Page:The History of San Martin (1893).djvu/111

Rh territories from a warlike people, and, in so doing, developed their own aptitude for war, while they supplied themselves with the first necessaries of life by their own labour.

While the colonists of the River Plate crossed immense deserts and reached the Pacific by way of Upper Peru, the colonists of Chile crossed the Andes from Arauco and established themselves to the east of the Cordillera at Mendoza, opening for themselves a road to the Atlantic. Thus the city of Mendoza, capital of the Argentine Province of Cuyo, was a bond of union between the two countries.

During the colonial epoch Chile had vegetated in obscurity amid peace and plenty, but the Provinces of the River Plate had lived in a state of almost constant warfare with their neighbours the Portuguese, with the English, and with the Indians, which gave them some knowledge of their own strength, and inoculated them with new ideas. These ideas filtered across the Cordillera to Chile, and there smouldered till, in the year 1810, the flames of revolution burst out in both countries almost simultaneously.

The kingdom of Chile, as it was called, was colonized under the auspices of Peru, but was, in 1778, separated from this Viceroyalty and placed under the orders of a governor, who was at the same time President of the Real Audiencia. These two authorities, with the Cabildos granted to some cities, constituted the whole political, judicial, and municipal system of the colony. The separation from Peru inspired the colonists with instinctive ideas of independent autonomy, till the death of the then governor, Muñoz Guzman, on the 10th February, 1808, plunged the hitherto pacific colony into a fever of expectancy.

The Home Government followed no fixed system in the appointment of the superior authorities in the colonies. Their nomination came from the Crown direct; sometimes vacancies were provided for beforehand, sometimes the Rh