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- 
ever, 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. tom. iii. 
ue? 
