in selection of officers-"without being actuated by any ambitious spirit of conquest." Stockton is peremptorily forbid den to relinquish possession of California; and he is instructed by Mr. Mason "to prepare the people to love our institutions" if the treaty of peace shall give us California. Shubrick is directed to make his relations as friendly as possible with the people of Upper California; and under our flag the people are to have liberty of self-government, subject to the general occupation of the United States !!* We may venture, in the absence of any distinct designation of what has been approved, to collate the instructions with the performance, and to contrast the annual with the special message; and in the performance of this humiliating task we will try to repress our disgust at the hollow falsehood and hypocrisy, the unblushing and greedy rapacity, the spirit of territorial aggrandizement, to be sated by the dismemberment of a neighboring republic, the enormity of which is only set off in a clearer light by the mockery of moderation, the false professions of peaceful desires, the disclaimers of an encroaching spirit, which pervade these instruments; to say nothing of the ungenerous meanness of thrusting officers out on distant and delicate duty, with general but positive instructions, and all doubts as to the intentions and wishes of the authors cleared up by the spirit that breathes over the whole, redolent with conquest, and then when called in question for acts within the scope of the instructions, charitably ascribing their excesses-if any exist-not to the spirit and intent of the instructions-but to their indiscreet zeal in the public service!

What, then, have these commanders done beyond the scope and spirit of their instructions? After everything is thrown out which the President specifies as objectionable in the organic law, he leaves a thoroughly organized government in full operation, endowed with every essential power, only temporary in duration. He does not object to a legislature which may alter the laws-only it must be temporary-that is, co-existent with our occupancy. The courts may take cognizance of life and death, of character and property; and the governor may see its judgments executed, and pay the expenses from the revenue. He is instructed to establish a civil government, and that

imports legislative, judicial and executive departments. He is directed to abolish arbitrary distinctions, and that imports a legislative act. The newly established institutions are to conform to our own, and that implies the legislative power of changing what is incompatible. The people are to be consulted in the selection of officers, and that may fairly sanction election. If nothing more were authorized than the erection of courts for the trial of civil and criminal offences, with the trial by jury, which we know are daily dealing justice or injustice to the people of those territories, he has widely overleaped the bounds of our Constitution and grasped at one of the highest and most peculiar prerogatives of the English monarchs, the right to erect courts of justice. The judgments of these courts must at least be permanent, or they are nothing. We can understand a temporary court but not a temporary judgment. If men are ousted of their land, if contracts are wrongly construed and payment or performance compelled in pursuance, are they temporary? And shall we not be treated to a temporary execution of a capital sentence, where the clerical judge now dispensing justice in California, in his judicial character having condemned a man to death, may resume the spiritual functions and change the final pax et misericordia that assures the departing soul of a speedy return after a temporary absence.

The distinction between temporary and permanent is idle. We do not complain of the establishment of permanent governments where they should have been temporary, but of usurping a right to erect any of any kind.

The President assumes in his annual message, and in his instructions, a power to increase the right which conquest gives to the conquering sovereign to establish civil governments-he fixes no limits to his claim, nor has he disclaimed this assumption in his special message. He still clutches the thing while he changes the name. He follows the true presidential precedents, never to relinquish a usurpation. He calls what has been done a belligerent right-a mitigation of military law, a duty imposed by the conquest on the conqueror. We respectfully would suggest that the acquisition was the exercise of a belligerent right; but the government is no more a

belligerent right than the government of a ceded territory would be an exercise of the treaty power. In each the government springs from the sovereignty acquired by the conquest or the treaty. A right or an obligation to govern an enemy's country, to provide for the administration of his laws and the protection of his subjects, may well be pronounced a solecism in the science of international law, quite worthy of one who calls civil government a belligerent right, and prates of "conquering peace." The President may, perhaps, be excused for being a little incoherent, in consideration of the perplexing affairs he is called to manage; but we think the confusion is of a very grave character when he assumes to be the conqueror of Mexico, and vested with all the rights of the conquering sovereign. Is he the conqueror-or is he the mere instrument used to effect it, as much so as the meanest soldier in his camp? Is the sovereignty of the United States to be pressed into so petty a form?

