Soult through the whole Peninsular war showed himself a match for the British General" beat him oftener and longer" than he was beaten by him. "Pitted against each other for years, they were so nearly balanced, that there seems little to choose between them." Yet who would think of " drawing a parallel between Soult and Napoleon?" Does it make Wellington Bonaparte's equal, that he did not lose the battle of Waterloo? He did not win that battle; he was simply "commander-in-chief when it was won." He was fairly caught; if Blucher had not come up unexpectedly, or if Grouchy had followed Blucher, where would Wellington have been? Napoleon would have annihilated him and the whole alliance. To judge of Bonaparte, as a leader of armies, we must look at him through all the scenes of his life.

"He marched his victorious troops successively into almost every capital of Europe. Meeting and overwhelming in turn the armies of Prussia, Austria, Russia, and England, he, for a long time, waged a successful war against them all combined; and exhausted at last by his very victories, rather than by their conquest, he fell before superior numbers, which, in a protracted contest, must always prevail. His first campaign in Italy, and the campaign of Austerlitz, are, perhaps, the most glorious he ever conducted. The first astonished the world, and fixed his fortune. In less than a year, he overthrew four of the finest armies of Europe. With fifty-five thousand men, he had beaten more than two hundred thousand Austrians-taken prisoners nearly double the number of his whole army, and killed half as many as the entire force he had at any one time in the field.

"The tactics he adopted in this campaign, and which he never after departed from, correspond singularly with the character of his mind. Instead of following up what was considered the scientific mode of conducting a campaign and a battle, he fell back on his own genius, and made a system of his own, adapted to the circumstance in which he was placed. Instead of opposing wing to wing, centre to centre, and column to column, he rapidly concentrated his entire strength on separate portions in quick succession. Hurling his combined force now on one wing, and now another, and now throwing it with the weight and terror of an avalanche on the centre, he crushed each in its turn; or cutting the army in two, destroyed its communication and broke it in pieces."

And then what astonishing activity of mind and body. We cannot find that

all the biographies of greatness furnish a parallel.

"No victory lulled him into a moment's repose-no luxuries tempted him to easeand no successes bounded his impetuous rapidity that accomplished the work of days desires. Laboring with an intensity and in hours, he nevertheless seemed crowded to the very limit of human capacity by the vast plans and endless projects that asked and received his attention. In the cabinet he astonished every one by his striking thoughts and indefatigable industry. The forms and ceremonies of court could keep his mind, hardly for an hour, from the lowed himself usually but four or five labour which he seemed to covet. He alhours' rest, and during his campaigns, exhibited the same almost miraculous activity of mind. He would dictate to one set of secretaries all day, and after he had tired them out, call for a second, and keep them on the stretch all night, snatching but a brief repose during the whole time. His common practice was to rise at two in the morning, and dictate to his secretaries for two hours, then devote two hours more to thought alone, when he would take a warm bath and dress for the day. But in a pres

sure of business this division of labor and rest was scattered to the winds, and he would work all night. With his night-gown wrapped around him, and a silk handkerchief tied about his head, he would walk backwards and forwards in his apartment from dark till daylight, dictating to Caulincourt, or Duroc, or D'Albe, his chief secretary, in his impetuous manner, which required the highest exertion to keep pace with; while Rustan, his faithful Mameluke, whom he brought from Egypt, was up also, bringing him from time to time, a strong cup of coffee to refresh him. Sometimes at midnight, when all was still, this restless spirit would call out, "Call D'Albe: let every one arise:" and then commence working, allowing himself no intermission or repose till sunrise. He has been known to dictate to three secretaries at the same time, so rapid were the movements of his mind, and yet so perfectly under his control. He never deferred business for an hour, but did on the spot what then claimed his attention. Nothing but the most iron-like constitution could have withstood these tremendous strains upon it. And, as if Nature had determined that nothing should be wanting to the full development of this wonderful man, as well as no resources withheld from his gigantic plans, she had endowed him with a power of endurance seldom equaled. It was not till after the most intense and protracted mental and physical effort combined, that he gave intimations of being sensible to fatigue. In his first campaign in Italy, though slender and ap

