Page:Mexico, picturesque, political, progressive.djvu/191

Rh the re-consolidation 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