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