but the collection of money due to British subjects CHAP. II and the redress of wrongs committed upon them in Mexico. The intervention of Spain, though it was mainly prompted by similar motives, was not without a suspicion of ulterior dynastic designs; while on the part of France there was a mixture of many different schemes, some of which were avowed and others were unavowable. It is not within the scope of this work to recount the scandals with which the air of Paris was filled in reference to speculations in which persons near to the Tuileries were said to be engaged, and which were understood to have exercised a powerful influence upon the conduct of the French Government in its Mexican enterprise. It is enough for us to quote the letter which the Emperor himself wrote to General Forey in the summer of 1862, to show that the expedition to Mexico was founded upon the hope that the internal troubles of the American republic would prevent its rulers from interposing a veto upon the Emperor's scheme of conquest, and that he intended nothing less than to establish an empire in Mexico which would build up a barrier to the supposed ambitious schemes of the United States and vastly increase the power and prestige of the French Empire in both hemispheres. "It is our interest," he writes, "that the republic of the United States shall be powerful and prosperous, but it is not at all to our interest that she should grasp the whole Gulf of Mexico, rule thence the Antilles as well as South America, and be the sole dispenser of the products of the New World. We see to-day by sad experience how VOL. VI.-3 CHAP. II. precarious is the faith of an industry which is forced to seek its raw material in a single market under all the vicissitudes to which that market is subject. If, on the contrary, Mexico preserves her independence and maintains the integrity of her territory, if a stable government be there established with the aid of France, we shall have restored to the Latin race on the other side of the ocean its force and its prestige; we shall have guaranteed the safety of our own and the Spanish colonies in the Antilles. We shall have established our benign influence in the center of America, and this influence, while creating immense outlets for our commerce, will produce the raw material which is indispensable to our industry. Mexico thus regenerated will always be favorable to us, not only from gratitude, but also because her interests will be identical with our own, and because she will find support in the good will of European powers." If this scheme of the Emperor's, as outlined in his own words, seems vague and visionary, it is on that account all the more characteristic of its author. Few of his schemes could bear the test of reality; his most ambitious plans were of the stuff that dreams are made of; and his purposes in regard to Mexico were none the less hostile to the true interests of the American republic that they were founded upon an absolute misconception of facts and faded away in logical and predestined disappointment and discredit.1 1 For some years before the war began the mind of the Emperor was very much occupied in regard to this question of planting the empire in Mexico. Profes sor Schele de Vere, in an account of a conversation with Napoleon III. at Biarritz in 1860, refers to the "peculiar and undisguised eagerness with which he dis ་ Sept. 30, 1861. In the correspondence of Earl Russell with Lord CHAP. II. Cowley, the British Minister in Paris, it is evident that he was aware of some of the difficulties in the way of a tripartite joint intervention. He referred to the dislike and apprehension which the advent of Spanish troops would excite in Mexico on the part of the Liberals and of the odium of British interference on the part of the Church faction; but he exhibited a singular ignorance of the state of feeling in the South when he spoke of the "universal alarm which would be excited both in the United States and the Southern States at the contemplation of European interference in the domestic quarrels of an American independent republic." The Southern leaders would have hailed with joy the annexation of half a dozen Spanish-American republics by any European power which would have assisted them in their furious family quarrel, yet Lord Russell seriously thought the menace of the independence of Mexico on the part of European powers would have a tendency to bring about a cussed the Mexican question. He knew the very number of guns on the Morro, the sums the United States had spent on the fortifications in Florida, the exports and imports of Galveston and Matamoras, in short, everything which well-informed local agents could have reported to an experienced statesman eager for information. He examined me again on Texas and its population, the disposition of the French residents, the tendencies of the German colonists, the feeling on the Mexican frontier. Twice, I remember well, he repeated 'La Louisiane, n'est ce pas qu'elle est Française au fond?' At last he turned to the Schele de Vere to Benjamin, Jan. 23, 1863. MS. Confed erate Archives. |