A patron of science and literature, a scholar rather than a ruler, a placid and somewhat eccentric philosopher, careless of the trappings of state, he devoted himself without stint to the public welfare.

Shrewdly divining that the monarchical system might not survive much longer, he kept his realm pacified by a policy of conciliation.
Pedro II even went so far as to call himself the best republican in the Empire.

He might have said, with justice perhaps, that he was the best republican in the whole of Hispanic America.

What he really accomplished was the successful exercise of a paternal autocracy of kindness and liberality over his subjects.
If more or less permanent dictators and occasional liberators were the order of the day in most of the Spanish American republics, intermittent dictators and liberators dashed across the stage in Mexico from 1829 well beyond the middle of the century.

The other countries could show numerous instances in which the occupant of the chief magistracy held office to the close of his constitutional term; but Mexico could not show a single one! What Mexico furnished, instead, was a kaleidoscopic spectacle of successive presidents or dictators, an unstable array of self-styled "generals" without a presidential succession.