The North Star (Rochester)/1848/01/07/The Mexican War
THE MEXICAN WAR.
The New Orleans Commercial Bulletin makes the following estimate of the cost of the war thus far:
| The increase of the public debt, agreeably to the statement of the President, has been | $27,870,859 |
| The surplus in the treasury at the commencement of hostilities, was | 12,000,000 |
| The additional surplus that would have accumulated up to this time, under a peace establishment and expenditure | 12,000,000 |
| The further extra surplus that would have also accumulated, under the operation of the tariff of 1846, agreeably to the President's statement, of more than | 8,000,000 |
| The Bounty Lands to the Volunteers | 8,000,000 |
| The arrearages for pay due the army and volunteers, and for supplies, contracts and damages, &c. | 12,000,000 |
| The sum required to replenish our arsenals | 4,000,000 |
| The Pension List, estimated on the average duration of twenty years of life, to the wounded and families of the dead, two millions per annum | 40,000,000 |
| Making a grand total of | $123,870,659 |
From the London Weekly Dispatch.
The miserable and devastating war between the United States and Mexico still continues. The war is growing at every point more sanguinary, as well as more desultory, and the individual passions of men are becoming more sternly and desperately exasperated against each other, converting the whole territory into a scene of outrage and bloodshed. We have in this war batch such a spectacle as the mother country, exhibited during the invasion of Napoleon,—a country occupied by the enemy in his capital and in most of its important points, but with the authority of the occupying power obeyed or respected only where an armed force is present to uphold it. We have a native population, quite incapable of contending in the field with the drilled armies of their invaders, driven from their homes in many instances, and with a fugitive government, almost unable to find a resting-place; yet among these people no idea is so hateful as that of peace, and no sentiment is so strong as that of vengeance on the aggressors. Santa Anna, though he has never been able to cope with his opponents in pitched battles, has great and acknowledged skill in erecting this guerilla spirit. He consents to negociate, but only to put his adversaries directly in the wrong, and to publish to Europe,, and especially to his own countrymen, the admission in plain words, or by as plain a silence, that his country has been attacked, and its citizens slaughtered, without any colorable plea. In his correspondence with Mr. Trist, the American Envoy, he insists that the treaty shall commence by a declaration of the causes of the war, or that it shall be distinctly declared that the Anglo-Americans decline to state them. The aggressors can find no reply, and stand self-convicted in the face that the world of the most unprovoked and barbarous attack. The Anglo-Americans are willing now to pay for the cessions they demand, and to take upon themselves the settlement of the very claims which they pretended to make the cause of quarrel—the debts due from Mexico to their citizens. All this, as Santa Anna forces them to prove, might have been gained, without spilling a drop of blood. In the midst of the horrors of this war, utterly disgraceful to the civilized world, more disgraceful to the republic which proposes itself as the pioneer of mankind, more scandalous still from the hypocritically insignificant cause of dispute, the organs of public opinion in the United States call for an increase of the evils of the war. They ask, with refined barbarity, the entire destruction of all the Mexican cities. We know the crimes and the suffering which such advice includes. There is no abomination which man can inflict or endure, which is not in the catalogue. And, composed as the American army mainly is, of the most ruffianly of their own people, aided by the buccaneers, the vomitings of all lands, we may imagine how such a work would be executed. A series of murders, rapes, robberies, and arsons, revenged by those against whom they are committed, is the war which the enlightened republic is recommended to wage, and which is very lively to result from the quarrel into which Mr. Polk has led his fellow-citizens. So mean an instrument never yet accomplished such tremendous evil. As for our American brethren, the children of our race, we ask, how long will they continue to disgrace us and themselves, and the institutions which the best men in both lands looked to as the beacon of their hopes? How long will they keep down the Anglo-Saxon race, and a republican constitution in one common and overwhelming infamy? Or, rather, how long will the good, the lovers of the liberty, the prophets of men's rights, suffer themselves to be ruled and represented by the vilest ambition that ever yet showed its recklessness of human sufferings, and its contempt for human progress?