In answer, Bolivar
expressed his agreement and, knowing that he could not live much longer,
said that in order to avoid civil war with its terrible results, which he
expected to occur within ten years, it would be advisable to divide the
country by legal and peaceable means. He declared that he considered the
stability of the government impossible because of the hostility between
Venezuela and Nueva Granada. He pronounced himself against a foreign
monarch and said that, as for himself, he took it for granted that it was
understood that he was tired of serving and of suffering ingratitude and
attempts against his own life. He still insisted that, "in case no other
solution seems feasible, the best way out of the difficulty would be
a president for life, and a hereditary senate," as he had proposed in
Guayana. In a letter to O'Leary, he wrote:
"I cannot conceive of even the possibility of establishing a kingdom in
a country which is constitutionally democratic because the lo
and most numerous classes of the people want it to be so, with an
indisputable right, since legal equality is indispensable where there
is physical inequality, in order to correct to a certain extent the
injustice of nature. Besides, who can be a king in Colombia? Nobody,
for no foreign prince would accept a throne surrounded by danger and
misery, and the generals would consider it humiliating to subordinate
themselves to a comrade, and resign the supreme authority forever.
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