omnivorous than the rest. But Greece was poor-spirited in comparison. She had become so enamored with her own glorious skies and hills, was so delighted with her own fair climate, and so besotted with a certain dreamy notion of beauty and self-perfection, that, like a woman as she was, she seldom passed beyond her own threshold. Not that she was afraid of fighting, either, as certain places named Thermopyla and Marathon bear witness; but that she was quite destitute of that grandeur of soul which led Belus, Sesostris, and the other illustrious individuals to whom we have referred, to cut their way to glory, by cutting the throats of so many of their fellow humans.

We shall have to dismiss republican Greece, then, as rather an untoward case, and turn to imperial Rome. Ah! how her records blaze with examples of a thorough spirit of annexation! Suckled by a wolf in the beginning, Rome never lost her original vulpine nature, but to the day of her dissolution, went prowling about the world, wherever there was a sheepfold to break into, or an innocent lamb to be eaten. Look into the index of any popular history of her triumphs, and mark how it is composed of one unbroken series of annexations! Thus it reads: B. c. 283, the Gauls and Etrurians subdued; B. C. 278, Sicily conquered; B. c. 266, Rome mistress of all Italy; B. c. 264, the First Punic War; B. c. 231, Sardinia and Corsica conquered; B. C. 224, the Romans first cross the Po; B. c. 223, colonies of Placentia and Cremona established; B. c. 222, Insularia (Milan) and Liguria (Genoa) taken; B. c. 283, the Second Punic War; B. C. 212, Syracuse and Sicily conquered; B. c. 210, Scipio takes New Carthage; B. C. 204, Scipio carries the war into Africa; B. c. 195, war made upon Spain; B. c 188, Syria reduced to a Roman province; B. c. 168, Macedon becomes a Roman province; B. C. 149, Third Punic War, and conquest of Corinth; B. C. 146. Greece becomes a Roman province; B. c. 135, Spain a Roman province; B. c. 133, Pergamus a Roman province; B.c. 118, Dalmatia a Roman province; B. c. 105, Numidia becomes a Roman province; B. c. 99, Lusitania becomes a Roman province; B. c. 80, Julius Cæsar's first campaign,-and after that the reduction of the world, from the hot sands of the desert South to the fogs of Britain in the North, and from the Euphrates to the Atlantic Ocean, in the other direction. The veni vidi vici, in short, was not an individual saying, but a universal Roman maxim.

We might refer, too, now that we are

on the train of historical locomotion, to those extraordinary migrations of the German races, who seem to have had no other object in life, than to overrun the territories of others, and who, in the end, coming on like whirling sand-storms of the desert, paid Rome in her own coin; or to those exciting episodes of the Middle Ages, when myriads of pious and bloodthirsty Crusaders flung themselves upon Asia, with an entire looseness, to recover the Holy Land; or to the impartial ferocity of the Spanish and Portugese in their excursions over South America; or to the entertaining annals of treachery, freebooting, and assassination by which the many great and royal houses of Europe built up their power, such as the house of Bourbon, which gradually enlarged its right to a few acres, to a right coextensive with France-or the house of Hapsburg, a small German dukedom at the start, but now a mighty empire in which a dozen kingdoms are absorbed or to the house of Bonaparte, which began without a sous to bless its stars with, but which speedily enlarged its phylactaries, and got itself warm on nearly all the thrones of the Continent; or, in brief, to a hundred other instances of enormous adventure and gigantic brigandage. But the truth is, that this kind of thing is the staple and uniform of all annals.

Rabelais, in his famous outline of conquest, which the gallant statesmen of Pichricole presented to that chivalric monarch, though he has caught the spirit of this national Rob-Royism, combining its own largeness of view with the easy effrontery of the swell-mob, hardly equals veritable history. "You will divide your army," said the Duke of Smalltrash, the Earl of Swashbuckler, and Captain Durtaille, who were Pichricole's advisers, "into two parts. One shall fall upon Grangouzier and his forces; and the other shall draw towards Onys, Xaintoigne, Angoumois, and Gascony. Then march to Perigourt, Medos, and Elanes, taking wherever you come, without resistance, towns, castles, and forts; afterwards to Bayonne, St. John de Luz, to Fuentarabia, where you shall seize upon all the ships, and, coasting along Gallicia and Portugal, shall pillage all the maritime places even to Lisbon, where you shall be supplied with all necessaries befitting a conqueror. Copsodie, Spain will yield, for they are but a race of boobies! Then are you to pass by the Straits of Gibraltar, where you shall erect two pillars more stately than those of Hercules, to the perpetual memory of your goodness, and the narrow

