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
establishwent 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 Caracas, acting in