easier to pass such laws than to enforce their observance by the Granadans. The clergy were enormously powerful among the common people and the conservative aristocrats. The banishment of the archbishop and several suffragans roused the conservatives. Politics became the principal preoccupation of the educated classes. Hardly a village in the country but had its political club, and more than a hundred party newspapers, besides innumerable pamphlets, thundered against their opponents. The conservative revolution broke out in 1851, beginning in Pasto and immediately spreading over the whole western half of the republic and even to the eastern plateau. Antioquia was the stronghold of the clericals, and there they gathered a force of a thousand men which was beaten at Rio Negro on the 10th of September, 1851, while the insurgent bands in a dozen other provinces were reduced in detail. Although the liberal government was thus triumphant in the field, the danger had been too great and was still too menacing to make it safe to maintain an uncompromising attitude on the religious question. Lopez procured the election of Obando, another political general of the same type and opinions as himself, as his successor in the presidency. The new president's first act was to summon a convention which abolished the last traces of Herran's moderately centralising Constitution, and depriving the executive of the power of naming provincial governors. Obando gave satisfaction to no one, and in 1854 General Melo, commander of the cavalry in Bogota, incited the garrison and workingmen of that city to join him in an insurrection. However, the chiefs of the conservative party would have none of him; the recent concessions to the clergy had removed the strongest motives for rousing fanaticism to arms; and the clericals declared in his favour in only a few provinces. The property-holding and educated classes were practically unanimous against him. Mosquera and Herran, the most powerful men in New Granada and the historical chiefs of the moderate conservatives, had modified their views to suit the exigencies of the situation and become in effect moderate liberals. It was Mosquera himself who led the provincial militia against Bogota and overcome the dictator after much bloody street fighting. [Illustration: TYPES OF COLOMBIAN NATIVES.]