FORMS OF POLITICAL ANARCHY
Revolution is general in Latin America. There the most civilised nations have been rent by civil wars. But there are a few republics in which these conflicts have been perpetual: such is the case in Central America and the Antilles. It seems as though the tropical climate must favour these disturbances. Assassinations of presidents, battles in the cities, collisions between factions and castes, inflammatory and deceptive rhetoric, all lead one to suppose that these equatorial regions are inimical to peace and organisation.
There are two South American peoples in which Jacobinism has become a national malady, in which men of every creed are involved: they are Colombia and Ecuador. Their tragic history shows us a curious form of Ibero-American anarchy: namely, religious anarchy.
CHAPTER I
COLOMBIA
Conservatives and radicals—General Mosquera: his influence—A statesman: Rafael NuÑez, his doctrines political.
A certain writer of New Granada, Rafael NuÑez, a President and a party-leader, writes that "there is not in South America a country more iconoclastic, politically speaking, than Colombia." Republican evolution there has been peculiar: it has witnessed perpetual anarchy, like other American democracies, and civil wars as long and as sanguinary as those of the Argentine, but no long succession of tenacious caudillo, personifications of local discord, whose ambitions determine the intention of political conflict.
In Colombia men have fought for ideas; anarchy there has had a religious character. The parties had definite programmes, and in the conflict of incompatible convictions they soon arrived at the Byzantine method of destruction. Public and private wealth was exhausted, the land was dispeopled, and inquisitors of religion or free thought condemned their enemies to exile. "With us," Rafael NuÑez admits "there has been an excess of political dogmatism." A Jacobin ardour divides mankind; the fiery Colombian race is impassioned by vague and abstract ideas. The champions of liberty and the supporters of absolutism apply their principles to an unstable republic; they legislate for a democracy devoid of passions and inimical castes; they build the future state by means of syllogisms.
These sanguinary struggles have a certain rude grandeur. On the continent men fight for crafty caudillos, for the conquest of power and fiscal treasure; the oligarchy which occupies the seat of government defends its bureaucratic well-being from the parties in opposition. In Colombia exalted convictions are the motives of political enmities; men abandon fortune and family, as in the great religious periods of history, to hasten to the defence of a principle. These hidalgos waste the country and fall nobly, with the Semitic ardour of Spanish crusaders. Heroes abound in the fervour of these battles. Obedient to the logic of Jacobinism, Colombia perishes, but the truth is saved.[1]
The liberal party, victorious in 1849, promoted a vast democratic programme: the romantic liberalism of the French thinkers, the socialistic ideas of the Revolution of 1848, had reached Colombia. The Colombians desired not only the liberation of the slaves, the abolition of industrial monopolies, and the autonomy of the communes, but also the realisation of the needs of democracy; all the political liberties, subject to prudent reserves; direct and universal suffrage, trial by jury, the suppression of the army, the abolition of capital punishment, the institution of universities and scientific diplomas, and the expulsion of the Jesuits, who in America were the obstinate supporters of the old colonial system. Federation, a weak executive, a secular State, and powerful communes: such was the aspiration of the liberals. A fraction of the party bore a symbolic name: it was known as Golgotha. In their civil wars the Catholics chose Jesus of Nazareth for their patron. Radicalism even aspired to religious consecration; it founded a Christian anarchy, like that of the primitive evangelical communities. It preached fraternity and liberty, condemning political power.
Nothing could be more disastrous to a disorganised republic than rationalism of this type. It applied the principles formulated by the extremest idealists in highly cultivated countries. Colombia, shaken by revolutions, had need of a strong government; radicalism destroyed it. There was no provincial life, yet it created the omnipotent commune; it suppressed the army in a democracy threatened by civil and external war, established trial by jury in a country swarming with illiterates, and granted liberties wholesale to a revolutionary people; it accorded political rights to the negro and the Indian, servile and ignorant as they were, and demanded federation, which is to say that it multiplied political disorder. Foreseeing the errors of the future, Bolivar told the Colombians: "I can plainly see our work destroyed and the maledictions of the centuries falling upon our heads."
From 1849 to 1853 the liberal party struggled to impose its doctrines. The Constitution of 1853, celebrated in Colombian annals, was doctrinaire and radical; it proclaimed the liberty of the press, of thought, and of suffrage. By separating Church and State it provoked a religious war and accepted a moderated political centralisation. Thus the excesses of unity and of federation were avoided.
The liberal charter gave rise to lengthy quarrels. The States gave themselves conflicting and opposite constitutions; some were conservative and reinforced authority; some were radical and founded an anarchical democracy; some were liberal and extended the suffrage; some were moderate and conciliatory, uniting the ideas of all parties in unstable equilibrium. In a country already divided by religious questions this variety of status created a perpetual disorder.
A new Constitution, more precise than that of 1853, established the federal system without restrictions; it was the triumph of the "Golgothas" over the "Draconians," the radicals over the classic liberals. The battle was renewed with fresh vigour. The religious communities lost their legal character, and could no longer acquire property; the State usurped their wealth and ruined them as in Mexico. The impetuous radicals sapped not only the ecclesiastical power, but the political power also. They reduced the presidential period to two years, granted the provinces full sovereignty, prohibited the death penalty without exception, conceded the absolute liberty of the press, and authorised the buying and selling of arms.
Excessive liberalism disorganised the country. Colombia suffered much from this vain idealism; she became the social laboratory of professors of Utopianism. The radicals created fresh elements of discord; they attacked authority, religion, and national unity. In 1870, in the face of bankruptcy, the party abandoned its original extremeness; it no longer professed anti-militarism, nor desired the complete separation of Church and State. Sceptical as to the benefits of the suffrage, it re-enforced the executive, in spite of its original federal creed.
