By Manuel González Prada

Gentlemen:

     Complying with the mandate of the National Union, I come to offer a word of inspiration to the few, who, after much temptation and many battles, remain loyal to our cause.¹ I will speak of political groups and their caudillos, of the last civil war and its consequences, of the National Union and its duty in the current circumstance.

     Don’t expect half words, concessions, or underhanded and cowardly shots from my reticent lips: I express ideas clearly and coarsely; head on, without a mask or knife. I attack head on all evil public servants. I do not speak to flatter those who rule, or to serve as spokesperson for those who dream of seizing power, but rather to say what I think is necessary and just, no matter whose interests it hurts, no matter whose wrath it stirs up.

I

     In general, what did our parties become over the last years? —unions of unhealthy ambitions, election clubs, or business associations. What of our caudillos? —agents of large financial enterprises, shrewd compatriots who have turned politics into lucrative labor, or impulsive soldiers who have taken the Presidency of the Republic for the highest rank of a military career.

     Enterprising men have not been lacking to construct homogenous and solid parties, but in the end, they were left isolated, without colleagues or disciples.² They had to remain silent or limit themselves to roles as solitary apostolates. Where do you find the members of the last Liberal Party?³ In Peruvians’ minds there are phosphorescences, nothing more than phosphorescences of emancipation. Today we reject the convictions we invoked yesterday; in old age we trample on ideas that were the pride and honor of our youth. If it were only the elders who went astray…

     We do not have to classify individuals as republicans or monarchists, radicals or conservatives, anarchists, or authoritarians, but as supporters of a presidential candidate. As we come together, we form political parties that denigrate into partisan clubs, or better stated, we establish political clubs that take themselves for parties. True, ideas become incarnate in people, but it is also true that for many years, our public servants have not even represented a falsified idea. Let’s look at the present. Which groups call themselves parties? Which ones rise up and think they’re the bosses?

     Let’s not be content with the Civilismo of 1872,⁴ with its nucleus of consignees reunited and sworn to react against Dreyfus.⁵ The press secretaries for the Civil Party were simple negotiators in the guise of politicians. These ranged from bankers who by dint of force of fraudulent bond issues changed the nation’s gold into depreciated bills to sugar merchants or Chinese brokers who transformed the wretched coolie’s blood into the saccharine juice of sugar cane. The uncorrupted strain of Civilism, those young people who had followed Pardo who, aspiring for liberal reform, became corrupted by evil elements, or distancing themselves just in time, moved away from politics definitively.⁶

     Pardo made committed massive economic errors renovating the state-loan and guano-cash advance system that he had been fighting, but he was suffering the effects of causes created by his predecessors, he was fighting against a resistance superior to his forces. He found himself encircled in a ring of iron. A great injustice is committed when the national bankruptcy is blamed on him, even though it began with Castilla,⁷ continued with Echenique,⁸ and was almost brought to the brink by Minister Piérola with the Dreyfus contract.

     A responsibility less avoidable than bankruptcy looms over Civilism. Giving itself a name that implies a challenge to a certain social class, taking off in a war against the military, Civilism forgot that if the lower layers of the Earth rest on bedrock, new societies support themselves with iron. This oversight contributed effectively to our misfortune in the last international war. Chile had an immense advantage in combat, in sea battles against our poorly armored and antiquated ships, on land against platoons of conscripted soldiers under the orders of newly recruited officers who were merchants, doctors, or large landowners.⁹ Castilla, an uneducated but intelligent and well-advised soldier, understood very well that it would be best if Peru were a maritime power. “When the Chileans construct a war ship,” he used to say, “we should build two.” Pardo preferred dubious and problematic alliances over true power defended over the barrel of a gun. He was in the habit of repeating a particular phrase with a flippancy unbecoming of his larger political disquietude: “My two ironclads are Bolivia and the Argentine Republic.” Now that it is all said and done, Pardo can also be forgiven for not having enlarged our navy; he had to squander gold combating Piérola that he should have invested in battleships.

     With the death of Pardo, the life and breath of the Civil Party, the organization fatally disintegrated. The Civilists, dispersed, without sufficient cohesion to reconstruct a stable organization, became resigned to their entrance, like accessory parts, into new arrangements. They have been continually and sometimes simultaneously, Pradists, Calderonists, Iglesists, Cacerists, Bermudists, Civilists, Coalitionists, and Democrats. Not continuing as a tight group, they developed their individual strategies so that when a revolution arises, or a caudillo appears to be heading to the summit of power, the impatient ones join the revolution while the evil and cautious ones resign themselves in the status quo to await the results of the conflict to then join the victor. Even in the bosom of one family, some brothers joined the Democratic or Constitutional parties with others remaining consummate Civilists. And that is how the Civilist Party remains today for many people, it has become the art of eating at all the tables while having one’s hand in all the cookie jars.

     Civilists have constructed an unavoidable calamity: one should not govern with them because they carry a virus, yet one cannot function without them because they bring both gold and shrewdness.¹⁰

     Let’s also exclude the Civic Union, or properly speaking, the parliamentary clique, which intended to pass itself off as a cure-all when instead it came as a new pathological case. It was born with multiple heads, and like all monstrosities, it lived a short and miserable existence, although it lasted long enough to serve as the dignified bridge between Civilism and Piérolism. Many would not have had the nerve to jump suddenly from being a Civilist to Democrat. They found they could gently slide from being a Civilist to Civic, from Civic to Coalitionist and from Coalitionist to Democrat.

