306 



HIS CHARACTER AND SERVICES. 



solving all their mysteries. His temper was not calculated for the 

 liberal debates of a free senate. He was better fitted to discipline 

 an army than to guide a nation. Educated in a school in which 

 subordination is a necessity, and where unquestioning obedience is 

 exacted, he was unable to appreciate the rights of deliberative as- 

 semblies. He felt, perhaps, that, in the disorganized condition of 

 his country, it was needful to control the people by force in order 

 to save the remnant of civilization from complete anarchy. But he 

 wanted conciliatory manners to seduce the congress into obedience 

 to his behests, — and he therefore unfortunately and unwisely 

 played the military despot when he should have acted the part of a 

 quiet diplomatist. Finding himself, in two years, emperor of 

 Mexico, after being, at the commencement of that period, nothing 

 more than commander of a regiment, it may be pardoned if he was 

 bewildered by the rapidity of his rise, and if the air he breathed in 

 his extraordinary ascent was too etherial for a man of so excitable 

 a temperament. 



In every aspect of his character, we must regard him as one al- 

 together inadequate to shape the destiny of a nation emerging from 

 the blood and smoke of two revolutions, — a nation whose political 

 tendencies towards absolute freedom, were at that time, naturally, 

 the positive reverse of his own. 



Death sealed the lips of men who might have clamored for him 

 in the course of a few years, when the insubordinate spirit that was 

 soon manifested needed as bold an arm as that of Iturbide, in his 

 best days, to check or guide it. Public opinion was decidedly op- 

 posed to his sudden and cruel slaughter. Mexicans candidly ac- 

 knowledged that their country's independence was owing to him ; 

 and whilst they admitted that Garza's zeal for the emperor's exe- 

 cution might have been lawful, they believed that revenge for 

 his former disgrace, rather than patriotism, induced the rash and 

 ruthless soldier to hasten the death of the noble victim whom for- 

 tune had thrown in his lonely path. 



