Chapter II

Chili: A Republic of the Anglo-Saxon Type

Portales and the oligarchy—The ten-years Presidency—Montt and his influence—Balmaceda the Reformer.

In Chili the course of political evolution has been entirely original. Her first years of republican life were as troublous as those of the Argentine, Bolivia, and Peru; it was an age of anarchy. Carrera, the dictator, overthrew four governments; there were mutinies in the barracks, and quarrels among the generals; the Dictator O'Higgins fell in 1823; a junta followed him, and after the junta four governors, Freire, Blanco Encalada, Eyzaguirre, and Vicuña—ephemeral figures which a turbulent democracy set up and destroyed. They occupied the centre of the moving scene for some few months, and were seen no more. During the administration of Pinto, from 1827 to 1829, there were no less than five revolutions. Federation was attempted in a country essentially Unitarian; the Congresses were disruptive assemblies; and in 1828 and 1829 an obscure demagogy rose in revolt against the guardians of social order. The national life was chaotic: vandalism in the country, commerce paralysed, industry at a standstill, finance in disorder, credit vanished, and politics revolutionary. The parties were struggling for power; the "old wigs," pelucones, or conservatives, and the "white-beaks," pipiolos, or liberals. The latter governed a people in love with liberty. The political orgy continued until 1830; the Chilian people went from liberty to licence, and from licence to barbarism. At last the demagogy was checked by a man of superior powers, Diego Portales, founder of the Araucanian nation.

THE CATHEDRAL, SANTIAGO, CHILE.
(From "Latin America, the Land of Opportunity"
by the Hon. John Barrett.)

The social constitution of Chili, the contact of the castes, and the traditions of the country all favoured his work of organisation. A narrow territory, whose racial action must be unifying, and a long coast-line, evoking the desire of adventure and expansion; these are the geographical basis of a homogeneous race. The Araucanians do not exhibit the gloomy passivity of the Quechuas and Aymaras; they are rude and warlike. Miscegenation has not, as in Peru and Brazil, been complicated by Asiatic and African strains; it has been simple, without the terrible "hybridisms" of other countries. Hence national unity and historical continuity. Over the servile mass reigns, haughty and remote, a narrow oligarchy formed of austere and positive Basques, deliberate Anglo-Saxons, merchants, and sailors.

No slaves, as in the tropics, but inquilinos, feudal serfs of territorial barons. The oligarchy is agricultural, and therefore stable and profoundly national. In short, we have a copy of Anglo-Saxon society, or of the first Roman Republic; a false democracy governed by absolute overlords.

With these strong conservative elements, Portales constructed an austere nation. He was born in 1793, and was thirty-seven years old at the time of his first intervention in political life. He was a "new" man, a merchant, with precise ideas. He had the suggestive power of the caudillos, a concrete intelligence, a moderate education, a strong will, some power of reflection and authority. He might well become the leader of a race that knew nothing of lyric enthusiasms nor enticing dreams—the sensible director of a practical people. Minister under Ovalle in 1830, he profited by the victory of General Prieto over the pipiolos. His conservative, authoritative ideas carried him into power. He never wished to be President, but a powerful minister, like Disraeli or Bismarck. Three or four simple and concrete ideas guided him in politics; in the first place, the organisation of Chili against anarchy. Religion is one of the forces of order, and Portales, like Garcia-Moreno, utilised it without going so far as theocracy; the principle of authority is necessary in order to organise a country, and the leader of the pelucones demanded a strong executive with extraordinary faculties. Between two excesses—autocracy and demagogy—he inclined rather toward the former, and became a minister-dictator.

Portales governed against disorder; he dismissed the revolutionary leaders, and men he divided into good and bad. He surrounded himself with "good" men: they were, naturally, conservatives. He hated sargentadas (barrack mutinies); he educated the soldiers, and founded a national guard as a counter-check to militarism. He destroyed the bandits who infested the country. Primary and normal schools were opened, in which he favoured religious instruction. A severe economy was introduced into the national finances. His work was given legal and economic form by a Peruvian jurist, Juan Egana, and a Minister of Finance, Tocornal.

