A Liberal Tragedy.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 18905, 21 January 1927, Page 10

A Liberal Tragedy.

The cieatb of the " Empress of "' Mexico " will perhaps carry some ol' our renders back to days in their teens when picturesque and uncomfortable gentlemen in the blue and green uniforms of Hie Second Empire galloped on the arid uplands of .Mexico. It was n fantastic adventure which even the final tragedy could not invest with dignity. The wonder indeed is how it ever got into the head of an' Austrian Archduke that be was a suitable ruler for some millions of half-breed Indians and Spaniards, hut in the middle of last century Royalty was distinctly romantic. Those were the days when Liberal monarch? sitting on the lid of I heir i»vn Parliamentary institutions ms.de compassionate gestures to the downtrodden of other countries, or drew up Utopian constitutions with the aid of Plato and Jean Jacques. It was the i heyday of the Liberal creed before it became soiled by contact with reality, and the Mexican affair is an almost perfect epitome of its tragedy. It would have required a much wiser man than Maximilian, when entreated by a band of Mexican exiles to become the ruler of an awakenu. Mexico, not to be fired by the thought that a nation in travail awaited its deliverer; and when military support was promised by Napoleon the Third, whose Liberalism was of a most advanced order, and who had some uncollected debts in Mexico, whatever hesitations there might otherwise have been meltfcd into air. Unfortunately, like most unenlightened people, the Mexicans fafled to recognise their deliverer, and oven found him a complicating factor in a civil war. It was a sad end to such a noble ambition, though the saiddest features of the story are not the courtmartial and the firing-squad. These made the tragedy spectacular, but what makes it still a tragedy to-day is the difference between heroics and reality. The Liberal has a solution for p.very problem; and it will work; but the world in its perversity never waits for the result, and even turns sometimes 1 and rends the magician. The Prisoner of 1 Ham planning his model state in the ' romantic seclusion of a dungeon is not ' a more fantastic figure than an exPrime Minister of Britain solving the 1 land problem out of texrt-books on , economics.