GABRIEL GARCIA MORENO.* So little is known of Ecuador, that
we took up this adaptation by Lady Herbert of a French memoir relating the history of Don Gabriel Garcia Moreno with curiosity that soon became interest. We are bound, however, to say that Pere Berthe's volume of continuous panegyric, written in what may be termed the Ultramontane dialect, does not commend itself even for accurate knowledge of its subject. Lady Herbert has reduced its dimensions, and in readable form gives us a life of a saint, though he is yet uncanonised ; but un- avoidably her narrative is affected by the exaggerations of the original. Pere Berthe has lost an opportunity which Carlyle would have known how to improve. Garcia Moreno was rightly entitled by the Congress of Ecuador the re- generator of his country, " because of the great works he had carried out in the religious, moral, material, and intellectual order." He was a very Thor in Jiitunheim, that " distant, dark, chaotic land," such as was Ecuador. He was a noble and brilliant tyrant, a Spanish Cromwell, but goodlier of pre- sence, accomplished in modern science, and so well versed in the formulas of modern revolution and socialistic democracy, that he could without ado " swallow them."
No people, it is said, can brag so loudly as South American Republicans ; and Pere Berthe, too freely accepting their magniloquence, has lost much of the relief which Garcia Moreno's figure should have against the dark background of superstition, laziness, and corruption in Ecuador both before and after it had claimed separation from Bolivar's Columbia. Pizarro and his rout had but badly replaced the Incas in their rich and peaceful Kingdom of Quito. The mortal torpor of Spanish rule had no doubt been shaken off, but the " principles of 1789 " had shattered a society altogether unfitted for them, and to which they were as poisonous as roast beef to a man nearly dead of hunger. But Ecuador was in Moreno's youth, as it is now, a land of unique possi- bilities. Within its territory, as yet not accurately defined on its Eastern frontier, but about the size of France, are united tropical, temperate, and arctic zones but a day's journey of each other ; seaboard treasuries of Equatorial vegetation, upland plains where the temperature has a mean of 57° Fahr., and mountain gloom and glory enough for a race of Hofers and Tells. Fertilising rain wanted in the lowlands of Peru and Chili, the neighbourhood of Panama, the fact that Quito was once the gold-bearing province of the Incas,—all point to prosperity for Ecuador if it had not been ruled for the most part by the least respectable methods of modern revolution. Into this Republic of sham Liberals fleecing indolent and crapulous Dons, of sham Generals, and, on the whole, sham pastors of the neglected fold, Moreno was born in 1821, nine years before Bolivar's death. It is almost neces- sary to supply some shade to Pere Berthe's hero, that the
• Garcia Moreno, President of Ecuador. From the French of the Rev. P. A. Berthe, by Lady Herbert. London: Burns and Oates. 1889.
" values " of his portrait may be true ; but except for the financial crime of preferring to pay domestic rather than foreign creditors, it is difficult to find fault with him. Yet the record of such a man should be austere as he was, religiously faithful and humble, and confessing mistakes as he did, when now and then he made them in his struggle to create a " practical world based on belief in God." He was of Castilian blue blood on his father's side who had emigrated to Guayaquil in 1793, and there married a lady of distinguished parentage, whose brothers had made their mark in Peru and Guatemala.