The minister wished his work to share the majesty of things eternal; his personal and passing influence on life was not enough to satisfy him. He had thoughts of a statute, an inflexible mould for the future. The Constitution of 1833, which others promulgated under his sovereign ægis, so to speak, was his political legacy.

This Constitution created a conservative Senate and a strong Executive; the first was to defend tradition, the second to direct the progress of the nation. The provincial assemblies, vestiges of federalism, were suppressed, and the municipalities were entrusted with the public services. In case of internal trouble, the President could declare a state of siege and suspend the constitutional guarantees; but he could neither judge nor apply penalties. The departments elected the deputies; a limited suffrage appointed the senators; their mandate was for nine years. Patronage was organised, and the Church became a State institution, for it defended property, order, and the "good ideas" of the pelucones: it consecrated the oligarchy, pure and simple.

This Constitution explains the slow progress of Chili in matters of liberalism, her long domestic peace, and the lasting hegemony of an oligarchic group. Alberdi attributed the Chilian peace to "a vigorous Executive" and the Constitution of 1833.

This statute once a reality, Portales quietly organised the country; he imposed order "by reason or by force." He retired from power, and, in consequence, the conservative party passed through a crisis, during which Rengijo and Tocornal were in conflict; but Portales reappeared, as Minister of War, under Prieto, and Tocornal, the eminent financier, was at his side. The caudillo of order resumed his work of organisation with incomparable activity; his patriotic ambition was not satisfied by his triumphs over intestine quarrels. He realised that Chili was a maritime nation, commercial and oligarchical, like Carthage, and he aspired to the domination of the ocean.

In the north, under the leadership of Santa-Cruz, Peru and Bolivia had united. Portales feared this confederation, intervened in the affairs of Peru, sent two expeditions against Santa-Cruz, and fomented anarchy in Peru. He destroyed the great work of the great Bolivian cacique, and for half a century his imperialism made progress. Peru had wealth, brilliance, and tradition; Chili deprived her of the hegemony of the Pacific in a four-years war (1879-84).

The work of Portales was considerable. He established peace in the interior, and excited the ambition to rule; he organised the country under a strong authority, aided by a tutelary Church; he fostered wealth and material progress; he built highways and railroads. A Constitution was to establish his moral dictatorship for a period of fifty years. The liberals themselves—Lastarria, Huneeus Gana—recognised his masterly action in a time of disorder. A conservative, Walker Martinez, wrote a brilliant apologia for his work. Vicuña Mackenna, the historian, wrote that "he was rather a great mind than a great character," though his life's work, from the repression of anarchy to the Peruvian war, proves plainly that he was rather a great character than a great mind. Portales died in 1833 by the hand of an assassin.

Manuel Montt continued his political work. His minister, Antonio Varas, assisted him, as Tocornal had assisted the leader of the pelucones. These conservative minds began to govern in 1851, and the re-election of Montt in 1856 prolonged their term of action; this was the "Decenniate," a period of bloodstained autocracy. The Monttvarists became a national party; they defended order to the death, by violence and dictatorship, first of all against the radicals, and later against the radicals and the pelucones. These ten years of disastrous organisation divided two periods: the conservative period of Prieto and Portales, and the liberal period of Perez and Errazuriz.

A liberalism better defined than that of the pipiolos was causing the champions of order some uneasiness. The eloquence of a tribune, Matta, the patriarch of radicalism, the propaganda of Bilbao and Lastarria, and the work of revolutionary clubs, such as the "Society of Equality," formed a party of romantic youth eager to sacrifice itself for its ideals. Montt and Varas opposed it, and exiled or condemned to death the future liberals—Santa-Maria, Vicuña Mackenna, &c. They considered that Chili was not yet sufficiently prepared for the theoretical liberties upheld by Lastarria and Bilbao; they sought to promote education of the British type, with a view to liberty and self-government. They were the representative personages of the Creole oligarchy, a powerful conservative force, rude and beneficent. Dictatorial repression did not destroy liberalism; the presidents of the future were to be liberals, and Montt himself slowly changed the direction of his policy. In 1858, in the last years of the decenniate, the pelucones attacked him because he tolerated the Protestant religion in Valparaiso.

