was translated into Spanish and read, at once, by Mr. Bossero:
The year 1861 without calculation or effort, and almost without expectation on my own part, brought me to a position in which I had to confront a desperate, organized, and even armed resistance, to all the great political ideas which I had fondly cherished and peacefully promulgated through a period of many years. Slavery had taken up arms in alarm for its life, and had organized rebellion aiming at the dissolution of the American Union. Spain, deriding what under the circumstances seemed the imbecile theory of the Monroe doctrine, through the treachery of President Santa Anna gained possession of the City of San Domingo, and re-established a Vice Royalty in that Island, and soon after seized the Chincha Islands from Peru; Great Britain, not yet cordially reconciled to the independence of her former colonies, the United States, struck hands with France, which had been their ancient ally, but was now laboring under a hallucination of imperial ambition, and with the concurrence, voluntary in some cases, and forced in others, of the other maritime powers of Western Europe, lifted the rebels of the United States to the rank and advantage of lawful belligerents. The statesmen of Europe, with its press almost unanimous, announced that the United States of America had ceased to exist as one whole sovereign and organized nation. The Emperor of France emboldened by the seeming prostration of the United States, landed invading armies at Vera Cruz and Acapulco, and overran the territories of Mexico, overthrowing all its Republican institutions and establishing upon their ruins an European Empire. With the United States in anarchy, St. Domingo re-established as a monarchy, and Mexico as an Empire, it was unavoidable that Republicanism must perish throughout the whole Continent, and that thereafter there would remain for those who had been its heroes, its friends, its advocates, and its martyrs, only the same sentiments of reverence and pity with which mankind are accustomed to contemplate the memories of Themistocles and Demosthenes, of Cato and of Cicero.
