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

THE GOVERNMENT OF MEXICO. 93
attempt the establishment of a republic among them, is the
very folly of building upon sand. Until directed by wisdom
and virtue, all popular efforts in Mexico, as in France, will
terminate in a military despotism, or in the crime and
folly of a Reign of Terror. In the words of the leading
Democratic paper of New York-which in April, 1853,
announced the return of Santa Anna to his native shores" What is chiefly wanted inl Mexico, is virtue and intelligence
among the people; an intelligence which can not be bamboozled by priests, and a virtue which will subject the military
to the civil power; together with such practical energy as
will convert the generous resources of nature into the food of
industry, instead of the nutriment of idleness and beggary."
Whether these wants will ever be supplied, whether the military will ever be made subject to the civil power so long as
she perseveres in what her recently exiled President, Arista,
terms, "that grand enigma, that squaring of the circle-nationality," is excedingly improbable. For every President
constitutionally elected by the people, the army can easily
make a half-dozen " ad interim Presidents," as the usurpers
are called. Look, for example, at the changes of administration in the three years that intervened between the annexation of Texas, and the treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo. In
that brief period, I believe Herrera, Paredes, Salas, Farias,
Santa Anna, Pena and Anaya, were severally at the head of
affairs. Was there every such a political whirligig? That
certainly was such "rotation in office" as one might suppose
would satisfy the most greedy spoils-seeker that ever fought
in the ranks of Jacobin or Empire club. Nor has the con