assume the presidency should
that office fall vacant. The rule of the usurper was short-lived,
however. Various improvised "generals" of conservative stripe put
themselves at the head of a movement to "save country, religion, and the
rights of the army," drove the would-be dictator out, and restored the
old regime.

Juarez now proclaimed himself acting President, as he was legally
entitled to do, and set up his government at Vera Cruz while one
"provisional president" followed another. Throughout this trying time
Juarez defended his position vigorously and rejected every offer
of compromise. In 1859 he promulgated his famous Reform Laws which
nationalized ecclesiastical property, secularized cemeteries, suppressed
religious communities, granted freedom of worship, and made marriage
a civil contract. For Mexico, however, as for other Spanish American
countries, measures of the sort were far too much in advance of their
time to insure a ready acceptance. Although Juarez obtained a great
moral victory when his government was recognized by the United States,
he had to struggle two years more before he could gain possession of the
capital. Triumphant in 1861, he carried his anticlerical program to the
point of actually expelling the Papal Nuncio and other ecclesiastics
who refused to obey his decrees. By so doing he leveled the way for
the clericals, conservatives, and the militarists to invite foreign
intervention on behalf of their desperate cause. But, even if they had
not been guilty of behavior so unpatriotic, the anger of the Pope over
the treatment of his Church, the wrath of Spain over the conduct of
Juarez, who had expelled the Spanish minister for siding with the
ecclesiastics, the desire of Great Britain to collect debts due to her
subjects, and above all the imperialistic ambitions of Napoleon III, who
dreamt of converting the intellectual influence of France in Hispanic
America into a political ascendancy, would probably have led to European
occupation in any event, so long at least as the United States was slit
asunder and incapable of action.

Some years before, the Mexican Government under the clerical and
militarist regime had made a contract with a Swiss banker who for a
payment of $500,000 had received bonds worth more than fifteen times the
value of the loan. When, therefore, the Mexican Congress undertook to
defer payments on a foreign debt that included the proceeds of this
outrageous contract, the Go