Those who delight in historical parallels will remember that this very tract, from the Sabine to the Rio Grande, which was included in Texas, was the same territory which was in controversy between us and Spain at the beginning of the century,--and that as in 1846 the advance of the Mexican general across the southern boundary of the controverted district brought on the Mexican War, so, forty years before, the advance of an American general across the northern boundary of the same district brought us to the verge of a Spanish war. But whatever any one may think of the nature and justice of the Mexican War, no one can doubt that its result was the infliction of the severest of blows upon a sister-republic. And the severity consisted, we repeat, not so much in the territory which she relinquished as in her entire loss of prestige among the nations. We took away, indeed, more than eight hundred thousand square miles. We left her hardly seven hundred thousand square miles. But had there been any recuperative energy, perhaps the State, so much more compact in territory, and so little diminished in population, would have been stronger rather than weaker by the process. * * * * * We return to our narrative. The spring of 1861 found the Liberal party triumphant. Never had it seemed so firmly rooted. Never had its opponents been so cast down. Well does the Scripture say, "Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall." All through the spring and summer of 1861, the leaders of the Church party were flitting from Paris to Madrid, and from Madrid to Paris again, weaving what webs of intrigue, seeking what forms of intervention, none but the arch-plotter of the Tuileries can tell. There were floating about that summer rumors of intervention, coming through what avenues, or to whom traceable, nobody knew. Did any one wish to intervene, there were certainly ostensible reasons enough. In that long agony of anarchy, Mexico had inflicted, through one or another of her jarring parties, insults and injuries, in robberies, in murders, in forced loans, in illegal taxes, in neglected debts, sufficient to give an apparent justification to any violence of policy in a foreign power. The British minister, under date of June 27, 1861, transmitted to Lord John Russell a fearful list of outrages against English subjects. In that list were included three murders committed, or permitted, by Government officials, and twenty-four robberies, forced loans and the like, some of them to the amount of twenty-five and even sixty thousand dollars. These he styles "British claims of the small and distressing class." One fact disturbs the force of this impeachment of the Liberal government. Almost without exception, these outrages were confessedly the work of the conservative party, which had just been expelled after an open rebellion of three years against the legitimate authorities. It was as though England