Since 1837 the United States have regarded Texas as an independent sovereignty as much as Mexico, and that trade and commerce with citizens of a government at war with Mexico can not on that account be regarded as an intercourse by which assistance and succor are given to Mexican rebels.  The whole current of Mr. De Bocanegra’s remarks runs in the same direction, as if the independence of Texas had not been acknowledged.  It has been acknowledged; it was acknowledged in 1837 against the remonstrance and protest of Mexico, and most of the acts of any importance of which Mr. De Bocanegra complains flow necessarily from that recognition.  He speaks of Texas as still being “an integral part of the territory of the Mexican Republic,” but he can not but understand that the United States do not so regard it.  The real complaint of Mexico, therefore, is in substance neither more nor less than a complaint against the recognition of Texan independence.  It may be thought rather late to repeat that complaint, and not quite just to confine it to the United States to the exemption of England, France, and Belgium, unless the United States, having been the first to acknowledge the independence of Mexico herself, are to be blamed for setting an example for the recognition of that of Texas.

And he added that—­

  The Constitution, public treaties, and the laws oblige the President to
  regard Texas as an independent state, and its territory as no part of
  the territory of Mexico.

Texas had been an independent state, with an organized government, defying the power of Mexico to overthrow or reconquer her, for more than ten years before Mexico commenced the present war against the United States.  Texas had given such evidence to the world of her ability to maintain her separate existence as an independent nation that she had been formally recognized as such not only by the United States, but by several of the principal powers of Europe.  These powers had entered into treaties of amity, commerce, and navigation with her.  They had received and accredited her ministers and other diplomatic agents at their respective courts, and they had commissioned ministers and diplomatic agents on their part to the Government of Texas.  If Mexico, notwithstanding all this and her utter inability to subdue or reconquer Texas, still stubbornly refused to recognize her as an independent nation, she was none the less so on that account.  Mexico herself had been recognized as an independent nation by the United States and by other powers many years before Spain, of which before her revolution she had been a colony, would agree to recognize her as such; and yet Mexico was at that time in the estimation of the civilized world, and in fact, none the less an independent power because Spain still claimed her as a colony.  If Spain had continued until the present period to assert that Mexico was one of her colonies in rebellion against her, this would not