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There is another subject of remark connected with our pretensions in regard to this war. If the annexation was intended by Congress to include the whole territory embraced by the boundary as defined by the Legislature of Texas in 1836 —that is, if it extended to the Rio Grande and thence to the forty-second parallel, it included a large portion of New Mexico, containing the city of Santa Fe. But the same Congress which made the annexation, passed an act allowing a drawback on merchandise received at our ports, and exported to Santa Fe. The question arises: Why was this drawback allowed? The answer is: Because Santa Fe was, in the opinion of Congress, in a foreign country: it was clearly, therefore, no part of Texas, as then understood. Now, if Santa Fe was not a part of Texas and incorporated by the act of annexation into the Union, neither was Point Isabel, nor the country adjacent. If Point Isabel was not a part, then the blood which was drawn in the skirmish upon the Rio Grande, was not shed on American soil: and if that again be true, there is need of some abatement of the tone of Executive declamation against the profanation of the American soil; some good reason to question that solemn preamble which asserted that "war exists by the act of Mexico;" some warrant to dispute the truth as well as the wisdom of the same declaration, made in the Presidential message, communicating it as a fact to rouse the warlike spirit of Congress. This presented a dilemma to the administration. Formidable enough it was. We have heard that Mr. Secretary Walker, with a view to extricate the Government from this dilemma, meditated the issuing of a circular to forbid the payment of the drawback upon exports to Santa Fe; that this device, however, upon second thoughts, was abandoned, as a little too bold even for this administration. Mr. Polk treated the matter more cunningly. He dispatched Gen. Kearney to take possession of our territory of New Mexico; not to conquer it, but to organize a government there,-which he has done with most soldier-like peremptoriness and promptitude. New Mexico is not conquered therefore, but organized and brought into line, and prepared to send her delegates to take their seats in Congress and so now we may trade there without paying duties or getting the drawback. The act of Congress is nul

lified. All this by virtue of the mere Executive command! The representatives of the people have had nothing to say to it: the people themselves have had nothing to say to it. Annexation has grown more summary than ever; the constitution is more elastic than we dreamed of, and new domains crowd in upon us like the multiplication of a juggler's balls under a cup. Truly, the strict constructionists have kicked up some new notions of late.

It will be the deep reproach of the present Congress, if these acts are suf fered to go unquestioned. That body will not escape the severest condemnation if the outrage which has been perpetrated upon the Constitution in this extraordinary proceeding be not visited with a most signal rebuke. We cannot but fear, from the past, from all that we have seen of party subserviency, that the Twenty-Ninth Congress possesses neither the disposition nor the faculty to do the country justice in this matter; that even the echoes of that voice, which has spoken of late with such emphasis from mountains and plains that have, heretofore, been wont to send forth no other than notes of assentation and fealty, will not be able to rouse the bated spirit of this Congress to the task of checking its too lordly master. The Whigs may speak, and, we predict, will speak, in no dulcet accents, on these points; though they will, doubtless, find all the apparatus of parliamentary restraint brought into use to suppress the inquiry, and even silence the voice of complaint. But it is not long before the people themselves will have a potent word to say in their own behalf, and to pass their judgment upon these events. With whatever gratulation they may look upon the prowess of our noble little army; whatever solace they may find in the glorious exploits of those brave men who have obeyed the summons to the field, as we trust our people ever will obey the first summons to any battle-field, in which American soldiers, marshaled under the national flag, may stand in need of succor; however freely they may consent to furnish all supplies and aids necessary to hasten the war to a termination which shall leave the lustre of our arms untarnished-they will still not abate one jot of their condemnation of an administration that has brought us into hostilities so unnecessary, by means so derogatory to the constitutional power committed to the

Executive. We have seen, in these proceedings, the right asserted and acted upon by the President, to wage war beyond the territory of the United States, without a declaration of war being authorized by Congress. We see in them the assumption that territory may be acquired to this Government by conquest a point not heretofore settled-and that, being so acquired, the President may annex it to the Union, and provide for it all the machinery of a provincial government; that this may be done, too, without the authority of Congress. It would seem, moreover, to settle, as far as such authority can settle a question, the point so often mooted, and so constantly denied, by the strict constructionists, that the United States may hold and govern colonies. These are grave questions, and are gravely to be answered.

