expeditionary force, drawn up to vindicate law, by the most serious punishment it metes out to the offender, stood almost in the shadow of the ruins of the church of the mission fathers. The roofless buildings of the old monastery, the crumbling arches of the spacious chapel, the waste fields which showed signs of former culture, and the skulking form of the half-clothed Indian, relapsing into savageism from which the holy fathers had rescued him, all declared the sort of protection Mexico had given to the persons as well as the property of the Peninsula. In the vital functions of government, the expeditionists may safely challenge a comparison of their acts with those of Mexico in Lower California; and the ruin and desolation which followed the unwise no less than unjust measure of secularizing the missions, were sufficient to forfeit the claim of the Mexican Republic to the allegiance of the peninsula. The main fact for us to know is that those engaged in the Lower California expedition gave proof of their desire not to destroy, but to re-organize society wherever they went. They were all young men, and youth is apt to err in pulling down before it is ready to build up. But they were men, also, full of military fire and thirsting for military reputation; and the soldier’s instinct leads him to construct rather than to destroy. The spirit of the soldier is conservative; the first law of military organization is order. Therefore, these men, though young, were not ill-fitted to lay the foundations of a new and more stable society than any they might find either in Sonora or Lower California. They failed, however; whether through the actions of others more than of themselves, it imports not our present purpose to determine. Suffice it to say that the last remains of the expedition reached San Francisco about the middle of May, 1854.