is acts and declared his ministers guilty of treason, Pedro forthwith
proclaimed Brazil an independent state. The "cry of Ypiranga" was echoed
with tremendous enthusiasm throughout the country. When Pedro appeared
in the theater at Rio de Janeiro, a few days later, wearing on his arm a
ribbon on which were inscribed the words "Independence or Death," he was
given a tumultuous ovation. On the first day of December the youthful
monarch assumed the title of Emperor, and Brazil thereupon took its
place among the nations of America.

CHAPTER IV. PLOUGHING THE SEA

When the La Plata Congress at Tucuman took the decisive action that
severed the bond with Spain, it uttered a prophecy for all Spanish
America. To quote its language: "Vast and fertile regions, climates
benign and varied, abundant means of subsistence, treasures of gold
and silver... and fine productions of every sort will attract to our
continent innumerable thousands of immigrants, to whom we shall open a
safe place of refuge and extend a beneficent protection." More hopeful
still were the words of a spokesman for another independent country:
"United, neither the empire of the Assyrians, the Medes or the Persians,
the Macedonian or the Roman Empire, can ever be compared with this
colossal republic."

Very different was the vision of Bolivar. While a refugee in Jamaica he
wrote: "We are a little human species; we possess a world apart... new
in almost all the arts and sciences, and yet old, after a fashion, in
the uses of civil society.... Neither Indians nor Europeans, we are a
species that lies midway .... Is it conceivable that a people recently
freed of its chains can launch itself into the sphere of liberty without
shattering its wings, like Icarus, and plunging into the abyss? Such a
prodigy is inconceivable, never beheld." Toward the close of his
career he declared: "The majority are mestizos, mulattoes, Indians,
and negroes. An ignorant people is a blunt instrument for its own
destruction. To it liberty means license, patriotism means disloyalty,
and justice means vengeance." "Independence," he exclaimed, "is the only
good we have achieved, at the cost of everything else."

Whether the abounding confidence of the prophecy or the anxious doubt of
the vision would come true, only the future could tell. In 1822, at all
events, optimism was the watchword and the total exclusion of Spain from
South America the goal of Bolivar and his lieutenants, as they