By

entrance there shall be called the Pichricolinal Sea. Having passed the Pichricolinal Sea, behold Barbarossa yields him your slave! And you shall conquer the kingdoms of Tunis, of Hippo, Argia, Bomine, Corone, yea, all Barbary. Furthermore, you shall take into your hands Majorca, Minorca, Sardinia, Corsica, with the other islands of the Ligustic and Balearian seas. Going along on the left hand, you shall rule all Gallia, Narbonensis, Provence, the Allobrogrians, Genoa, Florence, Luccia; and then-God be wi' ye-Rome! Italy being thus taken, behold Naples, Calabria, Apulia, and Sicily all ransacked, and Malta, too! From thence we will sail eastward, and take Candia, Cyprus, Rhodes, and the Cyclade Islands, and set upon the Morea. It is ours, by St. Irenæus! and the Lord preserve Jerusalem!" With the enumeration of Lesser Asia and the entire east of Europe, the imagination of the monarch was excited, and he shouted, "On, on, make haste my lads, and let him that loves me, follow me!"

No! the fertile fancy of Rabelais, in the widest circuit of its fun, does not equal the serious doings of some even of our modern nations. "A century ago," says the latest Blackwood, "Russia, still in the infancy of civilization, was scarcely counted in the great European family. Gigantic, indeed, have been the forward strides she has since made, in power, influence, and territory. On every side she has extended herself; Sweden, Poland, Turkey, Persia, have all in turn been despoiled or partially robbed by her. North and south she has seized upon some of the most productive districts of Europe; the Baltic provinces on the one hand, Bessarabia and the Crimea on the other."

Be it observed, however, in justice to critic and criticized alike, that Russia is bashful, self-denying, almost ascetic in her lust of annexation, compared with another power, which we shall not name, lest we should shock its delicate sensibilities. But we could tell, "an we would," of a certain little island of the North Atlantic, in itself scarcely bigger than a bed-spread, yet boasting of an empire on which the sun never sets. It has annexed to its slender chalk-cliffs, from year to year, one country after another, until now it exclaims in the pride and plenitude of its dominion,

in America, there are Upper and Lower Canada, Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, New Brunswick, Prince Edward's Island, Newfoundland, and the Bermudas; in the West Indies, there are Jamaica, Barbadoes, St. Vincent, Tobago, Trinidad, Antigua, Dominica, the Bahamas, Guiana, and a dozen more; in Africa, there are Good Hope, Mauritius, Sierra Leone, Gambia, and St. Helena; in Australia, there are New South Wales, Western Australia, Southern Australia, and Van Dieman's Land; and in Asia, there are, most monstrous of all, Ceylon and India, with its dependencies. Enough, one would say, in all conscience for a reasonable ambition; but it is not enough for the people of that little island -that model of all the national proprieties-which omits no opportunity now for extending its possessions, and almost with every steamer sends us word of new acquisitions in the East!

Alas! we must repeat it, annexation is not a new thing, not a peculiarity of republicans, and of late American republicans, in particular; not in any sense a novel iniquity over which we are just called to moralize! It is a practice as old as our race and as broad as our race; known to every people and every age; and as invariable, in its promptings, if not its effects, as a natural law. Wherever there have been weak nations to pillage, and strong nations to pillage them; wherever there have been men, like those splendid robbers of antiquity, willing to offer hecatombs of lives to their insane will to rule; wherever there have been chances opened to military genius, to rapacious selfishness, to the love of a row, to the hope of plunder, to the appetite for distinction and blood, to the mere vague restless feeling for movement and change, -there annexation has flourished, in one form or another, and the relations and destinies of empires have been relaxed, or enlarged, or revolutionized. But, God in heaven! what a phantasmagoria of wrong, outrage, and despotism it has been! What spoliations, ravages, wars, subjugations, and miseries have marked its course! What crimson pictures it has painted on every page of almost every history! Indeed, when we look at it, how the whole past comes rushing down upon our vision, like a vast, multitudinous, many-winged army; with savage yells, with wild piercing whoops, with ringing war-cries, with sackbuts, and cymbals, and trumpets, and gongs, and the drowning roar of cannon; naked heroes, shaggy sheep-skinned warriors, glittering troops, phalanxes and serried legions, colossal cavalries; now