The conservatives governed the country from the dissolution of Greater Colombia, in 1829, until 1849; they performed the work of organisation. Without forming an oligarchy, as in Venezuela and Chili, they represented permanent interests and effective powers; religion, the colonial nobility, and the patricians who won autonomy for their country. They were conservatives in so far as they opposed the radicals, but in 1832 they granted a political charter in which they accepted liberal principles; they respected municipal liberties and the liberty of the press, surrounded all the powers of the State with prestige and authority, as also the senate and the magistrature, created a Council of State, so necessary in an improvised democracy, protected Catholicism, and limited the suffrage. To be a citizen a man required "an assured subsistence without subjection to any one whatever in the quality of servant or workman." In the social world they accepted the old division of castes. They did not free the slaves, and they tolerated the exportation of human merchandise. The radicals protested against this shameful traffic; in 1842 regulations were passed affecting black immigration, and 1849 marked the fall of the conservative party. Then arose eloquent demagogues, who preached a social gospel much like that of the French revolutionists of 1848.
Political life was less imperfect in Colombia than in other Latin democracies. The opposition did sometimes triumph in the electoral struggle; thus in 1837 Dr. Marques was elected president against the will of General Santander, the government leader. I have spoken of the solid organisation of the parties: however, there was no lack of caudillos, whose influence in neo-Granzdan history was a lasting one.
The first President, General Santander, was one of Bolivar's lieutenants, as was Flores in Ecuador and Paez in Venezuela. He inherited the moral authority of the Liberator, and governed pacifically from 1831. He aspired to absolutism, founded schools, and organised the public finances; in London he commenced the negotiation of the Colombian debt, declared Panama a free port, and endeavoured to enforce unity and peace; conspirators and revolutionaries he shot.
After the founder of the nation came two strong personalities who hold a prominent place in the history of Colombia: General Mosquera and Dr. Rafael NuÑez.[2] Their long rule is comparable to that of Garcia-Moreno in Ecuador, or of Paez and Guzman-Blanco in Venezuela.
General Mosquera was at first a conservative leader; his education, his origin, and his travels in Europe all divided him from the democracy. He had the gift of command, which had been developed by the direction of armies in his youth. President in 1845, he developed the national wealth. His government, which lasted from 1845 to 1849, was distinguished by an intense material progress: railways were constructed, steam navigation commenced on the River Magdalena, the teaching in the universities was improved, the finances were organised, the service of the debt was assured, and the moral prestige of the country improved.
This conservative President had liberal leanings. He presented laws to Congress which made his old supporters uneasy; the abolition of the "tenth" or tithe paid to the Church, and the diminution of fiscal protection. It is difficult to believe that this lucky soldier conceived the wise ambition to transform his government into a liberal rÉgime without violence. Mosquera knew that after 1848 and its echoes in Colombia the basis of his future popularity must be a violent liberalism, and he became a federal and a democratic leader. As military dictator he placed himself at the head of the revolution of 1860, seized the capital, Bogota, and was elected President in 1861. He imposed his variable will, changed his ideas and his party in order to retain power, and attempted to govern above the law and above mankind.
GENERAL MOSQUERA. President of Colombia (1845-1849, 1861-1864, 1865-1867).
GENERAL MOSQUERA.
President of Colombia (1845-1849, 1861-1864, 1865-1867).
Mosquera declared a Kulturkampf, separated Church and State, exiled the bishops, confiscated the goods of the convents, and, like Guzman-Blanco, created a national Church. Without the authorisation of the supreme power no priest could exercise his religious functions. The civil power was the supreme power; the Church and her ministers were subject thereto.
The President shot or suppressed his enemies, and imposed his policy by terror; he enthroned militarism. Faithful armies followed him, accustomed to victory. The domestic policy of New Granada did not satisfy his ambition; he aspired to restore the Greater Colombia, and dreamed the dream of Rosas and Santa-Cruz; the hegemony of his country to be forced upon other peoples. He declared war upon Ecuador, and was victorious. In 1864 he was followed by another liberal, Dr. Murillo-Torro. In 1865 the military caudillo resumed the reins of government. He was hostile to Congress, and proclaimed himself dictator; he violated the Constitution and the law, intervened in the struggles of other States, and sought an absolute and irresponsible authority. His own supporters conspired against him, and sent him into exile. In Colombia he was the indisputable authority, as Paez in Venezuela, from 1845 to 1867.
After this long empire came a period of civil Presidents and military Presidents, who moderated the ambitions of the liberals. Presently a new caudillo arose: Dr. Rafael NuÑez. Mosquera was first a conservative, then a liberal. NuÑez, a liberal, fomented a conservative reaction and dominated Colombian politics for twenty years.
At one time secretary to Mosquera, he had made a study of the evolution of great States. He was not only a leader, but also a diplomatist, and a philosopher in his political disinterestedness, his lasting moral influence, and the width of his views. A theorist like Balmaceda and Sarmiento, he none the less did not forget the inevitable imperfections of Colombia. He became President of the Senate in 1878, and a minister of the Reformation and head of the Republic in 1880. Democracy looked to him for a renaissance.
