It is impossible to help those who will not help themselves, admitted the London Times; and Palmerston — disgusted, no doubt, like every one else, with Mexico's failure to achieve anything except fresh revolutions — admitted to Bankhead that it would be very imprudent to break with the United States for the sake of a country which did nothing effectual to defend itself.[1]
Some things, however, it was possible to do against us. At the beginning of the conflict our minister observed in London a systematic endeavor to break down American credit, and so embarrass our military operations. Viscount Ranelagh proposed to bring over enough British officers for some four or five thousand men, and it was not their fault nor his that Murphy said the Mexicans would not serve under foreigners. A captain employed by the highly favored company of English mail packets landed Paredes, an avowed enemy of the United States, at Vera Cruz. Mexico is "the very country for the guerilla," hinted Britannia; it "has ready-made guerillas by the ten thousand or the hundred thousand; it has hills and hollows where ten men might stop the march of 50,000." And the same journal went still farther. In the case of an invasion, it proclaimed, "the soldier is a soldier no more; he is a burglar, a robber, a murderer"; and should foreign troops invade England, "No quarter!" ought rightfully to be the cry.[2]
But the special delight of unfriendly journals was to misrepresent our military operations.[3] Apparently Taylor's battles on the Rio Grande surprised the editorial mind so much that few comments were ready, but after a while the Tames remarked, "No hostile army has been really beaten"; and it described our success at Monterey as merely occupying "a town of log-huts." That paper long professed to regard the war as "a border squabble," "ridiculous and contemptible," "justified by hypocrisy," "carried on with impotence," and sure to end "in some compromise more humiliating to the United States than to Mexico." "The Americans who have to conduct this most wearisome of wars," it assured its gratified readers, "are least of all nations competent to the task. They have no army, and have constitutional objections to raising one. They have no money, and are resolutely determined to find none. They have no General, and have just agreed