     Given its origin, could the Civic Union create something better? We all know the history of Peruvian Congresses, from the one that humbly knelt before Bolívar to give him the dictatorship to the one that quietly sanctioned the Protocol awarding the jackpot to the fruitful virginity of a Tartuffe. In our legislative bodies, in this shapeless conglomeration of colorless men, incapable and unconscious, there has almost always been a bacchanal, but almost never a fight for the national interest. Chambers consisted of regulated and disciplined majorities, such that, when an honest and independently minded minority wanted to raise its voice, that minority was sidelined by an authoritative coup or by the shouts and insults of the impudent and mercenary majority. And among the iniquitous Congresses, the one that deserves special mention is the Congress of the Grace Contract, the shamelessly venal congress, the Congress that by means of a schism produced the Civic Union.

     Upon the dissolution of the parliamentary clique, some of the members joined en mass the Democratic Party (which showed signs of rejecting them only to admit them later) while many contritely returned to the Constitutional Party because they were tied to Cáceres with their backdoor business dealings and bedroom mysteries.¹¹ If anything brought the founding members of the Civic Union together, it was that which separates men, crime. Before they brought themselves together for the purpose of forming a pseudo party, they had committed the Santa Catalina massacre, a useless and dishonorable crime that will be the dishonor of Morales Bermúdez, like Thebes for Cáceres.

     Cacerism and Piérolism survive. They should not be called homogenous parties but instead heterogeneous groups, led by two equally abominable and deadly men: Cáceres who once represented the business interests of Grace,¹² and Piérola,¹³ who may yet continue to favor Dreyfus. Anyone observing the bloody feud between Piérolists and Cácerists would have figured that their bosses personified two diametrically opposed political ideologies; one proclaiming ideas so conservative they became absolutist, the other bringing forth ideas so advanced they became anarchist. None of this: we challenge the most subtle man to draw a demarcating line between Piérolists and Cácerists to tell us which reforms Cáceres would not have accepted and which ones Piérola would have rejected. Or better yet, irrespective of finances, or even better, putting Grace and Dreyfus out of the picture, Cáceres would have signed off on one of Piérola’s programs, just as Piérola would have on one of Cáceres’s. Both represent a vivid contradiction: Cáceres is an illegal despotic Constitutionist, Piérola a clerical and autocratic Democrat. The two antagonists share many points worthy of comparison except for the fact that the 1879 dictator embraces a Hippocratic stance strangling with the left hand and making the sign of the cross with the right, while the Commander of La Breña pours scorn on the instincts of prehistoric man and has his truthful and loyal escapades in the primitive jungle. In both, however, the same pride, the same arbitrary spirit, the same thirst for power become an equal mania for greatness, and so if one believes himself to be dictator in partibus, the other considers the presidency the legal culmination of his military career. In Cáceres’s life there shines a glorious epic: when he was fighting against Chile, he had become the Grau of the land;¹⁴ in Piérola’s existence one always highlights the blurred figure of a conspirator and a signer of contracts. Surrounded by a few honorable men of good intentions, Cáceres could have been a good leader; Piérola, encircled by Cato’s ministry, would still give the same fruits that he gives. One represents ignorance, or a half-closed coffin, the other, poor instruction, or a basket full of odds and ends. In Cáceres, defects are compensated with a certain military chivalry and masculine arrogance; his adversaries both hate and respect him; in Piérola, all his actions, as natural as they seem, reveal something magical and troubadour-esque. His enemies find themselves before a comedian of language or a jester that causes them to laugh. People shoot at Cáceres; they whistle at Piérola.

      We have already seen them as dictators or presidents: with Piérola we had economic lavishness, political pandemonium, military confusion, and a dictator anointed with oil by an army chaplain and perfumed with a mixture concocted by a mother abbess; with Cáceres, a domestic bird of prey, flogging in prisons and barracks, shooting in the outback, and committing the worst of all tyrannies, tyranny with the mask of legality. In a word: what is Piérola? He is a García Moreno of comic opera.¹⁵ What is Cáceres? He is a Melgarejo aborted in his tracks. Piérolism and Cácerism make one thing clear: Peru’s intellectual and moral misery.

II

     Yes, a misery that will be incurable and eternal if the healthy and exploited majority does not eradicate the sick and plundering minority.

