The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1869-02-24

I been rapidly lapsipg back into condition "a
| deplorable as that in which Mr. Mel sue fOund
| 1t when be negotiated, in 1860, thai still-born
Ocampo treaty which Seward and T0ombs
combined to stine ere its birth.
AT the present moment, the Government OF
Juarez is tossing like q dismasted ship 10 a
nOrther, off Vera Cruz. IL may be longer
or a shorter time before it is driven on tue
shore and dashed TO pieces; but the oatas
tropbe is inevitable. And when the catastrophe
sbalI have occurred-what them
1t is easy to say that we have only TO put
ont sur hands and annex this distracted re-
pion TO our own territories. But, whereas all
our previous acquisitions since the ''srea OF
freedom" first began to be enlarged under
Jefferson have been acquisitions of territory
either quite unpeopled or so sparsey peopled
as to make the assimilation of its population
an easy task for us, the annexation of Mexico,
like the annexation of Cuba, would be the
aggregation into our political body of large
and well-established community too numerous
to be obliterated by any sudden wave of
American immigration, and so radically unlike
our own people in habits, origin, religion, aud
manners as to make the problem of digestion
a very grave and serious one.
With Louisiana we added to ourselves a
small number of French and Spanish subjects
familiaIized with the principles and the prac-
tice of order and of liberty under forms diff
fering indeed from, but not necessarily inoom-
patible with, our own institutions. Florida
brought us mere handful of Spanish citizens;
and California was practically uninhabited
With New Mexico we acquired a quota OF
colonial and hybrid Spanish Indian inhabi-
tapts, insignificant in proportion to the extent
of the region over which they were scattered,
yet so troublesome, by reason of their intrin-
sic unlkeness to ourselves, that the Tribune
and the radicals are to-day gravely urging the
establishment of the "Freedmen's Bureau
in that country, under the pretext of abolish
ing the plague of "peonage."
What would be the results to our body
polite, in its actual condition, of the sudden
admission of seven or eight millions of the
composite Mexican race to the rights and
privileges of american citizenship?' The
imagination recoils from the apocalypse of
"carpet-baggefs" opened to our gaze by the
mere suggestion st. Thomas we might
swallow with comparative ease, for its inhabi-
tants, so to speak, might all dance together
on the point of cambria needle; and, few as
they are, they are of a kindred blood, for the
most part, with the Saxons and the Morse
men, our foretathers in freedom. st. Domingo,
even, might be manageable by our national
gastric juices; for it numbers, we believe,
hardly more than hundred thousand people,
planted on region nearly equal in extent to
the New England States exclusive of Maine.
But Mexico, in its most important districts,
is as thickly settled as many of the most pros
porous parts of the Union. What are we to
do with it9 Were there but one-twentieth as
many statesmen at Washington as there are
politicians, such a question as this, pressed
upon us by events such as those which are
now occurring and during the last five years
| have occurred in Mexico, would long ere this
have been clearly brought before the public
mind and practically discussed in the public
interest. But the American press, not tn,
American Congress, represents the statesman
ship and leads the policy of the republic to
day. And what Congress is too careless or to-
ignorant to deal with, it has now become tn
duty of the press seriously to moot and patri
otically TO decide.