To call civil government a mere mitigation of military power is a novel use of language, intelligible perhaps to the subtle mind which invented it, under pressure of a great necessity to escape a difficulty. Military law, in any sense applicable here, is merely the law of the sword; for he cannot mean the rules and articles which govern our military and naval forces. In any other sense, it is pure despotism. Civil government may as readily be conceived of as a mitigation of military law, as day a mitigation of night. They are as compatible as the joint and simultaneous reign of light and darkness. Civil government-at least when conformed at all to our institutions-is the rule of law. Administered by tribunals, and through forms known and establish ed, it respects rights and enforces them; it has a moral element, and abides, or professes to abide, by it. It speaks the language of reason, armed with authority, and puts force far in the background not as a source or mode of government, but as a sanction to law, a support to reason, against the refractory, to the ministers of civil government when civil power is overmatched and defied; and the edge of the sword is invoked to restore, not to sway, the balance of justice. It is a goodly tree, that spreads its branches for the shelter and refreshment of the nation. Military government is not, so far as we are informed, a recognized form of government-but it is power wielding a

sword, and representing the dictates of a will. It bows to no reason, it acknowledges no law, it follows no course of procedure, it regards no rule of decision. It drives headlong at the impulse of passion, and varies with the whirl of caprice. It laughs at restraint, and truculently defies control. It scatters mankind in terror at its presence, and blasts the province over whose fields it spreads its blight. It is war in disguise, slumbering but not extinct, and liable at any moment to new and terrible outbreaks. It may prevail in a hostile province, it may frown over a sacked city, but it can have no place in a conquered territory, which has been proclaimed to belong to the United States, where the people submit, and their allegiance, permanent or temporary, is accepted. It can form no element in a polity assimilated to ours: but that such a blending of incongruous principles is thought possible by those who now administer our government, may throw a sinister light on their views of its nature and powers.

It is a source of some consolation that these outrages emanate from a personage like Mr. Polk, whose name as yet carries with it comparatively little force. Had Washington been their author, (pardon, illustrious shade! the hypothesis,) had Madison or Adams, Jefferson or Monroe, given their sanction, they might have set a fatal precedent. Had even Jackson lent them the support of his services and the countenance of his name, the gratitude of a large part of the people might have warped their judgment, and inclined them to overlook the presumption and the folly, rather than assail the man they revered. But these deeds of shame, extenuated by no illustrious services, surrounded by no misty halo of deluding eloquence, but brought out in bold relief by the poverty and effrontery of the apology urged in their defence, fill up the measure of their author's iniquities. The Presi dent, Phæton-like, has assumed, with his rash and unknowing hand, to guide the fiery steeds of War, and in his wild and erratic course he would dry up realms to deserts, unless arrested in mid course by the bolt of the people's indignation. It must crush him and scatter his party, which, bound together by no living prin ciple, is now but an aggregate of selfish cliques, severed from the organic whole which they once composed, and only existing by favor of that law of reptile being by which, though cut into a thousand

parts, it is permitted to prolong its loathsome life till the setting of the sun.

But this administration was begun, and continues, and will be ended in sin. Not content with dealing domestic stabs at the Constitution, it has blotched and blackened the national character in the eyes of the people of the world.

"Without being animated by any ambitious spirit of conquest," it has been its fortune, it has been its misfortune, to rob our only republican neighbor and friend of her fairest provinces, and to proclaim itself the enemy of mankind by waging war for the conquest of peace. Texas lay quietly as a part of the Mexican Republic, a stranger to thoughts of empire, when American emigrants, with the connivance, or at the instigation, of General Jackson, roused the passion for independence, and made the day of San Jacinto a nation's birth-day. A thin veil of coyness covered without concealing the ardor with which we longed for the family alliance we reject ed; but the apparent repugnance subsided at the instance of well-acted importunity; and the union was consummated, with what regard to forms we will not now inquire. The original boundary of Texas and her present possession extended along the Nueces-her claim went to the Rio Grande; and Congress endeavored to soothe the jealous and excited feelings of Mexico by declaring it a fit subject for negotiation. But Mr. Polk, while Mexico was willing to receive a commissioner to treat respecting the boundary, after meanly trying to decoy Gen. Taylor into a voluntary advance, peremptorily ordered him to occupy the extreme limits of the disputed territory; and that no circumstance of aggravation and insult might be wanting, his guns were planted within full range of a Mexican city. He stands condemned by the protest of our own government which, forty years before, denounced a similar movement on disputed territory as marking a sanguinary spirit, as a most ungracious and unwarrantable deed. Yet unabashed by this precedent, he hastens to proclaim the triumph of his acts in the shedding of "American blood on American soil," and secures from Congress the license to plunder, in the recognition of the existence of war by the act of Mexico. A handful of men appear at the capitals of two Mexican departments covering ten degrees from north to south and as many from east to west, and with

