rations of the French, to embarrass the dynasties that had
overthrown the first Napoleon, and to yield substantial gains for his
nephew. Certainly it did so in the case of Italy; his championship of
the Roumanians also helped on the making of that interesting
Principality (1861) and gained the good-will of Russia; but he speedily
forfeited this by his wholly ineffective efforts on behalf of the Poles
in 1863. His great mistakes, however, were committed in and after the
year 1863, when he plunged into Mexican politics with the chimerical aim
of founding a Roman Catholic Empire in Central America, and favoured the
rise of Prussia in connection with the Schleswig-Holstein question. By
the former of these he locked up no small part of his army in Mexico
when he greatly needed it on the Rhine; by the latter he helped on the
rise of the vigorous North German Power.

As we have seen, he secretly advised Prussia to take both Schleswig and
Holstein, thereby announcing his wish for the effective union of Germans
with the one great State composed almost solely of Germans. "I shall
always be consistent in my conduct," he said. "If I have fought for the
independence of Italy, if I have lifted up my voice for Polish
nationality, I cannot have other sentiments in Germany, or obey other
principles." This declaration bespoke the doctrinaire rather than the
statesman. Untaught by the clamour which French Chauvinists and ardent
Catholics had raised against his armed support of the Italian national
cause in 1859, he now proposed to further the aggrandisement of the
Protestant North German Power which had sought to partition France
in 1815.

The clamour aroused by his leanings towards Prussia in 1864-66 was
naturally far more violent, in proportion as the interests of France
were more closely at stake. Prussia held the Rhine Province; and French
patriots, who clung to the doctrine of the "natural frontiers"--the
Ocean, Pyrenees, Alps, and Rhine--looked on her as the natural enemy.
They pointed out that millions of Frenchmen had shed their blood in the
Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars to win and to keep the Rhine boundary;
and their most eloquent spokesman, M. Thiers, who had devoted his
historical gifts to glorifying those great days, passionately declaimed
against the policy of helping on the growth of the hereditary foe.

We have already seen the results of this strife between the pro-Prussian
foibles of the Emperor and the eager preju