of the last in Christendom that should ever make such an appeal, till forced into it by an inexorable necessity. If we are responsible for it, the responsibility is a fearful one. And we must not flatter ourselves that we can escape under the notion that it is, comparatively, an unimportant affair-only a war with Mexico! If Mexico, measured by our standard and stature, is a weak nation, distracted, and almost ready to fall to pieces by the essential discordance of the living materials of which it is composed, and, at any rate, utterly unfit to cope with us in feats of arms, or in the necessary resources of war, so much the more shame for us if we have sought a quarrel with her, except on the last necessity, or have allowed her to quarrel with us, when we might have calmed her anger by acts either of justice or of generosity, or soothed her by words and deeds of forbearance and kindness. If Mexico is a weak nation, physically or morally, the more shame for us if we could have avoided this war, and have not. If her sense of right and wrong is not as delicate as ours-would that some casuist, great in the resolution of doubtful and difficult problems, would demonstrate the advantage we have shown we possess over her in this particular-if when she has done us wrong she has not seemed as sensible of her error, or as ready to repair it, as we, the injured party, may have thought she should have been; if we have found her prompt to take offence where none was intended on our part, or imagining that her rights were invaded, or her honor insulted, when we have only pursued our own interests or followed a lawful advantage, without doing her any positive wrong; if all this be so, why could not we, proudly conscious of our eminent superiority over her in this regard-would that this, too, were proven to the world's full satisfaction!--why could not we have waited a little longer, with kind and generous indulgence, on her unreasonable temper, or her delays of justice, giving her passion time to cool, her wounded pride to salve itself out of its extreme irritation, and her sense of justice to recover from its blindness? Was the case so urgent that we could not brook one hour's longer delay? Must we fly to our arms on the instant? Was it necessary to answer a threat of war from such a quarter by a defiance sent by a herald no less formidable than a well-appointed army,

ready to proclaim that defiance by the mouth of hostile cannon? We had to complain, and we had good reason to complain, of " long-continued and unredressed wrongs and injuries committed by the Mexican Government on citizens of the United States, in their persons and property," as set forth by the President in his recent War Message to Congress; but these outrages were not committed yesterday, and is it certain that all hope of peaceful redress was at an end? Was there no alternative left but war? Mexico owes us some eight millions of dollars, it may be, but if we are at liberty to suppose that this has been the real cause why the two countries are now at war, may we not well ask ourselves whether we have always shown, in all parts of our own Union, such extreme alacrity in the discharge of our undoubted pecuniary obligations to others, as to entitle us to be very strict and exacting in our demands upon those who happen to be indebted to us? Are we quite at liberty to put any such case on the alternative of prompt settlement or war? Might not the President of the United States, considering what States he had among his most strenuous supporterssome of his hottest partisans might, we are sure-have well enough seemed to be touched with the feeling of that infirmity which causes an impoverished and distressed debtor, if not to repudiate his debt, at least to resort to dishonest or unjustifiable pretexts and pretences for present avoidance and delay?

Or if we are to believe that the real cause of this rupture is to be found in the fact of the refusal of the Mexican Govern

ment, in past or present revolutionary hands, to receive from our President a Minister Plenipotentiary, resident near that government, so circumstantially complained of, and not without apparent grounds of justice, by the Executive, in his late Message, still we may be allowed to ask, whether even so shocking an indignity as this was so unendurable, considering the quarter from which it came, that it could only be answered on the instant by a blow? We know that wars have arisen before now from lighter causes than this-but not very lately; and we did not suppose that the scrupulous, not to say fantastic, spirit of chivalry, was to be revived in our day, and in the person of President Polk. That gallant functionary gives us to understand in his message, so ready was he, with

lance in rest, for a tilt with the adversary, that, instead of waiting until the insult was actually offered, he anticipated events, and ordered a movement of our army, bristling with war, up to the very teeth of the Mexican forces, in a very remote quarter, as soon as he "had received such information from Mexico as rendered it probable, if not certain, that the Mexican Government would refuse to receive our Envoy!" So, then, the President snuffed this insult in the distance; and distant enough it was when this movement was first contemplated; for so long ago as the 30th of July, 1845more than three months before his Envoy was commissioned for Mexico, and long before the mission appears to have been thought of a dispatch from the government instructed Gen. Taylor that he was " expected to occupy, protect and defend the territory of Texas to the extent that it has been occupied by the people of Texas ;" and to "approach as near the boundary line-the Rio Grandeas prudence will dictate!" And it is not to be doubted that if the excellent officer in command of the " Army of Occupation," whose trade is war, had not been more reluctant than the President, so sensitive to the honor and interests of the country, to bring on a conflict of arms with Mexico, the fight which has only commenced in April of this year, would have been begun in the first days of autumn in the last. But even the peremptory order to Gen. Taylor, of the 13th of January, to take up a position on or near the Rio Grande, was quite early enough to save the scrupulous honor of the President, in the matter of his Envoy. At most, the rejection of the Minister was only "probable," in the mind of the President, when that order was dispatched, and his final dismissal did not take place till the 12th of March. One day before that event took place, it happened that our army was actually on its march for the banks of the Rio Grande. Twelve days before that, it seems that Mr. Slidell's letters from Mexico, he then being at Jalapa, spoke confidently of his being received and recognized. What if he had happened to have been received, after all! So far as concerns this point of honor, it would appear that chivalry, on the one side and on the other, took very opposite views. President Paredes proclaims, on the 23d of April, that “Mr. Slidell was not received because the dignity of the nation repelled this new insult."'" In

Mexico, then, it was deemed an insult for us to send there a Minister Plenipotentiary, under the circumstances of existing relations, and the hostile demonstrations made by our Government. Here, it was deemed an insult that Mexico should refuse to receive and accredit that Minister. Oh, for some Chevalier Bayard, or Admirable Crichton, to resolve this point of honor between two chivalric nations, that else must needs end this notable difference of opinion by cutting each other's throats!

