Page:The rise and fall of the Emperor Maximilian.djvu/77

Rh a scheme for the reorganisation of the Mexican army. The documents which your excellency has from time to time forwarded to me have proved most useful in the formation of a code of military laws, which I signed on January 26 of this year.

I thank your excellency for the devoted co-operation which you have afforded me in this matter, and for the fresh services which you have thereby rendered to the country.

The commission, and sub-commissions, of which you were the president, will be dissolved, and the recently reorganised ministry of war, by means of the regulations put in force, will be able to deal with the questions which have not yet been settled. 2em

Henceforth, the minister of war had to deal personally with the questions which remained to be decided. Maximilian, who had fancied that his own council were capable of directing the affairs which the ministers had endeavoured to get into their own hands with the sole desire of diminishing the French authority, was not long ere he discovered that disorder was again beginning to creep into the machinery of the military service. Important operations even were endangered by this confusion. Contingents which had been appointed to march on Oajaca had not even left their quarters at Mexico.

It must be here borne in mind that Marshal Bazaine, by an energetic siege, had just shut up the Juarist general Porfirio Diaz in the town of Oajaca, and had forced him to capitulate with the whole of his army. This liberal chief, who had valiantly upheld his cause sword in hand, had a right to be treated as a prisoner of war, and with all the respect due to the vanquished. Marshal Forey, in asserting in the French senate that he deserved to be shot, made a mistake; for Porfirio Diaz, the regular chief of a state, the capital of which it was his duty to defend,