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Most familiar among the group of English speaking foreigners in the courtyard during my stay was General Grant, who has lent a part of his great fame to the development of the resources of a much suffering people. Did he ever reflect in these historic halls, one wondered, on the career of the Emperor Iturbide?

Had all the talk on Caesarism in the Press ever put the idea the least bit in his head? Rumors, mischievous to the cause of amity, ran at the very time that it was in Mexico, not the United States, that he proposed to found his empire. Certainly it would be difficult to imagine so unmelodramatic a figure in the robes and stars and crosses in which Iturbide has arrayed himself, after the pattern of Napoleon the Great, in his portrait at the National Palace.

Iturbide wrote in his memoirs—which, as a display of egotism, are highly interesting reading—one sagacious sentence. "Devotees of theories," he says, "are apt to forget that in the moral as in the physical order only a gradual progress can be expected."