In the heart of the liberal party Dr. NuÑez directed a new independent group. He had been a radical in 1850, but he departed from the rigidity of his original beliefs before the persistent suggestions of experience. Why weaken the executive in an anarchical nation—why increase the national troubles by the bitterness of religious warfare? NuÑez became a liberal-conservative; he forgot his original socialistic principles, the theories of Louis Blanc and Saint-Simon, and applied a British common-sense to Colombian politics.[3]
His political ideas (expounded in various articles) were prudent and conciliatory; no sterile idealism dominated Dr. NuÑez. He believed, with many English statesmen, that "in politics there are no absolute truths, and all things may be good or evil according to opportunity and extent." This was the policy he opposed to Colombian dogmatism. He believed that "politics is indissolubly bound up with the economic problem."
A conservative in religion, tolerant in the art of governing, he taught the Jacobins of America some admirable lessons. "Our population," he wrote, "does not exceed three millions of inhabitants, the majority of whom are but slightly civilised. If the social fraction called upon by its aptitudes to the functions of government divides and subdivides itself and occupies itself in weakening itself we shall never succeed in doing anything of importance as legatees of the Peninsular domination." His ideal was a free oligarchy, coherent in intention, and in action persistent.
Equally lamentable were the division of the best class of the nation and the intolerance of the governing parties. Rafael NuÑez preached respect for minorities. "The absolute exclusion from the government of the parties in a minority," he said, "weakens the national spirit, envenoms discussion, and creates extraordinary dangers." Majorities have need of discussion and opposition. "The myopia of party spirit," adds the caudillo, "fails to perceive the virile vigour which a political group obtains by the mere fact of giving proofs of tolerance, justice, and respect for its defenceless adversary." "When for some extraordinary reason one of the great parties disappears, the surviving party splits up into fractions, and these fractions fight among themselves as bitterly as when they have to face a common enemy: even more bitterly."
The leader of the independents had studied political science not only in foreign books, but also in practice, in public life; he had a profound acquaintance with the country which he governed, and with the Latin American vices which are the incurable weakness of these new democracies. "We have no viceroy in Colombia," he said, "but anonymous rulers. We have a written liberty, but no practical liberty. We have a Republic, but only in name, for opinion is not expressed by the only legitimate means, which is the suffrage." "It is a grave error, generally accepted by us, that the sole object of a political party and all its efforts should tend toward the possession of the public power, represented by the leadership of the national army."
He defends the principle of authority as against anarchy. "The best of instruments, destined for the long and arduous task of civilising the human species."
Respect for the constituted powers is unknown in Colombia. All "dynamic mechanism" should have a governor, that is, a counterpoise to the predominant impulse. NuÑez writes: "Monarchies need liberal accessory institutions, and republics restrictive or conservative institutions, without which the former degenerate into autocracies and the latter into anarchies, which announce the approach of despotism." In default of the principle of authority, so necessary and generally so feeble in democracies, Rafael NuÑez sought for "elements of order in the moral domain."
He became a conservator; he protected religion, like Portales, in order to give a disorganised nation the firm unity of a law. The ex-radical ordered the teaching of religion in the schools. "Traitor!" cried his former supporters, but if he renounced his former dogmas it was in his intellectual prime, before the lamentable spectacle of an unstable republic. "Fanaticism," he wrote, "is not religion any more than demagogy is liberty; but between religion and morality there is an indissoluble bond."
Colombia had need of a stable internal law, of a morality. To obtain order Dr. NuÑez desired a Catholic unity; he abandoned his radical convictions, and put his trust in authority, religion, and moderate centralisation. But were not the articles of his new programme the result of a free examination of reality and of history? The leaders of the independents were inaugurating an experimental politics.
He accepted neither abstract principles nor theories imported from other continents. Free trade obtained in Colombia: it is the English economic dogma. "With us," explained the statesman, "free mercantile exchange simply transforms the artisan into a mere proletarian working man, into food for powder or a demagogue, for free trade practically leaves only two industries vigorous—commerce and agriculture—to which those who lack capital and credit cannot as a rule devote themselves." This caudillo wished to see a real autonomy based on a moderate protectionism: as President he fostered industries and condemned the bureaucracy; he knew that the latter favoured revolutions, and that men seldom fight in civil conflicts except to obtain public employment. "The motives for disturbing the peace," said he, "will be less and less powerful as the official system ceases to monopolise the opportunities of work."
Dr. NuÑez was a sociologist; he had studied Comte and Spencer; he wrote of society and its laws, starting from the liberalism of Lamartine to arrive at the British prudence of Guizot. An eminent Colombian, Don Miguel Antonio Caro, called him "the providential and necessary man," and demanded recognition of his political infallibility.
When he came into power in 1880 he was supported by the independents and the conservatives; men hoped for reform and peace as the result of his political action. Under his government public order was untroubled. He introduced economies in the finances, and realised, like Mosquera, many works of material progress; he founded a national bank, reformed the university, and convoked, like Bolivar, a Congress of plenipotentiaries at Panama.
Dr. Zaldua followed him in 1882. But the influence of the great caudillo was not yet at an end; he was re-elected in 1884 for a period of two years, and exercised a moral dictatorship. He proposed to a friendly Congress the revision of the Constitution of 1863.
He then applied his political ideas, condemning the two years' presidency, excessive federalism, and the licence and demagogy of the country; he organised a strong executive, conceded liberty to the Church, increased the duration of the presidential term, and initiated a prudent measure of concentration. The Constitution of 1885 ratified the triumph of the conservatives.
From that time forward the President was imperator; elected for six years in 1886, re-elected in 1892, he continued to exercise the supreme power at intervals. He lived at Carthagena, and Vice-Presidents (designated by himself) replaced him. He became the tutor of the Republic; the governors were his pro-consuls. He was the last great man produced by Colombia, that fruitful soil for politicians and men of letters.
