 In light of this view of the character and customs inherited from the colonial times, the liberal faith in the capacity of written constitutions to fully transform their societies away from the colonial structures and in the direction of progress went hand in hand with strong a pessimism about the capacity of the majority of the people to live up to the demands of such institutions. Since the majority of the population shared the moral values of the colonial society and lacked even the basic skills of reading and writing, the elite judged them to be backward and ignorant. Most liberals indeed deemed the majority of the people to be unfit for republican citizenship. To be sure, the latter was a widely shared view among European liberals who also advocated a limited franchise. Most Hispanic American liberals endorsed the French doctrinaire’s argument that most of the population lacked the needed independence of judgment to exercise political rights either because of lack of instruction or because of their subservience to masters, or both, which was usually the case. A notable exception to this dominant view was the short lived liberal Colombian constitution of 1853 which granted universal male suffrage following the French example after the 1848 revolution (Bushnell 1993: 108). The same year, a local legislature in Colombia also granted women the right to vote for the first time in the Americas though the measure was turned down by the supreme court (Bushnell 1993: 163). By contrast with their European counterparts, however, the Hispanic American liberals’ conviction about the political incapacity of the masses was compounded by their belief that the cultural practices inherited from colonial times were a formidable obstacle for the realization of liberal political ideas. This perception motivated the disenchanted conclusion that liberal institutions were not suitable for Hispanic American societies, as Bolívar put it, and as many other conservatives repeatedly complained against partisans of liberalism.