property of the latter, and many other opposite interests, would keep up between the two perpetual excitement, which would result in perpetual war.

In Mexico, for instance, none but a licensed few, who pay high for the privilege, can raise tobacco, and that, when raised, is to be sold to the government at a price far below its value. In Mexico, none but the government dare make a segar, and no man, woman, or child dare smoke one except it has the government stamp upon it, while every man, [405] woman, and child in the nation smokes. The valley of the San Antonio River in Texas is capable of making more tobacco at a cheap rate than the wants of all the northern states of Mexico, and it is preposterous to say that this would not be done, and carried across the border, in defiance of all the laws of Mexico, even had she an army upon that border twenty times her ability to maintain.

So it is with the articles of raw cotton and spun yarns. Under the unwise management of Mexico, her manufactories are languishing, with the latter at sixty-two to seventy-five cents per pound, while the cotton can be grown, spun, and transported from Texas into Mexico profitably at less than half that price. What possible circumstance can prevent this from being done, when the soil of Texas produces double the quantity of the raw article per acre which is reared in the United States - when, from the larger size of the Texas cotton-bolls, fifty per cent. more can be saved per day - when the length of the picking season is longer and better - when provisions are cheaper than in any other portion of the world, and where a superabundant water-power costs nothing?

Two nations so contiguous, so opposite in their policy, and every way so unlike each other, can never live in friendship with a border which invites both to its advantages. The Rio Grande, from its head to its source, from the forty-second to the twenty-fifth degree of north latitude, is capable of [406] maintaining many millions of population, with a variety of product which no river upon the north continent can boast. This river, once settled with the enterprise and intelligence of the English race, will yearly send forth an agricultural export which it will require hundreds of steamers to transport to its delta, while its hides, wool, and metals may be increased to an estimate which would now appear chimerical.

If annexation of Texas to the United States of the North succeeds, this boundary can exist but for a short period; and though there seems to me to be a destiny in the womb of time which marks her southern boundary at the extremity of the north continent, where the two great oceans of the world will unite under a genial sun and a smooth navigation, yet her more immediate southern boundary must extend to the Sierra Madre, that great Chinese wall which separates the people of the Rio Grande from those of the more southern table-lands. Can this be considered a greedy desire upon the part of the mighty northern nation, when her facilities of communication with those people from her