better. But a train of circumstances, over which they had no control, brought on the crisis of two years later.

The treaty of Bayonne had incidentally transferred to Napoleon I. all the Spanish possessions in America; and, having been forced to part with Louisiana, he now turned his attention to the Southern hemisphere. Hardly had he matured his plans, however, before hostilities were renewed in Europe; and the invasion of Spain, at a time when she was unprepared to give much attention to her colonies, afforded the opportunity so long sought by the Venezuelans and New Granadians. So in July, 1810, they deposed the Viceroy and declared the country independent of the Spanish crown. This was accomplished without a struggle; not a gun had been fired, not a life had been lost; and a bloodless revolution seemed assured.

But the end was not yet. Some months later, there arrived at Puerto Rico an adventurer named Domingo Monteverde, a coarse, cruel, ambitious, half-educated fellow, itching for fame. He had espoused the cause of Ferdinand VII., and obtained a commission as field marshal in the royal army. Landing in Venezuela, he invaded Carora, and defeated the patriots in the first pitched battle. Then followed the twelve years of armed conflict which is perhaps without a parallel in the annals of modern warfare. Venezuela and New Granada, hitherto separate dependencies under Spain, now formed separate juntas, or provisional governments; and each prepared to maintain its independence not only of Spain but of each other. Very soon the process of segregation began in both; and before many months there were some half-dozen petty provinces of each country claiming to be "independent states." Thus, in New Granada, the de facto Congress, com

posed of delegates from all the departments or provinces, was forced to choose between a total abandonment of the confederation and a war of coercion. The Congress chose the latter alternative; the refractory provinces were whipped into the Union, and compelled to obey its mandates. A similar condition of affairs existed in Venezuela; and in both countries the contest for independence often partook more of the nature of a civil war than of an organized resistance under a single head.

But even this anomalous state of affairs had its advantages. Although jealous of each other, all factions were united in a common purpose to throw off the Spanish yoke; and when not actively engaged in quarrelling and fighting among themselves, they were unitedly or separately prosecuting the war for independence. In those mountainous regions guerilla warfare is the most effective form of defensive military operations; and when the patriot forces were defeated in one province or section, resistance would spring up in another. When the united armies of the colonists were overthrown and dispersed by the Spanish forces, the little provincial juntas would keep alive the spirit of resistance. When the patriot cause seemed hopelessly lost by reverses in Venezuela, it would be suddenly revived in New Granada. When everything seemed hopeless in New Granada, the cause would come up again in Venezuela. So that the very diversity of governments, all engaged in a common cause, served to distract the attention of royalist chiefs and embarrass their operations.

After several years of this confusion and anarchy, General Símon Bolívar, a young man of aristocratic lineage and brilliant talents, though hitherto little known, came to the front and was made military dic

A series of decisive victories by the colonial forces under his command soon followed, and the cause of independence seemed assured. A resolution was now introduced into the Congress of the United States, championed by Mr. Clay, looking to the formal recognition of the new Republic. After considerable delay, this measure finally passed both Houses, and received the sanction of the executive; and on the 8th of March, 1822, the United States formally welcomed the new commonwealths into the great family of independent nations.

This step was taken in advance of all the other powers, over the vehement protest of the Spanish minister at Washington, and in defiance of a wordy menace by the Spanish Cortes. And yet many of our people, unacquainted with the civilization and history of the SpanishAmerican countries, expressed surprise that our action had been so long delayed. The war for independence had been going on with varied fortunes, but generally adverse to Spain, for twelve years; and after having inspired the Spanish-Americans by our example of thirty-four years before, people marvelled that we should have been so backward in taking the initiative to put an end to the contest.

But the delay was fully justified when its causes became better understood. The case of the SpanishAmericans was in no true sense parallel to that of our own struggle for independence. The primitive conditions of the two peoples had been totally different. The Anglo-American settlements on the North Atlantic coast had never been colonial in the sense in which that term was understood in Spanish-America. They had been autonomous communities from the very outset. They had never endured, even for one brief month, the commercial restrictions, political vassalage, and long

series of studied insults to which the Spanish colonists. had submitted, almost without complaint or remonstrance, for more than three centuries. The North American colonists hardly knew the meaning of the terms political and ecclesiastical slavery, for they had never been the victims of either. They did sometimes fancy themselves sufferers from religious bigotry, or the victims of unjust legislation; but they had never known a time when they could not arraign their colonial governors in "town meeting," or freely criticise Church dogmas; and the very moment they discovered, or fancied they discovered, a disposition to reduce them to a mere colonial condition, such as existed in Spanish-America, organized resistance began.

How very different was the case with the SpanishAmericans! They had never known anything like local self-government, and they knew even less of religious liberty. The natives had been reduced to a condition of abject servitude; the creole population had been trained never to question the authority of the imported magistrate; and the authority in temporal affairs of an established Church had never been controverted by either. The Church ruled everything, from the household to the common-law courts. It had prohibited the teaching of the arts and sciences; restricted education to the Latin grammar and the catechism; and limited. the public libraries to the writings of the Fathers and to works on civil and ecclesiastical jurisprudence. It had even prohibited the study of modern geography and astronomy, and forbade the reading of books of travel. It discouraged the study of the higher mathematics, and condemned all philosophic inquiry and speculation as heresy. It had even placed under the ban such innocent fictions as Gil Blas and Robinson Crusoe; and there had never been a book or a magazine or a newspaper in the

whole country that was not conformed to the strictest rule of the Roman Index. The Viceroys and CaptainsGeneral were all foreigners; some of them impecunious adventurers of desperate fortunes. None of them had any permanent interest in the country; none of them were ever in sympathy with the people they governed. The ports and harbors of the country were closed to the world's commerce, and it was made a felony punishable with death to trade with any but Spaniards. How could a whole people, thus kept secluded in ignorance and slavery for more than ten successive generations, be reasonably expected to suddenly realize their true condition, or to improve the means for utilizing the matchless resources of their fertile and beautiful country? The marvel is not that their struggle for independence was so long delayed, but that their independence should so soon become an acknowledged fact.

In one respect, however, their political history is analogous to our own. It required a long series of almost fatal experiences to induce New Granada, Venezuela, and Ecuador, and the petty provinces, or "states," of each, to sufficiently overcome their prejudices to form a federal Union. Thus, the opposition to the old Colombian Union was very general, not only by the leading politicians of both Venezuela and New Granada, but likewise by the politicians and demagogues of the provinces in each of those countries. Nor was this strange antipathy confined to the demagogues alone. Intelligent and patriotic men who had other avocations than office-seeking, had a strange and undefined dread of something which they called "consolidated government," without knowing exactly what that meant; and with them, as with us, this senseless fear of "centralization," long continued to be the evil genius of their political institutions. Thus in Venezuela, the