Mosquera represented federalism and radicalism; NuÑez unity and tolerance. Fresh revolutions, conflicts between conservatives and liberals, have retarded the national development; new chiefs have arisen, demigods of the world of politics. The conservative work of NuÑez has proved sterile: Colombia is always the land of eloquence and Jacobinism, extravagant and excessive as the tropics themselves. She still awaits fresh dictators who shall organise the democracy of the future.
CHAPTER II
ECUADOR
Religious conflicts—General Flores and his political labours—Garcia-Moreno—The Republic of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Ecuador constituted itself a free democracy after a long period of indecision. Guayaquil aspired to be an independent state; it listened to the melodious aspirations of its poet, Olmedo, and at other times sought to unite itself to Peru. Bolivar and La Mar both sought to claim this city, which a proud provincialism called "the pearl of the Guayas." The vast ambitions of Bolivar won the day, and Ecuador became a province of Greater Colombia, under the hegemony of Venezuela or New Granada.
General Juan JosÉ Flores, a Venezuelan, and a friend and lieutenant of the Liberator's, founded the Ecuadorian Republic in 1830. He was the "Father of the Country," and teacher and guardian of this precocious nation, as was Paez in Venezuela and Sucre in Bolivia. He governed the country for fifteen years, being elected President in 1831, in 1839, and in 1843. The unity of Colombia, maintained by the autocracy of Bolivar, was an obstacle in the way of Flores' ambitions for Ecuador; he therefore sought to destroy the federal organisation. Sucre, too, whose young and glorious shoulders were soon to sustain the authority of a liberator, was opposed to the ambitions of the Venezuelan caudillo. The latter convoked a Constituent Assembly at Riobamba. The first national statute of the equatorial republic was then promulgated: it established a representative government with two Chambers, an executive independent of these Chambers, and Catholicism as the sole State religion: these were the bases of the Constitution. Ecuador once independent, an era of incessant disturbances set in; men fought for their leaders and for ideas. Flores symbolised the principles of the conservatives, inimical to radicalism and democracy; he dreamed of a strong executive, a national religion, and a limited suffrage. His ideal was a presidency of eight years, and a senate of twelve, an echo of the Bolivian Constitution. He accepted monarchy as the necessary solution of Ecuadorian anarchy; he fell because he attempted the restoration of a superannuated system.
He and Rocafuerte, a liberal caudillo, the leader of a party of cultivated youth, shared the public functions between them. When Flores was President, Rocafuerte was governor of Guayaquil; when Rocafuerte ruled, Flores was commander-in-chief of the army. Both were sent into exile; they were successively enemies and allies. Flores played the tyrant, suppressed liberties, and aspired to the dictatorship; when he fell from power he prepared filibustering expeditions in Europe to be launched against his country. Spain offered him her aid in 1846. "Treason!" cried the Ecuadorian patriots. The chimera of a monarchist, the scepticism of an ambitious foreigner who had fruitlessly created a new country on the ruins of Greater Colombia, say we, after half a century has elapsed. America was stirred by the campaign of reconquest which he headed; in 1851 his temerarious plan had entirely miscarried, and he sought the aid of Peru in order to invade his country, then a prey to anarchy. He was not successful in the field, and after a long period of ostracism he joined Garcia-Moreno, the leader of the conservative forces; under the authority of the latter his influence decayed and his history ended. His disciple Rocafuerte was an excellent administrator, who founded schools, organised the National Guard, established military colonies in the east, partially secularised education, proved a liberal patron of arts and letters, and commenced the codification of the civil and penal laws.
In 1851 General Urbina forced a radical government upon Ecuador; he was the genius of destruction, an intriguer, an ambitious man whose excesses provoked a conservative reaction. He attempted in vain to establish a military rÉgime. Garcia-Moreno denounced the treason of Flores and the radicalism of Urbina, and his moral influence overcame the prevailing anarchy. This remarkable statesman was born at Guayaquil in 1821; he came of a Castilian family. His mother trained him strictly in poverty; a priest, Father Bethencourt, directed his later education. In 1836 he entered the University of Quito, and soon became the supervisor of his own companions—an undergraduate autocrat. Tall, of a severe aspect, the forehead wide, and the eyes forceful, he was already revealed as a leader of men. He devoted himself with ardour to mathematics and philosophy; he acquired general ideas and an analytical turn of mind. Endowed with a prodigious memory and a vigorous dialectic, always master of himself, he had every desirable gift. Towards his nineteenth year his chaste youth passed through a moral crisis. He issued therefrom, according to his biographer, less the devotee but not less of a believer. Like Goethe, he made up his mind abruptly. He would not be guilty of timidity; he liberated himself from the tutelage of the world by dint of heroism; he was Mucius ScÆvola before he was CÆsar. His fiery spirit and irreducible will made him a leader whom all respected, a mystic whom the conservatives acclaimed.
Garcia-Moreno intervened in politics as a journalist; he was a satiric poet, and founded various polemical sheets: El Zurriago, El Vengador, and El Diablo. He drafted pamphlets, accused and condemned in prose and in verse, and wrote his classic Epistle to Fabius concerning the poverty of the times. His style was steely, energetic, rarely declamatory; he wrote apostrophes in the manner of Juvenal; he brought into politics a rude indignation, the rebellious anger of a Hebrew prophet, announcing the final catastrophe of democracy; as a journalist he represented the national interests. In 1846, when the threat of a Spanish invasion hung over Ecuador, Garcia-Moreno roused America by his writings. He was the pacificator of Guayaquil, where the partisans of Flores had risen in insurrection.