out firing a gun, proclaim in the presence of the forest and the mountain, and the roving Indian, that these departments, in their full extent, belong to the United States by right of conquest. Governments are immediately constituted. A colony, with every implement that civilization has invented for the aid of industry, sailed from New York to occupy the yet unconquered territory; appropriations are asked to secure it by fortifications; and a Senator in his place, supposing others to be even such as himself, with great simplicity surmises, that no one will be satisfied with less than California. and New Mexico!

That war confers a technical validity on the acts of both-that the conqueror may govern the conquered territory, and treat it in all respects as his own, may all be very true; but it is equally true that the usage of the world is not to exercise those rights, except so far as regulations of revenue and police are concerned; and that such proclamations as our commanders have issued, and the erection of complicated systems of civil government, defended by permanent fortifications and supplied with armed colonists as citizens, are regarded among civilized nations as the clearest proof of an aggressive ambition, which Europe would be in arms to resist within her borders, if the universal voice of abhorrence, which everywhere would greet it, failed to arrest its progress.

By these deeds the stain of blood and ambition are upon us. The robbers of earth stretch forth their hands in fellowship. The vulgar herd of tyrants salute us with a smile; and exult that she, who was fair among the nations, in her purity and uprightness, has covered with scandal the cause of republican liberty, and made it a bye-word for hypocrisy, a proverb for shameless rapacity. Our voice can no more be lifted in execration of the oppressions which we ambitiously imitate, and with precocious maturity surpass, at our first essay. For since the French republic proclaimed the rights of man at the head of her legions, and the champion of an idea made war in the name of peace, and enslaved reluctant millions in the name and for the cause of liberty, organizing her principles into governments wherever her camps were pitched, no more wholesale, barefaced robbery has been committed among nations. Those powers which watch the world like birds of prey, that they may

devour the helpless, do not prey on their own kind. If England, whose single eye is ever fixed on gain, and carefully selects the fattest first, for her annual morsel of Indian territory, now swallows Scinde, then Gwalior, and then makes an ineffectual gulp at Affghanistan, they are pagan princes who are destroyed, and her calculating rapacity is careful to requite the loss of anarchic independence by the blessings of civilized government. If the Muscovite rob his southern neighbor, he retaliates on the Turk centuries of oppression to himself and his creed, and disguises his aggression under the garb of sympathy for the Servian. Mr. Polk has made us the cannibal of nations, and at his bidding we devour our sister republic, the last on whom we could rely to aid us in the defence of our common liberty against the military monarchies of Europe. Our hand is on her neck; our knee is on her prostrate bosom; she may invoke their aid to rescue her from our grasp.

Having conquered the good opinion of the world, the President was not less successful in "conquering peace." His greedy and grasping prosecution of the war has made the Mexican tremble for the integrity of his independence and his faith. He shrinks from the pollution of his sanctuaries by the footsteps of an heretical foe, and steels himself by the remembrance that his ancestors warred for seven hundred years against the Moor, often defeated, but never subdued, and finally fixing the yoke on the neck of the conqueror. He smiles at the mention of a march to the "Palace of the Montezumas," and pointing to its vacant site, sternly remembers how his Indian ancestors met the foe, nor yielded anything save smouldering and levelled ruins to refresh the invader after his toil, and at the thought all the Aztec obduracy hardens on his brow. He is not dispirited by any disparity of power-for his mountain passes are armies and fortresses, and he dwells on the recollection how the mother country met a greater than the present aggressor, and humbled him by the untrained arms of her peasantry.

