Page:The Fall of Maximilan's Empire.djvu/9



INTRODUCTORY AND RETROSPECTIVE.

, with the spring of the year 1865, the United States emerged from the winter of their domestic strife, the foreign Empire founded just beyond their southern border was apparently an accomplished fact. An Austrian held the sceptre of Montezuma, and forty thousand French bayonets bristled around his throne. It is possible that during the long civil war the mass of the American people had not fully realized the importance of that remarkable usurpation; but the eyes of their statesmen in the capital had been fixed with ceaseless watchfulness on the menace implied by the intervention of a European power in the affairs of that neighboring Republic.

For a number of years, in Mexico, revolution had succeeded revolution with such dazzling Rh