had obtained in
Mexico through the kindness of Maximilian's very able Foreign Minister,
Senor Ramirez, a most accomplished bibliophile, bearing upon Iturbide's
plan for making the American Mediterranean a Mexican lake. He expected
to break up the United States by asserting the right of the Mexican
Empire to the mouths of the Mississippi, and the whole Spanish dominion
as far as the Capes of Florida. 'It seems a mad thing now,' said the
ex-President, 'but it was not so mad perhaps then,' and we went on to
discuss the schemes of Burr and Wilkinson and the alleged treason of an
early Tennessean senator. 'Perhaps it was not a bad thing for us,' he
said, 'that the Mexicans shot their first Emperor--but was it a good
thing for them?' 'I have sometimes wondered,' he added, 'what would have
happened to us if Gates, or--what was at one time, as you know, quite on
the cards--Benedict Arnold, instead of George Washington, had commanded
the armies of the colonies successfully down to the end at Yorktown.'

What indeed! That is a pregnant query, not hastily to be dealt with by
genial after-dinner oratory about the self-governing capacity of the
Anglo-Norman race--still less by Fourth of July declamations over what
the leader of the Massachusetts Bar used to call the 'glittering
generalities' of the American Declaration of Independence!

The experience of the Latin states of the New World throws useful
side-lights upon it. Of all these states between the Rio Grande and Cape
Horn, only one began and has lived out its round half-century of
independence without serious civil convulsions. This is--or rather
was--the Empire of Brazil, of which Dom Pedro I., of the Portuguese
reigning house of Braganza, on March 25, 1824, swore to maintain the
integrity and indivisibility, and to observe, and cause to be observed,
the political Constitution. That oath the Emperor and his son and
successor, Dom Pedro II., who took it after him in due course, seem to
have conscientiously kept. It does not appear to have impressed itself
as deeply upon the consciences of the military and naval officers of the
present day in Brazil, all of whom, of course, must have taken it
substantially on receiving their commission from the chief of the State,
and it now remains to be seen what will become hereafter of the Empire.

The authors of the Brazilian Constitution fully recognised the
impossibility of maintaining a constitutional government without some
guarantee