“Simply to detect certain knaves, and save certain fools. The knaves have ruined me, and I make no lamentations; but there are others in their clutches still, quite as ignorant as myself, who may be saved before they are stripped entirely. The object is not a bad one; for the rest, trust to me. I mean no harm; a little mischief only; and, at most, a tweak of one proboscis or more. There's risk, of a certainty, as there is in sucking an egg; but you are a man! Not like that d—d milksop, who gives up his friend as soon as he gets poor, and proffers him a sermon by way of telling him—precious information, truly—that he's in a fair way to the devil. The toss of a copper for such friendship.”
The humor of Kingsley tallied somewhat with my own. It had in it a spice of recklessness which pleased me. Perhaps, too, it tended somewhat to relieve and qualify the intenseness of that excitement in my brain, which sometimes rose to such a pitch as led me to apprehend madness. That I was a monomaniac has been admitted, perhaps not a moment too soon for the author's candor. The sagacity of the reader made him independent of the admission.
“Your beggar,” said he, somewhat abruptly, “has the only true feeling of independence. Absolutely, I never knew till now what it was to be thoroughly indifferent to what might come to-morrow. I positively care for nothing. I am the first prince Sans Souci. That shall be my title when I get among the Cumanches. I will have a code of laws and constitution to suit my particular humor, and my chief penalties shall be inflicted upon your fellows who grunt. A sigh shall incur a week's solitary confinement; a sour look, pillory; and for a groan, the hypochondriac shall lose his head! My prime minister shall be the fellow who can longest use his tongue without losing his temper; and the man who can laugh and jest shall always have his plate at my table. Good-humored people shall have peculiar privileges. It shall be a certificate in one's favor, entitling him to so many acres, that he takes the world kindly. Such a man shall have two wives, provided he can keep them peacefully in the same house. His daughters shall have dowries from government. The prince of Sans Souci will himself provide for them.”
I made some answer, half jest, half earnest, in a mood of mocking bitterness, which, perhaps, more truly accorded with the temper of both of us. He did not perceive the bitterness, however.
“You jest, but mine is not altogether jest. Half-serious glimpses of what I tell you float certainly before my eyes. Such things may happen yet, and the southwest is the world in which you are yet to see many wondrous things. The time must come when Texas shall stretch to Mexico. These miserable slaves and reptiles—mongrel Spaniards and mongrel Indians—can not very long bedevil that great country. It must fall into other hands. It must be ours; and who, when that time comes, will carry into the field more thorough claims than mine. Master of myself, fearing nothing, caring for nothing; with a gallant steed that knows my voice, and answers with whinny and pricked ears to my encouragement; with a rifle that can clip a Mexican—dollar or man—at a hundred yards, and a heart that can defy the devil over his own dish, and with but one spoon between us—and who so likely to win his principality as myself? Look to see it, Clifford, I shall be a prince in Mexico; and when you hear of the prince Sans Souci be assured you know the man. Seek me then, and ask what you will. You have CARTE BLANCHE from this moment.”
“I shall certainly keep it in mind, prince.”
“Do so: laugh as you please; it is only becoming that you should laugh in the presence of Sans Souci; but do not laugh in token of irreverence. You must not be too skeptical. It does not follow because I am a dare-devil that I am a thoughtless one. I have been so, perhaps, but from this moment I go to work! I shall be fettered by fortune no longer. Thank Heaven, that is now done—gone—lost; I am free from its incumbrance! I feel myself a prince, indeed; a man, every inch of me. This night I devote as a fitting finish to my old lifeless existence.
“Hear me!” he continued; “you laugh again, Clifford—very good! Laugh on, but hear me. You shall hear more of me in time to come. I fancy I shall be a fellow of considerable importance, not in Texas simply, or in Mexico, but here—here in your own self-opinionated United States. Suppose a few things, and go along with me while I speak them. That Texas must stretch to Mexico I hold to be certain. A very few years will do that. It needs only thirty thousand more men from our southern and southwestern States, and the brave old English tongue shall arouse the best echoes in the city of Montezuma! That done, and floods of people pour in from all quarters. It needs nothing but a feeling of security and peace—a conviction that property will be tolerably safe, under a tolerably stable government—in other words, an Anglo-Saxon government—to tempt millions of discontented emigrants from all quarters of the world. Will this result have no results of its own, think you? Will the immense resources of Mexico and Texas, represented, as they then will be, by a stern, pressing, performing people, have no effect upon these states of yours? They will have the greatest; nay, they will become essential to balance your own federal weight, and keep you all in equilibrio. For look you, the first hubbub with Great Britain gives you Canada, at the expense of some of your coast-towns, a few millions of treasure, and the loss of fifty thousand men. A bad exchange for the south; for Canada will make six ponderous states, the policy and character of which will be New England all over. To balance this you will have your Florida territory, {Footnote: Florida, since admitted, but unhappily, as a single state.} of which two feeble states may be made. Not enough for your purposes. But the same war with England will render it necessary that your fleet should take possession of Cuba; which, after a civil apology to Spain for taking such a liberty with her possessions, and, perhaps, a few million by way of hush money, you carve into two more states, and, in this manner, try to bolster up your federal relations. How many of her West India islands Great Britain will be able to keep after such a war, is another problem, the solution of which will depend upon the relative strength of fleets and success of seamanship. These islands, which should of right be ours, and without which we can never be sure against any maritime power so great and so arrogant as England, once conquered by our arms, find their natural, moral, and social affinities in the southern states entirely; and, so far, contribute to strengthen you in your congressional conflicts. But these are not enough, for the simple reason that the population of states, purely agricultural, never makes that progress which is made in this respect by a commercial and manufacturing people. With the command of the gulf, the possession of an independent fleet by the Texans, the political characteristics of the states of Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, must undergo certain marked changes, which can only be neutralized by the adoption, on the part of these states, of a new policy corresponding with their change of interests. How far the cultivation of cotton by Texas will lead to its abandonment in Carolina and Georgia, is a question which the next ten years must solve. That they will be compelled to abandon it is inevitable, unless they can succeed in raising the article at six cents; a probability which no cotton-planter in either of these states will be willing to contemplate now for an instant. Meanwhile, Texas is spreading herself right and left. She conquers the Cumanches, subdues the native mongrel Mexicans. Her Hoestons and Lamars are succeeded by other and abler men, under whose control the evils of government, which followed the sway of such small animals as the Guerreros, and the Bolivars, the Bustamentes, and Sant' Annas, are very soon eradicated; and the country, the noblest that God ever gave to man in the hands of men, becomes a country!—a great and glorious country—stretching from the gulf to the Pacific, and providing the natural balance, which, in a few years, the southern state of this Union will inevitably need, by which alone your great confederacy will be kept together. You see, therefore, why I speed to Texas. Should I not, with my philosophy, my horse and my rifle—not to speak of stout heart and hand—reasonably aspire to the principality of Sans Souci? Laugh, if you please, but be not irreverent. You shall have carte blanche then if you will have a becoming faith now, on the word of a prince. I say it, It is written—Sans Souci.” {Footnote: All these speculations were written in 1840-'41. I need not remark upon those which have since been verified.}
“Altissimo, excellentissimo, serenissimo!”
“Bravissimo, you improve; you will make a courtier—but mum now about my projects. We must suppress our dignities here. We are at the entrance of our hell!”