Under the Monttvarist government, as under the dictatorship of Guzman-Blanco and Garcia-Moreno, the country progressed in an economic sense. Railways, highroads, and telegraph lines were constructed. Montt fostered agriculture and the colonisation of the soil in the south by means of credit banks; he opened nearly five hundred schools, and also founded a national bank. Maritime commerce increased, and the public revenue was doubled during the Decenniate; finally, the admirable civil code of Andres Bello, promulgated in 1857, gave discipline and stability to the civil life of the country. Portales, Bello, Montt, and Varas organised Chili both politically and socially.

After Montt, the presidencies of Perez, in 1861, of Errazuriz, in 1871, and of Santa Maria, in 1881, modified the conservative tendencies of the country. All the conquests of the liberals—the civil register, civil marriage, religious toleration—became laws of the State. Liberalism has not lessened the presidential authority. Perez, like Montt, ruled for ten years. Long autocracies and conservative constitutions explain the strength of Chili amid the anarchy of South America.

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).

The Imperialist minister had conquered; he aspired to the presidency of his country. Santa-Maria put him forward, and public opinion accepted him, proud of his diplomatic triumphs. An age of plenty commenced; the ancient Chilian austerity was at an end. Balmaceda governed with his energies increased a hundred-fold by the gold of Peru, the moral power of victory, his ambitions as a statesman, and the vocation for empire which a victorious war develops in the heart of an energetic people.

Materially, he transformed Chili; morally, he presided over her dissolution, or, at least, her decadence. Neither this degeneration nor this progress was the exclusive work of the autocratic President. Wealth enervates a sober people; it permits the erection of monuments, but it weakens men's characters. Honest and far-sighted, Balmaceda employed the millions he had drawn from the war in material enterprises; he built schools throughout the country, special institutes, mining and agricultural colleges, professional colleges; he began the construction of new railways, of a breakwater at Talcahuano, of palaces for the administrative services; he fortified several ports, bought new ironclads, encouraged immigration, founded military schools, and re-equipped the army. He suppressed contributions, assured the service of the foreign debt, amortised paper money, and demanded guarantees of the banks. When in Chili you inquire as to the origin of a public works, a school, or a prison, you will hear of Balmaceda. In finance, in education, and in colonisation he effected a fundamental renaissance; he was the master-builder among Presidents.

Balmaceda was raised to the presidency by three parties: the liberals, the radicals, and the nationals; that is to say, by three aspects of one central idea, varying from an attenuated liberalism which verged on conservatism in its ideas (nationalism) to a violent liberalism, verging on demagogy (radicalism). The Balmacedist victory stifled all attempts at clerical reaction; Balmaceda was a reformer. His ambition could not be satisfied by material progress and practical advance. As ideologist, he applied abstract ideas to politics. He wished to unite all the liberals in one preponderant party, to ensure a still greater independence to the public powers, judicial and municipal, and to despoil the executive of its traditional attributes; to found an educated, liberal, military, and virile democracy as a check against the oligarchy, in which democracy dreamers of every school could find their Utopia.

Between his character and his doctrines there was a grave discrepancy. An autocrat by vocation and by temperament, because a patrician, he nevertheless weakened the executive by the Municipal Law, which established autonomous municipalities, and by the law of incompatibilities, which conceded to Congress a complete independence of the other powers. "The mandate of the deputy" declares this law "is incompatible with the exercise of any paid public function." At this hour of party confusion Balmaceda despoiled the executive of efficacious agents in Parliament. He was thus, by a reform which, ideally speaking, was perfect, preparing the way for serious future conflicts.

