Founded by General Simon Bolivar, December 17, 1819, then including in its jurisdiction Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador. There was now no alternative left for Bolivar except to flee from Venezuela and seek refuge in the Dutch West India Island of Curaçoa, a few miles off the northern coast of his native country. From this moment, he was destined to experience the most startling changes of alternate good and ill fortune. He quickly repaired to Cartagena, Colombia, then in the power of the republicans, and by his enthusiasm and fiery oratory raised a small expeditionary force. He disobeyed the orders of his superiors, fell, like a lightning flash, upon an astonished Spanish army, routed it, and conceived the daring project of invading Venezuela by crossing eastward the lofty Cordillera of the northern Andes mountains, a movement he brilliantly executed, utterly defeating a far superior enemy, the royalist troops leaving all their artillery, munitions and baggage to the conquerors (February 28, 1813). He next penetrated, at the head of one thousand poorly armed and supplied patriots, through tropical swamps, and by almost impracticable paths, one thousand miles into the interior, augmented his little army by incredible exertions, moved forward with extraordinary rapidity, and, when least expected, fell, with superior forces, upon detachments of the enemy and cut them to pieces. Invested now by the Congress of Colombia with enlarged powers, General Bolivar received fearful reports, amply confirmed by the unbiased testimony of British officers in his service, that the Spanish monster Monteverde and his subordinates were committing unparal leled atrocities upon the defenceless, gena, was conspicuous for his obstinacy sparing neither age nor sex. He reluct antly resolved to meet the foul despoilers of his beautiful native country with their own weapons, and therefore issued his celebrated proclamation of guerra á muerte, war to the knife; that is, he declared a war of extermination. This gave for several years, an extremely horrifying aspect to the war, many slaughterings in cold blood occurring, alternately committed by royalists and patriots, upon hundreds of unfortunate prisoners. Success still continued to attend General Bolivar's operations, and, on the 6th of August, 1813, he entered Caracas in triumph, where the lovely young daughters of the nobles, in white dresses, and with laurel wreaths, pushed their way through the cheering multitude and took hold of the bridle of his horse. No wonder Bolivar dismounted and wept for joy. Fickle fortune, however, now turned against him, as the royalists resorted to the desperate expedient of arming the black slaves of the plantations, and inciting them, with promises of unrestrained license and plunder, to rise against their masters. Powerful reinforcements also arrived from Spain, and Bolivar, being beaten at Aragua, Venezuela (August 17, 1814), was forced to abandon his country for the second time, "stripped of everything but the glory of the attempt." The illustrious exile fled to Colombia, where the Congress of that republic expressed unshaken confidence in him and employed him in compelling the refractory mountainous province of Cundinamarca to submit to its authority. This delicate and difficult mission having been successfully accomplished, Bolivar was appointed Captain-General of the armies of the Colombian Union. He now left Bogotá, the new capital, with a wellselected expedition of two thousand veterans, but his plans were completely thwarted by the machinations of his private enemies, one of whom, Manuel Castillo, commandant of the port of Carta in withholding munitions and supplies which the army absolutely required. Five precious months were wasted in mutual recriminations when there came the calamitous news that Morillo had arrived from Spain with an army of ten thousand troops and a powerful fleet. Bolivar, finding his little army wasted by pestilential diseases, hastily concluded a convention with Castillo, and, in deep bitterness, fled from South America for Kingston, Jamaica, May 8, 1815. Whilst in Jamaica, he narrowly escaped assassination at the hands of a paid hireling of an unknown Spaniard. An overruling Providence having saved him from this danger, Bolivar repaired to Port-auPrince, Island of Hayti, where the nobleminded negro President Pétion hospitably received him, and furnished him with ships and two or three black battalions. With these General Bolivar returned to the north coast of Venezuela, and landed at Ochumare, near La Guayra, but being attacked to disadvantage, was defeated, with the loss of his bravest officers, and forced to reëmbark for Hayti. President Pétion again befriended him, so that, when Bolivar landed a second time on Venezuelan soil, he had the satisfaction of seeing the tide of war turn gradually in favor of the patriots, at the beginning of 1817. About the same time, two thousand British and Irish volunteers, officered by veterans who had fought against Napoleon under the Duke of Wellington, enlisted in the cause of South American liberty. The memorable year of 1819 was marked by events of transcendent importance. General Bolivar assembled at Angostura the second Congress of Venezuela, but seriously compromised his prestige by earnestly advocating a strongly centralized government or even an absolute monarchy as being the system most likely to conduce to the stability, happiness and prosperity of South America. These injudicious utterances raised against him a host of enemies, and were, in large meas ure, the fruitful origin of the animosities and sorrows which were to embitter the rest of his career. Bolivar was now to undertake an enterprise which should yield him imperishable fame and place him in the ranks of the really few great strategists of either ancient or modern times. His keen intellect perceived that the key to Spanish strength lay in the lofty and mountainous territory of Colombia or New Grenada, and that he must, at all hazards, effect a transit over the Northern Andes, through snow and ice-blocked passes twelve to fifteen thousand feet high, and then crush, once for all, the main army of the royalists. He accordingly raised an expedition of fourteen thousand troops, of cavalry, infantry and artillery, two thousand British and foreign volunteers accompanying him. He left Angostura, Venezuela, on the Orinoco river, in May, when the rainy season was setting in on the extensive forests and llanos or plains of that country. His objective point lay a thousand miles to the west, and to reach it a dense tropical virgin wilderness must be traversed, only six to seven degrees above the equator, when torrential inundations converted the land into seas of pestilential swamps. Poisonous reptiles hung from the trees and devouring alligators infested the waters. The artillery sank deep in the quagmires. Hundreds of miles of these