campaign of that year has plainly demonstrated the fact, that it was unnecessary to furnish either pay or rations. The ample pay which the soldier looked to was the consummation of that liberty for which he at first struck; nothing more did he desire, nothing less would he have. His sustenance was to be found upon every prairie, the free use of which was his welcome privilege. Thus we find Texas a nation of soldiers, brave in war and skilled in arms, with all the munitions of a campaign in readiness, and with a moral purpose which despotism can neither control nor check.[403]

When the timid and weak-headed of our own, and the speculative and uninformed of other countries, have expressed doubts as to the ability of Texas to maintain herself against Mexico, these doubts were the offspring of ignorance and fear. A people like the bulk of the Texas population, born in and reared under the principles of free representative government, will not even entertain a question of change. That proposition which purposes to send them back to despotism can get no hold upon the popular thought, and the occasional recreant who would harbour it in his own bosom dare not utter it. Effeminacy, licentiousness, and corruption, after the slow and gradual inroads of ages, may undermine a nation's political morals, as will indulgence an individual's. What months and years may do to the individual, requires ages and centuries to effect with the nation. Thus it has been with those representative governments which have preceded us: the constituents had first to be corrupted one by one, and when all the members were affected, then the body sunk. Such may ultimately be the destiny of Texas; but, with the lights of the world before her, there can be no just fear that her course of freedom will be short of any nation which has gone before.

Can a nation born and raised in such principles long practice a neighbourhood comity with one whose principles are in such diametrical opposition?

History has given a negative answer to this question. It was not so in the days of the Grecian Republics [404] or the Commonwealth of Rome, and the short life of representative government in France has fully demonstrated its entire impracticability. The lamb might as well be caged with the hungry wolf in the hope of living in friendship. Such nations, to keep in peace, must either be separated by long distance or by some difficult natural boundary, the surmounting of which will be equivalent thereto. They cannot commingle in the same trades, and practice rights common to both in quiet. What may be the policy of the one may prove the bane of the other, and we could with the same hope make virtue and vice assimilate: thus, for instance, the subjects of the present slavish despotism of Mexico holding, in common with the citizens of Texas, the free navigation of the Rio Grande, with the high tariff, contraband laws, and government monopolies on the one side, and the low tariff and free trade principles on the other. The interference of the former with the rights of negro