from Ohio represents southern gentlemen as desiring all these Mexican States?

Mr. Cox. I have not so represented them. I say, southern gentleman may not wish to take Sonora and Chihuahua, lest they might become free States, and not slave States. It was a suggestion made to me by a southern member, and I said to him, "Come along; we will put in Tamaulipas and New Leon. We will link them hand in hand." For myself, I am willing to give protection to northern Mexico; if not for annexation, for a free trade which will be of mutual advantage, and will be practical absorption. It will at least prepare these States for admission. Let Monterey be the nucleus of Zacatecas, San Luis, Queretaro, Tamaulipas, Coahuila, New Leon, Chihuahua, and Sonora-all the States between the Rio Bravo and the Gulf of California; all natural allies in the interests of the United States. Let them cluster in upon our ensign, not star by star, but in a galaxy. By that, you do at once what will in time be done by the natural laws of development. Besides, you raise our present feeble trade of seven millions to twenty-eight which Great Britain enjoys. You can thus enhance every inch of soil, and every shining particle of ore in these regions.

As to the question of protecting our citizens already in Mexico, and demanding reparation for wrongs done them, this should be a capital cause of intervention in Mexican matters. Senator MASON's bill is rightly predicated on this cause. If Spain could make the Liberals pay for the murder and spoliation of Spanish subjects at San Vicente, Chiconcuaque, Durango, and elsewhere, in Comonfort's time, why are we asleep over the rights of our citizens? I have before me a list of these claims, but a very imperfect one. Each claim is a casus belli. Here are some dozen cases of illegal seizure of American property. I saw it noticed that some eleven millions were already calculated at our State Department. We have grievances beyond money. The sentences in relation to illegal marriages are a wrong to those without the established Church, and degrade to crime the holy relations of parentage and wedlock; the infamous surveillance of the post office over American letters, refusing to deliver even the United States consular correspondence, unless it were first inspected by Mexican authorities; and worse still, the rude, cruel, and brutal arrest and imprisonment of Chaplin, Stocker, Ainsi, and Garcia, are enough to make the Haynaus of Austria pale beside the imbruted and unbridled scoundrelism of Mexican officers. The story of Ainsi, seized on American soil, sixteen months in the prisons of Sonora, wearing the barra de grillas; and that sad, saddest of all stories, the massacre of his brother-inlaw, Crabbe, and his confederates, whose characters have been blackened to rob their murder of its heinousness; these should move the very stones to sympathy.

In this matter the United States have but one duty. These sufferers were our citizens. Wherever that character of citizenship is to be found, the individual bearing it is clothed with the nationality of the Union. Whoever the man may be, whether native-born, naturalized, or semi-naturalized, he can claim the protection of this Government. It may respond to that claim without being obliged to explain its conduct to any foreign Power; for it is its duty to make its nationality respected by other na

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tions and respectable in every quarter of the globe." This doctrine was illustrated in the Koszta case. What difference is there between a dungeon in Guaymas, where Ainsi lay in chains, and the Austrian brig Huzzar, which held the body of the Hungarian?

The outrages upon our citizens are not confined to Mexico. In every Spanish American State they are common. In Peru, in Paraguay, in New Granada, in Cuba, in Costa Rica, in all places where the slanders of the Madrid press against the "peddling traders of the North" enter, we have to meet persecution, imprisonment, illegal seizure of property and person, and an unwinking espionage; and that, too, under taunts more galling, because we know how easy it would be to punish such outrages. We should examine the list of claims on Spanish-American States to appreciate the divine forbearance of our inactivity. A settlement with Mexico would be a general settlement with Spanish America.

This duty of intervention becomes at once imperative and dignified, when we remember that, by such an act, we do not only protect our citizens, but we save Mexico. We not only save her from Spain, France, and England, but from herself. This is no conquest of Cortes. It is the salvation of a people whose interests will be bettered by our aid. Without such aid, the fairest part of this continent will be a ruin-only the worse because, like the Parthenon, its fragments will remain to show the beauty and richness of its former condition.

In conclusion, the policy I have indicated with respect to this continent, and the application of which to Cuba, Central America, and Mexico, will be of such benefit to them, will enable us to conform to that law of growth by which alone we have become great, and by which alone we can become greater. This is the policy of other nations, and they have met obstacles to accomplish it. We shall accomplish it, but we shall have them as our obstacles. England has swept with her power from the Shannon to the Indus. She should be content, as we are, to see her greatness repeated in the career of her offspring. Yet she daily calls our attempts to expand by the rudest terms. France has twice threatened Europe with continental conquest, and now organizes the Arabs of Northern Africa, the granary of the Roman world, for her march upon Egypt and her domination of the Mediterranean. Russia, the great land animal, is piercing Asia at every vulnerable point, and is pressing for an empire of which there is no adequate prophecy in the Scriptures. Even Spain joins her arms and her priesthood with France, and is waging against Cochin China a war which her journals call the civilizing spirit of the age, impelling the force of Europe to break down the barriers which divide that race from humanity.

