The landless younger sons of the gentry and the Servian and Vlach immigrants provided him with excellent and practically inexhaustible military material.
The demand for the nationalization of the great landed estates was thus not only supported as a social and economic necessity in order to provide the landless population, notably the legionaries, with land, but was, deep in the minds of the people, regarded as a legal rectification of the wrongs suffered through the confiscations which followed the defeat of the White Mountain.
The people depend so entirely upon agriculture, and the harvest is so entirely destroyed by a single monsoon failure, that wherever a total failure occurs the landless labourer is immediately thrown out of work and remains out of work for the whole year.
Even as a landless fugitive Herod could count upon Roman support.
According to this constitution the sovereignty resides in the nation, but suffrage is restricted to married citizens over twenty-one and unmarried citizens over twenty-five years of age, not in domestic service, who can read and write, and who are the owners of real estate, or who have capital invested in business or industry, or who receive salaries or incomes proportionate in value to such real estate as investment; and as 75% of the population is classed as illiterate, and a great majority of the labouring classes is landless, badly paid, and miserably poor, it is apparent that political sovereignty in Chile is the well-guarded possession of a small minority.
