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.