The prisoners taken on the islands of Las Mugeres and Contoy were, and it is well known that they were, a portion of the Lopez expedition, and had left the United States on a piratical enterprise against the dominions of Spain. They were pirates, and, under our treaty with Spain and the laws of nations, they were punishable as pirates. Spain had been invaded, her territory had been violated by our citizens, her subjects murdered, her treasury plundered, her public buildings burned, and the governor of one of her towns made prisoner; she was threatened with still further invasion from the same quarter, and with all the horrors of war. She had, under these circumstances, the right to protect herself by taking and hanging every individual she found engaged in the piratical expedition against her dominions. These Contoy prisoners, as they are called, were the comrades of those who had invaded her soil; they shared in their guilt, and were virtually pirates, and as such could not claim the protection of our government. To any demand of ours to Spain to give them up, it was sufficient for her to allege this fact, and that she had taken them in the right of self-defence, and should treat them according to the law of nations.

Our government could demand the release of these prisoners only on the ground that there was no sufficient evidence to connect them with the piratical expedition against Cuba; but of that fact Spain was a competent judge, and she had the full right to bring them to trial, and if convicted by her own tribunals, under the laws of nations, of being a part of that expedition, she had the undoubted right to sentence and punish them, without our having the least right to remonstrate. There was really nothing in the conduct of Spain with regard to the capture, detention, and trial of these prisoners of which we have the least right to complain. Spain was not obliged to wait till the pirates had actually set foot on her soil, and struck the first blow, before her right to arrest and punish them commenced. It was enough that their intention to invade her soil was manifest, and it was clear that they had embarked for that purpose. These Contoy prisoners were taken under arms near her territories, on desert islands, the usual resort of the adventurers. Undoubtedly they had not yet actually invaded Cuba, but the circumstances under which they were found lurking there sufficiently indicated their purpose, and pointed them out as a part of the expedition which had landed, committed its depredations, and retreated to Key West

within the jurisdiction of the Union. They might be there waiting the return of their comrades with reinforcements to renew their piratical attacks, and no one can be so ignorant of the rights of Spain as to suppose that she was bound to respect their hiding-place till they had acquired sufficient force to commence the actual murder of her subjects, and the sack and destruction of her towns. She had the right to make them prisoners, and, if she had the right to make them prisoners, the right to retain them a reasonable time for investigating their case, and of ascertaining their guilt or innocence. She did only this, and considering the inefficiency our government had displayed in protecting her from the piratical attacks of our own citizens, and that the expedition intended to operate against her from our territory had been defeated by her own exertions, without any efficient aid or act of ours, she had far more right to deem herself aggrieved by our peremptory demand for the delivery of the prisoners, than we to complain of her for detaining and subjecting them, or proposing to subject them, to a trial before her own tribunals.

We are quite sure that, if the case had been reversed, we should have given a brief answer to a like demand from the Spanish government. How, in fact, did we reason, when General Jackson marched with his troops into Florida, then a Spanish province, and took military possession of its capital, because the Spanish governor could not, or would not, restrain the Seminole Indians, as bound by treaty, from making predatory incursions into the territory of the Union? If the tables had been turned, and the military expedition had been intended to operate from Cuba against us, and the Spanish authorities had been as remiss and inefficient in preventing or repressing it as ours has been, the whole force of the Union would have been put in requisition, if needed, to lay all Cuba in ashes; and if we had detected armed adventurers from her ports lurking near our coast, watching a favorable opportunity to make a descent, we should have taken them prisoners, and with the briefest trial possible hung them up, every one of them, as pirates. Of this no man who knows our character, and our summary manner of dealing with those who violate our rights, can reasonably doubt. It would be well to remember that the obligations of the treaty between us and Spain are reciprocal, that they do not bind her and leave us free, as one is tempted to think is our interpretation of them, but bind us as well as her, and what would be right in our case is equally right in hers.

The journals have been filled with loud complaints of the cruelty with which the Spanish authorities treated the Contoy prisoners while they detained them in custody. There is not a word of truth in these complaints, as the good plight of the prisoners when landed in the United States amply proves. They were well treated, and no unusual or unnecessary severity was exercised against them, — no further severity than that of guarding against their escape, and their intercourse with their sympathizers or accomplices. We are well aware that the mass of the American people, believing all the falsehoods and retaining all the prejudices of their ancestors current in the days of Queen Elizabeth, are prepared to credit any absurd tale of Spanish cruelty that any idle vagabond chooses to invent; but this much is to be said of our countrymen, that they are probably unrivalled in the facility of believing every thing-except the truth. No people can surpass them in their ability to believe falsehood without evidence, or to reject truth though sup ported by evidence complete and irrefragable. It is one of their titles to the admiration of the philosophers of the nineteenth century.