Aghast at the increasing difficulties of the task he had undertaken, the President looked about for some plausible pretext to justify his aggression. But painfully aware of the flimsy and transparent texture of the veil he attempted to throw over his misdeeds, he has been driven to

the reiteration of the stereotyped falsehood of the existence of war by the act of Mexico. Not a message can allude to the war, not a bill provide men or money for its prosecution, not a resolution can tender the national thanks to her heroic sons, without being garnished with this magic spell, and compelled to recite the grievous aggressions of our foe, and to chaunt in solemn recitative doxologies to our long-suffering, righteousness and reluctant self-defence!

But why this long recital of grievances, just liquidated by treaty? If they were the cause of war why did he dare to make it? If Mexico assailed us, why this impertinent recital? Who needs to justify self-defence? Who-but him who in violation of the fundamental law, has created that necessity? But his attempted defence is not merely impertinent-it is more than that--it is impudent.

We know not how it may feel, to be obliged to wield the lance with a wounded hand: nor do we know the degree of the sense of delicacy vouchsafed to the President and his advisers, nor how insensible they may be to difficulties of a delicate position. But had we been honored with the President's confidence, and admitted to that mysterious consultation when so many leaves of too precious morality were forever lost to the world, we should have advised the extension of the mutilation a little farther. Had we, as one of his cabinet, been compelled to devise arguments for usurpation, and excuses for outrage, we should have racked our ingenuity for other topics than those of national neglect of pecuniary obligations. No such grounds of defence of the war on Mexico, could we have ventured to advise the President, even in his greatest extremity, to adopt. We should have shrunk from the Arch-Fiend's mockery of hinting to the President, even in the most remote manner, that the war might be justified or extenuated by the failure of Mexico to pay her installments of the stipulated indemnity; lest he should remember that his election was carried by States, which pledged their faith to foreign capitalists-and on its security had realized millions in stupendous works of internal improvements for the development of their resources, and then found themselves unable to pay the interest on their loans, without "inconveniencing their citizens,"-leaving widows and orphans, clergymen and men of letters--who had trustingly confided in promises guar

antied by republican faith--to die in penury.

Nay, more: we should have hinted at the probability that the American people might be incredulous of the sincerity of his new-born fervor in vindication of the duties of common honesty-that they would surmise the existence of better reasons in the back-ground-that such a defence from Mr. Polk, of all men in the world, would be regarded as a bitter mockery of their discernment, when they reflected that fifty years ago-ere Mexico was rocked in her revolutionary cradle our citizens were robbed by that very French Republic of whose example we are now so emulous-that our government confiscated their claims to indemnity to buy itself off from an onerous treaty, and shutting up in its archives the proof that it had taken their private property for public use without compensation, turned a deaf ear to the continual claim of its outraged and unredressed citizens-now pretending the necessities of the treasury, then the pressure of the public business, as the causes of its delay-and that, when wearied out by their importunities, and awakened to a sense of its obligations, Congress revived and refreshed the

fainting hopes of the sufferers by the passage of an act of tardy and inadequate justice-this President, who now would visit with fire and sword, and dismemberment, a year's delinquency of our impoverished and distracted sister--this zealot of honesty, breathing out slaughter against unfortunate debtors-refused, by his veto, to permit Congress to pay an honest debt, because, though frequently asked and always able, it had hitherto failed to pay what it confessed to be due!

But we will no longer delve in these moral ulcers-ab hoc scabie teneamus ungues.

These deeds will be visited in indignation and ruin on the heads of their authors. It is matter of serious regret that the nation can only be aroused to inflict retribution by calling from the recesses of Executive offices, such detestable evidences of hypocrisy, corrupt ambition, and recklessness of bloodshed, as these messages and instructions which poison the moral atmosphere by their publication. But a spring tide will before long lift its waves over the high places of the land far and wide, and purge the seats of power at once of their corruptions and of the birds of prey which haunt them.