loss of prestige among the nations. We took away, indeed, more than
eight hundred thousand square miles. We left her hardly seven hundred
thousand square miles. But had there been any recuperative energy,
perhaps the State, so much more compact in territory, and so little
diminished in population, would have been stronger rather than weaker by
the process.

* * * * *

We return to our narrative. The spring of 1861 found the Liberal party
triumphant. Never had it seemed so firmly rooted. Never had its
opponents been so cast down. Well does the Scripture say, "Let him that
thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall." All through the spring and
summer of 1861, the leaders of the Church party were flitting from
Paris to Madrid, and from Madrid to Paris again, weaving what webs of
intrigue, seeking what forms of intervention, none but the arch-plotter
of the Tuileries can tell. There were floating about that summer rumors
of intervention, coming through what avenues, or to whom traceable,
nobody knew. Did any one wish to intervene, there were certainly
ostensible reasons enough. In that long agony of anarchy, Mexico had
inflicted, through one or another of her jarring parties, insults and
injuries, in robberies, in murders, in forced loans, in illegal taxes,
in neglected debts, sufficient to give an apparent justification to any
violence of policy in a foreign power. The British minister, under date
of June 27, 1861, transmitted to Lord John Russell a fearful list of
outrages against English subjects. In that list were included three
murders committed, or permitted, by Government officials, and
twenty-four robberies, forced loans and the like, some of them to the
amount of twenty-five and even sixty thousand dollars. These he styles
"British claims of the small and distressing class." One fact disturbs
the force of this impeachment of the Liberal government. Almost without
exception, these outrages were confessedly the work of the conservative
party, which had just been expelled after an open rebellion of three
years against the legitimate authorities. It was as though England
should enter complaint against our Government for property destroyed by
the Alabama, or for insults and injuries inflicted upon British subjects
in the streets of Richmond. No doubt, the form of law was with her, but
hardly substantial justice. As the French have progressed, we have seen
still stranger anomalies. The l