A voyage to Europe brought the young writer into contact with the social revolution of 1848. The spectacle of triumphant anarchy re-enforced his conservative opinions. In Ecuador radicalism triumphed in 1850; on his return the conservative leader protected the Jesuits expelled from Colombia, demanded the return of their property, and authorised them to found colleges. He published a pamphlet, Defence of the Jesuits, in which he called them "the creators of peace and order," and stated with fearless candour that he was a Catholic and was proud of the fact.
The military-radical dictatorship of Urbina devastated the country; the "Tauras," a prÆtorian guard, as brutal as the "Mazorqueros" of Rosas, killed and pillaged, and were the docile servants of tyranny. Garcia-Moreno then founded the journal La NaciÓn, and preached the doctrine that there can be no social progress in a country which does not foster material progress, and in which a devouring poverty is triumphant. He was arrested and exiled. He reached Europe once more in 1854, and there gave much time to the study of European politics. He had been something of a Gallican on the subject of the relations of Church and State, believing in the supremacy of the civil power. His opinions changed. Subscribing to the tradition of those Popes who aspired to empire, he considered that the Church should be absolute sovereign above all earthly powers. But a triumphant radicalism was secularising ecclesiastical foundations, and convents were being invaded by the troops. The conservative caudillo returned from exile in 1856, and was met with every species of homage; he was elected Mayor of Quito, and rector of the University. He founded a political party—that of national union. Elected senator, he called, with the authority of an avenging tribune, for honest finances, the suppression of the masonic lodges, a law of public education, and the abolition of the poll tax, which burdened the native, and represented all the forces of social conservation under the tutelage of the Church.
The Convention of 1860 made him provisional President, then constitutional President. Garcia-Moreno inaugurated a clerical semi-dictatorship after thirty years of revolutions. He did not limit the suffrage; he depended on the democracy to defeat unpopular demagogues. He believed that "to moralise a country one must give it a Catholic Constitution, and, to ensure the necessary cohesion, a statute of unity." He organised the finances, the army, the schools; he reduced the fiscal expenditure; founded at Quito a Tribunal of Accounts, which he supervised himself; he waged a pitiless war upon smuggling, peculation, and bureaucracy; he built roads connecting the capital with the coast, ruined militarism, and founded a civil rÉgime.
He was a Catholic President. As in the Colonial period, politics centred upon the Church. The clergy taught and legislated. "The Church," said Garcia-Moreno, "must march side by side with the civil power under conditions of true independence." He entrusted public education to the religious congregations, and prepared to sign a concordat with the Church; Catholicism was to be recognised as the State religion, to the exclusion of all foreign sects and cults, and the bishops would supervise the colleges and universities; they would choose the textbooks to be used, and the government, like the Spanish Inquisition, would see that no forbidden works were introduced. The ecclesiastical charter would be renewed, and as a set-off the government would annul the exequatur, the authorisation which the American governments accorded to the pontifical bulls, that these might be obeyed. More Catholic than the Sacred College, Garcia-Moreno insisted upon the reform of the clergy, despite the hesitation of the Pope. Once the Concordat was signed; Pius IX. created new dioceses, and ecclesiastical courts, which tried all causes relating to the faith—to religious matters in general, and to marriage and divorce. The conservative leader aspired to a Catholic Imperialism. He intervened in the domestic affairs of Colombia, where a radical President was in power; he eulogised the Mexican Empire, which was to deliver the country from the "excesses of a rapacious, immoral and turbulent demagogy." He dreamed of an America enfeoffed to the Papacy.
Presidents followed him who were weak in the face of anarchy: Borrero, Carrion, Espinosa. The great caudillo did not lose his influence; many times he was forced to leave his retreat in order to pacify a province or direct a political party. In 1860 he returned to power, to lay the foundations of a stable theocracy. His governmental programme read like an episcopal address. As essential articles appeared "the respect and protection of the Catholic Church, unshakable attachment to the Holy See, education based on morality and faith, and liberty for all and in everything, excepting crime and criminals." He declared that civilisation, "the fruit of Catholicism, degenerates and becomes impure in proportion as it departs from Catholic principles"; that "religion is the sole bond which is left to us in this country, divided as it is by the interests of parties, races, and beliefs." The new Constitution was to conform to the principles of the Syllabus; in Ecuador no one was to be elected or eligible who did not profess the Catholic religion, and whosoever should belong to a sect condemned by the Church would lose his civil rights. In his mystic ardour, he consecrated his country to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and in 1873 he protested, in a note addressed to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the King of Italy, against the taking of Rome and the confiscation of the Papal States. His ideal was the monarchy of Philip II.; the Jesuit Empire of Paraguay; the return of the Middle Ages, and a conventual peace. Like Rafael NuÑez and Portales, he believed that "religion is the only national tradition in these democracies at the mercy of anarchy—the creative agent, the instrument of political unity." Religion is the foundation of morality, and "the absence of morality is the ruin of the Republic; there are no good manners and morals without a pure clergy, and a Church free of all official tutelage." A moralising despot, he repressed concubinage, and imposed Catholic marriage or chastity upon his subjects. Virtue, faith, and order: there was his ideal.
The authoritative Constitution which he promulgated is analogous to the Chilian statute of 1883. The President was re-eligible; his mandate was for ten years; he could govern for a third period after his immediate successor. The government was at the head of the army, and appointed all provincial authorities; political rebellion was punished as high treason. The legislative term was six years for deputies and nine for senators. Garcia-Moreno strictly observed this new law; he made war upon revolutionaries, and condemned the leaders of revolts and conspiracies to death. Internal order re-established, he commenced a series of vast reforms in the national finances, in public education, and in legislation; he opened schools, re-established the death penalty, sent officers to Prussia to follow the military manoeuvres, reorganised the school of medicine, founded an astronomical observatory, and attracted German Jesuits who were to teach physics and chemistry. He proved himself a potent organiser: "Twenty-five years are needed," he said, "to establish my system." Re-elected in 1875, he was quickly overthrown by his enemies. He resisted to the death; the dagger of an enemy struck him down in the mournful solitude of the plaza of Quito, and he fell near the cathedral in which he had worshipped. A long silence, a time of deep mourning, followed the death of the caudillo; he was named a second Gregory the Great, the regenerator of his country, the martyr of Catholic civilisation.
