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28 fell Bolívar in the attempt to convert democracy into monocracy. The only American liberator who in his folly crowned himself emperor—Iturbide in Mexico—died on the scaffold, a presage of the sad end of another emperor, whose corpse was sent back to Europe as a protest against the imposition of monarchy.

The Empire of Brazil is apparently a proof of the possibility of establishing monarchy in America, but the contrary is the fact. Brazil is a democratic empire, founded upon the principle of the sovereignty of the people, without any privileged class or hereditary nobility, and has nothing monarchical about it except the name.

When the war was over and the continent at peace, Bolívar exclaimed, "I blush to say it, independence is the only good we have achieved at the cost of all else." Even at this price independence was solid gain, for it was life. The continuance of the colonial system was death by decomposition. Independence was, moreover, the establishment of the democratic republic, a system under which all losses may be retrieved. South America has no reason to complain of the task allotted to her in working out the destiny of humanity.

In the first decade of this century the republic of the United States was a sun without satellites. The apparition of a group of new nations from the colonial nebula of the South, formed, for the first time in the political world, a planetary system of republics governed by natural laws. An entire continent, almost one half the globe, extending from pole to pole and washed by the two greatest of the oceans, became republican.

At that time there were but two republics in the world—in Europe, Switzerland; in America, the United States. The influence of the latter was not yet felt, but the new system of republics soon became a power of the first rank.