Page:The History of San Martin (1893).djvu/40

8 being democracy. The mode of colonization contributed to this result. The most trustworthy annals of the Indies recognise the fact that the conquest was achieved at the expense of the conquerors, without any drafts on the royal treasury. Hence arose that spirit of self-reliance which they bequeathed to their descendants. A rebel world grew up under the auspices of absolutism. The colonial constitution, which inculcated a personal despotism and excluded the idea of a common country, contributed fatally to this result. Spanish America was looked upon as the personal property of the Spanish monarch, in virtue of the Bull of Alexander VI. Thus the colony did not form a part of the nation, and was united to her only by allegiance to a common sovereign. When the monarch disappeared, his power lapsed to his vassals; the logical and legal result being the separation of the colonies from the mother country.

The government of the colonies was entrusted to the Council of the Indies, represented politically by a Viceroy, and in law by the Audiencia, the bounds of whose authority were iilill [sic]-defined. In municipal affairs, the Cabildos, derived from the free communities of the mother country, were nominally the representatives of the people. In them lay the germs of democracy, as they possessed the right to call public meetings for the settlement of their own affairs by vote, which right, for long in abeyance, became an active power when supported by popular force.

The great extent of the country, the want of moral cohesion, the admixture of races, the general corruption of manners, the absence of an ideal, the lack of political and industrial activity, and the profound ignorance of the masses, all contributed to produce a state of semi-barbarism by the side of a weakly civilization, and vitiated the entire social organism. From this embryo was to spring a new republican world, the product of the germs latent within it.