In some respects, but only in some, South America, freed from the Spaniard, resembled the ancient Britain deprived of its Roman rulers and garrison.  It is true that the Spanish army had been forced, struggling, from the Continent by means of battle and blood, and that the Roman legions had left the coasts of Britain amid the lamentations of the natives.  One thing, however, is quite certain, that neither race was prepared to govern itself.  Washington was duplicated in the south by Bolivar and San Martin, but the influence of Bolivar and San Martin died very shortly after the dramatic events in which they took part.

It would be more correct, perhaps, to say that this influence was overlooked for the time being and forgotten, since, those periods of all-absorbing anarchy notwithstanding, the influence of Bolivar and San Martin has manifested itself strongly from time to time during every generation which has succeeded.

That the age of petty and local tyrants should have followed so closely on the skirts of the great national and Continental revolution was inevitable in the circumstances.  Spanish South America was Royalist by custom and tradition.  Whatever the nations might in the first instance term themselves, their inhabitants were bound by these very traditions and instincts to find some leader whom they could put in the place of the once revered, but never seen, monarch.

Thus the rather curious circumstance arose that South America flung off the Spanish dominion (which during its last decade had grown by comparison with the past considerate and beneficent), in order to replace it by the far more tyrannical Governors of their own creation.  It was doubtless the fact that these despots who ruled so unmercifully over the South Americans were men of their own race and country that tended to reconcile the private citizens to the very real perils and oppressions which they now had to endure.  The social upheaval had been such that, although many of these caudillos or despotic chieftains were descended from aristocratic Spanish colonial families, others were mere children of opportunity, whose ancestry and origin could bear no comparison with their feats, dark though these latter may have been.

In the eyes of many European contemporaries, and even in those of a multitude of their own people, the condition of the erstwhile Spanish South American colonists showed no glimmer of hope for a considerable time after the much-desired liberation had actually been obtained.  Yet all this time the leaven was working very slowly, but very surely.  The fact, indeed, was that, although the acts and circumstances, politically speaking, of the River Plate provinces grew wilder and more desperate, the human substance of the nation was steadily improving and becoming enlightened—­a somewhat curious paradox!  Even during the tyranny of the most remorseless of the caudillos the enlightenment was working its way among the mass of the people.