THE REVOLUTION IN PERU.
THE fuller account received this week of the Revolution in Peru does not quite confirm the favourable impression the telegrams had induced us to form as to the action of the successful party. Rather, it bears out a statement made to us some years since by an Englishman deeply versed in the history and internal politics of the Spanish-American States. "Spanish Americans," he said, "have many faults, but in politics it is not by their faults, but by their virtues that they are ruined. If they were only the selfish fools they are sup- posed in England to be, they could be governed easily enough, but they are all, the bad as well as the good, more or less idealogues. They convince themselves that Federalism, or Unitarianism, or Cassarism, or Ecclesiasticism is essential to the future of the State, and fight for that as if it involved their salvation. The opponents of their idea are their enemies, who ought not to be let live, and they will commit any crime if only their ideas may prevail. The only chance for most of these States is the dominance of some one idea." It looks very much as if this statement, which at the time we thought rather " viewy," were true of Peru. The contest there for some time appears to have lain between the friends of a "military government "—that is, a kind of Ctesarism, acknow- ledging election, but resting on the bayonet—and civil govern- ment as it is understood in North America. The Cmsarists, we should add, are not mere soldiers, but number in their ranks some officers honestly convinced that in States so large, so thinly populated, and so full of conflicting races, parties, and interests, a despotic central authority is necessary at once to order and to progress. The idea of the civil party has begun to triumph in Peru,—as it has in the Argentine Republic, where B. Sarmiento may be considered, in addition to his other quali- fications, the representative of civil supremacy over the soldiers, —and especially in Lima, and it was believed in July that EL Manuel Pardo would be raised to the Presidency as a protest against Camarism and military ascendancy. He had not been elected, but his election was morally a certainty. His acces- sion to power was of course very offensive to the President, Colonel Balta, an able person of the Bonapartist or modern absolutist type—a tyrant, but a tyrant who promoted public works—and to many of the principal officers around him. There were, however, no legal means of arresting his election, and Colonel Balta, who seems, like most men of his kind, to havebeen sensitive to opinion, though not oppressed by scruples, refused to employ illegal means to dissolve Congress by the bayonet, or to execute S. Pardo. His Minister at War, how- ever, General Gutierrez, who held to him, it would seem, something of St. Arnaud's position towards Napoleon, was of a bolder or more ferocious temper, and after advising a policy of action in vain upon his chief, resolved upon a coup d'etat. He filled the great square with troops, arrested the President, declared himself Dictator, and placed the capital under mar- tial law. His brother, Colonel S. Gutierrez, was made Minister at War, the bankers were ordered to produce some cash, and S. Pardo was terrified, probably by direct menaces, into a hurried flight to Callao.
So far all was in accordance with Parisian and South- American precedent, but Gutierrez lacked two of Napoleon's advantages, and one advantage possessed by Rosas, the whilorn Argentine Dictator. He was not legally entitled, as Colonel Balta would have been and as Napoleon was, to the obedience of the Army. He was faced by a Congress which had the courage, by proclaiming him hors la loi, exactly as the Constituent Assembly proclaimed Robespierre, to throw the whole weight of the law, such as it was, in the scale of his opponents. And he seems to have been under some re- straints of humanity. He did not, for example, as Roses might have done, execute the Congress entire. Congress being against him, the diplomatists refused to acknowledge the usurpation ; not being legally President, the soldiers began to absent themselves from the barracks ; and the Fleet, receiving S. Pardo on board, declared itself in revolt for Congress and the Civil Government. The Fleet, we should remark, which in modern Europe counts for very little in revolution, counts in a Spanish-American State for a great deal ; firstly, because it can shelter refugees, and secondly, because it can seize the custom-houses, the principal source of payments to the Treasury. Seeing himself thus deserted, and maddened by the death of his brother, who was murdered in a scuffle at the railway station, Colonel Gutierrez ordered the assassination of the President, who, in his view, had deserted his party, and with his remaining followers marched out of the city to the fort of Santa Catalina, where he could be reached by the provincial garrisons if they declared for his side. This was a fatal error. No pretender in modern times has ever MC- ceeded until he had obtained the control of the capital, unless indeed, as recently in Spain, his adversary had lost it too ; and the masses are always inclined to recognise the Administration which issues decrees from the accustomed offices. The Vice- President, Colonel Zavallos, on whom on the death of President Delta the government legally devolved, took possession of the Departments, and summoned the citizens to arms, or as we should say in Europe, called out the National Guard. The soldiers, seeing clearly how things were going, perhaps impressed with the feeling of the Limenos, but certainly impressed with Zavallos' title to their obedience, began to desert Santa Catalina, and Colonel Gutierrez, afraid of arrest, or it may very well be, finding Santa Catalina unpro- visioned, tried to hide himself within the city. He was recognised by the populace, and might have been arrested, bat was murdered instead by a mob, which then took his body and his brother's, and hung them up naked to the tower of the cathedral, 100 feet from the ground, so that the whole city might see that the Dictator had fallen, and then smearing them with kerosene oil, -burnt them to ashes in the great square of Lima.
No effort seems to have been made to prevent these atro- cities, which must have occupied hours, and the fact, as it seems to us, clearly shows that the successful party was actuated quite as much by fanaticism of party feeling as by any reverence or regard for the outraged Constitution. They obeyed Colonel Zavallos not because he was under that docu- ment the legal depositary of the executive power, but because if they obeyed him they could glut their vengeance on a detested and previously triumphant faction. An individual may in the tumult have slain General Gutierrez, while the majority had risen only for law and order ; but the masses must have taken part in such acts as the desecration of the cathedral and the incremation of the dead bodies, acts which in their wild vindictiveness and ferocity resemble only too closely the cruelties so often inflicted in Spanish America on defeated partisans. They betray at once in their senselessness, their deliberation, and their savage spirit of insult, that fanaticism of party spirit which in almost all Spanish States makes moderate government so hopeless. A political enemy is to be pursued even beyond the grave, and consequently compromise is as impossible as order. It should be noticed that Colonel Gutierrez had given the Limenos no excuse, as excuses go in such countries, for their barbarity by killing any favourite of theirs. It was the chief of his own party whom he had assassinated—not of theirs—and it was therefore to show their hatred of him as the head of a faction, not of him as an assassin, that the populace treated his body with such revolting indignities. They would have done the same, having the power, if he had been legally elected. It may turn out, of course, that the death of General Gutierrez is the death-warrant of military ascend- ancy in Peru, that the idea of civil government has attracted to it an irresistible force, and that consequently there will be for some years to come reasonable order within the State ; but it is clear that the rising of the Limenos was not promoted by constitutional feeling, as we at first were in- duced to hope, but by a party hatred of that savage sort which has so often troubled the Republic, has induced so many native politicians to urge that despotism is necessary to keep society from perishing, and has persuaded almost all European publicists to declare that Brazil, with its nearly absolute monarchy, its packed legislature, and its slave-owning aristo- cracy, is the best governed State throughout the South-Ameri- can continent. S. Pardo may prove an excellent ruler, but the constitutionalism of the masses of Lima is certainly no guarantee for the continuance or the steadiness of his power.
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