Certainly not in those whose souls have to reach heaven through that channel. Here this question presents itself. Great Britain, for instance, would, upon the refusal of Mexico to pay her sixty millions of debt to English subjects, and to extend a full protection to the hundred millions of English manufacturing and mining capital, have a better pretext to extend her laws over Mexico than she had in most of her East India conquest, or in forcing opium upon the Chinese. France, perhaps, would have as good a pretext, if the late arbitrary act of the Mexican government against the French subject is in contravention of existing treaties, as it is grossly violative of that comitas inter gentes which should ever exist. The national vicinage between the United States and Mexico, that great and leading neighbourhood policy which has the right to keep off a stranger who possibly might be troublesome, certainly would give the former the right, if it did not make it her imperative duty, to possess herself of that which a stranger might.
All history teaches that the general course of conquest has been from north to south.