     One shouldn’t take the last civil war as a symptom of regeneration. All the unhappy indigenous people who spilled their blood in the streets of Lima, weren’t citizens moved by the idea of justice and social betterment, but beings only partially conscious rounded up by lasso in the Andes, pushed along at the tip of the bayonet and thrown against each other, just as one pits one beast against another, or one locomotive against another.¹⁶ In Castilla’s revolutions against Echenique, and in Prado’s against Pezet, entire provinces rose in revolt, armies subjected to discipline and human, if bloody, combat. But in the civil war of 1894, towns remained completely indifferent, and we only saw hordes of mountain people led by bandits, extra-governmental tax collectors, lumberjacks, flagellators of military recruits, rapists of women, executioners of prisoners. In the end, we saw barbarians just as barbaric when defending the laughable legality of the Government as when proclaiming the monstrous birth of the Coalition. How important was the courage displayed in the capture of Lima? There is nothing so easy as making a ferocious beast from an illiterate person. If reflexive and generous values denote the moral greatness of an individual, then blind and brutal anger, the thirst for blood, killing for killings’ sake, destroying for destroying’s sake, prove a return to primitive savageness. When two civilized men agree to a duel, the vanquisher gives his hand to the vanquished; when a pair of cannibals vies for the same prey, the victor eats the prey as well as the loser.

     In all parts revolutions come like the painful and fruitful spawning of towns; they spill blood but create light, they suppress men but elaborate ideas. In Peru, who has risen an inch from the ground? Who has manifested a big heart or a superior intelligence? Of those who splashed and sank in the pool of blood, which one emerged carrying in their hands a gem of a generous idea or of a noble sentiment? Mediocrity and abjection in everything and everyone. Look at them after a triumph, when pools of blood have not yet dried, when the miasma of decomposing cadavers has not yet disappeared. The first labor of victorious heroes is limited to preying on the destinies of the nation now bled out and impoverished, drained of its very life blood. Like vultures they descend upon cattle stuck in a ravine and dying. Simultaneously, they offer bullfights, theatre, and sumptuous banquets. Civilists, Civics and Democrats all congratulate themselves by eating and drinking in a shameless and repugnant promiscuity. All convert their minds into a prolonged digestive track. Like runaway pigs of different pigsties, they joined together amicably in the same basket and watering trough. And not one single voice of protest! Not one single stomach feels nauseous and upset! And all eat and drink without delicacies reeking of death, without wine taking on the taste of blood! And Piérola himself presides over funeral banquets giving congratulatory toasts!¹⁷ It was not worth twenty-five years of clamoring against Civilism, sowing the seed of an un-relentless hate, leading bloody revolutions, and loading Montoya’s rifle, to conclude simply with mute pardons and brotherly hugs.

     Could the revolution produce better results? When poverty rises to such levels that hunger becomes a national habit, what do men do without disputing the catch and eating themselves up? A revolutionary who triumphs, plans the future, has a nice meal, and then attacks the National Treasury in order to steal from it. And as the fallen ones are hungry and cry out, it becomes necessary to close their mouths, and silence them, sometimes for eternity. We now see the struggle for a morsel to eat, either you or I, without mercy, in the heart of a jungle. Our revolutions have been (and will be for a long time) as licit as contraband, as nepotism. And in the clamor of combatants will be heard, not only the stampede of weapons that wound and kill, but also the sound of hands clawing at the bottom of a sack.

     With the Revolution’s triumph and the presidency of its caudillo, Peru’ luck does not improve; that which comes with Piérola is no better than that which left with Cáceres. One needs no more than to wear a bandage over the eyes or be intoxicated with the aromas of a feast to distinguish between the unbridled soldiery that yesterday was imposed on us by the head of the Constitutional Party and the famished hordes of mountain guerrillas¹⁸ who now subordinate us to the head of the Democratic Party. The same tragicomedy continues, with new supporting actors but the same principal leads. The Democrats are so conscious of their inferiority, that, to establish a provisionary government, they had to appeal to Civilism for a coalition. In twenty-five years of preparation and discipline, they were not able to define their ideas or educate half-dozen capable men to govern the ministries.

     We see Piérola installed in power, like one says, on the Papal throne. The Immaculate One concedes his intimacy, his favors, and most trusted offices to men of all ages and under all governments who distinguished themselves through their rapaciousness and lack of shame. The Restorer of individual guarantees¹⁹ jails functionaries, closes down newspapers, and avails himself of subterfuge and school boy tricks to confiscate printing presses and to seal the lips of men who speak with independence and boldness.²⁰ The Regenerator²¹ turns the capital city into a leper colony of monks and friars, offering up half of Peru to religious communities, expelling from Cusco the English clergy that founded a secondary school. He imagines that the darkness of the conscience is erased with the plaster applied to the spires of a church. The Federalist objects to the initial movement of Iquitos with cannon shot, insinuating the suppression of the departmental councils, and dreaming about measures that could bring to bear the most centralized oppression. The Democrat does not receive the strikers with the sweetness and affability with which a politician might receive constituents, but refuses with a frown and the toughness of a feudal lord, ready to dispatch a few henchmen who fill the starving with lead when all they are demanding is bread; in the end, The Protector of the Indigenous Race.²²

     In summary: the last civil war has been bad, as much as for the way it was waged as for the caudillo who was imposed on us: that war is as the earthquake when cities collapse in upon themselves and the earth is quartered, to throw up streams of black water and blasts of sulfuric gases. reestablishes the regime of the ancient mitas on the road to Pichis, and, with the disinherited Indians of Ilave and Huanta, renews the horrors and the carnage of Weyler in Cuba and of the Sultan in Armenia.

