Page:Vol 6 History of Mexico by H H Bancroft.djvu/170

150 Liberal-minded by nature, Maximilian could not well sympathize with the conservatives; and he felt less and less inclined to yield to the French, chafing under his dependence upon them till the feeling broke out in actual hostility. This feeling was shared by a number with republican tendencies, yet consenting to an empire — men who may be termed moderate liberals, and who were gaining favor with the emperor.

He was ready to go even further in his effort to reach the people, as the foundation of his empire, and he began by admitting into the cabinet known republicans, like the able lawyer and scholar José Fernando Ramirez, and Juan Peza, as colleagues of the two conservative ministers Leon and Gonzalez de la Vega, and the moderate liberals Escudero y Echánove and Robles Pezuela — a composition soon further colored by substituting the liberal Cortés y Esparza for Vega, and strengthened by the appointment of prefects and other officials of similar tendencies.

The usefulness of these men might have been greatly increased had they not been placed in a certain humiliating dependence on a private cabinet of polyglot character, under the direction of Félix Eloin, a Belgian mining engineer, who acquired a