have prompted the passage of this most iniquitous law. Simultaneous with it, all parts of Texas were deluged with garrisons in a time of profound peace. These garrisons extorted and consumed the substance of the land, and paid for their supplies in drafts on a faithless and almost bankrupt government. In their presence and vicinity the civil arm was paralyzed and powerless. They imprisoned our citizens without cause, and detained them without trial, and in every respect trampled upon our rights and privileges. They could not have been sent to Texas for our protection, for when they came we had expelled the savages, and were able to protect ourselves; and at the commencement of the colonial settlements, when we were few and weak, and scattered, and defenceless, not a garrison--no! not a soldier came to our assistance. As another evidence of the hostility of the Mexicans to the Colonists, I will instance the following: On the 7th of May, 1824, when the Republic was divided into States by the constituent Congress, the territory called Texas, not being sufficiently populous for a State, was united to Coahuila, but it was specially decreed by Congress that whenever Texas was sufficiently populous to figure as a State, she should make it known and be admitted. In 1833, the people of Texas, knowing that their numbers exceeded those of several of the old States, in solemn convention formed a constitution, and sent on a delegate to the city of Mexico, praying that Texas be admitted as a State. Instead of granting this just and legal request, they imprisoned our delegate in the dungeons of the Inquisition, and detained him without a trial for more than a year, deprived of the common air and common use of his own limbs! Under all of those multiplied oppressions, the colonists, from a spirit of forbearance, or rather from physical inability to resist, long groaned and languished. Not a voice, not an arm was uplifted. The wheels of government were not retarded in their operation by us. We consoled ourselves with the pleasing but delusive hope that a returning sense of liberality and justice would give to these obnoxious laws a brief duration. While laying this flattering unction to their souls, while indulging dreams of fancied felicity never to be realized, the dictator, Santa Anna, developed his tyrannical course. He surrounded Congress with an armed force, dissolved the body, and declared the constitution at an end. He dispersed our State Legislature by violence, imprisoned our Governor, demanded the arrest of some of the unoffending colonists, to be tried by military tribunals for (if any) civil offences, disarmed the militia, leaving only one gun to 500 citizens, and sent an army of mercenaries into Texas to rivet upon us the chains of centralism. When these glaring oppressions were attempted to be practised, the people of Texas felt that the cup of their bitterness was full to overflowing--that the rod of persecution had smitten sufficiently