A year of confused struggling followed and at last General Belzu succeeded in establishing himself as dictator. Of low origin and uneducated, passionate and violent, the new ruler owed his elevation to his popularity with the common soldiery and the lowest classes of the population. His so-called policy of conciliation amounted in fact to permitting the guerilla bands to do as they pleased. Rapine, robbery, and riot became almost the normal condition of the country, while the better elements never ceased their conspiracies. Doctor Linares, a man of probity and learning, though stubborn and uncompromising, persisted untiring in his efforts to rid the country of the dictator. For seven years, however, Belzu maintained himself, while Bolivia fell lower and lower into the pit of anarchy, disgraced abroad by the actions of an ignorant tyrant who broke treaties, refused to listen to the protests of foreign ministers, and finally bundled them all out of the country, secure that on his mountain-tops no army could reach him to avenge the insult. The British foreign office literally wiped Bolivia from the map, declaring that she could no longer be recognised as a civilised nation. At last the dictator tired of his place and voluntarily resigned it, leaving as his successor a bastard son-in-law, named Cordova. The latter suppressed nine revolutionary movements in three years before he was at last overthrown by the indefatigable Linares. The new dictator started in with the good wishes of the respectable elements, and earnestly tried to raise his country from the abyss into which she had fallen. But the nation had been so thoroughly demoralised that there was no foundation to build upon. The public offices were filled by political favourites, but when he threw them out and tried to put honest and competent men in their places he lost the good-will of the office-holding class. He tried to reform the army and dismissed the useless swarm of officers without commands, but this gained him the enmity of the military. The very ministers whom he had selected to aid him in putting reforms into effect plotted against him, and it was a conspiracy led by Fernandez, the member of his cabinet in whom he placed his greatest confidence, that brought about his fall after he had ruled three stormy and anxious years.