associated with others in a regency, until Spain should send out one of
the Spanish Bourbon princes to occupy the imperial throne of Mexico.

The Spanish parliament refused to sanction the treaty of Cordova;
O'Donoghue died, and Iturbide was left in possession of executive
power, without a defined office, while an insane opposition sprung up
against him in the new Congress which he had called together. This
unlooked-for opposition soon convinced him that the tearing away of a
nation from its traditional ideas was like the letting out of waters,
and that he must either ride upon the wave or be overborne by the
tempest. A resolution of Congress, to take from him the command of the
army, brought matters to a crisis. Accordingly, on the night of the
18th of March, 1821, he caused himself to be proclaimed Emperor by his
partisans; and the next day this new revolutionary act was confirmed by
Congress, under the intimidation of military force, and the nation
again acquiesced.

ITURBIDE DEPOSED.

The revolution had caused a stagnation in all the departments of
commerce and of revenue. Iturbide had inaugurated his insurrection by
seizing, at Iguala, a million of dollars belonging to the Manilla
Company, on its way to Acapulco. He made another like seizure at
Perote; but these high-handed measures, while they proved but a drop in
the bucket toward sustaining his government, increased his
embarrassments, by destroying all confidence; so that his new authority
had stamped upon it the unmistakable marks of dissolution. He was an
emperor without traditional associations; he had an empire without a
revenue; a large standing army without pay. The fickle multitude, who
supposed that independence was to prove an antidote for every evil,
began to murmur; while a host of demagogues, who envied the good
fortune of Iturbide, were all beginning to clamor for a republic. The
blow, however, came from an unexpected quarter. Santa Anna had
quarreled with a superior officer, General Echevarri, and Iturbide had
recalled him from his command. But Santa Anna thought it most advisable
to disobey the Emperor; and in the Plaza of Vera Cruz, surrounded by
the garrison, he proclaimed a republic, on the 2d of December, 1822. He
joined in his insurrection the name and the influence of Victoria, yet
both were insufficient to save him from a complete route at the hands
of Echevarri. At the critical moment in the affairs of Santa Anna, the
Grand Lodge of t