In 1851 General Urbina forced a radical government upon Ecuador; he was the genius of destruction, an intriguer, an ambitious man whose excesses provoked a conservative reaction. He attempted in vain to establish a military _régime_. Garcia-Moreno denounced the treason of Flores and the radicalism of Urbina, and his moral influence overcame the prevailing anarchy. This remarkable statesman was born at Guayaquil in 1821; he came of a Castilian family. His mother trained him strictly in poverty; a priest, Father Bethencourt, directed his later education. In 1836 he entered the University of Quito, and soon became the supervisor of his own companions--an undergraduate autocrat. Tall, of a severe aspect, the forehead wide, and the eyes forceful, he was already revealed as a leader of men. He devoted himself with ardour to mathematics and philosophy; he acquired general ideas and an analytical turn of mind. Endowed with a prodigious memory and a vigorous dialectic, always master of himself, he had every desirable gift. Towards his nineteenth year his chaste youth passed through a moral crisis. He issued therefrom, according to his biographer, less the devotee but not less of a believer. Like Goethe, he made up his mind abruptly. He would not be guilty of timidity; he liberated himself from the tutelage of the world by dint of heroism; he was Mucius Scævola before he was Cæsar. His fiery spirit and irreducible will {216} made him a leader whom all respected, a mystic whom the conservatives acclaimed. Garcia-Moreno intervened in politics as a journalist; he was a satiric poet, and founded various polemical sheets: _El Zurriago_, _El Vengador_, and _El Diablo_. He drafted pamphlets, accused and condemned in prose and in verse, and wrote his classic _Epistle to Fabius_ concerning the poverty of the times. His style was steely, energetic, rarely declamatory; he wrote apostrophes in the manner of Juvenal; he brought into politics a rude indignation, the rebellious anger of a Hebrew prophet, announcing the final catastrophe of democracy; as a journalist he represented the national interests. In 1846, when the threat of a Spanish invasion hung over Ecuador, Garcia-Moreno roused America by his writings. He was the pacificator of Guayaquil, where the partisans of Flores had risen in insurrection. A voyage to Europe brought the young writer into contact with the social revolution of 1848. The spectacle of triumphant anarchy re-enforced his conservative opinions. In Ecuador radicalism triumphed in 1850; on his return the conservative leader protected the Jesuits expelled from Colombia, demanded the return of their property, and authorised them to found colleges. He published a pamphlet, _Defence of the Jesuits_, in which he called them "the creators of peace and order," and stated with fearless candour that he was a Catholic and was proud of the fact.