Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/15

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NOTICE OF THE AUTHOR.
xi

continued to fulfill his obligations as a Catholic; nor had he any painful recollections to lament, nor need to blush on account of a single action, which could embitter the present or darken the future.

When Ferdinand VII., replaced upon the throne by a foreign army, wished, to the prejudice of the heir-apparent, Don Carlos, to favor his daughter Isabella, who, by the Salic law of Philip V., could not have succeeded him, Donoso caused a learned and eloquent memorial to be presented to the king, in which he sustained the cause of the Infanta, and appealed to the love of a husband and father. The king wished to recompense him, and in 1832 conferred upon him a distinguished place in the ministry of "Grace and Justice." He was in this way, at twenty-three years of age, thrown into political life, which he was destined never to abandon.

Ferdinand VII. died, but Donoso continued to support Isabella and her mother, Maria Christina. Spain loved her queens, and the memory of Isabella the Catholic, "the most illustrious being who had ever reigned over men," was affectionately cherished in popular traditions. Donoso considered that this sentiment was alone capable of saving his country, of delivering it from anarchy, of securing to it, not merely the order established in a beleaguered city, but the assured tranquillity of laws and of a just moderation. About this time he was elected a deputy to the Cortes, and afterward Secretary of the Council of the Ministry, under the presidency of the famous Mendizabal, the chief of the party of reform. Donoso soon resigned this office, as he remained firm in his principles, which were not those of the ministry; so that he took no part whatever in the confiscation of the property of the Church, in the suppression of religious orders, or in any of those sacrilegious excesses which seemed to renew the times of Charles III.

The tribune and the press still remained open to him, and sometimes by means of the one, sometimes of the other, he continued,

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