The liberal charter gave rise to lengthy quarrels. The States gave themselves conflicting and opposite constitutions; some were conservative and reinforced authority; some were radical and founded an anarchical democracy; some were liberal and extended the suffrage; some were moderate and conciliatory, uniting the ideas of all parties in unstable equilibrium. { 204} In a country already divided by religious questions this variety of _status_ created a perpetual disorder.
A new Constitution, more precise than that of 1853, established the federal system without restrictions; it was the triumph of the "Golgothas" over the "Draconians," the radicals over the classic liberals. The battle was renewed with fresh vigour. The religious communities lost their legal character, and could no longer acquire property; the State usurped their wealth and ruined them as in Mexico. The impetuous radicals sapped not only the ecclesiastical power, but the political power also. They reduced the presidential period to two years, granted the provinces full sovereignty, prohibited the death penalty without exception, conceded the absolute liberty of the press, and authorised the buying and selling of arms.
Excessive liberalism disorganised the country. Colombia suffered much from this vain idealism; she became the social laboratory of professors of Utopianism. The radicals created fresh elements of discord; they attacked authority, religion, and national unity. In 1870, in the face of bankruptcy, the party abandoned its original extremeness; it no longer professed anti-militarism, nor desired the complete separation of Church and State. Sceptical as to the benefits of the suffrage, it re-enforced the executive, in spite of its original federal creed.
The conservatives governed the country from the dissolution of Greater Colombia, in 1829, until 1849; they performed the work of organisation. Without forming an oligarchy, as in Venezuela and Chili, they represented permanent interests and effective powers; religion, the colonial nobility, and the patricians who won autonomy for their country. They were conservatives in so far as they opposed the radicals, but in 1832 they granted a political charter in which they accepted liberal principles; they respected municipal { 205} liberties and the liberty of the press, surrounded all the powers of the State with prestige and authority, as also the senate and the magistrature, created a Council of State, so necessary in an improvised democracy, protected Catholicism, and limited the suffrage. To be a citizen a man required "an assured subsistence without subjection to any one whatever in the quality of servant or workman." In the social world they accepted the old division of castes. They did not free the slaves, and they tolerated the exportation of human merchandise. The radicals protested against this shameful traffic; in 1842 regulations were passed affecting black immigration, and 1849 marked the fall of the conservative party. Then arose eloquent demagogues, who preached a social gospel much like that of the French revolutionists of 1848.