man
legions had left the coasts of Britain amid the lamentations of the
natives. One thing, however, is quite certain, that neither race was
prepared to govern itself. Washington was duplicated in the south by
Bolivar and San Martin, but the influence of Bolivar and San Martin died
very shortly after the dramatic events in which they took part.

It would be more correct, perhaps, to say that this influence was
overlooked for the time being and forgotten, since, those periods of
all-absorbing anarchy notwithstanding, the influence of Bolivar and San
Martin has manifested itself strongly from time to time during every
generation which has succeeded.

That the age of petty and local tyrants should have followed so closely
on the skirts of the great national and Continental revolution was
inevitable in the circumstances. Spanish South America was Royalist by
custom and tradition. Whatever the nations might in the first instance
term themselves, their inhabitants were bound by these very traditions
and instincts to find some leader whom they could put in the place of
the once revered, but never seen, monarch.

Thus the rather curious circumstance arose that South America flung off
the Spanish dominion (which during its last decade had grown by
comparison with the past considerate and beneficent), in order to
replace it by the far more tyrannical Governors of their own creation.
It was doubtless the fact that these despots who ruled so unmercifully
over the South Americans were men of their own race and country that
tended to reconcile the private citizens to the very real perils and
oppressions which they now had to endure. The social upheaval had been
such that, although many of these _caudillos_ or despotic chieftains
were descended from aristocratic Spanish colonial families, others were
mere children of opportunity, whose ancestry and origin could bear no
comparison with their feats, dark though these latter may have been.

In the eyes of many European contemporaries, and even in those of a
multitude of their own people, the condition of the erstwhile Spanish
South American colonists showed no glimmer of hope for a considerable
time after the much-desired liberation had actually been obtained. Yet
all this time the leaven was working very slowly, but very surely. The
fact, indeed, was that, although the acts and circumstances, politically
speaking, of the River Plate provinces grew wilder and more desperate,
the huma