     Nevertheless, nowhere does one need more than one profound and radical revolution. Here, where bad and corrupt institutions reign, where the guilty form not just transitory alliances, but secular dynasties, one should embark upon the task of putting the axe to the forest. We are not in any condition to satisfy ourselves with the collapse of a leader, the renovation of the chamber, the dismissal of certain judges, along with the total turning over of subordinate and passive government bureaucrats. Let’s ask simple and good intentioned people, from farmers or industrialists to citizens who do not maintain links with the Government or prosper at the expense of the Public Treasury: all will respond that they have disgust in their hearts and nauseousness in their mouths, that they suffocate in the hospital atmosphere and long for the burst of pure and fresh air. They ask for new ways of doing things. What can captivate us? All institutions have been dissected and left emaciated and today reveal their organic deformities. All people suffer anatomic dissection and microscopic examination: we know everyone.

      And the corruption continues spreading to city artisans. The working-class figures everywhere, like the mother jungle where there exists good timber for construction and good earth for sowing. When the most civilized part of a nation prostitutes itself and stops thriving, there rises from the country a heavy sea that regenerates and fortifies everything. Lima’s artisans, lying somewhere between the simple day laborer (who is despised) and the upper class (who is adored), constitute a fake aristocracy combining the ignorance of underdogs and the depravation of people of privilege. As a way to come together, they establish guilds or parties, which have no conviction or purpose; they have little or no conception of their social mission or of their rights, they come to believe that the highest form of human wisdom is condensed in the astuteness of Bertoldo and the slyness of Sancho.²³ Behold the artisans of Lima take on the role of courtesans and propagators of all legal and illegal power.²⁴ In summary: the last civil war has been bad, as much as for the way it was waged as for the caudillo who was imposed on us: that war is as the earthquake when cities collapse in upon themselves and the earth is quartered, to throw up streams of black water and blasts of sulfuric gases. Today they limit themselves to receiving the rosary and the blessed water from Piérola, in the same way that they received spirituous liquor and a butifarra sandwich yesterday from Pardo.²⁵

      Thankfully, Peru cannot be reduced into a corrupted and corrupting scab; far from politicians and profiteers, from the evil and the malignant, there sleeps a multitude of healthy and vital people, a kind of virgin field that awaits good labor and simple seed. We laugh at do-nothing sociologists who want to overwhelm us with their decadences and their inferior races,²⁶ comfortably fabricated to resolve unsolvable questions and justify the iniquities of Europeans in Asia and Africa. Decadence! If today we are the fallen, when was our age of assent? Could those once considered at the bottom raise themselves up to the top? Our fellow citizens from Moyobamba and Quispicanchis, do they already eat like Lucullus, and dress themselves like Sardanapalo,²⁷ do they love like Marques de Sade, collect Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and know from memory the verses of Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine?²⁸ Here for a national base, we have a mass of uneducated Indians, almost primitive, who up to the present have received as the sole elements of culture, revolutions, alcohol, and fanaticism. To think of them as decadent, one confuses childhood with old age, taking an old paralytic for a young man who still has not learned how to use his limbs. And the inferior races? When one remembers that in Peru almost all intellectual and successful men were Indians, cholos or zambos, when one sees that the few descendants of Castilian nobility transmit some sort of sexual inferiority and genetic deficiencies, when no one would find much difference between the facial angle of a gorilla and of an ancient marquis in Lima, there is no reason to conclude that one race is superior to the other.²⁹ One should affirm, yes, that at the dawn of the Conquest whites made of the Indian a sociological race, or better stated, a pitiful caste from which is drawn oxen for the plantation, moles for the mines, and bait for the military.

      If evil elements overtake the good ones, it will only be a matter of time before our nation disappears because no organism can endure when a disorganizing force exceeds one that conserves. Here the truly guilty party was the enlightened man who taught bountiful lessons of immorality when he should have been educating our nation with good examples and truthful instruction. The death of morality consolidates at the top or within the dominant classes.³⁰ We seem like the bits of earth that arise from the sea floor carrying upon its waves the detritus of underwater life. Peru is a mountain crowned by a cemetery.

III

      The Union does not expect to win over proselytes thanks to ambiguous pacts or hybrid solidarity; it breaks with political traditions and organizes a force that reacts against bad ideas and bad habits. There is only one way we can attract support and find an echo in the soul of the crowd: by being uncompromising and irreconcilable. Why have our parties failed? Because we lack clear-cut lines, because of the reciprocal infiltration of members from one gang into another? In the political order, as in the zoological order, the joining of different species produces only hybrids or sterile beings.³¹ In Spain, they create a transitory fusion of republican parties to dethrone the Monarchy and arrest Carlism. In France, they create alliances too as a means to offset the influence of clericals and Orleanists, but one cannot understand such alliances because their sole aim consists of either extoling or deposing a president. What was the result of the 1894 Coalition? Removing one man, installing another, and following in the same regime. What is happening right now? Civilists seek out Democrats to fertilize Candamo, while Democrats play elusive because they dream of imposing who knows what kind of hesitant and ill-formed personality to power.

