fore be regarded as by no means an improbable event, unless the Mexican Government should succeed in checking the tide of emigration, and in interposing a mass of population of a different character, between two component parts, which must have a natural tendency to combine into one.
A proposal to this effect was, I believe, made to the President in 1826, by John Dunn Hunter, whose history excited much interest in this country a few years ago.
The correctness of the account contained in his book of his origin, and early adventures, is denied in the United States, and Hunter has been denounced, by their periodical publications, as an adventurer who imposed upon the credulity of the British public, by representing himself as the hero of a romance of his own creation. To me it appears that his crime has been the boldness with which he vindicated the rights of an injured, and persecuted race, to whom he devoted his life, and in whose service he was at last sacrificed. No one can have known him, for however short a time, without being convinced that, in whatever manner his connexion with the Indians may have originated, he was a real enthusiast in their cause. Upon every other subject his language was coarse, his appearance dull, and his manner totally devoid of energy and grace; but as soon as that chord was touched, his countenance lighted up at once, his expressions became forcible and picturesque, and where words failed him, (as they some-
