraging home manufactures, by keeping foreign goods scarce and high, it
made the sale of special privileges to import goods more profitable to the dictator.
The higher were the profits to be realized by the merchant, the better price could he
pay for the privilege. Hence, although a dishonest government had pledged the
custom's revenue to discharge the interest on its debt; by this device of the special
privileges, they could still be made available to the officer. A system of low duties
would not have admitted such an operation.
"All these causes have operated powerfully against the development of those
great conservative industrial and commercial interests, without which there can be
no stability of government, no efficient execution of the laws, nor any means of
keeping in check those military adventurers, whose turbulence has torn that illfated country in internal brawls; and whose non-observance of treaties and plighted
faith has involved two nations in the horrors of war."