He and Rocafuerte, a liberal _caudillo_, the leader of a party of cultivated youth, shared the public functions between them. When Flores was President, Rocafuerte was governor of Guayaquil; when Rocafuerte ruled, Flores was commander-in-chief of the army. Both were sent into exile; they were successively enemies and allies. Flores played the tyrant, suppressed liberties, and aspired to the dictatorship; when he fell from power he prepared filibustering expeditions in Europe to be launched against his country. Spain offered him her aid in 1846. "Treason!" cried the Ecuadorian patriots. The chimera of a monarchist, the scepticism of an ambitious foreigner who had fruitlessly created a new country on the ruins of Greater Colombia, say we, after half a century has elapsed. America was stirred by the campaign of reconquest which he headed; in 1851 his temerarious plan had entirely miscarried, and he sought the aid of Peru in order to invade his country, then a prey to anarchy. He was not successful in the field, and after a long period { 215} of ostracism he joined Garcia-Moreno, the leader of the conservative forces; under the authority of the latter his influence decayed and his history ended. His disciple Rocafuerte was an excellent administrator, who founded schools, organised the National Guard, established military colonies in the east, partially secularised education, proved a liberal patron of arts and letters, and commenced the codification of the civil and penal laws.
In 1851 General Urbina forced a radical government upon Ecuador; he was the genius of destruction, an intriguer, an ambitious man whose excesses provoked a conservative reaction. He attempted in vain to establish a military _régime_. Garcia-Moreno denounced the treason of Flores and the radicalism of Urbina, and his moral influence overcame the prevailing anarchy. This remarkable statesman was born at Guayaquil in 1821; he came of a Castilian family. His mother trained him strictly in poverty; a priest, Father Bethencourt, directed his later education. In 1836 he entered the University of Quito, and soon became the supervisor of his own companions--an undergraduate autocrat. Tall, of a severe aspect, the forehead wide, and the eyes forceful, he was already revealed as a leader of men. He devoted himself with ardour to mathematics and philosophy; he acquired general ideas and an analytical turn of mind. Endowed with a prodigious memory and a vigorous dialectic, always master of himself, he had every desirable gift. Towards his nineteenth year his chaste youth passed through a moral crisis. He issued therefrom, according to his biographer, less the devotee but not less of a believer. Like Goethe, he made up his mind abruptly. He would not be guilty of timidity; he liberated himself from the tutelage of the world by dint of heroism; he was Mucius Scævola before he was Cæsar. His fiery spirit and irreducible will { 216} made him a leader whom all respected, a mystic whom the conservatives acclaimed.