the stories of the refugees, impressively told in her own native tongue.
To reinstate the church, and to oppose the strong Catholicism of a Latin
monarchy to the Protestant influence of the Northern republic, seemed to
her the most attractive aspect of the projected scheme.

The struggle that had been carried on for so many years in Mexico with
varying vicissitudes was not purely one of partizan interest based upon
a different view of political government: it was the struggle of the
spirit of the nineteenth century against the survival of Spanish
medievalism; it was the contest of American republicanism against the
old order of things, religious and social as well as political; of
progressive liberalism against conservatism and reaction.

The French intervention as planned by Napoleon III was, therefore, a
glaring paradox, and betrays his absolute ignorance of the conditions
with which he was undertaking to cope. As a matter of fact, the party
upon whose support he relied for the purpose of developing the natural
resources of Mexico, and of bringing that country into line with
European intellectual and industrial progress, was pledged by all its
traditions to moral and political retrogression.

The enterprise, undertaken under these conditions, bore in itself such
elements of failure that nothing save the force of arms and a vast
expenditure of life and money could, even for a time, make it a success.
Unless the French assumed direct and absolute control of Mexican affairs
irrespective of party--and this contingency was specifically set aside
by the most solemn declarations--they must sooner or later come into
direct antagonism with allies who were pledged to the most benighted
form of clericalism, and into real, though perhaps unconscious, sympathy
with their opponents who stood arrayed upon the side of progress.