On the 27th February the Emperor Maximilian issued a final
-decree, confirming all sales of Church property made under former 'Governments, placing all ecclesiastics under the laws, and pro- mising toleration to all creeds alike. It is believed that another -decree will soon follow assigning pensions to ecclesiastics, and depriving the Church of its character as a corporation and its right to hold property. Mexico is in fact to be secularized, and the clergy, for the first time since the Conquest, placed where -they ought to be, well within the gripe of the civil power. The Church party, it will be remembered, urged on the invasion of Mexico and the selection of Maximilian solely to avoid the -catastrophe which has now fallen upon them. They actually hoped to set up a clerical Government by the aid of a Bonaparte and the agency of a Hapsburg. Rome gets senile.
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