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published the first edition of his work in 1879, in the preface of which he said, with honest frankness: "I describe a past which dates from yesterday. Conciseness OBLIGES ME TO AGLOMERATE ASSERTIONS WITHOUT PROOFS OR PERSONAL JUDGEMENT."
It is not strange that in writing thus WITHOUT PROOFS (and he himself confesses the fact), Cesar Cantú should have incurred so many errors when speaking of Mexico and of Juarez,
Having thus demonstrated that the champion of Reform, who was also one of the most prominent defenders of the independence and of the integrity of Mexico, was very far from selling or mortgaging one single inch of the national territory, let us now see where were, and who truly were those that really sought to take posession of Sonora, with the pompous pretext of returning to the Latin race its vitality and its prestige on the other side of the Ocean.
In order to make these details known to Cesar Cantú himself, who appears to be ignorant of them, we will take as a preferable text the work written by Don Francisco de Arrangoiz, an author who certainly cannot be suspected by the Church party, and who moreover served Maximilian, and was an ally of the invader.
In his work entitled: Mexico from 1808 to 1867, Madrid, 1872, volume III, we find the following pages:
« Page 143.—We sought neither conquest nor the establishment of colonies, says the Minister for Foreign Affairs, while one of the objects of the intervention, the first in the mind of Napoleon, was the posession of the State of Sonora, a colonial establishment which would have been a great and useful acquisition for France."
