And he accomplished all this, not only without increasing the taxes, but even diminishing some of them. This is the reason why he was so much beloved by the people; why they called him father of his country and saviour of the republic. But it was also this which was his unpardonable sin, which had to promptly receive a chastisement which should serve as a warning for his successors, that they might not dare to imitate his manner of government. For such a course as his was sure to ruin the credit of Masonry in the popular mind.
III.
Moreno loved his country, and worked so hard for its good, because he was truly and thoroughly religious. Every one who really loves God loves his neighbor also; and he who loves God intensely loves his neighbor in the same way, because he sees in him the image of God and the price of his blood.
When he was a student in Paris he was admired for his piety. In his own country, amid the continual cares and heavy responsibilities of his office, he always found time to hear Mass every morning and say the rosary every night. In his familiar conversation he spoke frequently of God, of religion, of virtue, and with such fervor that all who heard felt their hearts touched and moved by his words. Before beginning the business of the day, he always made a visit to the church to implore light from the Source of all wisdom; and he had just left it, as we have said, when he met the ambuscade which was prepared for him. This religious spirit produced in him a great zeal for the glory of God, and that devotion to the Vicar of Christ which in him so much resembled the affection of a child for his father. Let it suffice to say that when he had to arrange the concordat with the Holy See, he sent his ambassador to Rome with a blank sheet signed by himself, telling him to ask his Holiness to write on it whatever seemed to him right and conducive to the good of the church and the true welfare of the nation. Such was the confidence which he reposed in the Pope, with whom politicians are accustomed to treat as if he were an ambitious and designing foreign prince, instead of being the father of all the faithful. When the revolution entered Rome in triumph through the breach of Porta Pia, Garcia Moreno was the only ruler in the world who dared to enter a solemn protest against that sacrilegious invasion; and he obtained from his Congress a considerable sum as a monthly subsidy and tribute of affection to his Holiness.
But his piety toward God and his filial love to the church can best be seen from the message to Congress which he finished a few hours before his death, and which was found on his dead body, steeped in his blood. Although it is somewhat long for the limits of an article, we think that we ought to present it to our readers as an imperishable monument of true piety and enlightened policy, and as a lesson for the false politicians of the present day and of days to come.
The message is as follows:
“Senators and Deputies: I count among the greatest of the great blessings which God has, in the inexhaustible abundance of his mercy, granted to our republic, that of seeing you here assembled under his protection, in the shadow of his peace, which he has granted and still grants to us, while we are nothing and can do nothing, and only give in return for his paternal goodness inexcusable and shameful ingratitude.
“It is only a few years since Ecuador had to repeat daily these sad words which the liberator Bolivar addressed in his last message to the Congress of 1830: ‘I blush to have to acknowledge that independence is the only good which we have acquired, and that we have lost all the rest in acquiring it.’
“But since the time when, placing all our hope in God, we escaped from the torrent of impiety and apostasy which overwhelms the world in this age of blindness; since 1869, when we reformed ourselves into a truly Catholic nation, everything has been on a course of steady and daily improvement, and the prosperity of our dear country has been continually increasing.
“Ecuador was not long ago a body from which the life-blood was ebbing, and which was even, like a corpse, already a prey to a horrible swarm of vermin which the liberty of putrefaction engendered in the darkness of the tomb. But to-day, at the command of that sovereign voice which called Lazarus from the sepulchre, it has returned to life, though it still has not entirely cast off the winding-sheet and bandages—that is to say, the remains and effects of the misery and corruption in which it had been buried.