Page:The History of San Martin (1893).djvu/116

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THE EMANCIPATION OF SOUTH AMERICA.

his baton of command, and the Cabildo appointed a governing Junta of seven members, of whom Dr. Rozas was one, the Count being named President.

The new Government was accepted by the whole country, but nothing was changed until the arrival of Dr. Rozas, who on the 2nd November entered the capital in triumph, between lines of troops, amid salvoes of artillery, the clang of bells, music, and loud acclamations. All that night the city was illuminated and fireworks blazed in his honour. Never had Santiago witnessed such an ovation.

The Chilian revolution resembled that of Buenos Ayres, in that it was Parliamentary and legal, initiated and carried out within the precincts of the municipal forum; and that it triumphed by the force of opinion, without violence, in the name of the public weal. Both followed the same formula, the resumption of their own rights, without a rupture with the mother country and protesting fidelity to the legitimate sovereign. The first was an aristocratic revolution, the second was democratic and radical; but, both were essentially American and obeyed the same historic law. Thus from the beginning, the two nations were bound together by fraternal ties and by a common cause.

The news of the installation of the Junta of Chile was received in Buenos Ayres with transports of joy, and the thunder of their guns on the 11th October, reverberated in the hearts of the Chilian people. Buenos Ayres proposed at once an alliance offensive and defensive, assuring the Chilians that England would recognise any constitution they might give themselves, now that Spain had fallen. Rozas, in return, presented a plan for a vast continental confederation, which idea found an eager advocate in Alvarez Jonte, the Argentine envoy, who as a practical exposition of it, asked Chile for an auxiliary force in aid of the Argentine Government against the reactionary movement which had its headquarters in Monte Video.