Indefatigable, stoical, just, strong in decision, admirably logical in his life, Garcia-Moreno was one of the greatest personalities of American history. He was no tyrant without doctrines, like Guzman-Blanco or Porfirio Diaz. In fifteen years (1859-74) he completely transformed his little country according to a vast political system which only death prevented him from realising. A mystic of the Spanish type, he was not content with sterile contemplation; he needed action; he was an organiser and a creator.
He felt the aid and the continual presence of God; he asked his friends for their prayers, and read daily in The Imitation of Christ. He was even too much of a Catholic for the conservatives; he was often to be seen carrying the daÏs in procession. "A Christian Hercules, a disciple of Charlemagne and St. Louis," writes Father Berthe, his ingenuous and enthusiastic biographer. "A hero of Jesus Christ, not of Plutarch," said Louis Veuillot in a dithyramb; while his enemies, Montalvo and Moncayo, accused him of treason, Jesuitism, and cruelty. Montalvo recognised, however, in the conservative President, "a sublime intelligence, a superiority to every trial, a strong, imperious, invincible will." Superior to exaggerated eulogy and acerbated criticism, Garcia-Moreno represented the great civilising principles in the Ecuadorian democracy; unity, the struggle against a militarism of thirty years' standing, material progress, religion, morality, and strong government against licence and demagogy. As an autocrat he resembled all great American leaders; but he surpassed them in idealism, by the logic of his actions and the originality of his essay in theocracy. With Philip II. and the Paraguayan Jesuits, he believed Catholicism to be an instrument of culture, and his policy was for fifteen years the exaltation of that religion. Only NuÑez and Balmaceda brought equally coherent ideas to the task of government. No one in Ecuador, neither Veintemilla, nor Borrero, nor Alfaro, could gather up the inheritance of this admirable despot. Carlyle, had he known him, would have set him in his gallery of heroes.
CHAPTER III
THE ANARCHY OF THE TROPICS—CENTRAL
AMERICA—HAYTI—SAN DOMINGO
Tyrannies and revolutions—The action of climate and miscegenation—A republic of negroes: Hayti.
In Central America and the islands of the Antilles civil wars are the result not merely of racial conflict, but also of the enervating action of the Tropics. Precocious, sensual, impressionable, the Americans of these vast territories devote their energies to local politics. Industry, commerce, and agriculture are in a state of decay, and the unruly imagination of the Creole expends itself in constitutions, programmes, and lyrical discourse; in these regions anarchy is sovereign mistress.
Five republics came into being here, which have lived in a continual state of conflict, their aim being political domination. Internal disorders and international wars are continual. Ambitious generals have sometimes forced a provisional unity upon the continent, but it is soon divided by the anarchy and dictatorships which continually overwhelm the soil of the Tropics.
It is impossible to distinguish a military period and an industrial period in the history of Central America. Intellectuals and generals govern alternately, it is true, but thanks to identical methods; they all exercise the same sanguinary tutelage. A few dictators whose rule has been slightly more prolonged have at times contrived to increase the number of schools or develop the national finances, but personal initiative and the importation of foreign capital are equally out of the question under the rule of autocracies which govern solely by grace of the military element. Liberty, wealth, and human rights are the appanage of inhuman dictators.
The Republic was proclaimed and the political Constitution adopted in Central America on the 10th of April, 1825. It was then that the autonomous life of the five united provinces commenced. General Manuel Joseph was the first President of Central America. The Federal Statute of 1824 attributed all powers to Congress: it initiated a parliamentary dictatorship. As against the popular assembly the Executive was powerless, and the Senate, to which the Constitution confided the final sanction of the laws promulgated by Congress, was weak in point of numbers. As in all republics, the government was popular, representative, and federal. The equality of all citizens and the abolition of slavery being decreed, it was a new era that opened, liberal and romantic.
In the Lower Chamber Guatemala had the majority, and from this superiority ensued a tendency to political domination which provoked a long series of internal wars. Here was no conflict of nations, but of the interests of rival provinces or the quarrels of individual generals. Salvador wished to realise its autonomy; a virile and well-peopled republic, she could not readily accept the hegemony of Guatemala. Here is one aspect of this monotonous history: the frequent wars which divided Guatemala and Salvador. They struggled for supremacy, for moral tutelage. The federal tie survived, and the Assemblies multiplied; there were General Assemblies and Provisional Assemblies. Suddenly one of the States declared void the pact which united it to the other republics: Congress was dissolved, and at once re-elected. There was a perpetual confusion of powers.
During the first twenty years of liberty the anarchical instinct which sought to separate the republics and the calm reason which sought to unite them under the pressure of powerful traditions were in mutual conflict. It was the conflict of nationalism and unity. As in Chili the Carreras opposed the authority of San Martin, as in Venezuela Paez rebelled against the unification of Bolivar, so Carrera the Guatemalan general warred against Morazan, the caudillo of the Unitarian party, during twelve years of a struggle of province with province.
