inary
personage speedily made himself master of the country. A population
composed chiefly of Indians, docile in temperament and submissive for
many years to the paternal rule of Jesuit missionaries, could not fail
to become pliant instruments in his hands. At his direction, therefore,
Paraguay declared itself independent of both Spain and La Plata. This
done, an obedient Congress elected Francia consul of the republic and
later invested him with the title of dictator. In the Banda Oriental two
distinct movements appeared. Montevideo, the capital, long a center
of royalist sympathies and for some years hostile to the revolutionary
government in Buenos Aires, was reunited with La Plata in 1814.
Elsewhere the people of the province followed the fortunes of Jose
Gervasio Artigas, an able and valiant cavalry officer, who roamed
through it at will, bidding defiance to any authority not his own.
Most of the former viceroyalty of La Plata had thus, to all intents and
purposes, thrown off the yoke of Spain.

Chile was the only other province that for a while gave promise of
similar action. Here again it was the capital city that took the lead.
On receipt of the news of the occurrences at Buenos Aires in May, 1810,
the people of Santiago forced the captain general to resign and, on the
18th of September, replaced him by a junta of their own choosing.
But neither this body, nor its successors, nor even the Congress that
assembled the following year, could establish a permanent and effective
government. Nowhere in Spanish America, perhaps, did the lower classes
count for so little, and the upper class for so much, as in Chile.
Though the great landholders were disposed to favor a reasonable amount
of local autonomy for the country, they refused to heed the demands
of the radicals for complete independence and the establishment of a
republic. Accordingly, in proportion as their opponents resorted to
measures of compulsion, the gentry gradually withdrew their support and
offered little resistance when troops dispatched by the viceroy of
Peru restored the Spanish regime in 1814. The irreconcilable among the
patriots fled over the Andes to the western part of La Plata, where they
found hospitable refuge.

But of all the Spanish dominions in South America none witnessed so
desperate a struggle for emancipation as the viceroyalty of New Granada.
Learning of the catastrophe that had befallen the mother country, the
leading citizens of