We do not wish to be understood as denying the power of acquisition by conquest: much less are we prepared to affirm it. It is a new question, not very distinctly contemplated in the Constitution, and very pregnant of weighty consequences. If it be decided in the affirmative, then it seems to us quite clear that the power to establish and maintain colonies is inseparable from it. When we make a conquest, it is inevitable that we must provide for it, govern it, and turn it to the best account. In what way we shall govern it, must necessarily rest in the discretion of the Federal authorities. The colonial form may be the most obvious and the most useful. Again, if we can acquire territory by conquest, we may acquire it in any quarter of the globe. What more probable than that, following up the spirit of aggrandize ment so recently developed in our Gov. ernment, we should find early motive and occasion to make a conquest of the Sandwich, the Marquesas, or other convenient islands of the Pacific? Could we not hold them by the same tenure by which we assume to hold parts of Mexico? There is no difference in the principle applicable to the two cases. We should thus possess territory in no proximity to our present Union; but possessing it, what is there to restrain us, under the recent precedents, from annexing it to the Union? We can see no limit to the extension of these principles. The most startling consequences seem to follow in lawful succession, after the first step which took us across the old confines of our Confederacy. What influ

ence such changes may have on our Government, we may hardly venture to foretell.

Before we conclude this article we have a few words to say upon the course of the present Congress in reference to the Tariff. Nearly sixty years have gone by since the adoption of the Constitution, and in the very first year of its existence, the question arose regarding the power of the new government to protect and encourage the labor of the country, against the competition of foreign nations. That question has been decided affirmatively by every Congress, from the first in which it arose down to the TwentyNinth. It has been decided affirmatively by the gravest enunciations of the Judiciary. It has been maintained by every President until the election of Mr. Polk. It has been affirmed by the great majorities of the people in every national election. One would suppose the point was settled. It was reserved to the administration of Mr. Polk and the TwentyNinth Congress to refute and disallow these combined authorities. The President has recently asserted the doctrine, that whatever duty has the effect to restrain or diminish importations, is unconstitutional; in other words, that whatever duty lessens the competition of foreign manufacturers against the American, is forbidden by the fundamental law of this Union. We gather no less than this from the argument of the Message. That this point might not be misapprehended, the Secretary of the Treasury reaffirmed the Presidential declaration in still more explicit language, and the same doctrine is announced by the committee to whom the subject was entrusted by the House. The result was the Tariff of 1846, which was not exactly an illustration of this ultra doctrine, but as near an approach to it as the House of Representatives dare make. It is not our intention to comment upon the details of that bill. It has been sufficiently exposed in the almost universal condemnation it has received from every press in the country, that is not a partisan retainer of the Administration, or the exponent of those peculiar opinions, which are endemic in certain sections of the Union, known to political naturalists as the region of abstractions.' We will remark, however, of this act, that it is not only a mischievous act, demonstrating equal ignorance of the condition of the country, and indifference to its opinions and wants; but it is, also, a coward

ly, equivocating, and false act, which, whilst it professes to be built upon the foundation of the Free Trade principle, flagrantly departs from it in almost every instance in which it encounters an interest sufficiently powerful to be felt in an election. It bullies the weak and succumbs to the strong. Even these concessions have not saved it from the denunciation of those whom it designed to favor; and we have already some significant whispers afloat, that the present session of Congress is to be called on, and directed to equivocate still farther, in the hope of averting that wrath which the democracy of the administration has not pith enough to defy.

We have heard of great joy in London-to use Mr. Ritchie's phrase-and over all England, when the Secretary's precious exposition of the American policy reached there. It is not often that Loco-focoism receives such compliments. The delight which the parliamentary honors awarded to the Secretary's report, spread over the hearts of his friends in Washington, will not soon be forgotten -especially by those who were accustomed to read the sneers of the government paper and its auxiliaries, conveyed in the term British Whigs,' whenever a surmise was indulged that Mr. Polk could, under any circumstances, take less than fifty-four, forty:" this joy in London' will not soon be forgotten by the mechanics of America who have been sacrificed, nor by those who wish well to the mechanics.

We refer to this expression of British gratitude towards our Secretary, for his friendly support of British policy, because we find in it a significant illustration of a very important truth, upon which the statesmen of this country may profitably reflect. In the general acclaim which arose from the depths of the English nation to honor the American Premier, we recognize the sincere delight of that people, that the United States should, at last, propose to them the most acceptable atonement in our power, for the injury done them by our Declaration of Inde pendence and successful revolt. The privileges of what Englishmen call Free Trade constitute, according to the opinions of their best informed statesmen, the sum of all the benefits they had hoped to derive from retaining the American Colonies in their allegiance to the British Crown.