sweeping like frost-winds across the plains-now hanging like tempests on the mountains- - now breaking in torrents through rocky defiles-and now roaring like seas around the walls of cities,-onward and downward they come, irresistible, stormy, overwhelming: the mighty host, the stupendous vanguard of neverending annexationists!

Note, also, that it is not in conquest alone that this spirit of aggrandizement has been exhibited; for next to the history of conquest, the most terrible book that could be written, would be a narrative of national colonization, or of the peaceful attempts of nations to create auxiliaries on distant shores. It would be a second Book of Martyrs, eclipsing in atrocities the rubric of Fox. It would show us innumerable homes, in all lands, made vacant by forced, or, quite as dreadful, voluntary exiles: the pathways across the lonely seas, lined, like the accursed middle passage of the slave-trade, with the bones of victims cast down to watery deaths; the inoffensive natives of many a continent and island driven mercilessly, by intruders, to the jungles, or the swamps, or to the solitary fastnesses of the mountains; weary years of struggle on the part of the intruders themselves against disease, against poverty, against capricious and persecuting climates and intractable soils, and against the cruel extortions and oppressions of remote administrations; and, as the end of all, failure, in its worst forms, of industrial bankruptcy and social ruin. Many, indeed, is the colony, to which we might apply the heated, but not overdrawn language of Sheridan, in describing the desolations wrought by Hastings in the province of Oude. "Had a stranger," he exclaims, "entered that land, and, observing the wide and general devastation of fields, unclothed and brown -of villages depopulated and in ruin-of temples unroofed and perishing-of reservoirs broken down and dry; had he inquired, what has thus laid waste this beautiful and opulent country; what monstrous madness has ravaged with wide-spread war; what desolating foreign foe; what civil discords; what disputed succession; what religious zeal; what fabled monster has stalked abroad, and with malice and mortal enmity, withered by the grasp of death, every growth of nature and humanity?' The answer would have been, not one of these causes! No wars have ravaged these lands and depopulated these villages! no desolating foreign foe! no domestic broils! no disputed succession! no religious superser

viceable zeal! no poisonous monster! no affliction of Providence, which, while it scourged us, cut off the sources of resuscitation! No! this damp of death is the mere effusion of British amity. We sink under the pressure of their support! We writhe under their perfidious gripe! They have embraced us with their protecting arms; and lo! these are the fruits of their alliance!"

Now, compared with the Brobdignagian scoundrelism of the older nations, both in the way of conquest and colonization, what have we poor republican Americans done? Why are we stigmatized, as offenders above all others, or as the special representatives of that national avidus alienum, which confesses neither limit nor principle? We have, since the commencement of our political existence, perfected three things: we have entered the lands of the Indians; we have acquired Louisiana, Florida, and Texas; and we have beaten Mexico out of California and a few other morsels of earth; to which let us add, that we meditate some time or other getting possession of Cuba, and perhaps of the Sandwich Islands. That is positively the front and substance of all our trespasses! But in what manner have they been committed?