Gabriel was the youngest of five sons, excellent in their various professions, but chiefly shining with his reflected light. It was perhaps easy to be a star of the first magnitude in the schools of Quito, but Moreno was singularly and almost impetuously eager to master all knowledge accessible to him. His family had suffered pecuniary loss by the revolution, indefinitely prolonged as it was, in Ecuador, and he determined to help it as afterwards he helped his country, straining every nerve and living in austerest self-denial to secure a success that should reward his mother and his friends. At first inclined to the priesthood, he afterwards chose law for his profession. His study of jurisprudence was chiefly for patriotic ends, and in a certificate given by his tutor, he is praised not only for legal, scientific, and literary knowledge. but for " those rare virtues of which the Republic is so greatly in need." Politics in Ecuador require somewhat different qualities from those needed in settled communities ; and Moreno, when twenty-five, invited to write a history of Ecuador, pertinently and prophetically re- marked that it were " better to make one." Even through the coloured spectacles of Pere Berthe, we can find curious facts touching the genesis of States in this narrative of ferment- ing civic life. Ideas that seem to us in England indissolubly linked, as, indeed, they have been by the events of our island history, were mutually antagonistic in Ecuador. The Catholic faith, and even certain religious customs more honoured in their breach than in their observance, were as dear to the people as ever was the right of hill-side meeting to the Cameronians. There was passionate revolt against reform in a democratic sense. Toleration was intolerable, and the only rights of men claimed were to murder and plunder in assertion of the rights —so called—of God. Though Moreno was the fierce denouncer of corruption in high places, he was not the less the champion of the masses in rejecting European fraternity and equality, and all the fata laorgana of Socialism. He used the weapons of modern as well as mediwval warfare, and his literary skill served him in the five newspapers which he started successively. In 1846, his power was first seriously felt in the resistance he secured by the common action of Ecuador and its sister-Republics to a filibustering expedition led by General Flores, an expedition fortunately arrested by Lord Palmerston. In 1849, Moreno, who always felt himself to be the David of Ecuador, gave himself six months of European travel. He found the Old World palpitating from the events of '48. It was natural that a man of his type should have been struck by the religious revival in France, where Lacordaire and his friends were popular prophets of that supreme liberty which is secured by authoritative dogma. His first act on again touching American soil at Panama was to succour a party of Jesuit priests exiled from Grenada, and to establish them, amid passionate acclamation, at Quito in their old church, closed since Charles III., eighty-three years before, had driven the missionary fathers from his Colonies. In a pamphlet defending them, Moreno appealed to the people in words not unworthy of an lronside :—" If, like the Hebrews, we have to pass through the Red Sea, God will open a path to his chosen people, and on the opposite shore we too shall lift up our voices in a hymn of triumph." In 1854, exiled by the dictator of the hour, be returned to Paris, when he devoted himself to study—we prefer to differ from his biographer in thinking that Rohrbacher's Church History inspired his political tendencies —and he received in that city of opposites a new impulse towards personal sanctity as well as towards theocracy. He returned to Ecuador a St. Louis plus the Syllabus, and found his country ready for a crusade. In the teeth of the Govern- ment, he was elected Alcalde of Quito, Rector of the University, and Senator. As Member of Congress, he found himself strong enough to secure the abolition of the Indian capitation-tax of three piastres, equivalent to three dollars a man, which had weighed heavily on the large community of
natives. He fluttered the Freemasons, whose organisation had been used in the South American Colonies for ends very different from those of our English lodges ; and his speeches on the Budget were found so damaging to the Government, that they were suppressed.