No one can read the President's War Message without perceiving that great stress is laid on this matter, as one principal ground to justify the war. Mexico affected to deem it as much a ground of offence, that a Minister, with such a commission as ours bore, was sent to her at all. Our President complains of a breach of faith on the part of Mexico, in refusing to receive a Minister whom she had promised to recognize. The Mexican President denies, indignantly, that that Government ever agreed to receive a minister on such terms as would imply that relations of friendship were restored between the two countries, so long as that grand difficulty-the Annexation of Texaswhich had caused the suspension of those relations, remained unadjusted. A Minister, or Commissioner, to adjust that difficulty, would have been received. How much of this suggestion was sincere, and how much a mere diplomatic quirk, it is not for us now to decide. Mr. Polk chose to regard the whole of it as evasive-mere dishonest pretences for delay. "If it were so, it were a grievous fault." And, one way or the other, either because the parties really misunderstood one another, or because Mexico, in the distracted state of her internal affairs, with no regular administration, the supreme power altogether unhinged, held by one military chief to-day, and by another to-morrow, and the whole Government water-logged and in a sinking condition, saw fit to degrade herself by diplomatizing and quibbling for delay against the just demands of a rich and stern, but not unjust creditor; why, for one or the other of these very grave offences, the administration at Washington pretend to have deemed it necessary to push matters to extremes.

But whether this affair of the rejection of the President's Envoy, which he construes as if Mexico had unqualifiedly "refused the offer of a peaceful adjust

ment of our difficulties," is to be regarded or not, as one main ground of the war, within the purview of his message, it cannot be doubted that, at least, he means we should understand him as having made the fact of such rejection, though by anticipating the event, the immediate occasion of his orders to plant the standard of war on the banks of the Rio del Norte. " This force," (the army), he says, "was concentrated at Corpus Christi, and remained there until after I had received such information as rendered it probable, if not certain, that the Mexican Government would refuse to receive our Envoy." It is not for us to attempt to reconcile this declaration with the disclosures made in the documents accompanying his message. It there appears, plainly enough, that the military occupation of the country up to the Rio del Norte was a foregone conclusion, determined on at Washington, even before Gen. Taylor left his station at Fort Jessup. In a "confidential" letter directed to him at that place, under date of June 15, 1845, from the Department of War, Gen. Taylor had these significant instruc

tions:

"You will forthwith make a forward movement with the troops under your command, and advance to the mouth of the Sabine, or to such other point on the Gulf of Mexico, or its navigable waters, as, in your judgment, may be found most convenient for an embarcation, at the proper time, for the Western frontier of Texas."

"The point of your ultimate destination is the western frontier of Texas, where you will select and occupy, on or near the Rio Grande del Norte, such a site as will consist with the health of the troops, and will be best adapted to repel invasion, and to protect what, in the event of annexation, will be our western border."

The time for this embarcation "for the western frontier of Texas," viz., for the Rio Grande, was fixed for the period when the Convention or people of Texas should resolve to accept the proposition of annexation, which Gen. Taylor was informed would probably be on the 4th of July, or very soon thereafter.

This carries us back to the original cause of our difficulties with Mexicothe question of annexing Texas to the United States. Everybody understands that when annexation should be consummated, when Texas should become part and parcel of the United States, the territory of Texas, whatever it really was, or

should turn out to be, was to be protected and defended, as if it was the soil of Carolina or New York. But every well-informed citizen knows also, that what constitutes the proper limits of Texas on the side of Mexico was, and is, wholly unsettled and disputed; and, in the proposition made by us to the Repub lic of Texas on the subject of annexation, was expressly reserved, as a question of boundary, to be settled between us and Mexico. And another thing we all know; that annexation was to be finally consummated, if at all, only by the act of the Congress of the United States in admitting Texas as a State into the Union. This final action of Congress, with the approval of the President, was not had till the 29th of December last. Yet we see now that the President determined, at an early day, to regard annexation as well enough consummated, at least for his military operations, when a Convention, or the people, of Texas should resolve to come into our Union, without waiting for Congress to pass on the question of her admission; and also upon that event to regard the extremest verge of territorial limit to which the wildest pretensions of Texas ever pushed her nominal, paper claim of title, as the fixed boundary of the State, for military occupation, without waiting to hear what Mexico had to say about it, or consulting her in the premises. He made preparations to act accordingly. More than this. He did not even wait for the action of Texas on the question of annexation. Some time before that event, at the invitation of Texas-a Republic then as foreign to our own as San Marino is to-day