      Why have they not removed half-tinged personages or changeable groups who have no definite color? We are confronted with a problem, to dissolve ourselves or change ourselves into a truly combative party. Let’s repeat again loyally and truthfully to avoid misunderstandings and draw a line in the sand. The Nation Union will not form alliances or allow transactions with any business-oriented or self-interested groups. When we approach any group, it will not be to march with it, but against it, not to shake hands with it, but to set fire to it.

      When these propositions are declared, they raise optimism to the point of the levity of neophytes who imagine that they are embarking on a journey through a bed of roses. War is instituted against powerful enemies who view the country as their legitimate patrimony, and will defend the booty with gold and astuteness, with force and crime. They have in the army an arm that tyrannizes with iron, in the newspapers a language that assassinates with slander; they can count on praetorians earning a good wage, with mouthpieces earning a good tip.

      It is not enough to display our flag and let out a cry so that hordes of followers come to us. We turn toward a nation who has been misled one-hundred times over, and who will mistrust us while our acts do not prove the sincerity of our intentions. We will do our best by pen and word, with pamphlets and lectures, with intimate letters and conversations; but we will be much more effective if we lead by example: life works as propaganda, slow and silent, yet irresistible. For this we need minds that think, not automatons who speak and gesticulate; people who are alive, not traveling corpses, proselytes of good faith, not turncoats³² corrupted by privilege and poor examples. In short, we need the freshness of youth, not men who have twenty-five years of baptismal faith and a century and a half in their heart.

      We have already endured the most difficult part of getting organized. As the country began to enjoy tranquility, the National Union was slowly developing, setting aside the fight against immense obstacles save for the setbacks that all associations encounter at first. But when caudillos rose up to formulate programs, win over proselytes and organize clubs, some of our followers became agitated like iron fillings when around a magnet. Agitation came to a head in March 1894 when the revolution exploded. In the heart of the Union itself, even among the reduced number of members of the Central Committee, we see two-facedness, desertions, and apostacies. We were like a newborn, whose hereditary evil was already eating us from the inside.

      This makes one occasionally think that attempts to reunite men for something superior to individual benefits results in nothing more than vanity and counter productivity. Who knows if in Peru the bells have pealed announcing true parties! Who knows if we remain in an age of the solitary apostolate! Perhaps we should hurtle ourselves onto the battlefield without counting on the loyal collaboration of many, fearing the enemy who attacks from the front as much as the friend who stabs us in the back. And in this unequal fight, our allies of today may turn around and become the enemies of tomorrow, while our opponents will never become friends. Those who walk in a straight line in Peru end up alone, incarcerated, crucified. Here one works a bit like a member of a disciplined crew, working and getting tired with the certainty of not saving cargo or lives because the water is rising and the vessel sinking. But things happen as they are going to happen. The voices of men who are loyal to their convictions will resonate tomorrow like a virile protest in this twilight of souls, in this material corruption of characteristics.

      Happily, within the National Union a compact and homogenous majority rules allowing it to resist internal dissentions and repel exterior attacks. If anyone became weakened enough to commit a crime, if anyone took on authority or representation that had not been conceded to them, the Central Committee of Lima did not solicit alliances or celebrate indignant transactions: the Committee ejected from its bosom the misguided and the schemers. Ambiguous and pernicious elements are separated out. The danger of a rift beaten back; the majority of the National Union continues raising an immaculate flag. And not only is it gallantly raised in Lima where citizens enjoy intermittent guarantees, but also temerariously in many towns of the republic, where people live and breathe under the regimes of Roman pro-councils, where the only law that exists is the obtuse will of a prefect, a sub-prefect, a governor, or a commanding officer. It can similarly be argued that the Union’s most solid force resides in the provinces, the inverse of our political bands that only move with energy generated in the Capitol. If one day the Committee of Lima violates the program or connives in sinister fashion, the last Committee of the Republic could convert into the true center of force for the National Union. Here, there are no men, nor do we want any, who blindly obey orders of a group and its master. ³³

     In our development, better late than never, nothing is owed to individual initiative, everything comes from collective action. No one has to waste energy on the pretensions of being indispensable. The Civil Party was Pardo, the Constitutional Party had been Cáceres, the Democratic Party is Piérola. The National Union does not belong to any one man. Sometimes, giving in to an obsessive need to organize and to the general itch to empty everything into the parliamentary mold, we have organized presidential tables with procedures that are both complicated and annoying. But we should recognize that we are attempting to teach our followers so that at the right moment the least likely and most humble of people become the spokesperson of ideas and the activist for the masses. In a word, we do not want to expose ourselves to decapitation as happened to the Civil Party.³⁴

      Nevertheless, being acephalous, which at first glance appear to be the force and the worth of the Union, postpones its might and merit, potentially bringing it to ruin. There is nothing so terrible as a man without convictions leading a nervous and easily swayed crowd; nothing so sterile as an idea that lives in the air that neither becomes tangible nor embodied in any personality. A cause without an apostle is a simple abstraction and Humanity adores and follows nothing greater than the individual. Even in the most idealistic religion, suppressed the material symbol, the dogma falters.

      We wait for the necessary man who will rise at the opportune moment, a sincere and enthusiastic supporter, possibly the quietest and least suspicious, who will tomorrow accomplish the National Union’s fruitful thought. When such a superior figure takes form among us, we will open the streets for him, sacrificing our pride and personal ambitions. If there is merit in proclaiming an idea, there is more merit in transferring such an idea to a man capable of realizing it.