The liberal President condemned the Constitution of 1833, the basis of Chilian order; he believed that the new period demanded a new statute. "Neither the desires of the country nor those of the parties or groups now active," he wrote, "can adapt themselves to the system of centralisation and authority consecrated by the Constitution of 1833."[1] He criticised "the attributions which devolve upon the chief of the Executive Power, the weakening of initiative and of the local charters by excess of vigour in the central power; the part played by the Executive in the formation of the judicial power, its influence upon the elections, the functioning of the legislative power, the centralisation of the administration, and the works which foster material progress."

But by abandoning, by a sort of heroic suicide, the forces conferred upon him by a traditional statute, Balmaceda paved the way for an omnipotent Congress. Pelucon by heredity, a cultured despot, he soon disregarded the power which he himself had raised above the decadent presidency. The contradiction between his life and his doctrines, his heredity and his ideals, gives his noble and patrician figure the majesty of a character of Æschylus, ennobled at once and annihilated by destiny. Balmaceda weakened the executive and put forward official candidates; established the preponderance of Congress and wished to have independent ministers; destroyed the Constitution of 1833 and ruled as an autocrat. Renan compared himself to the scholastic hircocerf, which bears within itself two hostile natures; this was also the fate of Balmaceda.

His political ideal was that of Benjamin Constant; of Lamartine, of Laboulaye. He accepted neither the despotism of the President nor the tyranny of Congress.

Could the perfect equilibrium of the public powers be realised in Chili, or was it merely the noble dream of an ideologist? Very soon the omnipotence of a centralised government was replaced by the dictatorship of anarchical Parliaments. The parties imposed ministers upon Balmaceda, and presented him with lists of candidates, among whom the President, powerless to refuse, was to choose his counsellors.

It was a radical transformation, for from the time of Portales the government had intervened in elections, had insisted upon presidents and deputies. Balmaceda disregarded his own work, rebelled against Congress, governed without a budget, defended the rights of the power which he had destroyed by short-sighted legislation, and tried to enforce his wishes as to the Presidency, in the traditional manner, and Congress refused to accept his candidate. It has been truly said that the government of Balmaceda was the crisis of electoral intervention.[2] Parliament refused to pass the President's law of contributions, overturned his ministries, and protested against the designation of an official candidate; as in the time of the French Revolution, a revolutionary committee was formed in the heart of the Chamber. The two dictatorships clashed. The revolution broke forth in 1891; the fleet revolted; civil war divided families; Congress fought for the Constitution, the Government for the autocracy. From La Moneda Balmaceda directed a terrible war against the combined forces of the fleet, the banks, and the Parliament. The factions fought with lamentable ardour; it was a war of hatreds and reprisals, bitter as a racial conflict. Two battles, Concon and La Placilla, destroyed the power of the President.

The revolutionaries got the upper hand, invaded Valparaiso and Santiago, and the Araucanian savages burned the dwellings of the President's friends, and swept, brutal and drunken, through the silent cities. Balmaceda took refuge in the Argentine Legation, and his supporters hid, while a horde of vandals proceeded to reduce the capital to ruins. The defeated President took on a stoic grandeur; like a hero of Plutarch, he transformed his fall into an apotheosis; he purified the local tragedy by catastrophe. Serene as a figure of antiquity, he committed suicide, after drafting a noble political testament. "Among those who are to-day my most violent persecutors," he wrote, "are the politicians of various parties whom I have heaped with honours, whom I have exalted and served with enthusiasm. I am in nowise surprised, neither by this inconsequence, nor by the inconstancy of mankind.... All the founders of South American independence have died in dungeons, in prison cells, or have been assassinated, or have perished in proscription and exile. Such has been civil war in the ancient as in the modern democracies. It is only when one has witnessed the fury to which the victors in a civil war abandon themselves that one comes to understand why, of old, the vanquished politician, even though he were the most unworthy servant of the State, made an end by falling upon his own sword."

