of our liberty, was premature. The people of Texas were still in the midst of revolution; a revolution which prevented men of capital from other countries making investments in ours.

There is nothing more true, that in their distress, political communities, like individuals, will frequently ascribe their calamities to wrong causes; and President Lamar's administration closed with much complaint of him as the cause of the then individual and national suffering. If this complaint had any foundation in justice, it was his neglect to procure for Texas a mild peace by the prosecution of a bold war.* Every sensible man must now believe that a [21] bold war would have procured such a peace; that peace would have brought us emigration, and that emigration would have brought us money. In the proneness of the public mind to visit all the wrongs upon the President, men did not look to that universal commercial and pecuniary distress which had swept through all Christendom: they could not believe that a distress even greater than theirs existed in other countries. The people of Texas a third time went to the polls, and in their then individual and political sufferings they forgot the errors and wrongs of President Houston's former administration, and elected him over David G. Burnet, one alike eminent for his learning and patriotism; too honest to indulge in the trickery of the demagogue, and too proud to pander to the vitiated appetites of the corrupt.

President Houston, unlike his predecessor Lamar, who, in all his public documents, defended the honour and dignity of his country, commenced his second term by exposing to his enemies and the world his weakness, by unnecessarily magnifying that weakness, by his repudiating doctrines of public faith, by his laying violent hands upon the public archives, by his secret orders to commence civil war upon a portion of the citizens of Texas, who opposed his violent and unlawful measures to remove the seat of government, and by his advocacy [22] of the traitor Seguin,5 who at that time was leading upon the heart of our country a portion of the Mexican army; and here commences the history of the campaign which we propose faithfully to record.

* Upon the authority of some of President Lamar's confidential friends, it is due to him to state, that the cause of his not prosecuting offensive measures against Mexico was the expectation of his procuring "a five million loan" in Europe, which he intended to expend by waging an offensive war against that country. It is certain that he was frequently flattered with the expectation of procuring said loan.