Yet all of these nations, except Russia, which has ever been kind and tolerant toward us, are this day in league to prevent the stretch of our influence over our continent. England, holding half of North America, is jealous of our growth, and would choke us at the isthmian neck. France would crush out the sympathies of the white republic of St. Domingo for the United States, by her Chevalier Reybaud, chargé at Hayti; and she used that burlesque of emperors and that ape of manhood, Soulouque, to Africanize the island, to overthrow Santana, and to break down the Cazneau treaty for a free port and steam depot, and for advantages to our

citizens in the mines, sugar lands, and mahogany forests of that island! France again appears in the Sandwich Islands; at the Isthmus, with M. Belly; and at last in Mexico, aiding the Spaniards, and in sympathy with the Spaniards of Cuba, to foil us in every attempt to adjust our national relations with that country. Every steamer brings us a lecture from Exeter Hall on our slave propagandist fillibusterism. And may we not go for its commentary to Copenhagen, to Ionia, to Gibraltar, to Malta, to the Cape of Good Hope, to the Red Sea, to Jamaica, to New Zealand, to China, and to the rajahs of all India? Why, the British régime in India was a system of torture more exquisite than regal or spiritual tyranny ever before devised. The Sepoys vainly tried to copy its atrocities.

Were we left alone, we might be content to let France alone. No American would whisper a "nay" to her making the Mediterranean a French lake. Her genius and vivacity can make its waves glow with the light of other days. That sea on which navigation had its birth-the maritime world of Greece, Carthage, Rome, Tyre, Sidon, Turkey, Egypt, Persia, Venice, and Genoa-the sea of Homer and David, Jonah and St. Paul, Ulysses and Neptune; washing the base of Ararat and Olympus; with a world's history on its bosom, and whole nations in its bed; the American can well say, let its guard be the gallant sons of France! He could say it without envy, and with heartiness, if France would keep her navies out of the Gulf of Mexico and the harbor of San Juan.

We have made no remonstrance against England on her ceaseless round of empire-bloody, cruel, and rapacious as it has been, subjecting the riches of Asia to her commerce and her greed. We know the law by which these powerful white races move. It will be irresistible. France, England, and Russia are tending to a common focus at the Isthmus of Suez, as France, England, and the United States are at Darien. Starting from opposite points, extra-European conquest converges here. England seeks passage across Egypt or Syria, for India and Australia, and pounces on Perim at the mouth of the Red Sea, as she did on Gibraltar and San Juan. France, marching her army of Algeria, presses toward the prize to realize the great Napoleon's dream of Egypt, and urges her canal at Suez as she is striving to do at Nicaragua. Russia, semi-oriental, marches through western Asia and Persia down upon the confines of English power and French ambition, and finds her rivals in the field. What fine reproaches they can hurl at each other and at us for the lust of dominion, when they gather at this focus of former civilization! What shocks of contending forces will there and then be encountered! Let them come and strive. Let Russia push its caravans across the steppes of Tartary until the trade of Kiachta and Irkootsk rival that of Canton and Shanghai. Let France divorce Asia from Africa by marrying the Red Sea to the Mediterranean at Suez; let England work its iron way to India from Beyrout to the Euphrates; let the steam engine labor for the millions of Asia under any engineer; but let America alone in her armies of occupation to open the Isthmus, and control the steam and commerce centre of our own hemisphere.

No change of dynasty, or of form of government, can check this ultimate condition of European expansion and collision. Such a change may affect the relations of these countries to ourselves. The illiberal policy of

France to this country may return to plague its inventor, the usurper of France. I have never heard his hated name since the 2d of December, that I could repress the prayer, which now I pray with something of a Red Republican fervor, that France may have barricades on the Boulevards; the throne in flames, as that of Louis Philippe in the Place du Carrousel; the dynasty which he seeks to perpetuate cut off, or flying from the rage of a Red Republic; more citizens and fewer soldiers, and both fraternizing to the music of the Marseillaise; exiles returning from their homes in pestilential swamps, amidst gay and festive welcome; prisons breaking; the press free; the Palais de Justice open, and the tri-color of a new Republic flashing from every part of France, and topmost on the Hôtel de Ville, made sacred by the heroic eloquence of Lamartine. This would be a fit retribution from God for crimes and perjuries; and not at all unfit as the reward of an intermeddling policy with the republican interests of the New World!

