seen that active hostilities by Mexico against the insurgents
had either ceased for nearly seven years, or had been confined to such
border forays as resembled predatory incursions rather than civilized
hostilities. Statesmen, in all parties, regarded the war as ended; for
Mexico, impoverished by the thriftless administrations that ruled and
plundered her during the short intervals between her revolutions, was
in no condition to carry it on with reasonable prospects of success.
France, England, Belgium and the United States, had acknowledged Texan
independence and established diplomatic relations with the republic.
Emigrants settled the interior, and invited accessions. The constitution
and laws of the nation were fixed upon a firm basis, while the
government was conducted with ability. A lucrative commerce from foreign
countries began to pour into the territory. New towns sprang up every
where, and Texas exhibited to the world every evidence of an orderly,
well regulated government, with infinitely greater strength and
stability than the military republic from which she was divorced.
Mexico, nevertheless, refused to recognize her independence
notwithstanding her inability to make any effort for reconquest. The
leading men of Texas anxiously desired that their national independence
should continue, and the moral sense of the world, in contrasting the
superior progress of the Anglo-American race with the anarchy and
feebleness of Mexico, was naturally solicitous to behold the infant
colony successful rather than to see it fall a prey to the passions of a
people with whom it had no sympathy, and, in whose victory, they might
witness the outpouring of a pent up wrath which would never cease in its
vindictive persecutions until the province was entirely desolated.[43]
This was not alone the common feeling in the United States, but it
prevailed in Europe also. The British minister of foreign affairs, Lord
Aberdeen, and that zealous partizan of liberty, Lord Brougham, took
occasion in the house of peers in August, 1843, to express their
solicitude as to the prospects of Texas. Lord Brougham characterized it
as a country as large as France, possessing the greatest natural
capabilities, but, at the same time he perceived in it an embryo state,
(a large portion of whose soil was adapted to cultivation by white
labor,) which might become a boundary and barrier against the slavery of
the United States of America. If, by the good of