Liberal and the
Clerical parties; the President asked for authority to use American
troops to bring to a peaceful haven "a wreck upon the ocean, drifting
about as she is impelled by different factions." Our own domestic crisis
then intervened.

Observing the United States heavily involved in its own problems, the
great powers, England, France, and Spain, decided in the autumn of 1861
to take a hand themselves in restoring order in Mexico. They entered
into an agreement to enforce the claims of their citizens against Mexico
and to protect their subjects residing in that republic. They invited
the United States to join them, and, on meeting a polite refusal, they
prepared for a combined military and naval demonstration on their own
account. In the midst of this action England and Spain, discovering the
sinister purposes of Napoleon, withdrew their troops and left the field
to him.

The French Emperor, it was well known, looked with jealousy upon the
growth of the United States and dreamed of establishing in the Western
hemisphere an imperial power to offset the American republic.
Intervention to collect debts was only a cloak for his deeper designs.
Throwing off that guise in due time, he made the Archduke Maximilian, a
brother of the ruler of Austria, emperor in Mexico, and surrounded his
throne by French soldiers, in spite of all protests.

This insolent attack upon the Mexican republic, deeply resented in the
United States, was allowed to drift in its course until 1865. At that
juncture General Sheridan was dispatched to the Mexican border with a
large armed force; General Grant urged the use of the American army to
expel the French from this continent. The Secretary of State, Seward,
counseled negotiation first, and, applying the Monroe Doctrine, was able
to prevail upon Napoleon III to withdraw his troops. Without the support
of French arms, the sham empire in Mexico collapsed like a house of
cards and the unhappy Maximilian, the victim of French ambition and
intrigue, met his death at the hands of a Mexican firing squad.

=Alaska Purchased.=--The Mexican affair had not been brought to a close
before the Department of State was busy with negotiations which resulted
in the purchase of Alaska from Russia. The treaty of cession, signed on
March 30, 1867, added to the United States a domain of nearly six
hundred thousand square miles, a territory larger than Texas and nearly
three-fourths the size of the Louisiana p