Some years ago, Mr. Clay said in the

Senate, in reply to Gen. Hayne of South Carolina, when the subject of Free Trade was in debate," It is, in effect, the British Colonial System that we are invited to adopt; and if their policy prevail, it will lead substantially to the colonization of these States under the commercial dominion of Great Britain."

That remark is as true to-day as it was in 1832, when it was uttered. We are enabled to show how accurately this language of Mr. Clay represents the convictions of sagacious Englishmen on this point; and for that purpose we refer to the opinions of the Edinburgh Reviewthe most authentic champion of Free Trade on the other side of the Atlanticgiven to us in an article written after Mr. Secretary Walker's report had elicited the commendations of Sir Robert Peel and Lord Aberdeen. From these we make a few extracts.

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"In what," asks the Reviewer, July, 1846, in a discussion of the Sophismes Economiques' of Bastiat," do the commercial advantages of colonial possessions consist? They consist simply, as it seems to us, in the power which the mother country thereby enjoys of securing a fair and open market to her goods. They consist in her power of preventing the colony from excluding her from its market by restrictions and discriminating duties, and all the perverse follies which the union of national jealousy with false systems of political economy have engendered.

It, (the colony,) if it were independent, would, however small in extent, attempt to set up a separate industrial and commercial system. Certain bodies of producers and traders would raise a cry about native industry, and the public, partly from simplicity and partly from national antipathies, would yield to the interested delusion. * For these reasons, we have, in the present state of the world, a substantial interest in the dependence of our colonies. We can secure an open market and a free trade so long as we can procure a safe passage over the seas and maintain the allegiance of the subject territories.

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Generally, therefore, the advantage we derive from the possession of colonies may be said to consist in this-that, in consideration of the responsibility and expense of superintending their government and defending them against hostile attack, we require them to trade freely with us. They are separate political communities, each with

its peculiar though not sovereign government, managing its own revenues and expenditure, levying custom-house duties of its own, and maintaining a distinct system of taxation, but not permitted to use its power so as to impose restrictions and disabilities upon the trade of the mother country.”

This is the language of Great Britain, speaking her conviction of the value of her colonies. The reader will be struck at the prevailing idea which runs through it all, the fear that a community left to itself would never adopt this genial principle of Free Trade, but must be coerced to take such a blessing"-that the "let us alone" policy, so lauded by these same writers, is the most imaginable privilege to be conferred upon a country with which England wishes to trade, and that, in fine, that celebrated saying, so current at the date of our Revolution, "America shall not manufacture a hobnail," lay at the very foundation of these notions of free trade. Mr. Walker's report was greeted in England because it fell in with these views; it proposed a commercial re-colonization, and offered to Great Britain all that she found valuable in the colonial relation, without even "the responsibility and expense of superintending our government." There is abundant reason in these disclosures for the fervid congratulations of the Secretary. It is the first time that such a piece of flattery has ever been bestowed by a British Parliament upon an American minister for such aid to British policy in its struggle against American, and we hope it will be the last.

We charge it against the TwentyNinth Congress that, with a conviction on the part of several of its members of the unsoundness of the free trade principle, with a knowledge, on the part of many more, that it was contrary to the interest and wishes of their constituents, and, on the part of all, that the policy was both new and, to say the least of it, hazardous to the country, they gave their support to this British system in contradistinction to our American system, and that, in this act, they have struck a disastrous blow at the comfort and prosperity of a large mass of the people.

