Branz Mayers' Mexico [pp. 117-141]

1S52.] B,~antz AJayer's Afexico. 135
~as a victory, and that every victory was gained in the
-teeth of tremendous odds, and the moral deduced by Europe from the war was one ot serious service to us.
But, more than all this, the war has been fruitful in
results so interesting in their present development, and so
vast in the expansion to which they are tending, as to
amaze the world. The soldier opened the way for thediplomatist, and the pioneer trod quickly on the heels of
both. For three hundred years, the dull blood of the
-unprogressive Spaniard had stagnated in California,- and
a handful of idle monks, and a few herds of coerced
Indian converts, gathered in some dozen missions, had
alone testified the presence of the "spiritual conquerors.-"
The ~treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was hardly dry, ere the
wagon of the emigrant and the ship of the trader were
bearing to our new possessions the fresh blood and vigorous impulses of our energetic people. The spade of the
labourer turned up the hidden gold, and the forests of the
-Sierra Nevada rustled with the shouts of a thronging
population, and the calm waters of the Pacific glassed
the spires of magic cities. Never before, in the history of
-the world, had the actual so eclipsed the ideal-the fact
outgrown the fiction. From the beds of swift rivers, and
the clasp of the rough granite, the hand of enterprise
~eclaimed the shining gold, in undreamed-of millions; the
broad valleys grew yellow with the harvests of the farmer,
and the crowded cities echoed the din of trade; the acquired property invoked the needed law, and the heterogeneous elements of a cosmopolitan emigration grew into
the fair proportions of an organized State; and now, firmly seated upon the borders of the Pacific, the New World
-confronts the sea. The probabilities of the future open a
yet wider field to the startled imagination. We will not
pause to scan it; but of one thing we rest assured, that,
bound up with the developments of t~at future, lie hidden
the most sd~ious interests of humanity. The historian,
who, ages hence, looks back to the epoch of this second
conquest, in which the free thought replaced the old superstition, and the earnest heart of enterprise and the
strong arm of labour fought the battles of progress, will
-shrink appalled from the magnitude of his task.
By the treaty of Guadalupe we gained from Mexico
over eight hundred thousand square miles of territory,