that “to reject indemnity, by refusing to accept a cession of territory, would be to abandon all our just demands, and to wage the war, bearing all its expenses, without a purpose or definite object.”  So then this national honor, security of the future, and everything but territorial indemnity may be considered the no-purposes and indefinite objects of the war!  But, having it now settled that territorial indemnity is the only object, we are urged to seize, by legislation here, all that he was content to take a few months ago, and the whole province of Lower California to boot, and to still carry on the war to take all we are fighting for, and still fight on.  Again, the President is resolved under all circumstances to have full territorial indemnity for the expenses of the war; but he forgets to tell us how we are to get the excess after those expenses shall have surpassed the value of the whole of the Mexican territory.  So again, he insists that the separate national existence of Mexico shall be maintained; but he does not tell us how this can be done, after we shall have taken all her territory.  Lest the questions I have suggested be considered speculative merely, let me be indulged a moment in trying to show they are not.  The war has gone on some twenty months; for the expenses of which, together with an inconsiderable old score, the President now claims about one half of the Mexican territory, and that by far the better half, so far as concerns our ability to make anything out of it.  It is comparatively uninhabited; so that we could establish land-offices in it, and raise some money in that way.  But the other half is already inhabited, as I understand it, tolerably densely for the nature of the country, and all its lands, or all that are valuable, already appropriated as private property.  How then are we to make anything out of these lands with this encumbrance on them? or how remove the encumbrance?  I suppose no one would say we should kill the people, or drive them out, or make slaves of them, or confiscate their property.  How, then, can we make much out of this part of the territory?  If the prosecution of the war has in expenses already equalled the better half of the country, how long its future prosecution will be in equalling the less valuable half is not a speculative, but a practical, question, pressing closely upon us.  And yet it is a question which the President seems never to have thought of.  As to the mode of terminating the war and securing peace, the President is equally wandering and indefinite.  First, it is to be done by a more vigorous prosecution of the war in the vital parts of the enemy’s country; and after apparently talking himself tired on this point, the President drops down into a half-despairing tone, and tells us that “with a people distracted and divided by contending factions, and a government subject to constant changes by successive revolutions, the continued success of our arms may fail to secure a satisfactory peace.”  Then he suggests