"To-day we are beginning to realise that the Colombian dictator was above all things a positivist, a realist. He wrote some trenchant things about codes "drawn up by gentle visionaries who, dreaming of republics away up in the clouds, have sought to attain to political perfection by taking it for granted that human nature is indefinitely perfectible". Despite his republican utterances, he was an uncompromising opponent of democracy, which he defined as "a state of things so incapable of resistance that the slightest difficulty is enough to throw it into confusion and bring it to naught"."