To meet the crisis one individual, taking the constitution of the United States as a basis,[2.4] drafted the required instrument in three days; and so an untrained and uneducated nation found itself provided with a complicated mixture of democracy and privilege, liberty and intolerance, progress and reaction, which paralyzed itself by combining such antagonistic elements, omitted the safeguard of a supreme court like ours, and showed its own inadequacy by providing that in emergencies the President might be given "extraordinary powers," or in other words become a dictator. In short, the government was organized as a permanent revolution. There was much enthusiasm, however, over this triumph of nationality, and on New Year's day, 1825, the first constitutional Congress assembled. The treasury was now full of borrowed English gold; and--as every one hoped the new system might be developed in the direction he preferred--all agreed that an era of peace, joy and prosperity had at length arrived.[2.3] [VICTORIA'S ADMINISTRATION] Victoria was elected President. His frank, ruddy, bronzed face, peering out of gray whiskers and curly gray hair, looked happy and encouraging, but soon the mass of the nation felt once more cheated; for although Bravo had been the candidate of the oligarchy, Victoria--yielding to the pressure of that element--gave it a preponderance in the administration. A multitude of people were exasperated to find the old privileged classes again in control, and the execution of Itúrbide under an illegal law--for he had returned to Mexico--infuriated his partisans. Worse yet, the oligarchy denied the practicability of the federal system for so unwieldy a country, where the states felt so independent, where so many men aspired to hold office and where so few were qualified, and plotted to set up the centralized regime, with monarchy--preferably under a Spanish prince--as the ultimate aim of many; and Victoria, a polite, weak, indolent, easily-flattered man of small abilities, little education and immense vanity, who idolized his country but felt she would always need him as chief-priest, fell in with this plan, because without a change of the constitution he could not be President a second time.[2.5]