No one, we suppose, will question the propriety of our mode of acquiring Florida and Louisiana, which were purchased honorably in the open market; therefore we will begin with the poor Indians. We have robbed them of their lands, it is said. But it is not so; not a rood of their land have we which has not been honestly paid for, and more than paid for, as land goes, and a thousand times paid for in superior returns! De Tocqueville made this charge in his book, and led Mr. Benton, who was then in the Senate of the United States, to call for a full "numerical and chronological official statement of all our dealings with the Indians, from the origin of the federal government in 1789 to his day, 1840," which he procured from the department, making a full and accurate list of every acre that we had ever taken from any Indian tribe or individual. What is the result? Why, it appears from the document, that the United States had paid to the Indians eighty-five millions of dollars for land purchases up to the year 1840, to which five or six millions may be added for purchases since-say ninety millions. This is near six times as much as the United States gave Napoleon for Louisiana, the whole of it, soil and jurisdiction, and nearly three times as much as all three of the great foreign purchases―

Louisiana, Florida, and California,--cost us! and that for soil alone, and for so much as would only be a fragment of Louisiana or California. "Impressive," says the distinguished statesman, to whom we are indebted for this exposition of an Indian policy, "as this statement is in the gross, it becomes more so in the detail, and when applied to the particular tribes whose imputed sufferings have drawn so mournful a picture from Mons. de Tocqueville." Fifty-six millions went to the four large tribes, the Creeks, the Cherokees, the Choctaws and the Chickasaws, leaving thirty-six millions to go to the small tribes whose names are unknown to history, and which it is probable the writer on American democracy had never heard of when sketching the picture of their fancied oppressions. Mr. Benton adds, in respect of these small remote tribes, that, besides their proportion of the remaining thirty-six millions of dollars, they received a kind of compensation suited to their condition, and intended to induct them into the comforts of civilized life. He gives one example of this drawn from a treaty with the Osages in 1839, which was only in addition to similar benefits to the same tribe in previous treaties, and which were extended to all the tribes which were in the hunting state. These benefits were, "two blacksmithshops, with four blacksmiths, five hundred pounds of iron and sixty pounds of steel annually; a grist and a saw-mill, with millers for the same; 1,000 cows and calves; 2,000 breeding swine; 1,000 ploughs; 1,000 sets of horse-gear; 1,000 axes; 1,000 hoes; a house each for ten chiefs, costing two hundred dollars a piece; with six good wagons, sixteen carts, twenty-eight yokes of oxen, with yokes and log-chains for each chief; besides agreeing to pay all claims for injuries committed by the tribe on the white people, or on other Indians, to the amount of thirty thousand dollars; to purchase their reserved lands at two dollars per acre; and to give them six thousand dollars more for certain old annuities. In previous treaties had been given seed grains and seed vegetables, with fruit seed and fruit trees, domestic fowls, laborers to plough up their ground and to make their fences, to raise crops and save them, and teach the Indians how to farm; with spinning, weaving and sewing implements, and persons to show their use." Now all this, observes our authority, was in one single treaty, with an inconsiderable tribe, which had been largely provided for in the same way in six different previous treaties! But all the rude tribes-those in the hunting

state, or just emerging from it, were provided for with equal solicitude and liberality, the object of the United States being to train them to agriculture and pasturage -to conduct them from the hunting, to the pastoral and the agricultural state. Not confining its care, however, to this, and in addition to all other benefits, the United States have undertaken the support of schools, the encouragement of missionaries, and a small annual contribution to religious societies who take charge of their civilization. Moreover, the government keeps up a large establishment for the special care of the Indians, and the management of their affairs; a special bureau, presided over by a commissioner at Washington City; superintendents in different districts; agents, sub-agents, and interpreters, resident with the tribe; and all charged with seeing to their rights and interests-seeing that the laws are observed towards them; that no injuries are done them by the whites; that none but licensed traders go among them; that nothing shall be bought from them which is necessary for their comfort, nor any thing sold to them which may be to their detriment. Had the republic been actuated, in its intercourse, by any of that selfish and infernal spirit, which animates the old monarchies, it would have swindled or beaten the Indians out of their possessions at once, and, in case of resistance, put the whole race to the sword.

