With him the liberals triumphed, and a social transformation commenced. The liberals were the "new men," as in Venezuela, under Guzman. The {152} colonial oligarchy, the republican bureaucracy, the high clergy, and the wealthy classes composed the conservative group which had founded the Empire with Iturbide, and desired royalty with Lucas-Alaman. Against them rose the reforming democracy, liberal or radical; it was a conflict of principles and classes. The lawyers, the lesser clergy, and the coloured middle classes gained the upper hand in 1833, and the great economic, social, and religious reformation commenced; Juarez was presently to give it the dignity of constitutionalism. In the struggle against the conservative and monarchical Church the liberals disregarded ecclesiastical jurisdiction, confiscated by mortmain the goods of the religious communities, promoted lay education, and secularised the reactionary University, as Garcia Moreno in Ecuador condemned the liberal University, and, impelled by a pernicious radicalism, they suppressed the army of a nation a prey to anarchy. After Santa-Ana a coloured _caudillo_, Benito Juarez, was the leader of the reformers (1839), and with him the liberal movement took on a profoundly racial character. Juarez represented the natives, the democracy, as against the colonial oligarchy; like Tupuc-Amaru, he was the redeemer of the Indians; like Las Casas, the protector of the vanquished. Better than Guzman-Blanco and Rosas he realised the ideal of those American republics which were oppressed by memories of colonial days; hatred of all privilege, a dream of absolute liberty, war upon the tutelary Church, and a strict despotism designed to create classes and ideals. He proclaimed the separation of Church and State, and the confiscation of ecclesiastical property. Lerdo de Tejada was the economist and ideologist of the Reformation; Juarez was its muscle, its iron will; he realised without compromise the old liberal programme. Congress, divided into Juarists and anti-Juarists, {153} elected him President. All the laws against the Church were applied, but that did not enrich the country. Stock-jobbing, scandals, waste, and bankruptcy accumulated and formed a terrible argument against the "pure" liberals; the latter defended themselves by means of proscriptions and new and violent laws of reform. Once more the shadow of the Empire hovered over the turbulent democracy.