[7] A strong restriction of suffrage was forced by economic criteria, reserving it for the wealthiest; and a policy of public order was promoted, entrusted to a newly created body, the Civil Guard.
Moderantism was markedly centralist, reducing the municipal powers that the progressives sought to expand; and it maintained an economic policy favourable to the interests of the Castilian-Andalusian landowning oligarchy (depending on the circumstances, between protectionism and free trade), which in fiscal matters translated into a greater indirect tax burden (consumption, paid by all) than direct (contributions, paid in relation to wealth).
Conservative in social and religious matters, the Spanish moderates did not seek the separation of Church and State, but rather a redirection of the anticlerical policy of the progressive liberals, which took shape in the Concordat of 1851.
The Spanish Catholic Church continued to enjoy a preponderant role in public life, respecting its privileged position in education and guaranteeing its economic survival after having been deprived of its sources of wealth with the confiscation.
By means of the cult and clergy budget, the State was obliged to pay the salaries of priests and bishops and to maintain the immense real estate patrimony that still remained under its control.
Ideologically, the so-called neo-Catholics represented the right wing of Moderantism, seeking a difficult balance between Catholicism and liberalism, which for their opponents was a simple masking of traditionalist, ultramontane or reactionary positions.
A Freemason, conspirator, tavern orator, tough parliamentarian, sometimes incendiary, he proposed the disqualification of Ferdinand VII in the midst of the invasion of the Hundred Thousand Sons of St. Louis.
Exiled to London, having learned from the errors of the Trienio and his English experience, he returned to Spain in 1834 as a different type of politician, more temperate and pragmatic.
His prologue to El moro expósito, by the Duque de Rivas, constitutes the authentic manifesto of Spanish romanticism, as Sánchez-Prieto has written.
Silvela, who is unquestionably an almost prototypical representative of the Spanish moderate liberalism of the regency of Maria Cristina, is, even biologically, a descendant of the enlightened Frenchmen who had to go into exile with the fall of the Josephine government and the return of Ferdinand VII.
Furthering this idea, Silvela, referring to the pages alluded to in the Introduction of his Collection of opinions, projects and organic laws or practical studies of administration, reiterates in relation to the possibility of participation of towns and provinces through corporations of popular origin (Town Councils and Provincial Councils) that in no case should this constitute an obstacle to the development of central power; he establishes as a principle that the people should not interfere in doing "what they should not do, what they cannot do: we do not want the democratic element to predominate in such a way in the municipal and provincial corporations as to make the exercise of the central authority completely impossible".
"It is not enough to allege, in magnificent and brilliant prose, that the best among the good exercise a right of their own and not delegated; that intelligence carries with it legitimate arrogance (in all of which there could not be the least doubt) but then to constitute and preserve political society, it is necessary to descend from such lofty regions, to knock at the doors of those same intelligences and make them take command and govern.... Property and capacity, in the sense in which these words are used, are not assurances of knowledge... they are vague indications, general presumptions".
In any case, and in spite of the aforementioned differences of nuance, Francisco Agustín Silvela was one of the representatives of this third way, in which the concept of order was so important, as opposed to the positions held by the exalted liberals under the motto of freedom.
And in 1838 he ratified the same position, defending the liberal condition of his ideas against those who might label them as too moderate: "There is no contradiction in professing the incontestable dogma of national sovereignty with all its legitimate consequences; in desiring the abolition of the tithe and all disproportionate contributions; the complete ecclesiastical and civil disentailment; the extinction of all privileges, legal equality; in being a man of the people, determined to support the interests of that immense majority, wretched in all countries, destined, if not to abjection, to ignorance, and to horrid privations; in a word in being just, beneficent, tolerant, a lover of humanity; in belonging to progress, to which we are honored to belong understood as we understand it, and wanting order, government, administration."