THE WAR WITH MEXICO REVIEWED.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION.

"The principles of true politics are merely those of morality enlarged." — BURKE.

HISTORY has assumed, under the light of the Gospel, a new value. It is no longer regarded as owing its chief interest to its royal genealogies, or its bloody record of battles. It is beginning to be understood, that the Providence of God

manifested through the rise and fall of nations. The actors in the scenes of the past have been the agents of a higher power than they themselves recognized. “The hoary registers of time" are the map of the grand march of humanity. To draw the moral of history, therefore, becomes of equal importance to the office of narrating its events. If it be "philosophy teaching by example," it becomes a question of the first importance to learn what the examples teach; what warning of evil, what encouragement to hope; what lessons for rulers, or for the people. And since the light has shone down out of Heaven upon the dark confusion of hu→

man affairs, we can discern a meaning in the most perplexing passages, and trace a guiding clew through labyrinths. more intricate than that of Crete.

In harmony with the comprehensive use, thus briefly indicated, of civil and political history, the American Peace Society wished to subject the late war between the United States and Mexico to the crucible of a philosophical and Christian analysis. The friends of peace have often drawn their arguments and illustrations in vindication of their holy cause from Herodotus and Thucydides, or Hume and Robertson; but unhappily they have now been provided with a fearful strife nearer home, whose fields of blood are hardly yet dry, and whose wounds are still ghastly, from which they may teach the evils of international war. And now the thunder of artillery and the shrieks of the wounded having died away, they wish to repeat again in mournful recitative, though it be but with a jarring human tongue, the angel's sweet hymn, "on earth peace, good will toward men.”

The language of the schedule, issued by the Society in February, 1847, was as follows: "The Review should be written without reference to political parties, and present such a view of the subject as will commend itself, when the hour of sober and candid reflection shall come, to the good sense of fair-minded men in every party and in all sections of the country. The war, in its origin, its progress, and the whole sweep of its evils to all concerned, should be reviewed on the principles of Christianity and of enlightened statesmanship; showing especially its waste of treasure and human life; — its influence upon the interests of morality and religion, its inconsistency with the genius of our republican institutions, as well as with the precepts of our religion, and the spirit of the age, its bearings immediate and remote, on free, popular governments here and through the world; how its evils might have been avoided with better results to both parties ; and what means may and should be