establishment is necessary. The presence of bayonets alone can keep down a people goaded to desperation with onerous exactions under unwise laws. Withdraw this threatening power, and the people are at once in arms: the presence of the bayonet is essential to the existence of the despotism, and their support is the consumption of the people's substance. If, then, a necessary peace establishment at home requires more than the income of the government, how is it possible to increase it so as to wage a successful foreign war? Let her withdraw the peace establishment to prosecute a foreign war, an enemy at once rises up at home which subverts the existing government. Her army has to be fed, [401] clothed, and armed alone from the public chest, and without such support from day to day, it must certainly dissolve. They have no provident commissariat, which looks ahead to emergencies, and the soldier's support is consequently a daily drain upon the army chest. The government, without manufactories, has to seek her arms from abroad, and the refuse of other nations, both from their cheapness and the ignorance of the Mexicans in the daily improvements of the age, are bought up. How is it with Texas?

Here is a whole nation of soldiers, from the twelve-year-old boy to the gray-headed grandfather, not shut up in walled quartels, as ready instruments to enforce the exactions of tyranny, but each soldier occupying his own armed castle with his true and faithful rifle ever in readiness, and his water-proof shot-pouch always filled; here, in one hour's notice, these guardians of liberty can be in their saddles, in readiness to meet wherever danger threatens, and prepared to stay from home according to the emergency; here no man is too poor to buy one dollar's worth of powder and lead, which will serve his rifle through a bloody campaign; and should there be such a one, his more able neighbour cheerfully supplies him; here is a surplus of corn and beef throughout the land always in readiness for those in the service of the country; here is a skill in the use of arms unknown in any other portion of the world, and an intrepidity of daring which frequent [402] dangers have made commonplace: in fine, here is a moral principle controlling the action which no circumstance can subvert. Thus it is that we see Texas, with an army of twenty thousand citizen soldiers quartered throughout the country, always in readiness to meet a foreign foe, and without the cost of one dollar to the government.

When the called session of the Texian Congress of 1842 urged upon the executive to prosecute the war, he, in his message to the Congress, makes the frequent assertion that the nation had no means of doing so.4 Not only was that message published to the enemy, but the same executive again reiterates the assertion, time after time, in the many speeches which his extraordinary conduct made it necessary for him to make to justify himself, without ever once adverting to the fact that, of the many thousand volunteers who took the field in that year, not one required either pay or rations of the government. The whole