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 GARCIA

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GARCIA

spent in Europe he returned to his native republic in the employ of a mercantile concern, and it was then that he took the first decisive step which marked him conspicuously for the enmity of the anti-Catholics, or, as they preferred to call themselves, the Liberals. At Panama he had fallen in with a party of Jesuits who had been expelled from the Republic of New Granada and wished to find an asylum in Ecuador. Garcia Moreno constituted himself the protector of these religious, and they sailed with him for Guayaquil; but on the same vessel that carried the Jesuits and their champion, an envoy from New Granada also took passage for the express purpose of bringing diplomatic influence to bear with the dictator, Diego Noboa, to secure their exclusion from Ecuadorean territory. No sooner had the vessel entered the harbour of Guaya- cjuil than Garcia Moreno, slipping into a shore boat, succeeded in landing some time before the New Grana- dan envoy; the necessary permission was acquired from the Ecuadorean government, and the Jesuits obtained a foothold in that country. How soon the report of this exploit spread among the anti-Catho- lics of South America was evidenced by the fact that within a year Jacobo Sdnchez, a New Granadan, had attacked CJarcia Moreno in the pamphlet "Don Felix Frias en Paris y los Jesuitas en el Ecuador", to which Garcia Moreno's reply was an able " Defensa de los Jesuitas".

In 1853 he began to publish " La Nacion", a periodi- cal which, according to its prospectus, was intended to combat the then existing tendency of the governm.ent to exploit the masses for the material benefit of those who happened to be in power. At the same time Garcia Moreno's programme aimed distinctly and professedly to defend the religion of the people. He was already known as a friend of the Jesuits ; he now assumed the role of friend of the common people, to which he adhered sincerely and consistently to the day of his death. The Urbina faction, then in power, were quick to recognize the importance of " La Nacion", which was suppressed before the appearance of its third number, and its proprietor was exiled, for the second time. Having been, meanwhile, elected senator by his native province of Guayaquil, he was prevented from taking his seat, on the ground that he had re- turned to Quito without a passport. After a sojourn at Paita, Garcia Moreno once more visited Europe. He was now thirty-three years of age, and his experi- ence of political life in Ecuador had deeply convinced him of his people's need of enlightenment. It was un- doubtedly with this conviction as his guide and incen- tive that he spent a year or more in Paris, foregoing every form of pleasure, a severe, indefatigable student not only of political science, but also of the higher mathematics, of chemistry, and of the French public- school system. On his return home, under a general amnesty in 1856, he became rector of the central University of Quito, a position of which he availed himself to commence lectures of his own in physical science. Next year he was active in the senate in opposition to the Masonic party, which had gained control of the government, while at the same time he persistently and forcibly, though unsuccessfully, struggled for the passage of a law establishing a sys- tem of public education modelled on that of France. In 1S58 he once more established a paper, "La ITnion Nacional", which became obnoxious to the govern- ment by its fearless exposure of corruption and its opposition to the arbitrary employment of authority; and once more a political crisis ensued.

Garcia Moreno was on principle an advocate of orderly processes of government, and that his pro- fessions in this regard were sincere his subsequent career fairly demonstrated, but at this juncture he was obliged to realize that his country was in the grip of a corrupt oligarchy, bent upon the suppression of the Church to which the whole mass of his fellow country-

men were devoted, and disposed to keep the masses in ignorance so as to sway them the more easily to its own ends. He had, years before, attacked "the revo- lutionary industry", a phrase probably first used by him, in the prospectus of "La Nacion"; it now became necessary for him to descend to revolutionary methods. Besides, the little Republic of Ecuador was at this time menaced by its more powerful neighbour on the south, Peru. Garcia Moreno, if he was sure of opposition at the hands of the soi-disant Liberals, was also, by this time, recognized by the masses as a leader loyal to , both their common Faith and their common country, and thus he was able to organize the revolution which made him head of a provisional government estab- lished at Quito. The republic wa-s now divided, Cien- eral Franco being at the head of a rival government established at Guayaquil. In vain did Garcia Moreno offer to share his authority with his rival for the sake of national unity. As a defensive measure against the threat of Peruvian invasion, Garcia Moreno entered into negotiations with the French envoy with a view to securing the protection of France, a political mis- take of which his enemies knew how to avail themselves to the utmost. He was now obliged to assume the character of a military leader, for which he possessed at least the qualifications of personal courage and decisive quickness of resolution. While Garcia Mo- reno inflicted one defeat after another upon the par- tisans of Franco, the latter, as representing Ecuador, had concluded with Peru the treaty of Mapasingue. The people of Ecuador rose in indignation at the con- cessions made in this treaty, and Franco, even his own followers being alienated, was defeated at Babahoya (7 August, 1860) and again at Salado River, where he was driven to take refuge on a Peruvian vessel. When his adversary had been forcibly driven from the coun- try, Garcia Moreno showed his magnanimity in the proclamation in which he sought to heal as quickly as possible the scars of this civil war: "The republic should regard itself as one family; the old demarca- tions of districts must be so obliterated as to render sectional ambitions impossible." In the reorganiza- tion of the Constituent Assembly, which was sum- moned to meet in January, 1861, he insisted that the suffrage should not be territorial, but "direct and uni- versal, under the necessary guarantees of intelligence and morality, and the number of representatives should correspond (proportionally) to that of the electors represented". The Convention, which met on 10 January, elected Garcia Moreno president; he delivered his inaugural address on the 2d of April following. Then began that series of reforms among which were the restitution of the rights of the Church and a radical reconstruction of the fiscal system. In the immediate present he had to deal with the machi- nations of his old adversary Urbina, who, from his retirement in Peru, kept up incessant intrigues with the opposition at home, and still more with the govern- ments of neighbouring republics. Garcia Moreno soon came to a sensible and honourable understanding with the Peruvian government.

A violation of Ecuadorean territory by New Gra- nada, though it led to a host ile collision in which Garcia Moreno himself took part, had no serious consequences until the Arboledo administration gave place to that of General Mosquera, whose ambition it was to make New Granada the nucleus of a great "Colombian Con- federation", in which Ecuador was to be included. Urbina was not above writing encouraging letters to the New fSranadan or Colombian dictator who was scheming against the independence of Ecuador. An invitation to Garcia Moreno to confer with Mosquera elicited a very plain intimation that, so far as the national obliteration of Ecuador was concerned, there was nothing to confer about. But in the meantime the Republic of Ecuador had ratified a concordat with Pope Pius IX (1862), and the discontent of the Regal-