ropean military intervention; in the second
place, it means to embrace not only Mexico, _but the whole Latin race on
the American continent_. By the Latin race is included all Spanish
America. It means, then, in the future, if our Government is overthrown,
that all Spanish America, from the northern boundary of Mexico to Cape
Horn, is to be consolidated into one great Power under imperial sway. It
means to include in this vast empire the command of the Isthmus of
Tehauntepec, the route by Central America (about which Louis Napoleon
has written so much), by Honduras and Chiriqui, but more especially the
Panama, as also the Atrato routes.

In the great future, whoever commands these routes, especially together
with that of the Isthmus of Suez, which I visited a few months since,
and which Louis Napoleon has nearly completed, will command the commerce
of the world, and, as a consequence, ultimately control the institutions
of the world. Such are the tremendous problems teeming in the brain of
Napoleon the Third, and all, as he believes, depending upon the
destruction of the American Union. I speak of what I know from a
residence now of nearly two years in Europe. Thus it is that Louis
Napoleon intends to bring us within the centrifugal gravitation of the
European balance of power. This wonderful man proposes to extend this
system from the old continents to the new, embracing both, and thus hold
in his grasp the equilibrium--the balance of power of the world. We may
well imagine what that equilibrium will be when Napoleon the Third shall
hold the balance in his hands. Already he has considerable possessions
(insular and continental) in North and South America, and Mexico, under
Maximilian, is substantially a French dependency. He holds Algiers. He
is colonizing Egypt (as I myself saw this year) by his railroads and
canals. He has seized and colonized Cochin China and Annam. He has made
Italy a dependency on the bayonets of Franco. Now then, under these
circumstances, when the blockade shall have terminated, and Jefferson
Davis, who is quite as ambitious and even more talented than Louis
Napoleon, shall hold in his hand more than a billion of dollars' worth
of Southern products ready for immediate shipment, may he not, and will
he not say, through his most able and adroit diplomatic representative
at Paris, 'Recognize the independence of the South, and all these
products shall be shipped for sale in France, and to French
man