After these considerations of political philosophy, the firm protestation of the hidalgo. He cannot submit to "the criterion of judges whom he dismissed from their posts on account of their revolutionary ideas." Two ways remained open to him: flight or death, and he preferred the second, for it might lessen the persecution and the woes to be endured by his friends. "I might still escape," he says in his testament, "by leaving Chili, but this expedient would not be consistent with my antecedents, nor my pride as a Chilian and a gentleman. I am inevitably delivered over to the judgment or the pity of my enemies, since the Constitution and the laws have no longer any virtue. But you know, gentlemen (he is addressing Claudio Vicuña and Julio Banados-Espinosa) that I am incapable of imploring favour, or even benevolence, of men whom I despise for their ambition and their lack of citizenship." He felt that a great crisis, or a drama, requires a protagonist or a victim, and he accepted his destiny to the death. Above the half-breed _caudillos_, above the obscure crowd who swarm in palaces and parliaments, hungering for power and display, rises this patrician figure, towering and solitary.
In his political testament he condemns the existing system: "As long as parliamentary government, as men have wished to practise it, and as the triumphant revolution will uphold it, shall continue in Chili, there will be no electoral liberty, no serious and permanent organisation within the parties, nor peace between the groups in Congress." His bitter prophecy is accomplished: an excessive and sterile parliamentarism triumphed with the revolutionaries. From Portales to Balmaceda the President was the supreme { 178} authority; after Balmaceda Congress governed, and the President, the slave of the ruling groups, could neither dissolve Parliament nor appeal to a popular referendum. The liberty of the vote has been won, but it ratifies the tyranny of the Assemblies. The parties are fractional; authority, the basis of Chilian greatness, has declined. A President without initiative, an incoherent ministry, a Parliament divided and uncertain: there is the political outlook. "The Government of Congress is the Government of the parties, and these political entities exist in Chili only in the shape of antipathies or memories."[3]