Excerpt from Rise of the Spanish-American Republics as Told in the Lives of Their Liberators To me a significant figure was Francisco de Miranda, often styled the great precursor of the spanish-american revolution. In Mexico there were two personages of paramount importance Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the father of Mexican independence, and Agustin de Iturbide, who should be styled the liberator of Mexico. In southern South America, the career of Mariano Moreno, the democrat and scholar, furnished an introduction to the troubled politics of the viceroyalty of la Plata. The struggle for Argentine independence was logically continued in the life story of Jos de San Martin, a founder of Argentina, Chile, and Peru. And the fight for the establishment of Peruvian inde pendence was ultimately crowned with success largely through the achievements of two Venezuelans, Simon de Bolivar and Antonio Jos de Sucre, who, after their native state had been liberated from the Spanish yoke, cooperated in the founding of independent republics in Peru and Bolivia. There were some queries which arose in my mind regarding the exact order in which the lives of these so-called liberators should be presented to the reader. Should the order be topical, or chronological, or geographical? At last, I decided upon a sequence which, with advantages that seemed to outweigh its disadvantages, in reality constituted a compromise: a sequence which began with the great precursor and permitted me to consider consecutively the two most important leaders of Mexico, - a sequence which made it possible for me to treat successively four great personages of the south-american revolution. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.