Material Mexico [pp. 319-329]

] MA TERIAL MEXICO.
It is true that Maximilian was not the designer of his own
ruin. It is unquestioned that he was anxious to win the goodwill of the Mexican people, and that it would have been the
highest happiness to-him and his amiable wife to have ruled
Mexico for her own good. The earth is not yet ready to dispense with the luxuries of royalty, and large aggregations of the
human race are persuaded that it is wise to pay for the glitter
and mockery of thrones. And it may be true that a monarchy
in Mexico, constitutional and conservative, maintained with just
firmness, would have afforded that tranquillity essential to national development. But experience, human nature, and the
reconsolidation of the United States were all opposed to Maximilian-experience, because there is no instance of genuine or
enduring national development under a ruler representing political and industrial interests opposed to those of the people he
tried to rule; human nature, because his own blind and deceitful
course rendered it certain that he should fail; and the reconsolidation of the United States, because the spirit of the American
people, calm after the conflict and purged by the effacement of
slavery from their own soil, would not suffer Old-World despotism to repeat in our own day the story of earlier ages.
Maximilian and the still more deeply and deservedly pitied
Carlotta have been the cause of much denunciation of the Mexican people. To refuse sympathy to Louis Napoleon's hapless
and beautiful victim, whose reason toppled after her heart was
broken, is surely beyond human power. The sternest heart
cannot tread unmoved the lonely cypress paths of Chapultepec
where her sad feet sought to escape the troop of sorrows that
encompassed her husband. Toussaint l'Ouverture, the emancipator, dragged from his farm in Hayti by the treachery of the
great Napoleon and starved to death in the dungeon of Joux on
the bleak and snowy Jura, is the companion-picture for the demented daughter of the king of the Belgians, widowed and
crazed by the last of the Napoleons. Maximilian had the misfortune to follow too closely the example of his patron. His
assumption of the crown of Mexico was made contingent upon
a popular vote of approval; but the assembly of reactionaries
who went through that ceremony for him no more represented
the people of Mexico than the people of any other land. The
pretext served its purpose; but he speedily freed himself from
those who had been the aiders of his fortunes. The spoliation
of the church by the republic, ruthless and undiscriminating,
had created a conservative party, not blameless altogether, but
1887.]
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