cultivation of its fertile lands, and of the arts and of commerce. In this
state-colonization law--the promises to protect the persons and property
of the colonists, which had been made in the two preceding national
colonization laws, were renewed and confirmed. We have now before us the
invitations and guarantees under which the colonists immigrated to Texas.
Let us examine into the manner in which these conditions have been complied
with, and these flattering promises fulfilled. The donation of 4,444 acres
sounds largely at a distance. Considering, however, all the circumstances,
the difficulties of taking possession, &c. it will not be deemed an
entire gratuity or magnificent bounty. If these lands had been previously
pioneered by the enterprise of the Mexican government, and freed from the
insecurities which beset a wilderness, trod only by savages--if they had
have been situated in the heart of an inhabited region, and accessible
to the comforts and necessaries of life--if the government had have been
deriving any actual revenue, and if it could have realised a capital
from the sale of them--then we admit that the donation would have been
unexampled in the history of individual or national liberality. But how
lamentably different from all thus was the real state of the case.

The lands granted were in the occupancy of savages and situated in a
wilderness, of which the government had never taken possession, and of
which it could not with its own citizens ever have taken possession. They
were not sufficiently explored to obtain that knowledge of their character
and situation necessary to a sale of them. They were shut out from all
commercial intercourse with the rest of the world, and inaccessible to
the commonest comforts of life; nor were they brought into possession and
cultivation by the colonists without much toil and privation, and patience
and enterprise, and suffering and blood, and loss of lives from Indian
hostilities, and other causes. Under the smiles of a benignant heaven,
however, the untiring perseverance of the colonists triumphed over all