Page:The History of San Martin (1893).djvu/361

Rh "Every Spaniard who does not conspire against tyranny in favour of the just cause, in the most active and efficacious manner, shall be held to be an enemy, shall be punished as a traitor, and shall be put to death."

A new system of dates was also adopted by him:— "Third year of Independence and first of the War to the Death."

This decree of extermination has found many apologists; with the exception of some Spaniards no one has condemned it as an act of personal atrocity. Only two men have utterly censured it. One of them, an historian of Venezuela named Gonzalez, says:—

"It created thousands of enemies to the Republic in the interior, and alienated exterior sympathy. It was the fury of a storm, a stain upon our history."

The other who condemned it was Bolívar himself, who in his last days spoke of it as a "delirium."

This struggle did not assume a ferocious character until the indigenous races took part in it. The Spanish leaders, Miyares, Ceballos and Cajigal, always acted with humanity and repressed the excesses of their subordinates, as also did Cortabarria, the agent of the Regency. Nothing that the Royalists had yet done could in any way justify this decree as a measure of retaliation.

At Trujillo Bolívar received orders from the Government of New Granada to proceed no further. As his ambition was to encircle his brow with the civic crown as liberator of his native land, to pause was to endanger the advantage he had already gained. From the east came echoes of the success achieved by Mariño and his comrades, but he aspired to be the man who should rescue the ruins of Caracas, the city of his birth, from the enemy. They might forestall him. On his own responsibility he went on.

Tiscar, the Spanish general, who occupied Barinas with 1,300 men, had done nothing to prevent the capture of Merida and Trujillo, but at last determined to cut off the retreat of the invaders, and detached Colonel Marti with 700 men for that purpose. Bolívar at once crossed the