the sun, is so purely, so prodigally wasteful as war. It is killing, burning, exploding, consuming, wasting, cheating, in all its processes. It has no producing power. If called, in company with other trades and guilds to show the results of his labors, the warrior can only point to the smoking battle-field, to the shattered city, to the trampled fields, to dead and dying.men and horses, to broken weapons and dismounted batteries, as the most consummate material trophies of his skill. His implements till no soil but "the dark and bloody ground," and his arm gathers no harvest but the harvest of death. His messengers are missiles of destruction, and his arm rests when he has done his weary day's work on a pyramid of human skulls. "Thrifty, unwearied Nature, ever out of our great waste educing some little profit of her own," may "shroudin the gore and carnage," and "next year the Marchfeld will be green, nay greener;" but for every ear of wheat that waves over the unnatural field, some tear was shed, some heart was broken, some life was lost. The productiveness of war would furnish a new chapter for Smith or Say on the wealth of nations and the laws of political economy.

From the enormous outgoes of other wars we readily draw the expectation, that our frugal republican habits have suddenly launched out into the most spendthrift ways in our recent contest. The Florida war of six years with a handful of naked Seminoles cost $42,000,000. The French war with Algiers has for sixteen years cost $20,000,000, annually, making a grand total of $320,000,000. The Affghan war, short as it was, cost Great Britain $65,000,000. For with all their inventions men have not yet discovered how to wage a cheap war. They invent labor-saving and ingenious machinery for every other work, but the horrid work of battle requires to be done by the practised hand and the steady eye of an intelligent agent. Hence

with all the increased means of destruction, man has still in a great measure to do the bloody drudgery himself, and work his own hellish engines; he cannot drag the reluctant steam or electricity into his service to tend his cannon, or propel the serried array of his lances. General Taylor is thought to have given a heroic command to his troops in his General Orders on the day preceding the battle of Palo Alto in saying, "he wishes to enjoin upon the battalions of Infantry that their main dependence must be in the bayonet;" but it shows the manual labor, so to speak, of a battle, and the impossibility, as in the arts of peace, of shifting off a large amount of the toil upon the spontaneous forces of nature. It requires men to kill men by the hundreds and thousands. The business cannot be done by machinery.

The time of reckoning the cost of the Mexican war has not yet come. The most that can be done now is to make some general estimates from what is known and authenticated to what is unknown, and to what never will be known. But from documentary statements we learn that this war has not proved an exception to the general rule. It has consumed millions upon millions of American, and what to the philanthropist and Christian will be deeply, if not equally deplorable, millions upon millions of Mexican property. The capital that the two chief young republics of the earth could ill afford to lose, has been squandered. Heavy debts that will require years for their disbursement have been contracted. The energies of many thousand men in both countries have been diverted from industrial and productive occupations. Many have taken up the profession of arms, and will not return again to the pursuits of peace, but will seek to find, in some "Buffalo Hunt on the Rio Grande," or some "Fox Hunt in Canada," the chosen theatre of their adventures.

The cost of the war to Mexico has probably on the whole

been as great as it has been to the United States.* For though her troops did not leave their own soil, nor require to be transported thousands of miles by land and water, yet she had three or four times as many in the field, and the killed and wounded men, cut off in the prime of life from all occupations, were far more numerous. The United States in most cases honorably paid the inhabitants where the country was conquered for all the articles consumed by the troops, but Mexico lost an immense sum by the blockade of every port in the Gulf and on the Pacific, the diversion of her maritime revenues into the coffers of her enemy, and the heavy military contributions that were levied upon the respective provinces, invaded both by General Taylor and General Scott, and by the commodores on the several naval stations. She also lost an incalculable amount of public stores, and the material of war of every description. So far as conquest was concerned and the fruits of conquest, all the gain was on the part of the United States, and all the loss on the part of her helpless victim.†

*Three causes have been mentioned by some periodical writer, why the United States have suffered less pecuniary loss in this war, than nations ordinarily do in such contests; 1. The distance of the active warfare from our own soil. 2. The perfect security and freedom of our commerce. 3. The influx for a time of foreign specie, owing to the famine in Europe.—Advocate of Peace, March and April, 1848, pp. 176-178.