he directed an army to take post in that country, for its defence; and not content, even at that early period, with occupying undisputed Texan ground, he took care to push his Army of Occupation first across the Nueces-the Rubicon, beyond which every inch was disputed ground between Texas and Mexicothen to await the action of the Texan authorities on annexation, and then, as he had already confidentially advised the commander of his forces, to strike for their ultimate destination, on or near the Rio Grande."

Mexico had taken mortal offence at us for undertaking to receive Texas at all, in any manner, into our Union. Upon this she had withdrawn her Minister from this country, and closed all diplomatic relations with us. Annexation, even

conducted in the most delicate manner, seemed likely to embroil the two nations; but it became evident, after a short time, that, with the best will to make war on us for that measure, the wheel of revolution was turning too rapidly in her own empire to admit of her prosecuting such an enterprise. It became perfectly manifest that her opposition to that measure would expend itself, in due time, in some very natural and proper, but very innocent ebullitions, when nothing, of that question at least, would remain to be settled, but the matter of the boundary. By a solemn act of Congress, we had pledged ourselves before the world, that, in bringing Texas into our Union, we would take only "the territory properly included within, and rightfully belonging to, that republic," and we took "all questions of boundary" within our own jurisdiction, out of the hands of Texas, to be adjusted by ourselves. And how adjusted by us? By prompt military seizure of the whole territory in dispute? By an Executive war in defence of the disputed territory? So the President seems to have understood it. He informs the country that he attempted negotiation, which failed by the fault of Mexico. He negotiated, however, after the manner of Frederic of Prussia, with an army already in the disputed country, instructed to occupy and defend every inch of it, and to make war on the opposite party if he attempted to set a hostile foot in it.

How this war has come about it is easy enough now to see. It is not because Mexico owes us money for spoliations and injuries, which she neglects to liquidate and pay. Nor is it because she sent home our Minister, as she had before called home her own. It was not for either of these causes, or both of them, justifiable causes of war as they might be, that the Executive sent his army, on his naked authority, to occupy the banks of the Rio Grande; though a part of his Message might be read as if he meant we should so understand him. Nor has the war broken out because any act of hostility was committed, or offered, by Mexico, up to the time when our flag was raised to flout the Mexican forces on the opposite side of that river,_in the Mexican city of Matamoras. But "the war exists by the act of Mexico." So says the President; and Congress yes, the American Congress-has echoed the declaration! It exists, says the President, "notwithstanding all our efforts to

avoid it"-and we almost wonder that Congress did not echo this declaration also. Yes, "the war exists by the act of Mexico." It is true we first set down an army in the heart of a vast country which she claimed as her own, and in that particular part of it of which she has been in undisturbed possession ever since she became a nation; a country where she had numerous towns and cities, and many thousands of peaceful citizens, subject to her sway and authority; and we planted a fortified camp there before one of her important commercial towns, pointing our batteries on the principal square of the city, and when she threatened resistance, we blockaded the mouth of the river on which it stands, to cut off the supplies of the forces that were quartered in it. We did all this; but we committed no act of war-not we; and it exists, as all the world must see, "notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it."! It exists "by the act of Mexico." She first pulled a trigger upon us, not we upon her. It is true that her President, Paredes, ever since he has held his present position, has constantly declared that he was not authorized to make, and would not make, offensive war on the United States. But this at least he has done; he has seen fit to regard the departments of Tamaulipas and New Leon, as we dare say he would also those of Chihuahua and New Mexico, as an integral por tion of the Mexican territory, and the presence of our army there as an invasion of Mexican soil, and has accordingly issued orders that they shall be defended as such. Under those orders, though still protesting that he does not declare war against the United States, and first causing a solemn demand to be made that our troops shall be withdrawn "to the other side of the Rio de los Nueces, the ancient limits of Texas," the forces of Mexico have actually ventured to come on to the same side of the river, in the State of Tamaulipas, where our army is encamped; and thus it is, "notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it," that hostilities have actually been commenced. Of course, the war exists "by the act of Mexico!"

But it was far from our purpose, when we commenced this paper, to enter into any particular examination of the causes that have led to the commencement of hostilities, and to the actual existence of war. Nor shall we pursue the subject further at this time. În another number