The American _élite_ were monarchists. In liberating a continent their generals and statesmen professed to endow the new nations with the stability of a monarchy. Iturbide was Emperor of Mexico. The lieutenants of Bolivar offered the latter a crown; Paez persistently held the imperial ambition before him. Belgrano, in 1816, at the Congress of Tucuman, stated that the best form of government for the Argentine was "a tempered monarchy"; and many deputies in that Assembly demanded the restoration of the throne of the Incas and of its traditional seat at Cuzco: in short, the creation of an American dynasty. Bolivar wished to see Colombia and Spanish America constitutional monarchies with foreign princes. Ministers were to exercise a policy "of vigilance or defence, of mediation or influence, of protection or tutelage" on the part of the great European states in respect of the Colombian nation. Other partisans of the monarchy were Flores, Sucre, Monteagudo, Garcia del Rio, Riva-Agüero, and the Argentine director Posadas, who wished to establish that form of government "on solid and permanent foundations" in the provinces of La Plata; Dean Funes, the Colombians Nariño, Mosquera, Briceno Mendez, and others. The founders of South American independence understood that only a strong government could save the new nations from demagogy, anarchy, warfare between military chiefs, and untimely provincial ambitions. They wanted autonomy without licence, monarchy without despotism, and political solidity without Spanish suzerainty. Despite this conviction on the part of the revolutionaries, South America saw the birth of the Republic. Alberdi wrote that its origin was involuntary, and that it was the result of European {62} indifference and Yankee egoism; more than involuntary, it was spontaneous. The demagogues and the crowd accepted it as the negation of monarchy. The latter symbolised the Gothic despotism, the old humiliating domination, the persistence of castes and municipal privilege. In the popular mind, naturally of a simplifying tendency, monarchy was slavery; anarchy and the republic were liberty; there was no distinction between the King of Spain and other princes, between the absolutism of Ferdinand VII. and the constitutional monarchy of England. A universal hatred condemned all kings. The republic was not so much an organisation or a political system as a negation, and indissolubly bound up with it were the cardinal ideas of country, equality, and liberty.