In one respect the reconquest of Mexico by Spain would prove beneficial to us.  If the Southern Confederacy should be established through the action of foreign powers, it would be for our interest that Mexico should have a strong government ruling over a united people.  If the anarchical condition of Mexico should be continued, that country would afford a fine field for the energy and enterprise of all the lawless spirits of the South, who could be precipitated upon it to the great gain of their countrymen; and England, in pursuance of her great Christian principle of creating markets for cotton and cottons, would encourage the Confederates to enter Mexico.  But if Mexico should be converted into an orderly country, and have an army capable of treating buccaneers as the Spanish army treated Lopez and his followers, it would be no place for the discharged soldiers of Davis and Stephens.  They would have to stay at home, and they would make of that home a hell.  The welfare of the North would be promoted by the misery of the Southrons, who ought to be made to pay the full penalty of their extraordinary crime.  Without provocation, and making of that want of provocation an absolute boast, they have brought war upon their country, and are endeavoring to spread its flames over the world.  The misery they have wrought is incalculable, and no narrative of it, let it be as minute and as detailed as it could be made, will ever furnish a full picture of it.  It would be but the merest justice, that men who make war in the spirit of wantonness be compelled to drink off the red cup they have filled, to the very lees.  Such would probably be their doom, should they prevail.  The least successful thing to them would be success.

It is not certain, however, that the revival of Spanish power is to be lasting in its nature; and if Spain should fall as suddenly as she has risen, the way to Mexico would be open to the Southrons, who might then and there add so tremendously to the dominions of King Cotton as to make him even more powerful than ever he has been in the imagination of his votaries,—­and they have ranked him only one step below the Devil.  Spanish revivals are so much like certain other revivals, that they are apt to be followed by reaction, leaving the unduly excited subject in a worse condition than ever.  European affairs, too, may demand Spain’s attention, and require her to leave Mexico to take care of herself.  Europe is full of causes of war, occasion for waging which must soon arise.  The American war has tended to the promotion of peace in Europe, but that cannot be much longer maintained.  Let war break out in Europe, and Spain would probably feel herself called upon to assume a principal part in it, and then the Southern Confederacy would be at liberty to spread slavery over the finest cotton country on earth, under the patronage of England, which hates slavery, but worships its results.  The future of Mexico it lies in the power of the American Union to decide, and our armies are contending as much for Mexican freedom as they are for American nationality.