The first Bonaparte received his death-wound in Spain. The second may find that his coup de grace will be dealt to him from Mexico. “The Spanish ulcer and the Austrian match” were coupled by the great Napoleon as the joint causes of his fall. The last would have done him no harm had it not been for the first; but men had always rather attribute their misfortunes to the treachery of hollow friends than to their own mistakes or crimes. The dire necessity of finding employment for his armies and supplying illuminations for Paris urged him on to his doom, and drove him upon the disasters of the Peninsula and of Russia. This present Bonaparte has felt the same compulsion, and it has driven him into a complication which may well end in a catastrophe. Facts have shown him to be cunning rather than wise, crafty rather than sagacious. He caught at the chance of our rebellion, and sought to turn it to his own uses. Assuming that it must succeed, as a despot always believes in the success of the worser side, he seized the opportunity to occupy Mexico, on a preposterous pretense, for the double purpose of dazzling the French people by the spectacle of their sovereign bestowing the crown of the Montesumas on a prince of the House of Hapsburg, held virtually of him in chief, and of acquiring a part of Texas and the command of the mouth of the Mississippi, as a direct augmentation of the territories and the power of France. But things would not go according to his calculations. The United States persisted in beating their rebels. The Juarists refused to yield their claims to the government of their own country. An immense debt had to be guaranteed by the French nation, and a great army exiled to a land it hated and a service it detested, in order to prop up this mock throne with their bayonets. The whole attempt was a failure. The Mexican empire consisted of precisely as many roods of ground as French troops could occupy and French cannon command. The United States refused to recognize the creature of Bonaparte as the authentic choice of the Mexican nation, or to admit the right of a European despot to impose a monarchy on a trans-Atlantic country against the will of its inhabitants. The army growled in Mexico, the legislative body grumbled in Paris. It was but too evident that this factitious state of things must come to an end, both in Mexico and in France. It was too expensive a toy to130be played with any longer. The grown children would not be amused with it any more. And so it is to be thrown away like a broken plaything. But it may prove something worse than a broken plaything—a broken reed that may pierce the hand that leaned upon it as a prop of his dynasty. It has proved one of those blunders which are worse than crimes—a blundering crime, a criminal blunder. When a crime is consecrated by success, it is always sure to find worshippers enough; but when blunders come to confusion and mischief, there is none so poor as to do them reverence. This Mexican misadventure is precisely one of the blunders which came to sudden calamity, and it is one of its worst features for Bonaparte that its folly is now plain for all sorts of people to see. He had not examined the ground he was to go upon, like a skillful engineer. He had made no proper reconnoissance into the country he was about to invade, as a prudent general should do. His success was dearly bought, and brought in no returns. The expedition went up like a rocket, and is now fast coming down like the stick. In obedience to the demands of the United States and the murmurs of the French people and the French army, a definite time is fixed for his troops to be withdrawn; and when they withdraw, the baseless fabric of the Mexican empire vanishes into thin air, and Maximilian will be all one as Montezuma, only he will escape with his life. His poor wife has just been politely repulsed by the man who placed her husband and herself on their ridiculous elevation, when she came a suppliant for the aid essential to keep them yet a little while upon it. He is obliged to refuse what she asks. She, the grand-daughter of Louis Philippe, on whose throne the man she supplicates sits, a suppliant for grace which is refused! An awkward interview that must have been! He who had lured her husband and herself from their beautiful Miramar, on the shores of the Adriatic, by the likeness of a kingly crown, into a distant hemisphere, which vanished in the touching, and then left them to their fate, must have felt her presence and her errand as the most cutting of reproaches, and perhaps as the most fatal of portents. Thrones which rest upon long prescriptions, whose traditions run back into remote antiquity and take hold of the imagination and the heart, may last long even after they are honey-combed by corruption, and exist like those dead bodies which retain all their proportions until a touch crumbles them to dust. This is not the case with monarchies which have no basis for their existence excepting the faith of the lieges in the genius, the wisdom, or the fortune of the monarch. Opinion is the breath of the nostrils of Bonaparte; and when opinion deserts him, the life of his power departs from him. He is now in the critical moment of his life, when the French people are coming to discern that he is not the miracle of political wisdom and forecast for which they had taken him. They find that he is not the sure leader in the paths of glory and dominion. They doubt the share he had in his own successes, and question whether they do not rather belong to luck than sagacious purpose and profound design. It is possible that the downfall of Maximilian may be but the precursor of that of Bonaparte. It would be more than poetical justice. It would be righteous retribution.