Events in Brazil shaped themselves differently. Upon the French invasion of Portugal in 1807-8, the Portuguese royal family migrated to Brazil and made Rio for a time the capital of the Portuguese dominions. When King John VI returned to Lisbon in 1821, he left as Regent of Brazil his son Dom Pedro, who, a few months later, supported by Brazilian opinion, threw off allegiance to his father and declared himself an independent sovereign. Thus was established, or rather continued, that Brazilian monarchy which subsisted down to 1889 and which secured to that country tranquillity and a continuous though rather sleepy progress during the stormy period through which Spanish America passed after the achievement of independence. For the long struggle had been mainly destructive. It had not only swept away Spanish authority, but had blurred and in some parts had erased all authority, all stability and order, had confused or obliterated whatever had existed of political experience or tradition, and had left the ignorant masses a prey to theorists and adventurers. The result was that, for at least a generation after the achievement of independence, most of the Spanish-American states were agitated by a turmoil of multitudinous constitutional experiments, confused conflict and destructive civil war, alternating with periods of rigorous and often tyrannical personal despotism. These movements have been perhaps unfairly judged in Europe. The young communities of Latin America, wanting in political experience and torn by a long and unavoidable struggle, were engaged in sweeping up the débris of their great revolution. The Republic of Chile in great part escaped that turmoil through the establishment, after a brief period of conflict, of a fairly stable aristocratic oligarchy of landed proprietors. Her three "revolutions" have been landmarks rather than interruptions in her historical development; for they were brief, decisive and conducive to a clearer constitutional definition. Argentina, after the fall of the Dictator Rosas in 1852, began to feel her way towards union and order, and may be said to have achieved that end with the general acceptance of her completed Federal Constitution in 1880. In the tropical republics constitutional agreement was rendered more difficult by the mixture of races, by geographical and climatic obstacles and by a comparative remoteness from European influences. And in the Caribbean lands our own generation has seen Presidential seats occupied by despots of the old type, usually men of imperious and resolute character, dauntless courage and unscrupulous indifference respecting means and methods, men sometimes risen from the lowest station through ruthless force and cunning. Indeed, Mexico, after a period of remarkable economic development under the long autocracy of Porfirio Diaz, relapsed, upon his fall in 1910-11, into the condition of a century ago.