d on the streets. Night he spent till a late hour
in reading and study, changing his bedroom frequently to avoid
assassination. Religious functions that might disturb the public peace
he forbade. Compelling the bishop of Asuncion to resign on account of
senile debility, Francia himself assumed the episcopal office. Even
intermarriage among the old colonial families he prohibited, so as to
reduce all to a common social level. He attained his object. Paraguay
became a quiet state, whatever might be said of its neighbors!

Elsewhere in southern Spanish America a brilliant feat of arms brought
to the fore its most distinguished soldier. This was Jose de San Martin
of La Plata. Like Miranda, he had been an officer in the Spanish army
and had returned to his native land an ardent apostle of independence.
Quick to realize the fact that, so long as Chile remained under royalist
control, the possibility of an attack from that quarter was a constant
menace to the safety of the newly constituted republic, he conceived
the bold plan of organizing near the western frontier an army--composed
partly of Chilean refugees and partly of his own countrymen--with which
he proposed to cross the Andes and meet the enemy on his own ground.
Among these fugitives was the able and valiant Bernardo O'Higgins,
son of an Irish officer who had been viceroy of Peru. Cooperating with
O'Higgins, San Martin fixed his headquarters at Mendoza and began to
gather and train the four thousand men whom he judged needful for the
enterprise.

By January, 1817, the "Army of the Andes" was ready. To cross the
mountains meant to transport men, horses, artillery, and stores to an
altitude of thirteen thousand feet, where the Uspallata Pass afforded
an outlet to Chilean soil. This pass was nearly a mile higher than
the Great St. Bernard in the Alps, the crossing of which gave Napoleon
Bonaparte such renown. On the 12th of February the hosts of San Martin
hurled themselves upon the royalists entrenched on the slopes of
Chacabuco and routed them utterly. The battle proved decisive not of the
fortunes of Chile alone but of those of all Spanish South America. As a
viceroy of Peru later confessed, "it marked the moment when the cause of
Spain in the Indies began to recede."

Named supreme director by the people of Santiago, O'Higgins fought
vigorously though ineffectually to drive out the royalists who,
reinforced from Peru, held the region south of the capital. That
h