282 WORKMEN AND HEROES into voluntary exile. His country crowned him dead and made for his dead body a tomb of Peace, surrounded by the marble angels of the arts of human progress, more beautiful in its meaning than any tomb on the Appian Way, and one of the most wonderful memorials on earth. The Battle of Maipu, of which San Martin was the victor, completed the emancipation of South America, and made the achievements of Bolivar easy in the Northern Andes. Said the hero of Maipu and what words of man under the circumstances ever equalled the declaration in moral sublimity ! "The presence of a fortunate general, however disinterested he may be, is dangerous to a newly founded state. I have achieved the independence of Peru : I have ceased to be a public man ! " He died at Boulogne, France, in poverty, after nearly thirty years of exiled and fameless life. His career seems like that of some hero of fiction, such as the imagination of a Plato, a Bacon, or a Sir Thomas More might create for an Utopia. He is the one perfectly unsel- fish man in history, and his fame has grown steadily in Spanish America, since Argentina built a tomb-palace for his remains, and decreed for him one of the most splendid funerals ever known to the Western World. General Don Joachim de la Pezuela, the last Spanish ruler of Peru, was the forty-fourth viceroy from Pizarro. "The Indians," he said, "love the memory of the Incas the country is ready to rise." The banner of Argentina was put- ting to flight the condors of the Andes, and the last viceroy saw in its advance the end of Spain in the New World. The Argentine hero who had created the army of the Andes for universal liberty was San Martin. He was born on February 25, 1778, at Yapeyu, in Misiones. His father was a South American officer under the last rule of the viceroys. The family removed to Spain in his boyhood, and he became for two years a pupil in the Seminary of Nobles, at Madrid. At the age of twelve he became a cadet, wearing a uniform of blue and white, which he made in man- hood the colors of South American emancipation. He fought in the war against the Moors, and in the campaign against France, in 1793. In 1800 he took part in the so-called "War of the Oranges against Portugal." In the early part of the nineteenth century there began to be formed in Spain secret societies for the purpose of advancing the cause of liberty and human prog- ress. One of these associations, called Caballeros Rationales, became very in- fluential, and corresponded with the society of the Grand Reunion of America {Gran Reunion Americana) of London. This society was pledged " to recog- nize no government in America as legitimate unless it was elected by the free will of the people." San Martin joined this society. The London society was established by Miranda, the Spanish patriot, a friend of Bolivar, by whose inspi- rations. San Martin became a disciple of liberty,, and whose dreams he fulfilled long after the patriot was dead. San Martin won honors and a medal in the Spanish resistance to the victo- rious eagles of Napoleon. In that campaign he fought under a banner of the
