In this State the proportion of the white races to
the coloured is unusually small; nevertheless, this has not had the
effect of checking the revolutions, of which the Republic has been
extremely prolific.

General Juan Jose Flores stands as the chief hero of Ecuador. He it was
who actually founded the Republic in 1830. Flores provides one more
instance of the power of the men who stood at the helm of these new
States when they were first of all launched on the stormy waters of
their careers. When his fifteen years of power ended came the inevitable
flock of revolutions, and Ecuador went the way of her neighbours.

A military Dictatorship endured until 1860, when Garcia-Moreno, being
declared President, supported the clerical influence and established a
species of Dictatorship. His influence continued for many years after he
had ostensibly resigned his office, and the sincerity of his acts was
unquestionable. Considering that the situation of the country rendered
it necessary, he resumed power and arrested various attempts at
revolutions. In 1875, however, he was assassinated. A statesman of
disinterested merit and high ideals, he was generally mourned by the
populace.

Venezuela began its fateful career under the guardianship of General
Paez, one of the principal heroes of the revolution. It was Paez who had
led his Llanero cavalry so often to victory against the Spaniards, and
who, as already related in these pages, had achieved the unique feat of
capturing a flotilla of Spanish gunboats--or, to be more accurate,
gun-barges--by means of this very cavalry. Those were certainly
remarkable men who swam their horses into the river where the flotilla
was anchored, and succeeded in this most extraordinary onslaught!

Paez, whose strain was half Spanish and half Indian, was intensely
practical in his views of government. Caring nothing for idealists and
for those who indulged in abstract theories, he severed himself abruptly
from Bolivar shortly after the final patriot victories, and in the end
was the chief cause of the exile of the Liberator. There is no doubt
that both his views and those of the Liberator had changed considerably
in the interval, for it is said that in 1826 General Paez had implored
Bolivar to mount the throne of the new kingdom which it was proposed to
found. The career of Paez fluctuated between a tenure of the office of
President and an apparent retirement into private life, in the course of
which,