We cannot follow the fortunes of the brilliant reformer and patriot in the following years of hairbreadth 'scapes, alarums, and excursions habitual in Ecuador. The capture of Guayaquil by a coup de main worthy of Roncesvalles, found the leader of the people in 1860 with power to attempt at least the establish- ment of a theocratic Republic, in which be should be Judge and Father. Such a State, even in the Ecuador wilderness, presented very different problems for solution from those of Palestine under Samuel and David, and it is the triumph of Moreno that after many years of struggle, he welded a new society wherein, if it were possible on earth, God's will should be done. Liberty for all save for evil and evil-doers> was his object ; and righteousness, or divine justice, his aim. Before accepting the Presidency, to which he was voted unanimously, he insisted that certain scaffoldings on which future laws might be framed should be granted by Congress. He reformed the constituencies, basing elec- tions on population, not on geographical limits. He gave the suffrage to every man who could read and write. He resisted federation, though the antagonisms of the tierra caliente and the tierra fria were some plea for Home-rule; and he proclaimed the State to be Catholic. He established the concordat he desired with Rome ; he reorganised finance and education, and laid out a system of national roads entirely wanting before. Unfortunately, too many of these measures had yet to remain dead-letters. The new Constitution had some weak places, and there were plenty of antagonists to reform. Pere Berthe has, we think, insufficiently dwelt on the limitations imposed by Moreno in his concordat. He wished complete liberty for the Church and non-interference with its discipline, but he insisted at Rome on the radical reform of ecclesiastics. He gave Churchmen rights as ample as any claimed by Gregory VII., but he was stern in making his Bishops act in repression of the grievous abuses of their dioceses. It must have been a startling sight to see the Papal and Ecuadorian flags flung out together against the sky, while the Te Deum was sung by the people, and cannon thundered forth the balanced union of Church and State, with some realisation in that Western commonwealth of Dante's hope. In vain the clerics hesitated to attempt such a puri- fication alike of regular and secular clergy as was necessary for the President's purpose ; " behind the Papal Envoy was the iron hand of Garcia Moreno." He made short work of the Ecclesiastical Courts, where justice was visibly impeded, and he replaced unworthy priests by missionaries from Europe ; Christian Brothers, the acknowledged masters of primary education ; Jesuits, ever the best colonisers of South America; Sisters of Charity for his reorganised hospitals, and other communities who are in the van of progress. Of course, a violent opposition declared itself ; and not only the recalcitrant Ecuadorians, but the neighbouring Republics spared no method of attack on Moreno and his infant State. His extraordinary genius and power of influencing others had ample occasion for exercise in the four years of his first Presidency. Taken prisoner in a skirmish with Columbian troops, he used the opportunity to make a useful treaty. He swept away a refractory Court which had excused traitors as only guilty of "fruitless rebellion." To a Bishop who pleaded for one of them, he used the wise words,—" If you ask in the name of justice, prove his innocence ; if from charity, have pity on the innocent people whom you condemn to the evils of renewed revolution." Lady Herbert tells with spirit the final blow by which Moreno recovered Ecuador's one war-ship, stolen by the rebels, and captured their three piratical craft. Remembering the condition of the road from Quito, where the President was, to Guayaquil, where he embarked for his sea-chase, it is difficult to believe that he accomplished the descent of 10,000 ft. by crag and torrent, by jungle and forest, a distance of eighty leagues, in three days. "We must have peace," he said, when he was welcomed with acclamation on his return, " and you will see with what cement I shall establish it. The scaffold set up for criminals will be the guarantee for peace and security to honest men." By the Constitution he could not be re-elected to the Presidency when his term of office had expired, but his candidate was put in power by a majority of 23,000 against 8,000 votes for his opponent. In further proof of his popularity, it was forbidden by Congress that a man so necessary to the safety of the Republic should leave his country ; nor did he desert it except as an Envoy to conclude a treaty with the neighbouring States against some Spanish interference of the hour. He used the opportunity to arrange fiscal and postal conventions with them, and in his own person to gain respect for his emergent theocracy. We cannot agree in the estimate of Catholic liberalism formed by the author of these memoirs ; but it is probable that Ecuador was not fit for compromises. The land of Cotopaxi and Chimborazo, of earthquakes, precipices, and jungle, had not discerned the excellences of a via media. For it, as for a " sinner saved," stern discipline, unquestioned dogma, the awful verities of hell and heaven, truth naked and unashamed, were best. The moderate men set up by Moreno to rule in his place were failures, and in 1869, he was invoked by pronunciamientos in Quito and the other chief towns of Ecuador, to rescue the Republic from a conspiracy which had its centre at Guayaquil, and stifled it without bloodshed by the mere power of his name. Moreno would have again retired from rule, but the Convention representing the people and called to frame a new Constitution, insisted with a unanimity only broken by one dissident, on his return to office as President. Again, with the experience of the past ten years, he entered on the task of rebuilding his ideal Christian Republic on firmer foundations.
