18 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



therefore, most acceptable to the Mexican Church and its adherents ; 

 and in Maximilian of Austria they thought they had found a man 

 after their own heart. 



He was a man of elegant presence, winning manners, and of much 

 refinement and culture ; and these qualities, with undoubted personal 

 courage, contributed to give him a certain amount of personal popu- 

 larity and sympathy. But he was, nevertheless, in all matters of gov- 

 ernment, always a representative of the highest type of absolutism 

 or imperialism, and in devotion to the Catholic Church an extremist, 

 even almost to the point of fanaticism. The first of these assertions 

 finds illustration in his establishment of a court, with orders of nobil- 

 ity, decorations, and minute ceremonials ; the construction and use of 

 an absurd state carriage modeled after the style of Louis XIV 

 and still shown in the National Museum ; and worse, by the proclama- 

 tion and execution of an order (which subsequently cost Maximilian 

 his own life), that all republican officers taken prisoner in battle by 

 the imperialists should be summarily executed as bandits ; and, sec- 

 ond, by his walking barefoot, on a day of pilgrimage, all the way 

 over some two or three miles of dusty, disagreeable road, from the city 

 of Mexico to the shrine of the Virgin at Guadalupe. 



When the attitude and demand of the United States, on the termi- 

 nation of the rebellion, induced the withdrawal of the French forces 

 from Mexico, Maximilian, at the suggestion of Louis Napoleon, pre- 

 pared to abdicate ; and, in October, 1866, even commenced his journey 

 to Vera Cruz, with the intent of embarking from the country. Unfor- 

 tunately for himself, however, he was persuaded by the Church party, 

 under assurances of their ability to support him, to return to the city 

 of Mexico and resume his government. But the attempt was hopeless, 

 and culminated some six months later in his capture and execution by 

 the republican forces, and with the downfall of the " Maximilian" or 

 the " imperial " government, Juarez became the undisputed, and also, 

 to all intents and purposes, the absolute, ruler of the country. 



This portion of the more recent history of Mexico has been de- 

 tailed somewhat minutely, because the series of events embraced in 

 it led up to and culminated in an act of greater importance, than 

 anything which has happened in the country since the achievement 

 of its independence from Spanish domination. For no sooner had 

 Juarez obtained an indorsement of his authority as President, by a 

 general election, than he practically carried out with the co-operation 

 of Congress, and with an apparent spirit of vindictiveness (engen- 

 dered, it has been surmised, by the memory of the oppressions to 

 which his race had been subjected), the provisions of the Constitu- 

 tion which he had been instrumental in having adopted in 1857. The 

 entire property of the Mexican Church was at once "nationalized" (a 

 synonym for confiscation) for the use of the state. Every convent, 

 monastic institution, or religious house was closed up and devoted to 