However, the States separated one from another, and united anew under the domination of a theoretical federation; men still legislated in Congresses, and built the future nation with the ardour of Jacobins: eleven Assemblies of the Confederation prepared codes and statutes. One essential trait of the new laws was their secular spirit, and their tendency to aggressive action against the clergy. Even sooner than Mexico these assemblies promulgated the laws of the Reformation; even before the era of religious quarrels opened in Colombia the radical fervour which was contemporary with the liberalism of Rivadavia was at work in Central America. For that matter, it appeared to be a remnant of the old "regalism." In 1829 the Assembly suppressed all convents of monks; in 1830 Honduras declared that secular priests might marry; in Guatemala it was enacted that the sons of members of the clergy ordained in sacris were necessarily their heirs. In 1832 toleration was proclaimed, but, on the other hand, the States were continually fighting over the question of patronage, and the antagonism between the State, which wished to impose its tutelage, and the rebellious Church was perpetual.
Two influences dominated the minds of the new law-makers: English utilitarianism and Yankee federalism. Here French ideas were not predominant. But the tropical republics could not assimilate the severe English doctrine. In vain, in 1832, did Congress go into mourning on the occasion of the death of Bentham; in vain was absolute liberty of testimony proclaimed in Guatemala. The double and inevitable influence of tradition and race cannot be destroyed by means of improvised laws.
Central America borrowed from the United States their mode of suffrage, the federal system, the organisation of the jury, and the codes of Louisiana. But popular agitation condemned the institution of the jury; the codes borrowed from the United States did not annihilate barbarism, and the federal system was powerless to enforce unity.
In 1842 this troublous Confederation of sister nations was dissolved. Once these nations were definitely separated, what we may call the period of provincial history commenced; it was confused, yet identical in the case of the various States. Above the anarchical multitude rose energetic caudillos; necessary tyrants, who endeavoured to enforce order in the interior, and to organise the national finances.
The history of Costa Rica forms the only exception among these republics oscillating between tyranny and demagogy. In this country were no clearly divided social castes, no great capitalists, and no crowds of proletariats. A small homogeneous State, in which men were always known as hermanicos ("brotherlies") because their interests and their ideas were identical, Costa Rica seemed to justify the classic idea which associated the success of the republican system with limited territories and small human groups. Work, unity, and lasting peace have been the characteristics of social evolution in Costa Rica. While neighbouring States were at war this tiny republic was progressing peacefully.
Salvador also developed normally without the discords of Nicaragua or Guatemala. Race explains the differences to be observed in these great theatres of political experience; in Salvador and Costa Rica the Spanish element was predominant, the castes were confounded, the population was dense, and the birth-rate high. In Honduras mulattos abounded, and in Nicaragua and Guatemala the races were mixed, and the Indians were superior in point of numbers. Among these five tropical republics those which progressed were those in which the race was homogeneous, or in which the Iberian conquerors outnumbered the Indians, negroes, and mulattos.
The very tropical anarchy which has turned Central America into a perpetual theatre of civil wars has also continually divided the two zones of the ancient Hispaniola: San Domingo and Hayti. In the one the Spaniards ruled, in the other the French, and the antagonism of these two Powers was of long duration. Hayti is a negro State, and San Domingo refused to submit to the tyranny of ex-slaves. Conflicts of a political origin were supplemented by the warfare of castes. Caudillos and tyrants have succeeded one another in the government; revolutions and domestic wars have continually troubled these two small States, over which the United States have gradually extended their tutelage.
As early as the seventeenth century the French were established in Hispaniola, on the northern coast; bold Normans, herdsmen and shepherds, the celebrated buccaneers, had founded a kind of forest republic ruled by special laws. In 1691 this territory was a French colony, and in 1726 it contained 30,000 free inhabitants and 100,000 slaves, black or mulatto. The Creoles, according to the chroniclers of the time, were proud and inconstant, idle and sceptical as to religion. The negroes, chiefly occupied in servile labour, superstitious and imprudent, formed the bulk of the slaves. A Jesuit, Father Charlevoix, who had observed them, wrote in 1725: "Properly speaking we may say that the negroes between Cap Blanc and Cap Noir have been born only for slavery."[1] It was said that the negroes were wont to celebrate the rites of a secret worship in the forest, and were preparing to fight for their liberty. They hated the other castes, the whites, the free negroes, and the mulattos; and the Hayti of the future was born of this racial hatred. Ex-slaves governed the isle, and found in bloody hecatombs revenge for their long servitude. These formed the oligarchy, an intolerable and intolerant aristocracy, inimical to whites and mulattos. Like the revolts of slaves in the ancient world, these rebellions of American serfs were the occasion of wars of extermination. The French Revolution provoked them by its Utopian liberalism: Mirabeau and Lafayette were friends of the negro, and the Convention decreed the abolition of slavery in the colonies in 1794. The slaves had risen already, in 1791, at the first rumours of the risings in France, burning property and killing their rulers.
They therefore attained political and civil liberty suddenly, with no prudent transitions. A caudillo, Toussaint Louverture, was the hero of the war of liberation. The metropolis made this ex-coachman a general. Sober and active, crafty and patriotic, he aspired to seize the reins of government; he expelled the English and fought against the people of colour who were led by General Rigaud; he was the indomitable defender of his race. The slaves regarded him as a tutelary deity; they thought him inspired; he gradually became the fetish of a superstitious caste. In 1801 an Assembly elected him governor for life; but he did not renounce the protection of France. In vain did his adulators call him the Napoleon of the negroes; he did not aspire to absolute rule. He organised an army and set the finances in order; he proved a vigilant administrator. Like the dictator Francia in Paraguay, he forced his people to work by strict regulations; he prosecuted vagabonds, won the esteem of the whites, and introduced a severe morality into matters of finance.