No more paltering with clerical reform, no more weakness in dealing with the armed force of the State ; the Bar had to be purged and trial by jury suspended. Moreno's educational laws are noteworthy. All children from eight years old must go to school or their parents be fined ; every hamlet where were fifty children, had the right to claim a primary school from the Government ; nor were the native Indians neglected. When Moreno took office, only eight thousand children were being taught ; when he was assassinated, within six years, there were thirty-two thousand, chiefly boys. He founded a Technical College with a view to creating native industries, and a Polytechnic School for a higher class of youths ; and notwithstanding the poverty of the State, the best instru- ments were supplied for scientific training. A hospital, fitted with three hundred beds, was attached to his medical school, superintended by professors from France, and visited of many an early morning by the President himself before his official day began. Music and the fine arts were not neglected ; but the observatory at Quito would have been perhaps his greatest boon to science, had he lived to perfect its arrangements. There was, in truth, hardly an institution in which a Government could legitimately concern itself, that was not undertaken by this faithful ruler of the theocracy he had proclaimed. Almost surprised by the success of his second Presidency, he said,—" God is bearing us up with his hand like a tender father when his child tries to walk his first few steps." His activity of mind and body was only possible to a man of his fine organisation, trained habits of self-denial and order, and who habitually acted with con- sciousness that he was trustee for God in the redemption of his country. For years he refused his salary of twelve thousand piastres or dollars. When the financial condition of Ecuador improved, he gave it to the poor. It is true that to speak of finance in connection with Ecuador is to provoke a
smile from holders of its foreign bonds. Not even the 1 per cent. promised has yet been paid, though by the latest report
the Republic is " blessed with a revenue exceeding expenditure, and a growing trade." But much of what Garcia Moreno did towards this result is bearing fruit, notwithstanding the re- newed disturbance and civil war that followed his death. He planned, if he did not complete, the necessary roads for the development of the country; and the year before he was assassinated he paid off four hundred thousand piastres. He maintained unbroken peace—the chief need for the material development of Ecuador—during his second term of office, and with peace the revenue doubled itself under his vigorously honest rule ; in six years the imports increased by more than a third, and the exports were nearly twice as great.
To be the agent of God without reserve or questioning, was, however, the chief preoccupation of this great statesman's
life, and he remains one of the noblest figures of Christendom, —a Gordon of larger wisdom and wider sympathies, though the master but of a confused and insignificant State, from which it is difficult to expect any " good thing " to come. It was natural that his existence should be inconvenient to many, and after his almost unanimous re-election to the Presidency in 1874, plots for his assassination were rife. He knew of them, but went about his daily work as usual, the words—his favourite words—Dios no muere, " God dies not," often on his lips. They were his last utterance as he fell, stabbed and shot and hacked by the cutlasses of some Ecuador " Invincibles," on August Gth, 1875. Considerable cheques on the Bank of Peru were found in the pocket of the leader of the gang, who was seized and given short shrift by the populace of Quito. General mourning, every pomp of public grief, and even in Europe eager testimony to Moreno's greatness, followed ; and we are glad that at last a biography should have been written and translated into our tongue to keep his virtues in remem- brance.
It is interesting to know that though after Moreno's death Ecuador fell once more among thieves, its most recent annals tell of return to his plans and ideals. Civil war has checked the rapid rise under his rule, but recently the Republic has turned with solemn services of humiliation to the road Moreno had marked out for its true progress. The actual President, Don Antonio Flores, elected in 1888, seems likely to pursue it in the spirit if not with the genius of his great example. The best reports come to hand of improving prosperity, which may some day rejoice the hearts of foreign bondholders. Whatever be the accidents of the future—and who can foretell the conduct either of volcanoes or Ecuadorians P—let us he glad that from a South American Republic should come even muffled echoes of Garcia Moreno's motto, the last words he spoke, the key-note of hope and progress,—Dios no muere !
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