it was forgotten, and republican life and language had become a part of Mexican nature — there was nothing, I say, to awaken in these latter-day Mexicans a desire for the restoration of an order of things which they never had known, and never had been taught to venerate.[1]
Turning to the earlier years of the republic, and noting the deadly animosity existing between the escocés, or centralist party, and the yorkino, or federalist, it will be remembered that the remnants of the former in their efforts to rally and face their opponents always showed timidity, because a hated name bore them down — that of monarchists, as the people insisted on calling them. At last, when a writer called them conservadores, they clutched at the new name that should enable them to make recruits, and they again became a political party; but it was a republican party, and as such was sometimes in power, and at others in the opposition, but under no circumstances pretending to advocate monarchism.[2]
In September 1840 Jose Maria Gutierrez de Estrada — the man so prominent in the events of 1861 and subsequent years connected with the monarchial scheme — returned to Mexico, after an absence of some years in Europe, when the expediency of a change in the constitution was publicly discussed. Declining a position in the cabinet and a seat in the senate, Gutierrez availed himself of the opportunity to bring forward the ideas he had become imbued with in his European travels — the establishment of a monarchy in Mexico. In a pamphlet, accompanied with a letter to President Bustamante, he endeavored to show[3] that Mexico would never enjoy peace and
- ↑ Prim wrote Napoleon III., March 17, 1862, that there were few men in Mexico imbued with monarchial sentiments; that a few rich men, possibly, would accept a foreign monarch, who might retain his throne as long as French bayonets supported him; but those men could do nothing for him after the supporting force had left; he must then fall. Veritas, Nuevas Reflex. Cuest. Franco-Mex., 116-18; Lefêvre, Doc. Maximiliano, i. 292.
- ↑ The old leaven still worked, however, among a limited number of the party, who showed their hand in 1844, as will be made to appear.
- ↑ He ably displayed the best records of the monarchial system, and de-