      While we wait for this day, we are left to make do. Up until now we take pride in common sense, and nevertheless, the evil ones or professional politicians, ban us for being idealists, utopians, and dreamers. Since deeds matter in politics, we must ask, what these perfectly practical men have achieved that was not mere illusion or attempts to form utopias or dreams? They promulgated constitutions and laws without educating citizens so that they might understand and abide by them. They forged metal without bothering to check if the mold was big enough to hold it. They decreed digestion without considering where the bread would come from. The disinherited masses of Indians find themselves in the position of being apostrophized to: What good is free schooling, if we lack schools? What good is the Printing Press Law if we don’t know how to read? What good is the right to vote if we cannot exercise it consciously? What good is freedom of industry if we do not have capital, credit, or a piece of land to cultivate with a hoe? These perfectly practical men were good politicians in the same way as when a good doctor kills all his patients, when a good lawyer loses all his cases, and when a good sea captain lets all his boats rot. We see them today. When the South threatens us with new and worse scenarios than those in 1879, they pose questions outside their territory, imagining vindicating with Diplomacy and protocols the goods appropriated with a rifle and a sword. The perfectly practical men raise a dike of massive proportions to counteract an invasion of bayonets.

      Some people ask that every word or manifesto of the National Union contain a complete and defined program, offering a solution for problems that have not been solved by people anywhere on Earth. If Humanity had resolved its religious, political, and social problems, the planet would be an Eden, and life a feast. A party cannot and should not condemn itself to following an invariable and strict program as with a religious creed. It is enough to plant some fundamental benchmarks and mark the path. There is no need to determine beforehand the number of steps that need to be taken. The National Union could condense its program in two lines: evolve in the sense of the greatest individual liberty, preferring social reforms to political transformations. It is already possible to discern what side we will be on in the process of establishing a federal regime or establishing freedom of religion. Although saying it seems paradoxical, we are a party, political, driven by the desire to move away from mere politics,³⁵ an epidemic that has plagued modern societies. Politics means treason, hypocrisy, bad faith, white-collar power. Calling a man of conscience a bad politician, instead of offending him, grants him a diploma of honor and humanity. Of the good and illustrious politicians nothing good nor illustrious has come to the world: politicians named Enrique IV grumbling in Paris and Saint-Denis, Napoleon shooting the Duke of Enghien, Talleyrand getting rich³⁶ under all regimes, Bismarck falsifying the Ems telegram, William II applauding the strangulation of Greece, Canovas from Castile devastating Cuba, destroying the Philippines, and instituting a secular inquisition in the fort at Montjuich.

      Questions regarding governmental form, questions of words or people. Differences between monarchical and republican regimes hold little value when just as much misery reigns in St. Petersburg as New York, when in Belgium they enjoy more individual guarantees than in France, when in Great Britain the queen herself lacks the authority to imprison a wretched worker; while a Morales Bermúdez and a Cáceres lock us up, exile us, flog us and set us before a firing squad in a deserted pampa or in a hidden away corner of a barracks. For this reason, the world tends toward division, not into republicans or monarchists, not into liberals or conservatives, but into two great factions: the haves and the haves not, the exploiters and the exploited.

      We idealists prefer a limited community of loosely associated farmers and free people to an immense republic of serfs and proletarians; we utopians recognize that nothing is absolute or definitive in the nation’s institutions, and we consider all reform as a point of departure to try and institute even newer reforms; we dreamers know that the government should leave behind evangelical charity to enter instead into human justice, that everyone has the right to integral development of their own being, not existing a reason to monopolize for the privileged the goods that pertain to all of Humanity. We repeat to eminently practical men: Down with politics and up with social reform! We tell them so we can be done with them once and for all. If one day the National Union becomes a decisive and powerful force, only then it will be seen if we are humdrum idealists or as men capable of carrying out a just and complete social liquidation.

IV

     The country’s attention is concentrated on the elections of 1899, on the new revolutionary movement, and on the Protocol of Arica and Tacna.

      We might deserve being branded as idealists, utopians, and dreamers if we believed ourselves to be a powerful factor in our political life, wanting to intervene like an annulling judge in the next sham elections. Throwing ourselves into the fight we would waste our energies in a sterile and damaging manner, energies that we should take advantage of as we grow and get consolidated. What dike would we use against the torrent of illegality and corruption? Acting alone, we would see those who had been run over and defeated. Aligning ourselves with others, we would end up absorbed and discredited. Without the necessary prestige to move crowds and lead them toward effective and regenerating action, we must vanquish impatience and store energies for a later time: abstaining today does not mean abdicating but postponing one’s rights.

     Perhaps within the sphere of councils and senates we could fight with a degree of probability of success in some locations of Republic (this the Committees would decide by certifying their influence.) But regarding the positions of the presidency and vice presidencies, nothing is worth trying. Why choose men to condemn them to become pointlessly maculated and injured in this field of disgrace and abomination? Whether we take part or not, future elections will be as they always are, a fraud legalized by Congress.

