As he ascended the tribune he heard the murmurs around him telling him that he was already hated. But his courage gave him words. He was called a doctrinaire. "A doctrinaire!" he said. "But who is not a doctrinaire? Is there anyone who does not profess some doctrine, either good or evil? As for myself, I know that my doctrine is good; it is the Christian doctrine, and I am proud to declare that I put aside the enjoyments of life as an end of existence, holding for certain that a Supreme Justice awaits all men at the doors of death. The individual who faces the inevitable afflictions of life, its maladies and its miseries, if you limit his aspirations to the times in which he lives, he becomes a foe of discipline; he carries his negations, not to Heaven, which does not exist for him, but to everything which proves an obstacle to his ambitions, to country, family, and society, to destroy them. He becomes an international.
"Reactionary you call me! There is no one who in these days of trouble ought to bear that name better than I. I have heard that the Senors, Margal and Castellar, were reactionaries; and the successor of Proudhon, who has written his diabolical gospel, Chaudrey himself, he was shot as a reactionary by the Commune of Paris. You are preaching social and economical emancipation to the masses; but what obstacle has the workman from performing his labors freely? You promise social liquidation, the revision of property and of public fortune and their better division. What good reasons, political, historical or philosophical do you bring to support these theories? Are you bound to accept as Gospel truth, every idea that rises in the minds of men? Must you take every man as a Messiah who proclaims himself an apostle or a prophet? If you do so, you will rob the State of all security, society of all stability, history of all solidity; and if you are indifferent, the philosophic theorizers will soon plunge the land into a torrent of blood."
ANTONIO CANOVAS DEL CASTILLO.
Conservative Prime Minister.
Canovas was listened to in silence, and his auditors uttered no protest; but they remained unchanged. Four years of republican rule ruined the country; liberty was betrayed by a license which permitted everyone to live according to his own caprice. Religion, buffeted and persecuted, its temples and property confiscated, its ministers proscribed, the public safety destroyed, with pillage unpunished in the cities conflagrations started in the country places, were the fruits of the new ideas which reigned in the high places of the state. Valencia, Grenada, and Seville became principalities, created Parliaments, frontiers, custom houses, coined monies, and levied taxes; it was a form of anarchy. Carlism took up arms again; Cuba revolted; and the government found itself powerless to bring matters to a peaceful condition.
In its anxiety the country looked to Canovas de Castillo. To those who spoke of insurrection he answered: "Let us wait; there is no need of bloodshed." On December 28, 1874, he appeared at the head of the troops at Sagonta, and proclaimed Alphonso XII. as King. The news spread quickly, and was accepted as a signal of deliverance. There was no resistance; the old government was gone; and the Cortes was dispersed.
CANOVAS IN POWER.
Canovas was at once recognized as the representative of the absent King, and the country was ready to obey his directions. Armed with this power, he set to work to put the country in order. He exiled Zorilla, the chief of the demagogues, he banished the revolutionaries and expelled the teachers of disorder, who had the impudence to call themselves "the Intellectuals." As the Constitution was but the legalization of tyranny, he drew up another, in which Catholic principles were respected.
The moment had come for inaugurating an era of peace. His ministry again declared that "the Catholic religion is the religion of the State," though it professed a tolerance for dissident sects. The monastic orders were received back into the land; churches were restored, the clergy received as much of the ecclesiastical property as had not been absolutely alienated. The Carlists were pacified, and the whole country once more brought within the bonds of patriotic union.
It was unfortunate that this great statesman, who had placed Alphonso XII. upon the throne, and watched over the first years of the present King Alphonso XIII., was assassinated by an anarchist, August 8, 1897.