The Quarter Master General reports, Nov. 24, 1847, the receipt of $46,960,82 captured in Mexico, or accruing from customs.

The Secretary of the Navy reports, Nov. 17, 1847, the collection by officers of the United States of $530,810,46 in the four cities of Vera Cruz, Tampico, Matamoras, and Saltillo, as military contributions levied upon them.

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The General Orders of Scott, dated Mexico, Dec. 31, 1847, assessed $3,046,568, on the several States of Mexico, according to their ability, being quadruple of the direct taxes paid by the several States to their Federal Government in the year 1843 or 1844." It was not, however, nearly all collected.

The actual destruction of private and public property must necessarily have been immense in the path of the invading armies, and at the sieges of Monterey, Vera Cruz, Puebla, Atlixco, and Mexico, to say nothing of the bombardment of other places, Tuspan, Tobasco, and Huamantla. It will let us into the secrets of war-making a little to read such as the following items of intelligence taken at hazard. Edwards, in his sketch, entitled "Doniphan's Campaign,” pp. 153, 154, writes, "at this same Ceralvo we arrived on the twenty-ninth. It is one of the few places which Taylor did not destroy along the road:-he had been compelled to lay waste most of the ranchos and small towns, on account of their affording concealment to parties of guerillas who would occasionally rob the waggon trains." General Taylor in a letter to the War Department, dated Monterey, Sept. 28, 1846, says, "The command left by Colonel Harney at the Presidio crossing, having been fired upon by the Mexicans with the loss of one killed and two wounded, set fire to the public stores they were left to protect, and retreated to San Antonio." The bombardment of Vera Cruz was computed to have destroyed between one and two millions of property. * These facts may serve to show the losses which probably ensued to a

The Secretary of War reports, Dec 1, 1848, that the amount of "contributions, and avails of captured property" cannot at that time be fully and accurately ascertained, but $3,844,373,77 were reported as received, and more was expected from New Mexico and California. - 30th Congress, 2nd Session, House of Representatives. Ex. Doc. 1, p. 80.

An officer, on board the United States' man-of-war Independence, wrote under date of April 15, 1848, Mazatlan, that "we have collected or secured at the Custom House here duties to the amount of $150,000."

*It was computed by some that the bombardment of Vera Cruz destroyed property to the amount of $3,000,000; and Mexican authorities asserted an equal loss at the capital, but it was no doubt exaggerated.

greater or less extent at every point, touched or occupied by the American arms. When to these considerations we add

the loss of part of her provinces of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, Chihuahua, and the whole of New Mexico, and Upper California, we shall stand justified in the opinion that notwithstanding what she has received in indemnity, viz. the relinquishment of the claims, and the payment of $15,000,000, as a make-peace, the loss to Mexico has been fully equal to that of the United States.

We proceed to state what that is, according to the most reliable documents and estimates; premising, however, that many years must pass, before any one can say what the expenses are in full; since all the incidentals, - as pensions, bounties, and private claims,—of neither the Florida war, nor that of 1812, nor even that of the American Revolution, have as yet been ascertained and paid. The details, too, in official documents, are so difficult to analyze and understand, that none but an accomplished financier can do the subject full justice. Even Mr. Gallatin himself, one of the ablest and most experienced of living men in his day, in this department of affairs, in his Treatise of 1848, entitled "War Expenses," is obliged, sometimes, to confess himself at fault.

War was declared by the President of the United States, May 13, 1846, and peace was ratified by the Mexican Congress, May 25, 1848. The two nations were, therefore, embroiled with each other about two years. The fiscal year of the United States ends June 30th, and the two years of the war may be regarded as covering, in some measure, two fiscal years. The expenses of the war extended, however, materially into the fiscal year beginning June 30, 1848, and ending June 30, 1849.