1030
AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
situation, immersed in clouds of prejudice, and backward in every- thing, can advance rapidly of itself alone and reach the level of other nations without drawing learning, industry, and population from abroad is almost ihe same as to imagine that the lVfexicans of the time of Cortes could have advanced to where they now are without knowing any other people or having had communica.tion with any other nation in the world. The United States of the North were n1uch .more advanced at the time of their independence than the i-Iexicans, and yet they needed learning, arts, and population from abroad. Upon the same policy are based my schemes for Texas, and for ·all the eastern frontier. It is depopulated; I wish to people it. The population that is there is backward; I wish it to be advanced and-improYecl by the introduction of industrious agricultural settlers, liberal republicans. I want the savage Indians subdued; the frontier protected; the lands cultivated; roads and canals opened; river navigation developed and the rivers covered with boats and barges carrying the produce of the interior to the coast for export in ex- change for foreign products, thereby saving the precious metals which are now our only medium of exchange; I wish to take from my native land and from every other country the best that they contain a,ncl plant it in my adopted land-that is to say, their best inhabitants, their industry, and their enlightenment~ so that the eastern frontier which is now without population and in its greater part almost without government, might present an example worthy of imitation. These are the magnificent, and as it now appears, visionary, plans which I have held for Texas, and for all this ~rontier; and if there is a :Mexican who does not wish to see them realized, I must say that he does not love his country; neither wants ~o see her emerge from the clarlmess of the fifteenth century nor shake off the chains of superstition and monastic ignorance which she is still dragging along. ,Very little do they lmow me who believe that I have sacrificed thE' best years of my life in the wildnerness of Texas to gain a fortune ! I have not gained it, and I could have lived in comfort in a settled counfry. I entered Texas in 1821 an enthusiastic philantropist and no~v·at the age of forty I find myself on the verge of misanthropy, firecl _of men and their affairs, and convinced that I wished to finish ip..a few·years the work of a century. I have seen the United States of the North make every effort to attract population, knowledge, and capital from abroad for its development. I have seen a wilderness covered with a dense population in a few years, and new states erected where at the time of my birth there was not a single civilized per~on. _. I believed that ·it would be the same with the free and nascerit Mexican nation. I see that I was mistaken. Before :Mexico
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