We hasten to a conclusion. In what we have already written, we have briefly

noticed the chief topics upon which the country arraigns the Twenty-Ninth Congress. We have passed over the absurd rhodomontades of the Oregon debate, and many subjects of minor import which concern the morals and decorum of the Halls of Legislation, and have brought into view only the War, the Tariff, and the Sub-Treasury, as the special questions by which the same of this Congress, in good or evil report, is likely to be determined. In regard to these, we have no language but that of censure. But there are-and we take pleasure in adverting to them—there are incidents belonging to the proceedings of this Congress which entitle it to commendation. It has done an act of justice in the French Spoliation bill, for which it deserves the thanks, not of the claimants only, but of every citizen who respects the integrity of the nation. We commend this Congress for the spirit with which it has shaken off the trammels of old party discipline in the question of the Internal Improvements. We are not disposed to scrutinize the ingenuity with which the River and Harbor bills were reconciled to the rescripts of Gen. Jackson, nor to do more than congratulate Mr. Calhoun for his happy and timely discovery of the Mediterranean Seas, through which he has found a safe passage for the Constitution in its voyage to the Western Rivers: we are too much gratified at these retrogrades towards the old and approved Whig doctrines, and too much pleased with the prospect they open of future good to the country, to allow ourselves to call up invidious recollections or comment upon the mode in which the change has been produced. We applaud the TwentyNinth Congress for these, and could wish it had been thus in all things. The veto of Mr. Polk has cropped these honors in the moment of their ripening, and it is with no small gratification we perceive signs of growing displeasure against this fearful prerogative of the Executive in quarters where it is likely to be effective. We rejoice that this is one item in the bead-roll of grievances which the people are reckoning amongst the motives that are every day growing more cogent to place the Whigs in power.

JOHN P. KENNEDY.

HAVING designed to present to the public, occasionally, the features of some one of our distinguished Representatives, as well as of our Senators, or eminent national characters deceased, we have chosen to commence with a gentlemen, whose withdrawal (temporary we hope) from politics, has left him for a time in the quite of private life.

The services of Mr. Kennedy to the public, in both a literary and political capacity, have been great enough to give occasion for an extended notice. We must content ourselves, however, with presenting a few scattered facts in his life, from the want of more ample materials. MR. KENNEDY'S father emigrated from the north of Ireland, and settled in Baltimore, where he became an active and prosperous Merchant. He married a daughter of Philip Pendleton, of Berkley County, Virginia. From this union there were four sons, of whom John was the oldest. He was born in Baltimore, 25th of October, 1795, and was educated at the Baltimore College, where he was graduated in 1812.

In 1814 he served as a volunteer-a private soldier in the ranks at the battles of Bladensburg and North Point.

In 1816 he was admitted to the Baltimore Bar, and began a successful practice in that city.

In 1818 he, in conjunction with his highly accomplished friend, Peter Hoffman Cruse, published in Baltimore a little work in 2 vols. called The Red Book. It appeared in numbers, at intervals of about a fortnight, and was of a playful, satirical character. The book, though of an ephemeral nature, excited a good deal of attention.

In 1820 Mr. Kennedy was elected to the Legislature of Maryland, as a delegate from the city of Baltimore, and was re-elected in 1821 and 1822.

we will proceed to enumerate his literary productions.

In 1832, he published Horse Shoe Robinson, the first idea of which he received from an accidental acquaintance with the Hero of it, whom he met in the Pendleton District of South Carolina in 1818, and from whom he received some interesting particulars of his own participation in the war of the Revolution, which were faithfully introduced into the story. This work of fiction was perhaps as extensively read as any one produced among us, with the exception of two or three of Mr. Cooper's.

In 1838, he produced Rob of the Bowl, a story intended to illustrate some portion of the early history of Maryland. In particular the wild, reckless character and stern and bloody career of the Buccaneers of the Gulf "The Brothers of the Bloody Coast"-was vividly set forth in this fiction, one of their leaders with his piratical crew being introduced as cruising along the shores of Maryland.

In 1840, he wrote and published Quodlibet, a political satire written during the Presidential canvass of that year, and having special reference to the scenes and topics of that contest.

Mr. Kennedy, besides these more extended writings, has delivered many public addresses upon invitations from various Societies; among them, In 1834, One before the Horticultural Society of Maryland. "1835, A discourse on the Life and character of William Wirt; delivered at the request of the Baltimore Bar.

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In 1830, Mr. Kennedy first became an author, publishing Swallow Barn in the course of that year. This book was designed to be a picture of the manners, customs and peculiarities of Eastern Virginia. The narrative was pleasantly drawn up, and obtained for the young Author a gratifying reputation. Leaving "1845, out of view for the present his political occupations in the interval succeeding,

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The Annual Address before the American Institute of New York.

Address before the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of the University of Maryland; in which he had been appointed Professor of History.

Address delivered at the consecration of Green Mount Cemetry, near Baltimore. Sundry Lectures on various subjects.

Address before the Maryland Historical Society on the Life and character of Geo. Calvert.

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