Portales was the organising genius; Montt represented an epoch of social defence; Balmaceda was the democratic reformer in an oligarchic country, a liberal president in a time of conservative traditions. Balmaceda is the greatest Chilian figure after Portales; his presidency excited a revolution, and transformed the political life of his people.
José Manuel Balmaceda belonged to the Chilian oligarchy. He was descended from a very old colonial family. Juan de Balmaceda was president of the Real Audienca, the king's tribunal, towards the end of the eighteenth century. The name of the family reveals its Basque origin. Balmaceda was born in Santiago in 1838. His father, Don Manuel José Balmaceda, was a conservative, the possessor of vast latifundia, as the head of a traditional family.
Balmaceda adopted democratic ideas. "Apostate" the conservatives called him, forgetting that he had changed his doctrines, but had not abandoned his original mysticism; he believed in liberty as he had previously believed in the inflexible dogmas of the conservatives. He belonged to the Reform Club of Santiago, in which a brilliant younger generation upheld all the liberal idelas and romantic faiths of 1848, the antitheses of the ideas of the pelucones and the Monttvarists. To the despotic executive he opposed electoral liberty, a single-term presidency, autonomous municipalities, and the restriction of presidential powers; to the Catholic oligarchy, religious tolerance; to the traditions of authority, the formal recognition of the rights of the press and the rights of assembly, meeting and petition; to the confusion of the powers of the State, their independence. Balmaceda was the president of the Reform Club. He did not attack the position of a traditional group with plebeian fervour, as the avenger of an age of servitude; he left their ranks, rich and patrician, to condemn their authority and their privileges. It is the attitude of Winston Churchill in liberal England.
Balmaceda had powerful tools at his disposal: personal wealth, the basis of independence, a sympathetic creed, and a party which had been growing powerful under the governments of Perez and Errazuriz.
We may distinguish three phases in his political action: as a deputy he championed the laws of reform; as Minister of Foreign Affairs he prevented the intervention of the United States in the Pacific war; as President he increased the presidential power against the tyranny of Congress. From 1870 to 1879 he was an impassioned parliamentarian, believing in the efficacy of liberty against the excesses of the conservative régime. In the Chamber, as deputy and as Minister of the Interior and Religions, he supported the legal measures of the liberals: secular burial, civil register and marriage, and liberty of worship. In place of an absolute separation of Church and State—not to be realised in Chili—he proposed the union of the two powers on the basis of the traditional "patronage" and religious liberty. He desired no radical reforms. "Let us renounce," he said, "the idea of accomplishing everything in a short space of time; let us beware of carrying our solutions, guided by a spirit of rigorous abstraction, beyond what is required by the actual needs of the moment for the correct application of liberal doctrine and for the common happiness." Balmaceda, a radical in 1879, moderated his ambitions ten years later, when he came to ask the Chilian Parliament to pass his reforms.
Minister of Foreign Affairs under Santa-Maria in 1881, he consolidated the victories of Chili in the war of the Pacific. The military campaign was over, and Peru was vanquished, but was defending her territorial integrity against the conquering ambition of Arauco. What the armies had not been able to do diplomacy hoped to effect. The intervention of the United States would have proposed, as the solution of the war, peace without conquest; this was the policy of Mr. Blaine, who dreamed of an America at lasting peace under the golden reign of arbitration. A North American minister, Mr. Trescott, brought the proposals of his government to Chili. Garcia-Calderon, President of Peru, the champion of territorial integrity and national union, stimulated the intervention of the United States, but the mediators were inclined to treat the victors with docility. President Garfield died, and the North American policy changed. The Peruvian President was a prisoner of Chili; from Rancagua to Quillota, from Santiago to Valparaiso, he was the irreducible symbol of vanquished Peru. The United States abandoned him; their policy finally became indecisive, turbid, Machiavellic. Lima and Callao were occupied until 1883, when Balmaceda succeeded in arranging the terms of peace, and the treaty was signed which delivered over to Chili the riches of Southern Peru.
JOSE MANUEL BALMACEDA.
President of Chile (1886-1891).