Besides, our commissioners to Mexico had been instructed that--
Neither the President nor the Senate of the United States can ever
consent to ratify any treaty containing the tenth article of the treaty
of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in favor of grantees of land in Texas or
elsewhere.
And again:
Should the Mexican Government persist in retaining this article, then
all prospect of immediate peace is ended; and of this you may give
them an absolute assurance.
On this point the language of the protocol is free from ambiguity, but
if it were otherwise is there any individual American or Mexican who
would place such a construction upon it as to convert it into a vain
attempt to revive this article, which had been so often and so solemnly
condemned? Surely no person could for one moment suppose that either the
commissioners of the United States or the Mexican minister for foreign
affairs ever entertained the purpose of thus setting at naught the
deliberate decision of the President and Senate, which had been
communicated to the Mexican Government with the assurance that their
abandonment of this obnoxious article was essential to the restoration
of peace.
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