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.