Nearly forty years have now passed since the Mexican war, and a survey of the facts and subsequent history is of genuine interest. The United States employed, in the invasion of a sister republic, about one hundred thousand armed men. Of these, 26,690 were regular troops, 56,926 volunteers, while over 15,000 were in the navy, or in the department of commissariat and transportation. Probably as many as eighty thousand soldiers were actually in Mexico. Of this host, 120 officers and 1,400 men fell in battle or died of wounds, and 100 officers and 10,800 men perished by disease. These figures by General Viele are from the army rolls. Another writer gives the total, in round numbers, of American war-employées lost in battle at 5,000, and by sickness 15,000. About 1,000 men of the army of occupation died each month of garrison-fever in the city of Mexico, and many more were ruined in health and character. In all, the loss of manhood by glory and malaria was fully 25,000 men. The war cost the United States, directly, a sum estimated between $130,000,000 and $166,500,000. Including the pensions, recently voted, this amount will be greatly increased. Turning from the debit to the credit account, the United States gained in Texas, and the ceded territory, nearly one million square miles of land, increasing her area one-third, and adding five thousand miles of sea-coast, with three great harbors. Except for one of those world-influencing episodes, which are usually called “accidents,” but which make epochs and history, this large territory would long have waited for inhabitants. The vast desert was made to bud with promise, and blossom as the rose, by the discovery of some shining grains of metal, yellow and heavy, in a mill race. California with her golden hands rose up, a new figure in history, to beckon westward the returned veteran, the youth of the overcrowded East, the young blood and sinew of Europe. The era of the “prairie schooner” to traverse the plains, the steamer to ply to the Isthmus, the fast-sailing American clipper ships to double the Cape, was ushered in. Zadoc Pratt’s dream of a trans-continental railway, laid on the Indian trails, soon found a solid basis in easy possibility. In the eight months ending March 1850, nine millions of gold from California entered the United States. The volume of wealth from California and Texas in thirty-two years, has equalled the debt incurred during the great civil war to preserve the American union; enabling the government to say to Louis Napoleon, “Get out of Mexico, and take imperialism from the American continent.”