perhaps, just how General Moreno owned all this land, and the
question might not be easy to answer. It was not and could not be
answered to the satisfaction of the United States Land
Commission, which, after the surrender of California, undertook to
sift and adjust Mexican land titles; and that was the way it had
come about that the Senora Moreno now called herself a poor
woman. Tract after tract, her lands had been taken away from her;
it looked for a time as if nothing would be left. Every one of the
claims based on deeds of gift from Governor Pio Fico, her
husband's most intimate friend, was disallowed. They all went by
the board in one batch, and took away from the Senora in a day the
greater part of her best pasture-lands. They were lands which had
belonged to the Bonaventura Mission, and lay along the coast at
the mouth of the valley down which the little stream which ran
past her house went to the sea; and it had been a great pride and
delight to the Senora, when she was young, to ride that forty miles
by her husband's side, all the way on their own lands, straight from
their house to their own strip of shore. No wonder she believed the
Americans thieves, and spoke of them always as hounds. The
people of the United States have never in the least realized that the
taking possession of California was not only a conquering of
Mexico, but a conquering of California as well; that the real
bitterness of the surrender was not so much to the empire which
gave up the country, as to the country itself which was given up.
Provinces passed back and forth in that way, helpless in the hands
of great powers, have all the ignominy and humiliation of defeat,
with none of the dignities or compensations of the transaction.

Mexico saved much by her treaty, spite of having to acknowledge
herself beaten; but California lost all. Words cannot tell the sting