The military-radical dictatorship of Urbina devastated the country; the "Tauras," a prætorian guard, as brutal as the "Mazorqueros" of Rosas, killed and pillaged, and were the docile servants of tyranny. Garcia-Moreno then founded the journal _La Nación_, and preached the doctrine that there can be no social progress in a country which does not foster material progress, and in which a devouring poverty is {217} triumphant. He was arrested and exiled. He reached Europe once more in 1854, and there gave much time to the study of European politics. He had been something of a Gallican on the subject of the relations of Church and State, believing in the supremacy of the civil power. His opinions changed. Subscribing to the tradition of those Popes who aspired to empire, he considered that the Church should be absolute sovereign above all earthly powers. But a triumphant radicalism was secularising ecclesiastical foundations, and convents were being invaded by the troops. The conservative _caudillo_ returned from exile in 1856, and was met with every species of homage; he was elected Mayor of Quito, and rector of the University. He founded a political party--that of national union. Elected senator, he called, with the authority of an avenging tribune, for honest finances, the suppression of the masonic lodges, a law of public education, and the abolition of the poll tax, which burdened the native, and represented all the forces of social conservation under the tutelage of the Church. The Convention of 1860 made him provisional President, then constitutional President. Garcia-Moreno inaugurated a clerical semi-dictatorship after thirty years of revolutions. He did not limit the suffrage; he depended on the democracy to defeat unpopular demagogues. He believed that "to moralise a country one must give it a Catholic Constitution, and, to ensure the necessary cohesion, a statute of unity." He organised the finances, the army, the schools; he reduced the fiscal expenditure; founded at Quito a Tribunal of Accounts, which he supervised himself; he waged a pitiless war upon smuggling, peculation, and bureaucracy; he built roads connecting the capital with the coast, ruined militarism, and founded a civil _régime_.