Page:The History of San Martin (1893).djvu/53

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HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION.
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regiments, victors over the soldiers of Napoleon in the Peninsula. The manumitted negroes gave their contingent to the American infantry, showing the warlike qualities of their race. In Upper Peru the indigenous races kept alive for ten years the flames of insurrection when the patriot armies were defeated. The cholos of the Highlands of Peru espoused the cause of the king, and were highly esteemed as infantry by the Spanish generals, more especially on account of the extraordinary rapidity of their marches.

The Creole of South America is a sturdy off-shoot of that civilizing Indo-European race to which is reserved the government of the world. It is his mission to complete the democratization of the American continent and to found a new order of things destined to live and progress. He has impressed the peculiarities of his character upon the new nationalities.

When the revolution broke out in 1810, it was said that South America would become English or French; when it triumphed, that the continent would sink back into barbarism. By the will and the work of the Creole, it became American, republican, and civilized.


The First Throes of Revolution.

The initial outbreaks of the year 1809, were in some parts of a more radical character than were those of the following year, when the first political formula of the rebellion was merely a demand for relative and provisional independence, for a compromise between democracy and monarchy upon the basis of autonomy.

The doctrine that on the disappearance of the monarch his sovereignty reverted to his people, was for the first time boldly proclaimed in Mexico. From this it was deduced that they had the right to appoint governing Juntas for their own security, and owed no allegiance to those established in Spain at the time of the French in-