Page:Mexico (1829) Volumes 1 and 2.djvu/13

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
PREFACE.
vii

listened to by the contending parties, no small portion of the calamities which have since befallen them might have been averted.

I have likewise made free use, in my sketch of the Revolution, of the Cuadro Historico of Don Carlos Bustamante, as well as of Robinson, Brackenbridge, and a number of other works published in the United States, and but little read in England, from each of which I have taken whatever my own observations pointed out as correct.

The whole will, I think, be found to indicate with sufficient clearness the causes of the American Revolution; and these, again, are the best guarantee for its stability.

The subject is one of deep, and universal, interest, for it is upon the duration of the new order of things that the prospects of the rising States depend. The Revolution has affected not only their political, but their commercial, relations with the rest of the world; its influence has extended to their agriculture, and mines, to both of which, after threatening them with total annihilation, it has given a fresh impulse, and opened a new, and more extensive, field. But liberty can alone repair the evils, which the struggle for liberty has caused; and to ascertain the probability of its