Now what says in regard to all Mexico Colonel Hardin, that most lamented and distinguished officer, honorably known as a member of the other house, and who has fallen gallantly fighting in the service of his country?  Here is his description:—­

“The whole country is miserably watered.  Large districts have no water at all.  The streams are small, and at great distances apart.  One day we marched on the road from Monclova to Parras thirty-five miles without water, a pretty severe day’s marching for infantry.

“Grass is very scarce, and indeed there is none at all in many regions for miles square.  Its place is supplied with prickly-pear and thorny bushes.  There is not one acre in two hundred, more probably not one in five hundred, of all the land we have seen in Mexico, which can ever be cultivated; the greater portion of it is the most desolate region I could ever have imagined.  The pure granite hills of New England are a paradise to it, for they are without the thorny briers and venomous reptiles which infest the barbed barrenness of Mexico.  The good land and cultivated spots in Mexico are but dots on the map.  Were it not that it takes so very little to support a Mexican, and that the land which is cultivated yields its produce with little labor, it would be surprising how its sparse population is sustained.  All the towns we have visited, with perhaps the exception of Parras, are depopulating, as is also the whole country.

“The people are on a par with their land.  One in two hundred or five hundred is rich, and lives like a nabob; the rest are peons, or servants sold for debt, who work for their masters, and are as subservient as the slaves of the South, and look like Indians, and, indeed, are not more capable of self-government.  One man, Jacobus Sanchez, owns three fourths of all the land our column has passed over in Mexico.  We are told we have seen the best part of Northern Mexico; if so, the whole of it is not worth much.

“I came to Mexico in favor of getting or taking enough of it to pay the expenses of the war.  I now doubt whether all Northern Mexico is worth the expenses of our column of three thousand men.  The expenses of the war must be enormous; we have paid enormous prices for every thing, much beyond the usual prices of the country.”

There it is.  That’s all North Mexico; and New Mexico is not the better part of it.

Sir, there is a recent traveller, not unfriendly to the United States, if we may judge from his work, for he speaks well of us everywhere; an Englishman, named Ruxton.  He gives an account of the morals and the manners of the population of New Mexico.  And, Mr. President and Senators, I shall take leave to introduce you to these soon to be your respected fellow-citizens of New Mexico:—­