army with admirable skill. The result
was a total defeat for the royalists--the Waterloo of Spain in South
America. The battle thus won by ragged and hungry soldiers--whose
countersign the night before had been "bread and cheese"--threw off the
yoke of the mother country forever. The viceroy fell wounded into their
hands and Canterac surrendered. On receipt of the glorious news,
the people of Lima greeted Bolivar with wild enthusiasm. A Congress
prolonged his dictatorship amid adulations that bordered on the
grotesque.

Eastward of Peru in the vast mountainous region of Charcas, on the
very heights of South America, the royalists still found a refuge. In
January, 1825, a patriot general at the town of La Paz undertook on his
own responsibility to declare the entire province independent, alike of
Spain, Peru, and the United Provinces of La Plata. This action was too
precipitous, not to say presumptuous, to suit Bolivar and Sucre. The
better to control the situation, the former went up to La Paz and the
latter to Chuquisaca, the capital, where a Congress was to assemble
for the purpose of imparting a more orderly turn to affairs. Under the
direction of the "Marshal of Ayacucho," as Sucre was now called,
the Congress issued on the 6th of August a formal declaration of
independence. In honor of the Liberator it christened the new republic
"Bolivar"--later Latinized into "Bolivia"--and conferred upon him the
presidency so long as he might choose to remain. In November, 1896, a
new Congress which had been summoned to draft a constitution accepted,
with slight modifications, an instrument that the Liberator himself had
prepared. That body also renamed the capital "Sucre" and chose the hero
of Ayacucho as President of the republic.

Now, the Liberator thought, was the opportune moment to impose upon
his territorial namesake a constitution embodying his ideas of a stable
government which would give Spanish Americans eventually the political
experience they needed. Providing for an autocracy represented by a life
President, it ran the gamut of aristocracy and democracy, all the way
from "censors" for life, who were to watch over the due enforcement of
the laws, down to senators and "tribunes" chosen by electors, who in
turn were to be named by a select citizenry. Whenever actually present
in the territory of the republic, the Liberator was to enjoy supreme
command, in case he wished to exercise it.

In 1826 Simon Bolivar stoo