Under the Monttvarist government, as under the dictatorship of Guzman-Blanco and Garcia-Moreno, the country progressed in an economic sense. Railways, highroads, and telegraph lines were constructed. Montt fostered agriculture and the colonisation of the soil in the south by means of credit banks; he opened nearly five hundred schools, and also founded a national bank. Maritime commerce increased, and the public revenue was doubled during the Decenniate; finally, the admirable civil code of Andres Bello, promulgated in 1857, gave discipline and stability to the civil life of the country. Portales, Bello, Montt, and Varas organised Chili both politically and socially.
After Montt, the presidencies of Perez, in 1861, of Errazuriz, in 1871, and of Santa Maria, in 1881, modified the conservative tendencies of the country. All the conquests of the liberals--the civil register, civil marriage, religious toleration--became laws of { 170} the State. Liberalism has not lessened the presidential authority. Perez, like Montt, ruled for ten years. Long autocracies and conservative constitutions explain the strength of Chili amid the anarchy of South America.
Portales was the organising genius; Montt represented an epoch of social defence; Balmaceda was the democratic reformer in an oligarchic country, a liberal president in a time of conservative traditions. Balmaceda is the greatest Chilian figure after Portales; his presidency excited a revolution, and transformed the political life of his people.
José Manuel Balmaceda belonged to the Chilian oligarchy. He was descended from a very old colonial family. Juan de Balmaceda was president of the _Real Audienca_, the king's tribunal, towards the end of the eighteenth century. The name of the family reveals its Basque origin. Balmaceda was born in Santiago in 1838. His father, Don Manuel José Balmaceda, was a conservative, the possessor of vast _latifundia_, as the head of a traditional family.
Balmaceda adopted democratic ideas. "Apostate" the conservatives called him, forgetting that he had changed his doctrines, but had not abandoned his original mysticism; he believed in liberty as he had previously believed in the inflexible dogmas of the conservatives. He belonged to the Reform Club of Santiago, in which a brilliant younger generation upheld all the liberal idelas and romantic faiths of 1848, the antitheses of the ideas of the _pelucones_ and the Monttvarists. To the despotic executive he opposed electoral liberty, a single-term presidency, autonomous municipalities, and the restriction of presidential powers; to the Catholic oligarchy, religious tolerance; to the traditions of authority, the formal recognition of the rights of the press and the rights of assembly, meeting and petition; to the confusion of the powers of the State, their independence. { 171} Balmaceda was the president of the Reform Club. He did not attack the position of a traditional group with plebeian fervour, as the avenger of an age of servitude; he left their ranks, rich and patrician, to condemn their authority and their privileges. It is the attitude of Winston Churchill in liberal England.