removed from his command, with many thanks for his distinguished services, and retired to Columbia, his native land. Las Heras and several other officers resigned their commands, and Alvarado, who appears to have been also one of the conspirators, was named General-in-Chief. San Martin had thus the sad certainty that although the disaffection had not spread among the junior officers, nor among the rank and file, the sympathies of the army were no longer with him as they had been at Rancagua.
The chief cause of the general discontent was his advocacy of monarchical principles; he sacrificed his own principles in favour of what he considered the most practicable system. In his own words:—
"The evils which afflict the new States of America arise not from the people, but from the Constitutions under which they live. These Constitutions should harmonise with their instruction, education, and habits of life. They should not have the best laws, but those most suited to their character, maintaining the barriers which separate the different classes of society, so that the most intelligent class may preserve its natural preponderance."
His ideal of legislation was based upon the precepts of Solon, an oligarchy of intelligence counterbalanced by a Conservative plutocracy. He forgot that in his own country he had seen safety only in the establishment of a sovereign Congress, and that the advocacy of monarchical ideas had there only fanned the flames of anarchy; that he himself had been forced to disobey when he was called upon to support a monarch elected by a secret committee; he forgot that he himself had founded a republic in Chile, and had sketched out a republican constitution for Peru, and that, with the exception of Mexico, every one of these new States had adopted the Democratic Republican system as a necessity of the age.
San Martin also failed to see that he must work in harmony with Bolívar, who had just established the Republic of Columbia, and with the great Democratic Republic of
