CHAPTER XVIII.

Congress of Deputies-Patriotism-The Army-Undisciplined TroopsThe Lasso, an Instrument of Warfare-Mexican and American Cavalry -Mode of Recruiting the Army-Texian conflicts with the Mexicans. THE Congress of Deputies is a highly respectable looking body. I have seen no similar body anywhere superior in this respect, or which is more dignified and orderly. Spanish decorum and gravity, which I have before remarked are never forgotten, even in the excitement of the gamingtable, are proof against what our own experience would lead us to believe is a much severer trial, the excitement and irritation of political strife. Two members of the Mexican Congress who would fight on the floor of Congress would be in danger of the garote. The manner of some of the speakers is decidedly oratorical. As to the matter I cannot speak, as the gallery where seats are provided for the diplomatic corps is so high that it is impossible to hear. Their style, however, like that of all Mexicans, is excessively grandiloquent, always in "Ercles vein." But what is much more to their honor is, that in the evershifting scenes in the drama of Mexican revolutions and civil wars, there has not been a single instance of a Mexican Congress proving false to the trust confided to it. It is true that there have been subservient Congresses, but they were not composed of the members originally elected. The strong measure of all usurpers, from the time of Cromwell, was resorted to of dissolving the original Congress, and assembling another selected by the President

from his own subservient tools, and who were no more, of course, than the passive instruments of his will, and the registers of his edicts. The resistance made by the Congress of Mexico to the usurpation and arbitrary acts of Iturbide may be advantageously compared with that of the English Parliament to Cromwell, and more closely with the conduct of the French Chambers towards Buonaparte. The course of Pedraza, as a member of the Mexican Congress during the last administration of Santa Anna, when his power was absolute, and he seemed to be altogether impregnable, was worthy of all admiration. It was firm, cool, resolute, and patriotic.

The better classes of the Mexicans are generally educated to some extent, and, I think, as generally patriotic. They have the sentiment of liberty, but it is vague and undefined, and a devoted attachment to the word "Republic," but, I greatly fear, are not altogether capable of laying wisely the broad and deep foundations of such a government which would be suited to their peculiar circumstances. God grant that they may! for they deserve success; and I can say, in all truth, that there is no other country, except my own, in whose advances in the great career of civil liberty I feel so strong an interest.

The first spark struck out from our own great movement was kindled in Mexico. The nation has passed through the severest trials, and, in many instances, developed characters of the most disinterested patriotism and exalted virtue.

That which is in all respects the greatest nuisance, and the most insuperable barrier to the prosperity and progress of Mexico, is the army. They will tell you there that it amounts to forty thousand men ; but they have never had half that number. I have no doubt that the accounts at the

Department of War exhibit nearly the number stated, but a large proportion of them are men of straw-fictitious names fraudulently inserted for the benefit of the officers who pay them. They are paid every day, or, rather, that is the law; but the pay is just as fictitious as the muster rolls.

They have more than two hundred generals, most of them without commands. Every officer who commands a regiment has the title of general, and is distinguished from generals who have no commands by the addition of "General effectivo." The rate of pay is not very different from that of our own army. Each officer and soldier, however, is his own commissary, no rations being issued; and they are well satisfied if they receive enough of their pay to procure their scanty rations, which was very rarely the case, except with Santa Anna's favorite troops, whom he always kept about his person, and this made it their interest to sustain him. In one of the last conversations which I had with him, I told him that the army would remain faithful to him just so long as he could pay them, and no longer, and that I did not see how it was possible for him to pay them much longer.

The result proved the truth of both predictions, and that, I have no doubt, was the cause of the revolution which overthrew him. It is not alone with the French sansculottes that "la liberté et la peine" is a cry of fearful potency. Shortly before I left Mexico, an officer in the army came to the city and settled his accounts with the War Department, and received a certificate that twentyfive hundred dollars were due him; after hawking it about amongst the brokers, he sold the claim for a hundred and twenty-five dollars, which was five cents on the dollar.

They say that they are obliged to have a standing army,

and that they can only enforce their laws "by the grace of God and gunpowder." This may be true, but I doubt it. But if it be, is there any military man who will deny that five thousand soldiers well-paid, fed and disciplined, would be more efficient than fifty thousand such troops as they have? It has been the policy of all great commanders not to take doubtful and undisciplined troops into a great battle. I do not hesitate to say that if I was in command of an army of ten thousand disciplined troops, and was going into battle, and was offered ten thousand more Mexican troops, that I would not take them. Napier, in his history of the Peninsular War, describing some battle uses this expression: "The British army was strengthened or rather weakened by twenty thousand undisciplined Spanish troops." The inequality between disciplined and undisciplined troops is estimated by military men as one to five. This inequality is much greater with large masses, and I do not think that any commander could perform a tactical evolution with five thousand Mexican troops. I do not believe that such an one-a manœuvre in the face of an enemyever was attempted in any Mexican battle; they have all been mere melées or mob fights, and generally terminated by a charge of cavalry, which is, therefore, the favorite corps with all Mexican officers. I should regard it, from the diminutive size of their horses and the equally diminutive stature and feebleness of their riders, as utterly inefficient against any common infantry. I said so in conversation with Colonel B―n, an officer who had seen some service, and had some reputation. I was not a little amused at his reply. He admitted that squares of infantry were generally impregnable to cavalry, but said it was not so with the Mexican cavalry, that they had one resource by which they never had any difficulty in breaking the square. I

was curious to know what this new and important discovery in the art of war was, and waited impatiently the "push of his one thing," when to my infinite amusement he replied —the Lasso; that the cavalry armed with lassos rode up and threw them over the men forming the squares, and pulled them out, and thus made the breach. I remembered that my old nurse had often got me to sleep when a child, by promising to catch me some birds the next day, by putting salt on their tails, which I thought was about as easy an operation as this new discovery of the Mexican colonel. I had read of " kneeling ranks and charging squadrons," but this idea of lassoing squadrons was altogether new to me. Buonaparte fought and gained the battle of the Pyramids against the best cavalry in the world, the Mamelukes, entirely in squares. He lost the battle of Waterloo because the British squares were impenetrable to the next best-the French cavalry-during all of that long and awful conflict. The idea, however, of the lasso did not occur to the Mamelukes in Egypt, nor to Buonaparte at Waterloo. I was reminded of the equally novel attack of the Chinese upon the English, when they were all formed in battle array and the Chinese threw somersets at them instead of cannon balls and shells.

The Mexican army, and more particularly their cavalry, may do very well to fight each other, but in any conflict with our own or European troops, it would not be a battle but a massacre. Frederick the Great, who was the author, in a great degree, of the modern system of tactics, had three maxims as to cavalry. First, that a cavalry corps. should never be charged but should always make the charge. Second, that, in a charge of cavalry, they were not going fast enough unless when halted the froth from the mouth of the horse struck the rider in the face; and