victim is Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a Catholic,
thirty-five years of age, and colonel of the first regiment of the
Prussian foot-guards, whose father, a mediatized German prince,
resides at Duesseldorf. The Prince had not the good sense to
decline. How his acceptance excited the French Cabinet, and became
the beginning of the French pretext, I have already exposed; and
now I come to the pretension itself.

By what title did France undertake to interfere with the choice of
Spain? If the latter was so foolish as to seek a foreigner for
king, making a German first among Spaniards, by what title did any
other power attempt to control its will? To state the question is
to answer it. Beginning with an outrage on Spanish independence,
which the Spain of an earlier day would have resented, the next
outrage was on Germany, in assuming that an insignificant prince
of that country could not be permitted to accept the invitation,----
all of which, besides being of insufferable insolence, was in
that worst dynastic spirit which looks to princes rather than the
people. Plainly France was unjustifiable. When I say it was none
of her business, I give it the mildest condemnation. This was the
first step in her monstrous _blunder-crime_.

Its character as a pretext becomes painfully manifest, when we
learn more of the famous Prince Leopold, thus invited by Spain and
opposed by France. It is true that his family name is in part the
same as that of the Prussian king. Each is Hohenzollern; but he
adds Sigmaringen to the name. The two are different branches of
the same family; but you must ascend to the twelfth century,
counting more than twenty degrees, before you come to a common
ancestor. [Footnote: Conversations-Lexikon, (Leipzig, 1866,) 8