After these considerations of political philosophy, the firm protestation of the hidalgo. He cannot submit to "the criterion of judges whom he dismissed from their posts on account of their revolutionary ideas." Two ways remained open to him: flight or death, and he preferred the second, for it might lessen the persecution and the woes to be endured by his friends. "I might still escape," he says in his testament, "by leaving Chili, but this expedient would not be consistent with my antecedents, nor my pride as a Chilian and a gentleman. I am inevitably delivered over to the judgment or the pity of my enemies, since the Constitution and the laws have no longer any virtue. But you know, gentlemen (he is addressing Claudio Vicuña and Julio Banados-Espinosa) that I am incapable of imploring favour, or even benevolence, of men whom I despise for their ambition and their lack of citizenship." He felt that a great crisis, or a drama, requires a protagonist or a victim, and he accepted his destiny to the death. Above the half-breed caudillos, above the obscure crowd who swarm in palaces and parliaments, hungering for power and display, rises this patrician figure, towering and solitary.

In his political testament he condemns the existing system: "As long as parliamentary government, as men have wished to practise it, and as the triumphant revolution will uphold it, shall continue in Chili, there will be no electoral liberty, no serious and permanent organisation within the parties, nor peace between the groups in Congress." His bitter prophecy is accomplished: an excessive and sterile parliamentarism triumphed with the revolutionaries. From Portales to Balmaceda the President was the supreme authority; after Balmaceda Congress governed, and the President, the slave of the ruling groups, could neither dissolve Parliament nor appeal to a popular referendum. The liberty of the vote has been won, but it ratifies the tyranny of the Assemblies. The parties are fractional; authority, the basis of Chilian greatness, has declined. A President without initiative, an incoherent ministry, a Parliament divided and uncertain: there is the political outlook. "The Government of Congress is the Government of the parties, and these political entities exist in Chili only in the shape of antipathies or memories."[3]

The Balmacedist party itself did not escape the universal dissolution. It still supports the presidential system, but it does so without the rigidity of its founder; it is liberal, democratic, and parliamentary; its strength lies in the assemblies. "In liberalism," Don Julio Zegers can write,[4] "the Balmacedists are those who prefer Unitarian pacts to doctrines."

In the political world the tradition of the pelucones, of a strong tutelary authority, is dying; in the social world the oligarchy is losing its ancient privileges before the progress of the middle classes. Balmaceda, the founder of schools and colleges, the champion of all liberties, realised this national transformation. Chili was the scene, after the political revolution of 1891, of a social revolution, a warfare of castes, a bloody conflict between the feudal overlords and a Third Estate formed in the schools, liberal and industrial. Two parties, radicals and democrats, are organising themselves for the battles of the future. "The radical party," writes an observer, "is composed of the fervent enemies of the clergy and a great part of the youth of the middle class, which combines with its religious hatreds a certain degree of dislike of the wealthy and respected classes."[5] Señor Edwards believes that this socialistic tendency, which is predominant among the radicals, "constitutes a serious danger for the future." The democratic party, like the English labour party, and the united socialists of France, is a working man's party.

The revolution of 1891 was directed by the bankers. After the war of the Pacific the Chilian oligarchy was dissolved; it formed itself into a plutocracy, without austere traditions, which is predominant in the Parliaments and is ambitious to seize the reins of government. Balmaceda would never give way before the "new men"; as an aristocrat he was the enemy of the merchants. Portales founded a society of patricians, but the liberal president could not organise the democracy he dreamed of. The financiers united with the great families before the threat of formidable strikes, and the intellectual elevation of the middle class, bankers and landowners and property owners grouped themselves in a more accessible oligarchy, much after the pattern of the oligarchy of the United States. Balmaceda was the last representative of the great Chilian tradition, of the tutelary oligarchy which led and educated the people and distrusted the plutocracy.

[1] See J. Bañados Espinosa, Balmaceda, su gobierno y la revolucion de 1891, vol. i. pp. 455 et seq.

[2] Said by Don Juan Enrique Tocornal, a Chilian politician.

[3] Alberto Edwards, Bosquejo historico de los partidos politicos chilenos, Santiago, 1903, p. 116.

[4] Cited by Vicuña-Subercasseaux in his study of Balmaceda. See Gobernantes y Literatos, Santiago, 1907, p. 64.

[5] Edwards, as cited.