father's study in the turret, and stood before
him, pale and stem, like a marble statue of
herself.

Colonna looked up, and pushed his papers
aside.

' Well," he said eagerlv, " what speed?"

"This."

Saying which, she took a pen, deliberately
filled in double the sum pencilled on the
margin, and laid Saxon's cheque before him on
the table.

THRONED UPON THORNS.

WHOEVER reigns in Mexico is throned upon
thorns. And why? The crop of troubles
in that land was not of its own people's
sowing. It was made subject centuries ago to
the least liberal of European monarchies; for
three hundred years bearing—as New Spain—
that monarchy's name, and governed by it
upon imperial principles of despotic restriction
in church and state; with trade in shackles;
with a dominant privileged clergy; and with
unequal laws that ground the common people
while they protected the nobility in every direction
against burdens and responsibilities. After
very many years the failure of force at the heart
of that decrepid despotism enabled the fair
country to shake itself free, and it broke loose
into independence, with a social system formed
and set by centuries of pressure in the old
despotic mould. Free, but perplexed at heart,
with a dominant aristocracy of priests interfused
with its social system, and unwilling to
abate a jot of their supremacy; overgrown also
with an order of nobles unwilling to give up
one of the exclusive privileges transmitted to
them from the middle ages under a despotic
government, to this hour mediaeval in many of
its traditions and its usages. Mexico then
having freed itself from foreign rule, but suffering
from the effects of the long tyranny,
proceeded through many a throe of internal strife
to put out the despotic element from its own
social system. There could be no sound liberty
till that was done, but it would be found difficult
to do while the organised strength of the
party holding undue privileges enabled it to
neutralise the efforts of the people, who, in the
first passionate untrained enjoyment of a hope
of independence, desired to achieve for
themselves a freedom like that of a great and strong
republic lying on the borders of their land.
During the ferment and confusion of the civil
strife between those antagonist interests which
had yet to be brought into accord, when every
military chief or fighting adventurer, whose soul
had been corrupted by the influences inherited
from a long age of despotism, was ready to grasp
for himself power and wealth at his country's
cost—the strong neighbouring republic held out
its hand in hinderment instead of help, to rend
and not to rescue. Thus we had the country of
a people with high aspirations towards freedom,
who had yet to learn its ways, not only troubled
at home by the factions of those who were privileged
in days of despotic rule, and who, in the
days of liberty, were fighting for retention of
rights incompatible with social freedom. As
long as the domestic struggle remained equal, it
was preyed upon and schemed against by every
self-seeking adventurer within its borders, it was
attacked, also, and robbed of wide regions by
the strong state of the neighbouring republicans,
with irrepressible greed for the extension of
their own dominion. And what if there come
some trouble for the same land that shall open
for it a yet lowest deep after all these deeps
have been safely sounded? One of its patriots,
Benito Juarez, proved strong enough to
take and keep the directing influence that
might have saved the state. He swept away,
by a law bearing his own name, because it
was of his proposing and supporting in the
legislature, all the privileges that removed
noble or ecclesiastic from their share in the
responsibilities of all good citizens, and made
them, like their neighbours, answerable to the
law. He helped to give his country a free
constitution; he at last made known to the
body of the people wherein a reasonable liberty
consists; he broke, after a long and painful
struggle, the disturbing power of those who
upheld evil traditions of the centuries of despotism;
he was beginning to make trade free and develop
the resources of the land.

But that beaten party of the priests and
nobles, shorn of privileges inconsistent with the
life of a free state, regarded only its own mean
interests, and sank so low as to seek the
restoration of its power by the ruin of its country.
Joined by some foreign traders who expect
payment of divers sorts of extortionate claims to be
wrung under compulsion from the afflicted
people; self-seeking speculators who may
profit largely by thrusting out of court the
scrutiny of justice—those beaten combatants
for personal immunities and privileges, made
false representations to a remote state under
military despotism, knowing that the remote
state is desirous for its own domestic reasons to
find cheap and showy foreign occupation for its
troops. They ascribe all the misrule of the
past—misrule of their own breeding—to the
native government that had just triumphed over
it, and that ruled, peacefully at last, with the
consent of a contented people. They stated
falsely to the foreign despotism, that this native
government was not ruling with consent of the
people; but that a foreign army, if it were to
land in war against such government, would be
hailed by the people as deliverer. Victories,
they said, will be easy, and they will be cheap.
For this is a rich land, with silver and gold in
the very earth of it, and the mines are a safe
guarantee to the conqueror that his own country
will be the richer rather than the poorer for the
conquest. So the foreign invader was tempted
to error by false hopes. The foreign army landed,
and was not received as a deliverer. With no
allies but the men who had failed in the struggle
to retain the social system of the fifteenth in the