Let us be decided! These European Powers cannot, and do not, have peace. The bugles of truce sounded at the conference of Paris. Heralds proclaimed peace in every capital. But the war harness is not off. It is burnished anew, and the weapons within reach! England, trembling at the one hundred thousand soldiers across the channel, and the naval wonders at Cherbourg, commences to build coast defences. Russia acquires Villa Franca, and stirs insurrection in Ionia against England. Mazzini issues his rescript to the secret societies and Republicans of Italy to be ready and one as the thought of Italy and God. The coin of "Emanuel, the King of Italy," is circulated through the peninsula. An actress moves the people of Venice to insurrection by a recitative which reminds them of their patriotism. Austria arms, and Piedmont proposes to repel. France sends more troops to Rome. Austria growls. France obtains from the Swiss a strong strategic post, and Austria growls again. Naples insults Napoleon to please Austria. England writes bitterly against Naples, and does not spare the prosecutor of Montalembert. England shakes with a new reform movement-John Bright striving to Americanize her by popular sovereignty. Turkey is unsettled in Europe and in Asia. Russia moves on, immense and great-the envy of all. A lighted match may flash this magazine into a terrific blaze, whose thunder will make all Europe quake. The alliances of to-day, in Europe, for her own balance of power, may be dissolved by a popular breath to-morrow. As a consequence, they cannot be relied on to pursue us to any fatal end.

Already England has pushed this alliance with France to its snapping point. The English people will not permit their aristocracy to carry it so far as to make it an offence to the people of this commercial nation. Not but that the English Government would like to aid France in checking our career; but trade is powerful for peace, and peace with us means cotton in England. Let England find cotton elsewhere, and our Southern friends may be assured that her intercourse with us will be no longer peaceful. Gentlemen need not flatter themselves either, that cotton is their peculiar staple. Why is England trying every appliance to reach central China? To clothe in her fabrics the four hundred millions of Chinese? No. They are thus clothed, and mark it, by nankeen, which is the stupendous growth of their own great central valley, estimated now to produce more than

double the cotton raised in all our southern States put together.* This valley being England's, Manchester and Stockport can snap their fingers at Charleston and Mobile, and English audacity will begin a new career of rapacity and insolence toward us. Her jealousy of us is intus et in cute. Our reliance must be on our own strength and growth. If we cannot enact the Monroe doctrine into international law, we can create and consecrate it as a national sentiment. Let it be the national genius. Let it be the power of Aladdin's lamp. You remember the story. The old lamp from its friction evoked from the cave a mighty spirit; awed by its terrors, the poor youth only ventured at first to employ its powers in familiar affairs; but gradually accustomed to its presence, he employed it to construct palaces, to amass treasures, to baffle armies, to triumph over foes, to wield the elements of air, light, and heat, until, at the close of the story, the poor youth becomes the sovereign of a peaceful empire assured to his remote posterity!

This story, Mr. Speaker, is the type of our political genius. By it we have fortified ourselves in our domestic interests. Our domestic and territorial policy is fixed under its guidance. It is the instrument of that progress which must keep pace with steam and telegraph, until we are assured of an empire with which kingcraft dare not meddle; or meddling, find it a power to baffle its force of arms, and its fraud of diplomacy. We have become a Colossus on this continent, with a strength and stride that will and must be heeded. With our domestic policy as to local governments established, we can go on and Americanize this continent, and make it what Providence intended it should become, by a perpetual growth and an unsevered Union-the paragon in history for order, harmony, happiness, and power!

MEXICO.

LAWS OF NATIONAL GROWTH-MEXICAN RECOGNITION-MONROE DOCTRINE-PROPHECIES AS TO FRENCH INTERVENTION-MANIFEST DESTINY-EUROPEAN AGGRANDIZEMENT.

On the 19th of March, 1860, Mr. Cox said: In speaking to the motion to refer the bill and amendment under consideration, I premise that, before that vote can be intelligently taken, our relations with Mexico must be considered. If it be objected that this discussion is inappropriate on this motion, I say that the late news from Vera Cruz, before which Miramon is now hovering with his army, and the projected armis

* When this remark was made, Hon. HUMPHREY MARSHALL, who was a member at the time, and who had been our Minister to China, called it in question; in fact, saying that cotton was rather imported into China. He had forgotten that, although along the coast England had traded her cotton off to the Chinese, the vast interior was not reached by trade at all. Since then, cotton has been struggling for his sceptre. His claims have been thoroughly investigated; and by none more exhaustively than by the Hon. F. A. CONKLING, from whose pamphlet I learn that China last year exported to England 399,074 bales, besides large quantities which went into the United States and France. This was in addition to the home consumption, as to which it is alleged that, "Every morning throughout the Chinese Empire, there are three hundred millions of blue cotton breeches drawn over human legs. Men, women, and children alike wear them."