In France the ruling class, the bankers, the industrialists, the higher clergy, and many of the party of free trade supported Napoleon III in his well-known friendliness for the South. Moreover, the Emperor was promoting a scheme to build for his Austrian friend, Maximilian, an empire in Mexico, where the perennial war of factions was hotly raging. Davis might aid such a move as a consideration for recognition, and certainly Seward was too busy with his own troubles to intervene on behalf of an "outworn" Monroe Doctrine. Slidell, the shrewd Confederate commissioner to France, led the Emperor to expect Southern support of his scheme, and at the same time borrowed millions of dollars in gold from rich Paris bankers and hurried it off to the famishing Confederacy. No revolutionary power ever had a fairer chance of winning its goal than did that of Davis and Lee in the autumn of 1862 and winter of 1863. The unexpected often happens. While Charles Francis Adams was being coldly elbowed out of the salons of an unsympathetic English nobility, and when Confederate bonds were selling both in London and Paris at or near par, Secretary Chase sent Robert J. Walker, the former Mississippi repudiator and successful Secretary of the Treasury under Polk, to Europe for the purpose of breaking down Confederate credit and building up that of the United States. The commissioner of the Treasury Department began the publication of a series of articles on the financial page of the London _Times_ which seemed to show that Davis had been responsible for the repudiation of a large issue of state bonds, many of them held in London, in 1843. All that Mason and Slidell could do did not remove the suspicion that the Confederate President would "repudiate" again. Men who had loaned large sums of money to Mississippi could not be made to understand that Walker himself had been the responsible agent of Mississippi in those days. From the beginning of this unpleasant advertising of former American financiering, in which Northern States had sinned quite as flagrantly as Southern, Confederate credit in Europe declined. Her bonds were soon withdrawn from the market. At the same time Walker succeeded in borrowing $250,000,000 from European bankers, and thus at a critical period he was able to prop the declining fortunes of his country. To say that Walker destroyed the credit of the Confederacy and at the same time restored that of the Union would be an exaggeration. But his services were of incalculable value to the nationalist cause. When, therefore, Napoleon asked England to join him in intervening between the warring parties of the United States there was other reason, besides the strong and vigorous activity of Charles Francis Adams, for the British Ministry to postpone or decline cooeperation.