San Martin, the ideal liberator of South America from the long and tyrannical rule of Spanish viceroys, was one of the most remarkable men of his own or of any age. From a moral point of view he stands in the first rank of the world's heroes. "He was not a man," said a student of South American history, "he was a mission." Cincinnatus, after serving the state, returned to the plough, and Washington to the retirement of Mt. Vernon; but San Martin for the peace of his country went 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 Maipú, 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 Maipú--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 unselfish 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 putting 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 manhood 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."