We are not the apologists of Spain; but we may say this much for her, that no nation has been more maligned, and no national character more vilely traduced, than the Spanish. There is no nobler blood in Europe than the brave old Castilian, and a more elevated or virtuous peasantry than the Spanish is not to be found in the whole world. Time was, and not long since, when Spain was the freest country in Europe, worthy even of all admiration for her noble political institutions. She was, at no distant date, the ruling European nation, surpassing in grandeur and power all that Great Britain now claims to be. Domestic dissensions, fomented by foreign influences, foreign and civil wars, French invasion, French philosophism, English protection, radicalism, rebellion, revolu tion, and the terrible struggle for her very national existence against the colossal power of Napoleon, in the zenith of his pride and his strength, have for the moment reduced her from her former relative position among European nations, and induced many in both hemispheres to forget the gratitude that is due her for her eminent services and eminent sacrifices to the cause of religion and European and American civilization; but she is still a living and a noble nation, with a recuperative energy in her population to be found in no other population in Europe, and lowly as she lies at this moment to the eye of the super

ficial spectator, she has in her all the elements of her former greatness, and before her a long and glorious future. She has still a believing heart, a loyal soul, and an inbred reverence for religion and morality. The spoiler's work is wellnigh finished, and the infidel and sacrilegious revolutionary storm has wellnigh spent its fury, and the day draweth nigh for her to put off her garments of sorrow, and to put on her robes of joy and gladness. She has had, no doubt, her faults, and will have them again, but as to her cruelty it is mildness itself in comparison with the tender mercies of the renowned Anglo-Saxon, who, after twelve hundred years of culture, seems still to cherish in his heart the habits and tastes of his piratical ancestors.

But our failure in the discharge of our duty to Spain extends farther than we have stated. Cuba, in consequence of our remissness and inefficiency, is still in danger of piratical attacks from our citizens, or at least of their attempts, in concert with disaffected Cubans, to get up a democratic revolution in the island, and involve it in the horrors of civil war. Spain has been put to great trouble and expense in defending that island from our machinations, which it was our duty to have spared her, and she is obliged to continue her armament and defences on the war footing, and that to defend her province from the hostile invasions of the subjects of a government which professes to be at peace with her. This is not an endurable state of things. Does it comport with our honor as a nation to suffer it to continue ? Have we not the will and the power to restrain our lawless citizens, and to compel them to respect the rights and the property of a friendly power? Are we reduced either to the moral or physical necessity of compelling nations with whom we have treaties of peace and amity to arm themselves to the teeth, and everywhere keep watch and ward against the depredations of our American citizens and subjects? We would fain hope not, and we look with confidence to the new administration to take efficient measures to reassure Spain, to indemnify her for the wrongs she has suffered in consequence of our remissness, and to relieve her from the necessity of keeping up any extra garrison in Cuba to protect her possession of that island from the aggressions of persons subject to the government of the United States. We have full confidence that, in the hands of the present Secretary of State, the errors and blunders of his predecessor will be repaired, and that our foreign relations will be managed with wisdom and en

NEW SERIES. VOL. IV. NO. IV.

65

ergy, with jealous regard to the rights and feelings of other nations, and to the dignity and honor of our own.

We hope, too, that our citizens will participate in the reaction against wild and lawless democracy, or Red Republicanism, which appears to have commenced in the Old World; and that, remembering that justice exalteth a nation, while sin is a reproach to any people, they will retrace their steps, and return to the wholesome principles embodied in their fundamental institutions. It is time for them to pay less attention to the acquisition of territory, and more to the acquisition and maintenance of national honor. We have, morally considered, fallen to a fearful depth, but we have not fallen so low that we cannot, if we choose, rise again. We have prided ourselves on our institutions, and have claimed to be a model republic. We are not, as a people, wholly insensible to the opinions of the civilized world, and we wish all nations to admire our political institutions, and to model their own after them. This is all laudable enough. But we cannot expect them to do it, unless we retrace our steps, and show that we ourselves adhere to the principles of our institutions, and are governed by them.

Hitherto republicanism in the Old World has been associated in the minds of intelligent and honest people with barbarism, the absence of public and private virtue, contempt of relig ion, disregard of the most sacred obligations and relations, the loss of personal freedom, war on the Church, on morality, on property, on the family, and on society itself. It should have been ours to have proved by our example that this is only an accidental character of republicanism, and that a people may be republican, may dispense with kings and lords, without lapsing into barbarism or interrupting the progress of Christian civilization, that such a people may be cultivated and moral, refined and religious, free and loyal, respecting the rights of God as well as the rights of man, preserving the sanctity of marriage, and the integrity of the family, respecting the rights of property, the rights of sovereignty, and the independence of nations, and maintaining peace and order under the reign of law. This should have been our mission, but we have been recreant to it; we have been latterly identifying republicanism with democracy, and American democracy with the European, and doing our best to prove by our example, that in all lands democracy degenerates into license, becomes immoral, irreligious, and aggressive. We have been furnishing kings and aristocrats with strong arguments against republicanism, and in