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TIDu\S STATE LIBRARY
to its rulers. It was particularly the policy of the government that the then wilderness of Texas should be settled and cultivated, nnd thus serve as a frontier protection to the interior provinces against savage incursions. Accordingly, a system of colonization laws was framed, by which foreigners, and particularly citizens of the United States, were not only allowed, but invited to settle in the country, and such inducements held out as had never before been known in any government. Having modelled their constitution of 182-! nfter that of the United States-of which it is almost a literal ccipy-the induce- ments of Republican Government, €qua! rights, libernl laws, and a splendid endowment of public lands, were offered to every emigrant. Great numbers availed themselves of the privilege; aud brnving th.! privntions of the wilderness and the dangers of savage warfare, are now possessed of comfortable homes, and in some instances, large estates in a country which is beginning to attrnct the attention of the world, on account of its great fertility, unequalled climate and abundant production of the richest of all agricultural staples-cotton and sugar-a country which may without exaggeration be denomi- nated "the garden spot of the world, "-the fairest portion of the sweet and sunny south-in which, more than any other,-man is ex- empt from·the original curse pronounced upon his race, of '' earning his bread by the sweat of his brow." The revolutions inseparable from all governments having a popular form and an ignorant popu- lation, more than· once occurred in the ~Icxican Republic during this period, but they disturbed not the repose and welfare of Texas. Sepa- rated from the interior by the ocea•, in one direction, and by nn im- mense desert of several hundred miles extent in the other, she flourished in peace, and increased in products nnd population, not caring, and hardly knowing whether Iterbide, Bustamente or St. Anna was de facto or de j1ire, at the head of the Federal G°'·ernment. In the midst of this peace, repose, and unexamplrd prosperity, a political destroyer appeared in the person of the President Santa Anna-a soldier of fortune who had risen to the first station in the republic by his devotion to those principles of constitutional liberty .ind republican government which he has now, at last, betrayed and deserted-preferring to be clnssed in the page of history among the Caesars and Bonapartes, rather thnn the Bolivars and Washingtons. "With a rude and unceremonious hand, the President St .Auna- leagued with the Priests, those eternal enemies of liberty and human rights in every nge and country-has prostrated Mexican Liberty and the Mexican Constitution, nnd under the neve1· foiling pretence of tyrants-" the good of the people;" bus abolished nll the rights of the States-annihilated the very existence of the State Lcgislaturcs- estahlished a central, consolidated, military government-and now offers to our free countrymen in 'fexas the crnel alternative, either to abandon their homes and estates, earned by so many privations, or to submit to the mos.t intolerable of 1111 tyrannies, the combined des- potism of the sword and the Priesthood. 'l'hns have they b<'cn forced into a contest for the preservation of every p1·inciple worth maintain- ing, and driven to a third alternative, not contemplated by the Priests and the usnrper,-war-dcifiancc-revolution-thc last a11d solemn np-
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