But it will be answered, "You have carried them by force, from their ancient homes, from the graves of their sires, and planted them in new and distant regions!" We reply, that we have done so, in the case of a few tribes, or rather remnants of tribes, as a matter, however, of absolute necessity, and not in any grasping or unkind spirit. A small, but savage and intractable race suddenly surrounded in the Providence of God by a powerful and civi lized people, whose laws and customs it cannot or will not accept, but whose vices are readily spread among them, has no other destiny but to die of its corruptions, to perish in arms, or to be removed by gentle methods to some more remote and untroubled hunting grounds. It was at the option of the United States to choose either of these courses, and its choice, on the advice of Jefferson, whose noble fortune it has been to initiate so much of our most wise and beneficent policy, fell upon the most humane, peaceful, and considerate of the three. Indeed, the language in which this plan was urged, in the second inaugural address of the eminent democrat we have just named, may be used also as the

language of the history which records its execution. "The aborigines of these countries," said he, "I have regarded with the consideration their position inspires. Endowed with the faculties and the rights of men, breathing an ardent love of liberty and independence, and occupying a country which left them no desire but to be undisturbed, the streams of overflowing population from other regions directed itself on these shores. Without power to divert, or habits to contend against it, they have been overwhelmed by the current, or driven before it. Now reduced within limits too narrow for the hunter state, humanity enjoins us to teach them agriculture and the domestic arts-to encourage them to that industry which alone can enable them to maintain their place in existence, and to prepare them in time for that state of society which, to bodily comforts, adds the improvement of the mind and morals." We have therefore liberally furnished them with the implements of husbandry and householdure; we have placed instructors amongst them in the arts of first necessity; and they are covered with the ægis of the law against aggressors from among ourselves. A few stubborn individuals, misled by prejudice or ambition, and carrying with them fragments of their tribes, have resisted the inevitable fate of their race, and have compelled our authorities to subdue them by arms; but the greater part of the tribes have gone to their new homes beyond the Mississippi cheerfully, and in peace. Some, like the Cherokees, have been raised to a higher European civilization; and all are in a condition superior to that in which they were found by our people.

The annexation of Texas, secondly, it is needless to dwell upon, because it was an event so inevitable as a historical development, and so clear in all its principles, that it requires no justification. A bordering people, in the natural increase of population and trade, settle in a foreign state, where they acquire property and rear families; they gradually become citizens, and look upon the place as their home; but they are oppressed by the government, and rise in revolt; they carry on a successful revolution; they organize and maintain a free and stable government: they are acknowledged as independent by all the leading powers of Christendom; and then to secure themselves from external assault, and to acquire additional internal strength,-led too, by old and natural affinities, they seek a constitutional alliance with the people to whom they formerly belonged, and are still cordially at

tached. That is the whole history of Texas, and we see nothing in our yielding to her request for admission to the rights and protection of the Federal Union, that is, in the least, extraordinary, or atrocious, or particularly greedy. As a question of domestic policy, the annexation may have properly divided opinion; but as a question of international relations, nothing could have been more simply and obviously just.

Again: in respect to conquests, we have but one to answer for-that of Mexico,and there is nothing in either the commencement, the course, or the end of that -if even it may be called a conquest-for which the lover of his country or humanity, needs to blush. It was a regular war, begun in vindication of the clearest national rights, which had been outraged; carried on with vigor, but with the strictest regard also to the most just and honorable principles; and closed by a deliberate treaty, in which, though it was in our power to confiscate the whole nation, by reducing it to the state of a dependent province, we refrained from all arbitrary or exorbitant demands, and agreed to pay generously for every acre of land that we retained, and for every iota of loss we had occasioned! It is true that the territories thus acquired proved subsequently, through their unexampled mineral deposits, to be of priceless worth; but this peculiar source of value was unsuspected at the time, while it is probable that, if they had remained in the same hands, they might have been unknown to this day.

Compare, then, the "annexation" of the United States, for which it is so largely ridiculed, or so roundly abused, with the same process as it has been conducted by other nations! Not with those predatory expeditions of the magnificent bandits of the East; not with the Roman conquests, which were incessant scenes of spoliation, violence, subjugation and tyranny; not with the irruptions of the northern hordes, whose boast it was that no grass grew where they had trod; not with the merciless and gory marches of Pizarro or Cortes. because those were the deeds of rude and brutal ages; nor yet even with the stormy anabasis and ratabasis, as De Quincy somewhere calls it, when,

"The Emperor Nap. he did set off On a pleasant excursion to Moscow;" but compare it with the more modern, and, therefore, we may suppose, the more just and humane management of their external relations, by any of the most advanced nations of Europe! With the treatment of Algiers by the French,