sequent events, the point of greatest interest and importance in this scheme on the part of Louis Napoleon for the conquest of Mexico and its conversion into a French dependency, to the humiliation of whatever political organizations might be left after the war to represent the former Federal Union, and to the utter discomfiture of the "Monroe doctrine"—a scheme which Napoleon designed should constitute the most brilliant feature of his reign—was the connection of the Church of Mexico and its adherents with the movement. If not, indeed, as is often suspected, the instigators of it in the first instance, they were undoubtedly in full sympathy with it from its inception—and with good reason. For, as far back as 1856, Juarez, when a member of the Cabinet of Alvarez, had been instrumental in the adoption of a political Constitution which was based on the broadest republican principles, and which provided for free schools, a free press, a complete subjugation of the ecclesiastical and military to the civil authority,[1] the abolition of the whole system of class legislation, and universal religious toleration—a Constitution which, with some later amendments, is still the or-
- ↑ Before this date, members of the army and all ecclesiastics could only be tried for offenses by privileged and special tribunals composed of members of their own orders; but the Constitution of Juarez abolished all that, and proclaimed for the first time in Mexico the equality of all men before the law.