      Let’s achieve something more useful than descending into the arena of electoral squabbles, to this veritable soup of vipers. Let the Civicists, Democrats, Civilists and Constitutionists continue parading between ruins and blood like the grotesque masquerade of a sinister carnival. In the clamor of obnoxious and selfish voices, we must be a voice that night and day cries out for the reconstitution of our army and our navy, not to attack, but to defend ourselves, not to conquer but instead to avoid being conquered, not to seize other people’s land, but to regain that which was wickedly taken from us.

      When the National Union was announcing not so long ago that the sanction of the Protocol would spark a civil war, the kowtowing and incense-bearing media maliciously confused the announcement with the desire and attributed revolutionary intentions to us. Naturally, the birds of lower flight met without much difficulty the gracious antithesis between the weakness of our arms and the ardor of our bellicose impulses. It was the same logic used when attributing desires of an epidemic to the doctor who announces it, or desires of a storm to a sailor who foretells the storm.

      Have we forgotten the revolutions of Cáceres against Iglesias and of Piérola against Cáceres? If gold poorly spent in such revolutions was instead used in the national treasury, if the useless and sacrificed walked today with rifles on their shoulders, then Chile would hold a different attitude toward us. No, these revolutions produced no good, but instead produced that which they force on us from the North. Did Cáceres annul or try to annul the Treaty of Ancón?³⁷ Did Piérola constitute a government more legal and less arbitrary than Cáceres’? If tomorrow the snazzy revolutionaries triumph, would anyone think that that they were capable of tearing apart the Protocol and standing for battle face-to-face against the Chileans? Upon the revolution’s taking form, on the eve of the victory, Chile would send a Confidential Agent, and Chileans and Revolutionaries would sort out everything. Say Ataura.³⁸

     Instead of scrambling to know if colonel Pérez won or if doctor García was left defeated, people should figure out if after the war they will pay less property taxes, shake up the guardianship of the landowners, and consign to history the conditions of the day laborers and yanaconas in order to change them into free men and small property owners.³⁹ Is it worth starting a revolution to substitute people, not regimes? With civil wars like those we have had until now, the illiterate ones do not rise even a centimeter toward the light; the disgraced ones cannot free themselves of one milligram of the centuries-old load that wears them out. The illiterate and unfortunate revolt as serfs to change masters, like sheep that revolt to get new shearers and executioners. For this reason, when the revolution is proclaimed, we shout a single cry: Away with the newly ambitious ones and with new criminals! As members of the National Union, we could yell this out, not hiding our blood-covered hands; but neither will we hide those from the Democratic Party, nor Piérola’s himself during twenty-five years that he held the academic chair of seditions and uprising. He does not have the right to condemn and make fun of the current revolutionaries who come from his school, those who are his disciples.

      International problems today offer a new face with the alliance, entente cordiale, or tacit contract between Bolivia and Argentina. Forming together a triple alliance, we improve our chances of defeating Chile, annulling the Treaty of Ancón, and reclaiming the lost territories. By not adhering, we risk the possibility of our neutrality being viewed as a hostile manifestation and of an Argentine-Bolivian union not only damaging Chile, but also us. The thought of an alliance between Peruvians and Chileans against Bolivians and Argentines is thrown out without a thought. There is no government crazy enough to celebrate it nor is there any country so low as to permit it. The most that Chile could expect from us, if she should throw herself into war, would be a strict neutrality. According to this supposition, what would we gain? Before anything else, very little honor. With Chile’s defeat, we would remain as we are today, without our inclement victor of 1879 revealing even the smallest gratitude nor awarding even a modest compensation for our valiant neutrality. Triumphing Bolivia and Argentina, they would impose on Chile the conditions of Peace, going forward without a concern for justice, reconciling their respective interests, while making us pay deeply for not having joined its alliance. No moral obligation imposes on Bolivians and Argentines the shedding of their blood and wasting their money to redeem us; and although this need would exist, there are no countries as romantic and generous as to sacrifice national interest on the altars of moral obligation.

      And what of Bolivia? A single consideration today justifies Peru’s alliance with her, —the terror of her not being aligned with us, implying its union with Chile to fight and dismember us. The 1879 alliance of Peruvians and Bolivians is reminiscent of the fraternity of Sancho and Don Quixote. In the unfortunate adventures of war, they were saving their hides and we got a beating. No one knows if Bolivia washed itself in rose water while Peru was drowning in a sea of blood, all that is seen is that after San Francisco the veterans of Daza made so much smoke that the invisible and ubiquitous General Campo took Calma twenty times, having once moved from Cochabamba or La Paz. Since the famous retreat from Camarones, some Bolivian public figures began to imagine that their involvement in the war and the movement away from Peru would give them the title so that Chile would concede Tacna and Arica to them. Sometimes they figured that we would feel obliged to do it, if not for payment for services rendered in the war (war that we accept in her defense) at least for a Latin-American solidarity or generous Christian charity. Regarding the last assumption, the Cavours and the Metternichs of Chuquisaca gave us the great honor of conceding the virtues of Saint Vincent de Paul and Saint Martin to us. If Chile does not release its prey and if Peru would not release it by any means (if it were recovered) the Bolivians turn toward the Argentines with the hope of finding more complacent and generous friends.