Napoleon wished to reconquer the emancipated colony, and sent a strong army against it. The negroes rallied round their chief, and offered a heroic resistance; finally the French withdrew, and abandoned the island to the ex-slaves. In 1825 the metropolis recognised the independence of Hayti.
The Constitution of the new republic was promulgated in 1801. Without disdaining the suzerainty of France, which had prematurely abolished slavery, the negroes made laws intended to establish a democracy; they organised municipalities, and recognised Catholicism as the State religion. They recognised that labour, painful as it is to an indolent nation, is yet obligatory. From this time forward the history of Hayti is a perpetual succession of civil wars and dictatorships. Liberal laws were given to a caste habituated to slavery. PÉtion, who was honoured by the friendship of Bolivar, was President in 1807; he applied himself more especially to the education of his people, and was called the father of his country; his government was a period of peace between two crises of vandalism. Before him the successor of Toussaint Louverture, Dessalines, had ordered the killing of all the whites, and had commenced a disastrous racial war. Nothing could be more hateful to the ex-slaves than the aristocracy of the skin; neither whites nor mulattos escaped the fury of the rulers. The integrity of the negro race was the ideal of these ferocious dictators.
No South American republic had to suffer such ill-augured tyrannies as those of Hayti; no autocracy was so formidable as that of these ex-slaves, whose leaders were notable amateurs of pageantry and bloodshed. Soulouque, the sworn enemy of the mulattos, proclaimed himself Emperor in 1849, taking the name of Faustinus I., and surrounding himself with a grotesquely ambitious court: he was the most execrable of despots. The Republic was re-established in 1859, and the monotonous sequence of servile coxcombs who made use of their power to gratify their passion for extermination recommenced: civil wars, international wars, assassinations, and massacres filled the bloodstained chronicles of the isle. The Haytian rulers exercised a harsh domination over San Domingo, where mulattos abounded and the Spanish tradition was not extinct; the negro invasion exiled the Dominican writers, destroyed the culture of the university, and swept like a wave of barbarism into the brilliant colony.
The Dominicans abhorred their long servitude, and, despite the terrible reprisals of their rulers, they prepared in silence for liberation. In 1821 NuÑez de Caceres declared San Domingo to be separated from Spain, and demanded protection of Colombia; the President of Hayti, Boyer, could not permit this unexpected autonomy, and sent an army to occupy the capital of the new republic. After a long period of secret preparation another group of patriots again proclaimed the independence of San Domingo, and in 1844 a movement which coincided with the revolt of the Haytian liberals against the tyranny of Boyer. This campaign, known as "the Revolt," was directed by an impassioned ideologist, Juan-Pablo Duarte, who was surrounded by intellectuals and men of action. The traditional oppressors were vanquished, and the victors proclaimed that "the peoples of the ancient Spanish portion, in vindication of their rights and desiring to provide for their own welfare and future happiness in a just and legal manner, have formed themselves into a free, independent, and sovereign State."
In winning her autonomy San Domingo did not realise the dream of the strict republicans. Her history is less troubled than that of Hayti, and education and literature have attained an astonishing development in the old Spanish colony, but political life has been indecisive and full of revolutionary upheavals, as in the other democracies of South America. Perhaps we must attribute to the great number of mulattos, always incapable of self-government, or to the long duration of the Haytian domination, the anarchy of this, one of the youngest of the overseas republics. After 1844, the year of liberation, Santana, a half-breed dictator, cunning, uncultured, and implacable in hatred, retained the supreme power. The Februarists were at the head of the revolution known as the Reformation—Duarte, Mella, Sanchez—noble idealists in love with the idea of democracy. However, a caudillo profited by this movement of regeneration, overruling the ideologists in the name of practical despotism. "Februarism," said a remarkable Dominican thinker, "that is to say, the constitution of a free government founded upon equity, without caciquism and without the shameful fetters which sometimes limit the exercise of sovereignty, has predominated for too short a time on two or three occasions of our national life. On the contrary, Santanism—that is, personal autocracy, rigid and stifling, such as characterised the entire policy of Santana, and which has been practised since his time by nearly all our rulers, attenuated in some cases and in others exasperated—Santanism seems to have deep and inextricable roots."[2]
But is it not the fact that despotism is the necessary form of all government in these republics, where the division of castes opposes unity and the normal development of nationality? The future of Haytians and Dominicans both is full of grave problems: among the first we find poetry, imagination, a high state of culture, but political evolution is very slow. The peoples of the Tropics seem incapable of order, laborious patience, and method; so that the prodigal literature of San Domingo forms a striking contrast to the archaic quality of its political life. "Its geographical situation," says SeÑor Garcia Godoy, "places it almost at the mercy of North American imperialism." Hayti is still a barbarous democracy. It is not easy to turn a colony of negro slaves into an orderly and prosperous republic merely by virtue of political charters of foreign origin; and it has not been proved that parliamentarism, municipal life, and the classic division of powers, the creation of the East, form an adequate system of government for negroes and mulattos. In vain did General LÉgitime, once President of Hayti, affirm that had they been properly encouraged and directed, his people would already have arrived at "the highest degree of prosperity and civilisation"; in vain did he pretend that the decadence of his country was due not to a question of race but to a problem of social economy: excess of taxation and paper money. Hayti possesses immense natural wealth, yet the taxes are crushing, the railways go bankrupt, labourers emigrate, and agriculture and industry are dwindling, as the General recognised; all because the indolence of the race does not permit it to take advantage of the fertility of the soil nor to govern itself.
