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fully and impressivly convinced of that plain fact than is the President Santa Anna. He has learned it by a sore experience, the best possible teacher of practicable truths. He knows that his favorite scheme of a central government in Mexico can never be tranquilly established in Texas. The demonstrations of this fact he has witnessed in the abandonment of our homes, the voluntary conflagration of our towns, and especially in the thunders of our cannon, and the impetuous r.harges of our gallant troops on the field of San Jacinto. I ask you then, citizen soldiers, reasoning from the known and ordinary principles of human conduct, what has the aUedged faithlessness of Santa Anna to do with this trcaty?-Will he be faith1ess to his own plain interests, and to the interests of his country? ls his faithlessness of that perverse, idiotic and extraordinary kind, that it will sacrifice all the blandishments of ambition and all the endearments of self interest, lo its own fatuitous and suicidal gratification? If so, then is Santa Anna a wonderful being; an anomaly in human nature; a creature transcending even the unique and preternatural obliquities of Shakespeare's Calahan. It is objected again that Santa Anna is a murderer and ought to be tried and executed. I have yet to learn the principles of international or of civil law that would jusllfy the courts, civil or military, of one beligerant taking cognizance of the official, military acts of the Commander in Chief of the antagonist nation. But supposing such right of jurisdiction did exist, or suppose more rationally that the Government were disposed to inflict on their distinguished prisoner the utmost rigor of the Lex taliones, still they were barred and precluded from doing so, by the military convention agreed upon, and ratified between Gen1 Houston and the Mexican Chief. before the Government were apprized of his capture. I do not pretend that the Government were so disposed, for I am free to declare for myself that I never would have consented to the c;leliberate and cold blooded masacre of any prisoner. No man reprobates the murderous and abominable conduct of our enemies more than l do. It is so much the object of my abhorrence, that I have no desire to imitate it, but would rather hold up its atrocities to the indignation of the World, in the bright conspicuousness of contrasted clemency.
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