Page:The rise and fall of the Emperor Maximilian.djvu/49

 of parties, every man that was willing would be called upon to give his advice freely as to public matters. The clergy, on the other hand, had announced that Maximilian had engaged with the pope to reinstate them in their mortmain property, and had thus given alarm to the numerous holders, both Mexicans and foreigners, of the realty which had been sold. The Archbishop of Mexico, a member of the council of regency, contributed no little by his intrigues and restless character to give authority to these unhappy reports.

The religious question was the real knotty point in Mexico, which, for six years past, had arrayed the inhabitants in arms one against the other. The ecclesiastical property was so considerable that it represented a value of about a thousand million of francs. This immense capital belonged legitimately in part to the church; but undue means and abuses of authority had had much to do with this accumulation of wealth so contrary to the ideas of self-denial. Juarez's government, whilst obeying the spirit of progress which rejects mortmain endowments, had fallen into the grave error of not acting with sufficient moderation—of not leaving for the benevolent, charitable, and educational institutions those resources which were requisite for their maintenance—of stripping the church of all the pomps of worship, and of not providing, from the very outset, by means of a concordat, for the proper position of the clergy; besides all this, the sales of the ecclesiastical lands had been conducted in a scandalous manner, and it was important both for the interests of the treasury and for the dignity of the state that a revision of the contracts should be effected. On these grounds of conciliation, the new commander-in-chief, who wisely saw the danger there would be in attempting to