      And what of Argentina? The nation that for more than twenty years suffered through Rosas’ bloody dictatorship, the nation that aligned with Brazil and Uruguay to consummate the crucifixion of the Paraguayans, the nation upon being asked in 1866 to join the alliance with Peru and Chile against Spain, answers (with insolence and disdain) that its interests are not called toward the Pacific. This country does not deserve to be trusted for its civility, its high spirits, or its Americanism. And Juárez Celman’s administration, does he serve his country in the best light? Who knows if by optical illusion, we see Argentina from afar as a great cattle slaughterhouse like a mixed bag of Italians who do not know Spanish and Spaniards that speak Catalan or Basque. What is for sure is that this Republic reminds us of export products, all varieties of loud colors, and furniture made of luxurious wood even though it is neither refined nor glossy. Nothing would be so strange, except that in the least expected moment Argentines celebrated a sultry peace, or being obliged to go to the battlefield, they would receive a lesson more disastrous than the one which we suffered in 1879. Meanwhile, for some ten years, the good gauchos stand like Don Simplicio Bobadilla in Pata de cabra: they lend a hand with the dagger, but they can’t get it out of the sheath, the blade is bewitched, and we can’t figure out how long it is. ⁴⁰

      All in all, the Nation’s tide of sympathy toward the Argentines is so widespread and spontaneous, that if one day they launched an attack against Chile, no one could know the effect the first cannon shot would have upon us. Perhaps it is time to repeat that rifles would point only in the direction of Iquique and Tarapaca. No one would envy the luck of the presidents who would oppose the national torrent and dream of changing course. The revolution to overthrow them and teach them a lesson would be the only good one, a saintly one, the only one truly popular. We Peruvians suffer because in our house they duped us and made fun of us, they gagged us and tied our hands behind our backs, they disgraced us and made us poor; but we will no longer tolerate someone confusing our interests with the interests of Chile to the point we are dragged along as mendicant allies in a war against Bolivia and Argentina. It behooves us not to attack the Bolivians because we are loyal, the Argentines because it suits us. If there is treachery on the part of the Chileans, if there had been treachery on the part of the Bolivians and Argentines, then there would be neither treachery nor stupidity on the part of the Peruvians.

      Whether war is invoked or breaks out, whether we make alliances or remain indifferent, we should pursue one objective —to make ourselves strong. Chile will prove to be more demanding and more arrogant while we seem weaker and more humiliated. With it, there are no stricter protocols than mighty ironclads, nor more convincing reasons than a large and battle-hardened army. As long as it is held in check by the East and with a fear of our adhering to the Argentine-Bolivian alliance, it will lull us to sleep with hymns of tenderness and promises of friendship. But as soon as it is free and clear, it will shamelessly return to its relentless system of absorption and confrontation. What! If today, threatened by a foreign war, possibly on the eve of horrifying civil strife, ruined in its credit, with enormous fiscal debts, almost on the edge of the abyss, when it should oblige us with its loyalty and its good faith, it mocks us with an insidious Protocol. Far from granting us hopes of retaking Tacna and Arica, it involves us in an endless series of issues to disorient us, to tire us out, and manipulate us regarding Tarata.⁴¹

      I conclude gentlemen. If Chile has encountered its national industry in its war against Peru, it does not abandon the hope of coming sooner or later to ask us for a new piece of flesh. Let’s arm ourselves from head to toe and live in formidable armed peace or state of a latent war. The past speaks to us with much clarity: Is it worth being men if the damage of yesterday does not open our eyes to tomorrow? When one breathes the optimism that reigns in the official regions, when one sees the confidence that puts all the social classes to sleep, anyone could guess that there are no exterior dangers, that Chile is impotent and disarmed, that in the last war we tasted victory. Nevertheless, it would not be bad to remember sometimes that Piérola did not overrun the Chileans at San Juan, that Cáceres did not make them bite the dust at Huamachuco. By not drawing the right lesson from our setbacks, by not trying to prevent new storms from swirling over our heads, we would deserve Chileans, Argentines, and Bolivians falling on us making us the Poland of South America.

      This is not a question of throwing ourselves today, weak and poor, into a clumsy and crazy war, or of creating a squadron and an entire army in a few days. War requires underground and meticulous work, something like the labor of a mole or ant: accumulating money, Sol by Sol, cent by cent, to purchase elements of war, cannon by cannon, rifle by rifle, down to bullet by bullet. Nations live longer lives and never tire of waiting for the hour of justice. And justice on Earth is not achieved with reasoning and entreaties, it comes at the point of a bloody iron. True, war is the ignominy and opprobrium of humanity; but this ignominy and opprobrium should be directed toward the unjust aggressor, not the defender of one’s own life and rights. From the colonies of infusoria to human societies, one sees relentless struggles and abominable victories of the powerful with one single difference: all of Nature suffers the harsh law and remains quiet, man refuses it and revolts. Yes, man is the only being that clamors for justice in the universal and eternal sacrifices of the weak. We listen to the clamor and rise up against injustice and obtain reparation, let us be strong: the lion that tears out nails and teeth will die in the mouths of wolves, the nation that does not raise iron in its hands concludes by dragging it on its feet.