Leading government supporters, including Don Claudio Vicuña, president elect, and who only lacked a few days of being formally declared the chief executive of the Republic, sought refuge on board foreign warships in the harbor. That night Valparaiso was the scene of a Bacchanalian rabble that would have shamed Rome in the reign of Nero. The city was in possession of a mob, intoxicated with success, drunk upon wine and athirst for blood, that murdered with impunity and sacked the town without restraint. Drunken men and women reeled through the streets, shooting at each other as a matter of sport, and on the following morning four hundred victims of the mob’s violence were found dead in the streets. The scenes enacted in Santiago were equally as wild and tragic as those witnessed in Valparaiso. The houses of Balmaceda, Claudio Vicuña and other Balmacedistas were attacked, looted and everything they contained destroyed or carried away. A statue of the deposed president was dismembered and kicked through the streets. From balconies ladies cheered the performance, while opprobrium was heaped upon the inanimate form by the drunken mob. Beggars and thieves appropriated with impunity works of art and beautiful articles of furniture found in the residences of those who had remained loyal to the administration. That night President Balmaceda left the Moneda (Government Palace), and sought asylum in the Argentine Legation, where he remained until his legal term as president expired, September 18. On September 19 he took his own life by firing a revolver-shot into his brain, thus avoiding the chronicle in history that he committed suicide while president of the Republic. Thus the tragic and untimely death of this strong, brave man, who was called a tyrant and dictator by his enemies, but was loved and revered by his friends. Through the vista of years that intervene between the present and the close of the revolution, the official acts of Balmaceda and the monuments he left to his memory in the form of government works and public enterprises, loom large and conspicuous when compared with the works of those who have succeeded him. Public opinion and sentiment in Chile have undergone wonderful changes since the day a shot from a revolver in his own hand crashed into and stilled forever the fertile, creative brain of Jose Manuel Balmaceda, and an ungrateful Republic is now beginning to set its seal of approbation upon his official life and private character. History will yet write the name of Balmaceda large upon the roll of honor reserved for Chile’s patriots, statesmen, diplomats and scholars.