(Signed) MONTEAGUDO. 
   Attested by the Rubrica of the Protector.

Though this was a request to acknowledge General San Martin as invested with the attributes of a Sovereign Prince, I complied with it in the hope that quiet remonstrance might recal him to a sense of duty to the Chilian Government, no less than to his own true interests.  On the 7th of August, I addressed to him the following letter:—­

   Callao Roads, 7th Aug. 1821. 
   MY DEAR GENERAL,

I address you for the last time under your late designation, being aware that the liberty I may take as a friend might not be deemed decorous to you under the title of “Protector,” for I shall not with a gentleman of your understanding take into account, as a motive for abstaining to speak truth, any chance of your resentment.  Nay, were I certain that such would be the effect of this letter, I would nevertheless perform such an act of friendship, in repayment of the support you gave me at a time when the basest plots and plans were laid for my dismissal from the Chilian Service, for no other reason than that certain influential persons of shallow understanding and petty expedients hate those who despise mean acts accomplished by low cunning.

Permit me, my dear General, to give you the experience of eleven years during which I sat in the first senate in the world, and to say what I anticipate on the one hand, and what I fear on the other, nay, what I foresee; for that which is to come, in regard to the acts of Governments and Nations, may as certainly be predicted from history, as the revolutions of the solar system.  You have it in your power to be the Napoleon of South America, as you have it in your power to be one of the greatest men now acting on the theatre of the world; but you have also the power to choose your course, and if the first steps are false, the eminence on which you stand will, as though from the brink of a precipice, make your fall the more heavy and the more certain.

The rocks on which the South American Government have split have hitherto been bad faith, and consequent temporary expedients.  No man has yet arisen, save yourself, capable of soaring aloft, and with eagle eye embracing the expanse of the political horizon.  But if in your flight, like Icarus, you trust to waxen wings, your descent may crush the rising liberties of Peru, and involve all South America in anarchy, civil war, and political despotism.

The real strength of Government is public opinion.  What would the world say, were the Protector of Peru, as his first act, to cancel the bonds of San Martin, even though gratitude may be a private and not a public virtue?  What would they say, were the Protector to refuse to pay the expense of that expedition which placed him in his present elevated situation?  What would they say, were it promulgated to the world that he intended not even to remunerate those employed