In annexing the whole of Mexico, Protestant Americans would feel that they were losing more than they could gain. In California and New Mexico, they have already to deal with a population of Mexican Catholics, and difficulties have arisen in the matter of the church lands. The Catholic vote is powerful not only in California and New York, but in Maryland, in Louisiana, in Kansas, and even in Massachusetts. The sons of the Pilgrim Fathers would scarcely look with pleasure on the admission to the Union of ten millions of Mexican Catholics, and, on the other hand, the day-dreams of Leonard Calvert would not be realized in the triumph of such a Catholicism as theirs any more than in the success of that of the Philadelphia Academy, or New York Tammany Hall. With the exception of the Irish, the great majority of Catholic emigrants avoid the United States, but the migration of European Catholics to South America is increasing year by year. Just as the Germans, the Norwegians, and the Irish flow toward the States, the French, the Spanish, and the Italians flock into La Plata, Chili, and Brazil. The European population of La Plata has already reached three hundred thousand, and is growing fast. The French “mission” in Mexico was the making of that great country a further field for the Latin immigration; and when the Californians marched to Juarez‘s help, it was to save Mexico to North America. In all history, nothing can be found more dignified than the action of America upon the Monroe doctrine. Since the principle was first laid down in words, in 1823, the national behavior has been courteous, consistent, firm; and the language used now that America is all-powerful, is the same that her statesmen made use of during the rebellion in the hour of her most instant peril. It will be hard for political philosophers of the future to assert that a democratic republic can have no foreign policy. The Pacific coast of Mexico is wonderfully full of beauties of a peculiar kind; the sea is always calm, and of a deep dull blue, with turtles lying basking on the surface, and flying-fish skimming lightly over its expanse, while the shores supply a fringe of bright yellow sand at once to the ocean blue and to the rich green of the cactus groves. On every spit or sand-bar there grows the feathery palm. A low range of jungle-covered hills is cut by gullies, through which we get glimpses of lagoons bluer than the sea itself, and behind them the sharp volcanic peaks rise through and into cloud. Once in awhile, Colima, or other giant hill, towering above the rest in blue-black gloom, serves to show that the shores belong to some mightier continent than Calypso‘s isle. CHAPTER XXVI. REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT.