Possessing unusual gifts and wide experience, President Pardo was well equipped to fulfil the highest duties of the state. He devoted himself with particular energy and purpose to the intellectual development of his country, and introduced radical reforms in various branches of the public service. In no period of the republic was more rapid progress shown in the culture of the people than during this administration, when the encouragement of education stimulated a love of knowledge among all classes. A Faculty of Political and Administrative Science was created, also a School of Engineers and a School of Science and Arts; the military and naval schools were reorganized, and the School for Midshipmen of the Navy as well as the School for Corporals and Sergeants of the Army was established. The present system of modern instruction conforms to the code promulgated by President Pardo. His administrative ability was seen in every department of the government. He organized the national guard and the police service; established departmental, provincial, and district councils, to overcome municipal centralization; coöperated with the judiciary in maintaining the authority of their decisions; ensured the stability of the financial system and reformed the mining code. Unfortunately, the administration of President Manuel Pardo succeeded a period of material expansion so costly that the responsibilities resulting therefrom were of extraordinary weight and difficulty, and could be met only by heroic sacrifices. The public debt called for an immense sum to pay the interest, and caused a financial and economic crisis, which made it impossible to redeem the bank notes, and necessitated the issuance of government notes. In order to improve the economic situation, President Pardo, realizing that Peru contained the world’s chief nitrate and guano deposits, conceived the plan of establishing a nitrate monopoly. He hoped by controlling the nitrate output to destroy the competition which nitrate had waged against guano, the country’s principal source of revenue, and the chief means of paying its public debt. By this and other patriotic measures, a reform in existing conditions was to be effected which would relieve the financial strain and restore the prosperity of the country. But the intensity of the commercial crisis and the unsettled state of politics that always accompanies panic conditions, made it impossible for the great statesman to realize his hopes, and his administration was a continued struggle through one of the most trying financial periods of the republic. President Manuel Pardo, the founder of the Civil party, was the first executive to dominate the tendency which had hitherto prevailed in Peruvian politics of keeping the public offices in the hands of a privileged class. He was impartial in his recognition of superior worth wherever he found it.