His political ideal was that of Benjamin Constant; of Lamartine, of Laboulaye. He accepted neither the despotism of the President nor the tyranny of Congress.
Could the perfect equilibrium of the public powers be realised in Chili, or was it merely the noble dream of an ideologist? Very soon the omnipotence of a centralised government was replaced by the dictatorship of anarchical Parliaments. The parties imposed ministers upon Balmaceda, and presented him with lists of candidates, among whom the President, powerless to refuse, was to choose his counsellors.
It was a radical transformation, for from the time of Portales the government had intervened in elections, had insisted upon presidents and deputies. Balmaceda disregarded his own work, rebelled against Congress, governed without a budget, defended the rights of the power which he had destroyed by short-sighted legislation, and tried to enforce his wishes as to the Presidency, in the traditional manner, and Congress refused to accept his candidate. It has been truly said that the government of Balmaceda was the crisis of electoral intervention.[2] Parliament refused to pass the President's law of contributions, { 176} overturned his ministries, and protested against the designation of an official candidate; as in the time of the French Revolution, a revolutionary committee was formed in the heart of the Chamber. The two dictatorships clashed. The revolution broke forth in 1891; the fleet revolted; civil war divided families; Congress fought for the Constitution, the Government for the autocracy. From La Moneda Balmaceda directed a terrible war against the combined forces of the fleet, the banks, and the Parliament. The factions fought with lamentable ardour; it was a war of hatreds and reprisals, bitter as a racial conflict. Two battles, Concon and La Placilla, destroyed the power of the President.
The revolutionaries got the upper hand, invaded Valparaiso and Santiago, and the Araucanian savages burned the dwellings of the President's friends, and swept, brutal and drunken, through the silent cities. Balmaceda took refuge in the Argentine Legation, and his supporters hid, while a horde of vandals proceeded to reduce the capital to ruins. The defeated President took on a stoic grandeur; like a hero of Plutarch, he transformed his fall into an apotheosis; he purified the local tragedy by catastrophe. Serene as a figure of antiquity, he committed suicide, after drafting a noble political testament. "Among those who are to-day my most violent persecutors," he wrote, "are the politicians of various parties whom I have heaped with honours, whom I have exalted and served with enthusiasm. I am in nowise surprised, neither by this inconsequence, nor by the inconstancy of mankind.... All the founders of South American independence have died in dungeons, in prison cells, or have been assassinated, or have perished in proscription and exile. Such has been civil war in the ancient as in the modern democracies. It is only when one has witnessed the fury to which the victors in a civil { 177} war abandon themselves that one comes to understand why, of old, the vanquished politician, even though he were the most unworthy servant of the State, made an end by falling upon his own sword."