universal suffrage, and the races are illiterate; liberty and despotic rulers enforce an arbitrary power. By means of the prefects and governors the President directs the elections, supports this or that candidate, and even chooses his successor. He is the supreme elector. The representative assemblies become veritable bureaucratic institutions; deputies and senators accept the orders of the President. According to Señor L. A. de Herrera, two castes are in process of formation, "on the one hand the oligarchies, which possess the supreme power in defiance of the public will, and on the other the citizens, who are deprived of all participation in the government." Frequent revolutions and _pronunciamentos_, according to Spanish tradition, disturb the ruling class in the exercise of power; these superficial movements cannot be compared to the great crises of European history, which result in the disappearance of a political system or bring about the advent of a new social class. They are merely the result of the perpetual conflict between the _caudillos_; the leaders and the oligarchies change, but the system, with its secular vices, remains. The South American revolutions may be regarded as a necessary form of political activity: in Venezuela fifty-two important revolts have broken out within a century. The victorious party tries to destroy the other groups; revolution thus represents a political weapon to those parties which are deprived of the suffrage. It corresponds to the protests of European {371} minorities, to the anarchical strikes of the proletariat, to the great public meetings of England, in which the opposing parties attack the Government. It is to the excessive simplicity of the political system, in which opinion has no other means of expression than the tyranny of oligarchies on the one hand and the rebellion of the vanquished on the other, that the interminable and sanguinary conflicts of Spanish America are due. These internal wars continually retard the economic development of the State and decrease its stability; they ruin the foreign credit of the republics, prepare the way for humiliating interventions, and give rise to tyrannies; but it must not be forgotten that revolution, in these democracies without law and without real suffrage, has often been the only means of defending liberty. Against the tyrants even conservative spirits have revolted, and rebellion has become reaction. For the rest, the civil wars have lost their former character. They used to symbolise the return to primeval chaos; vagabond multitudes, armed bands, desolated the fields and burned the towns. Assassination, theft, the devastation of property and estates, war without mercy, fire, and all the powers of destruction were in revolt against the feeble foundations of nationality.