Revolution is general in Latin America. There the most civilised nations have been rent by civil wars. But there are a few republics in which these conflicts have been perpetual: such is the case in Central America and the Antilles. It seems as though the tropical climate must favour these disturbances. Assassinations of presidents, battles in the cities, collisions between factions and castes, inflammatory and deceptive rhetoric, all lead one to suppose that these equatorial regions are inimical to peace and organisation. There are two South American peoples in which Jacobinism has become a national malady, in which men of every creed are involved: they are Colombia and Ecuador. Their tragic history shows us a curious form of Ibero-American anarchy: namely, religious anarchy. {201} CHAPTER I COLOMBIA Conservatives and radicals--General Mosquera: his influence--A statesman: Rafael Nuñez, his doctrines political. A certain writer of New Granada, Rafael Nuñez, a President and a party-leader, writes that "there is not in South America a country more iconoclastic, politically speaking, than Colombia." Republican evolution there has been peculiar: it has witnessed perpetual anarchy, like other American democracies, and civil wars as long and as sanguinary as those of the Argentine, but no long succession of tenacious _caudillo_, personifications of local discord, whose ambitions determine the intention of political conflict. In Colombia men have fought for ideas; anarchy there has had a religious character. The parties had definite programmes, and in the conflict of incompatible convictions they soon arrived at the Byzantine method of destruction. Public and private wealth was exhausted, the land was dispeopled, and inquisitors of religion or free thought condemned their enemies to exile. "With us," Rafael Nuñez admits "there has been an excess of political dogmatism." A Jacobin ardour divides mankind; the fiery Colombian race is impassioned by vague and abstract ideas. The champions of liberty and the supporters of absolutism apply their principles to an unstable republic; they legislate for a {202} democracy devoid of passions and inimical castes; they build the future state by means of syllogisms. These sanguinary struggles have a certain rude grandeur. On the continent men fight for crafty _caudillos_, for the conquest of power and fiscal treasure; the oligarchy which occupies the seat of government defends its bureaucratic well-being from the parties in opposition. In Colombia exalted convictions are the motives of political enmities; men abandon fortune and family, as in the great religious periods of history, to hasten to the defence of a principle. These hidalgos waste the country and fall nobly, with the Semitic ardour of Spanish crusaders. Heroes abound in the fervour of these battles. Obedient to the logic of Jacobinism, Colombia perishes, but the truth is saved.[1]