VALPARAISO. 



147 



constitution was adopted. The law of the land continued to be such 

 as the Old Spaniards had bequeathed it. The constitution gave equal 

 rights to all ; abolished slavery, limited the privileges of the mayor- 

 asgos, diminished the power and revenue of the church, and adopted 

 the English naval code for the regulation of its maritime affairs. But 

 three years and a half of internal peace and success in all distant 

 expeditions had given leisure to the northern provinces of Chile, and 

 particularly to the capital, to see and feel the inconveniences of the 

 actual form of government ; which was in fact a despotic oligarchy at 

 first, and, by the absence or secession of the members of the senate, 

 who were disgusted at the opposition they met with in a plan for 

 declaring their office perpetual and hereditary, the whole power had 

 been left in the single hands of the director : if he had had a spark of 

 ordinary ambition, he might have made himself absolute. It is 

 seldom that a successful soldier like O'Higgins has the sense to see, 

 and the prudence to avoid, the danger of absolute power : he, how- 

 evei', has had both ; and the senate being dissolved, he has convoked 

 a deliberative assembly for the purpose of forming a permanent con- 

 stitution. The members are to be named by him and his private 

 council, from among the most respectable inhabitants of each town- 

 ship in Chile. This assembly is to devise the means for forming and 

 securing a national representation ; and, till such representation can 

 be called together, to sit as a legislative body, for a period not ex- 

 ceeding three months, while the executive power still remains in the 

 hands of the director. * 



If such an assembly should honestly do its duty, nothing could be 

 wiser than this measure. But chosen by the executive, and therefore 

 biassed not unnaturally in its favour, it appears to me, that every pos- 

 sible difficulty lies in the way of obtaining through that assembly an 

 effective representative government ; and it might have been wiser, 

 and certainly, as the government is constituted, as legal, to have 

 issued a decree for electing representatives for the towns at once. 



* See Gazeta Ministeriel de Chile, No. 44. torn. iii. 



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