Anarchy and dictatorship--The civil wars: their significance--Characteristics of the industrial period. Spencer observed the invariable succession of two periods in the development of human affairs--the military and the industrial period. Bagehot contrasted a primitive epoch of authority and a posterior epoch of discussion. Sumner-Maine discovered a historic law--the progress from status to contract; from the _régime_ imposed by despotic governors to a flexible organisation accepted by free wills. Thus, in three different formulæ, we may express the same principle of evolution. In the beginning a warlike and theocratic authority determines ritual, customs, dogma, and laws. The common conscience is potent; individuality accepts without discussion or scepticism the essential rules of social life. History is thereafter a struggle between authority and liberty, a progressive affirmation of autonomous wills, an assertion of destructive and censorious individualism. In America political development presents the same successive phases. Invariably we find the sequence of the two periods, one military and one industrial or civil. The Independence realised, the rule of militarism sets in throughout the republics. After a period of uncertain duration the military caste is hurled from power, or abdicates without violence, and economic interests become supreme. Politics are {87} then ruled by "civilism." The military _régime_ is not theocratic, as in some European monarchies; the President does not combine the functions of religion and empire. None the less, the civil period involves a fatal reaction against the Church--a period of anti-clericalism or radicalism. The revolution is confined to a change of oligarchies: the military group gives way to plutocracy. [Illustration: GENERAL JUAN JOSÉ FLORES. President of Ecuador (1831-1835 and 1839-1843). To face p. 87.] As the generals of Alexander disputed, after his death, for the provinces of Europe, Asia, and Africa, the remains of the imperial feast, and founded new dynasties in the flood of Oriental decadence, so the lieutenants of Bolivar dominated American life for a period of fifty years. Flores in Ecuador, Paez in Venezuela, Santa-Cruz in Bolivia, and Santander in Colombia, governed as the heirs of the Liberator. So long as the shadow of the magnificent warrior lay upon the destinies of America, so long the _caudillos_ triumphed, consecrated by the choice of Bolivar. The monarchial principle was thus forced upon unconscious humanity. The Liberator left America in the hands of a dynasty.