regions having at last been traversed, there began the ascent of the forbidding Andes, their snowy peaks thousands of feet above the clouds. The transit over these mountain chains, among the loftiest in the world, was frightful beyond description, an appalling mortality prevailing, the British and foreign volunteers especially perishing by the hundreds. Finally, at the end of seventy-five days, and having covered at total distance of one thousand miles, Bolivar's diminished and wasted army descended the Andes into Colombia, encountered the royalists at the bridge of Boyocá, August 7, 1819, and won a splendid victory, all the Spanish surviving GENERAL SUCRE, Bolivar's second in command, who won the victory of troops being made prisoners, together with their commanding general. Bogotá and all New Grenada became, as a consequence, free from the yoke of Spain. Bolivar, almost immediately after this wonderful victory, returned to Angostura, where he prevailed upon the Congress of Venezuela to unite herself to New Grenada and form the confederated Republic of Colombia, December 17, 1819. Subsequently, the southern territory of Quito, or Ecuador, was added, the Colombian Union thus extending from the Isthmus of Panama on the north to the regions of the equator on the south, bordering on Peru. Bolivar received the title of Liberator of Colombia, and it was decided that a general constituent Congress should assemble at Rosario de Cucuta, in January, 1821, to frame a constitution for the confederacy. An armistice of six months with the Spanish commander-in-chief of northern South America was concluded, beginning tin whose genius had already emancipated the southern half of Spanish-speaking America, that is, Argentina, Chile and Peru. The two greatest military geniuses of South America met in secret conference at Guayaquil, Ecuador, July 22d, but, after three days of earnest consultation, separated, San Martin, knowing that Bolivar could brook no powerful rival, sublimely yielded in the interests of South American independence, resigned his immense power as Protector of Peru, summoned the first Congress of that country, placed the command of his Chilo-Argentine army under his rival, sailed, in September, for Chile, and shortly afterwards retired to France, there to new republic, called, in his honor, by its grateful inhabitants, Bolivia. There, in the land of the highest Andes, in the ancient empire of the Incas, ruthlessly destroyed by Pizarro and the Spanish conquerors three centuries previously, the final act of the Latin-American drama for life, liberty, happiness and independence was played in 1824. The final battle of the Latin-American Revolution, won, after months of consummate strategy, by General Sucre, Bolivar's second in command, was fought, December 9, 1824, at Ayacucho, on a plateau about 12,000 feet above the Pacific, surrounded by some of the loftiest snow-covered peaks of the Peruvian Andes. In spite of Sucre's army being reduced to starvation and in size only about half that of their opponents, that is, six thousand, the royalists suffered a disastrous defeat, with a loss of upwards of two thousand men in killed and wounded, and the surrender of about four thousand more as prisoners of war, including the Viceroy La Serna and fifteen general officers. Sucre's crowning triumph forever assured the independence of not only Latin America but the United States as well. At this point, Bolivar was to cease any further military operations. His generous mind yearned to carry the banner of freedom and light still further. If his hand had not been stayed by the government of the United States, then dominated by the intrenched American slaveowning power, he would have saved Cuba and Porto Rico from seventy-five years more of Spanish thraldom, and would have sent his liberating navies and armies across the Oriental Pacific and have liberated the Philippines, also. Had he been free to act, who can say how much farther advanced in true civilization the present twentieth century might have been? Bolivar, in 1825, had reached the pinnacle of fame. He had become the acknowledged ruler of the northern half of Spanish-speaking South America, over a continental territory as large as the United States. The following year he summoned the first Pan-American Congress at Panama. Its deliberations led to no immediate results, yet, there the seed was sown which was to ripen into international arbitration, the ever-growing agitation for universal disarmament and honorable peace, and the reserving of the American continent and adjacent islands as the free and independent home and country of all the oppressed of the earth. After 1826, the eclipse of the great Liberator's life, ended within the next four erator's life, ended within the next four years, had already begun. His fatal love of ostentation, adulation and the exercise of power imposed ordeals upon him which his more self-poised rival San Martin escaped. He endeavored, with disastrous results, to compel the nations he had liberated to accept constitutions monarchical in their nature and wholly hostile to the natural environment of the Western Hemisphere. His overshadowing personality inspired a universal dread in South America that he would, after all, trample upon her dearly-bought liberties and become another Cæsar or Napoleon. Bolivar, however, with all his glaring faults, was a patriot and soldier of liberty, and he at last awoke to the error of his ways. The closing year of his life was intensely tragic. He had sacrificed both his health and his princely fortune in the cause of South American emancipation. At forty-seven he was a physical wreck. The Colombian Republic he had built up fell into anarchy and the separate parts formed seceding republics. Sincerely anxious to bring peace to distracted northern South America, he withdrew from public affairs on the 30th of April, 1830. He retired, in extreme poverty, to private life and fatally ill, and his sensitive nature was stung to the quick when he received the news that his bosom friend the illustrious General Sucre had been foully assassinated in the forests of Ecuador, June 4th. From this moment he never rallied, and inexorable fate also willed that he should still be pursued by the venom of his implacable enemies, some of the worst of whom were in his own native country Venezuela. The crisis came in December, 1830, when his illness turned to rapid pneumonia. the 10th he sank so low that he received the sacrament, made his will, and addressed these final words of farewell to the Colombians: On "My last prayers are for the felicity of my native country: if my death should contribute towards party strife ceasing, and the Union being consolidated, I shall and the Union being consolidated, I shall go to the grave with tranquility." From the 10th until the 17th, the vital spark lingered like a flickering lamp. 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