“I am now through the whole of the President’s evidence; and it is a singular fact, that if any one should declare the President sent the army into the midst of a settlement of Mexican people, who had never submitted, by consent or by force to the authority of Texas or of the United States, and that _there_, and _thereby_, the first blood of the war was shed, there is not one word in all the President has said which would either admit or deny the declaration. In this strange omission chiefly consists the deception of the President’s evidence--an omission which, it does seem to me, could scarcely have occurred but by design. My way of living leads me to be about the courts of justice; and there I have sometimes seen a good lawyer, struggling for his client’s neck, in a desperate case, employing every artifice to work round, befog, and cover up with many words some position pressed upon him by the prosecution, which he _dared_ not admit, and yet _could_ not deny. Party bias may help to make it appear so; but, with all the allowance I can make for such bias, it still does appear to me that just such and from just such necessity, are the President’s struggles in this case. “Some time after my colleague (Mr. Richardson) introduced the resolutions I have mentioned, I introduced a preamble, resolution, and interrogatories, intended to draw the President out, if possible, on this hitherto untrodden ground. To show their relevancy, I propose to state my understanding of the true rule for ascertaining the boundary between Texas and Mexico. It is, that _wherever_ Texas was _exercising_ jurisdiction was hers; and wherever Mexico was exercising jurisdiction was hers: and that whatever separated the actual exercise of jurisdiction of the one from that of the other, was the true boundary between them. If, as is probably true, Texas was exercising jurisdiction along the western bank of the Nueces, and Mexico was exercising it along the eastern bank of the Rio Grande, then _neither_ river was the boundary, but the uninhabited country between the two was. The extent of our territory in that region depended not on any _treaty-fixed_ boundary (for no treaty had attempted it), but on revolution. Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the _right_ to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right--a right which, we hope and believe, is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that _can_ may revolutionize, and make their _own_ of so much of their territory as they inhabit. More than this, a _majority_ of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a _minority_, intermingled with, or near about them, who may oppose their