Page:The rise and fall of the Emperor Maximilian.djvu/259

 in the preceding statement. There still remains the design imputed to the marshal of having wished to deliver over secretly to Porfirio the arms, the fortified places of the empire, as well as the emperor and his generals; but this calumny will recoil upon the head of its author, whoever he may be.

The marshal never saw General Porfirio after the time when he took him prisoner at Oajaca with his whole army. It will be well to recollect that this chief was given up by the French to the Austrians by Maximilian's order, and escaped from the hands of the Austro-Belgian Legion. Our headquarters, as documents will soon show, subsequently negotiated an exchange of prisoners with this Mexican chief, whose honour was equal to his humanity; but this was all openly done at a distance from head-quarters through the French officers commanding at Tehuacan and Puebla. Porfirio, who must be honoured for the way in which he energetically claimed the rights of his country, must have yielded to perfidious advice or to a culpable feeling which he cannot fail to disclaim, when he wrote this letter of which Mr. Seward himself was the originator and sender in order to serve as a documentary support to his foreign policy. This document—inserted in the 'Yellow Book'—aimed to show that he had caused the American representative to act in favour of the 'Monroe doctrine,' and also to calm down the ill-humour of the Congress, which was irritated at the rebuff given to the mission of its two envoys. There is no mistake about it: the Mexican question has been for the last five years a means of gaining popularity for the cabinet of the United States, and an instrument it has been able to handle with as much boldness as skill in order to silence the