Page:Life in Mexico vol 2.djvu/206

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
186
CONGRATULATION.

gratitude; that your Excellency will receive my noble acknowledgments, and my companions the assurance that every time I put it on I shall remember the names of all and each of them who accompanied me on the 15th of July of 1840, together with the pleasure that to them I owe so great a mark of respect."

Amongst the congratulations given to the President, the following "congratulation from His Excellency General Valencia to His Excellency the President, on his receiving the decoration of the cross of honor from Congress," is very remarkable. "God said, the first day of the creation of the world, when it was in a state of chaos, 'Let there be light, and there was light.' And God saw his work and pronounced it good! With how much more reason ought the garrison of Mexico to do so every day in which, by any action, the 15th of July of 1840 is celebrated; in which, by their strength and heroic valor, that passage of Genesis was politically repeated in this capital. Society arose in chaos. Its President is taken. Authorities no longer exist, and those who ought to save them are converted into their oppressors. 'God said let there be light, and there was light!' The honorable troops re-united in the citadel, in the midst of chaos, said, 'let order be reëstablished, let the supreme magistrate be set at liberty, and let things resume their proper march.' Order was rëestablished, your Excellency was set free, and the political body followed the regular path, without which no society exists. So it is that those worthy troops who thus said, thus undertook, and