The eighteenth century, as it drew to its close, found the Spanish occupation of America almost as it had been in the first half of the seventeenth. Then a mighty upheaval was witnessed both in North America and Europe, and the War of Independence in the United States, together with the French Revolution, provide the sequel for what followed in South America. Scarcely a murmur was heard in the principal Spanish colonies while these great events were changing the destinies of the civilized world, and an onlooker who had time to think must have been astonished at their apparent loyalty to the mother country, oppressed though they had been, and still were, while everywhere else the blow for freedom was being struck. Perhaps another conclusion might have been arrived at; namely, that the ancient Spanish stock had so degenerated, and had become such a mean-spirited race, that it dare not act like its neighbors further north; but subsequent events disproved this hypothesis. The Girondists and the Mountain rose and fell; Napoleon became successively director, dictator, emperor--still no sign of movement. Then the moment arrived for the arch-disturber of Europe to overthrow the ancient monarchy of Spain, and to establish a brand-new one with his brother Joseph at its head. That was the supreme crisis to make a move, or forever to remain still. Spain almost to a man resented the affront. Spanish America joined the mother country, and refused to recognize the upstart dynasty. Still, in the midst of this death-like calm, some presages of the coming storm were discernible. In the first place, France, by the Treaty of Basle in 1795, secured the cession of the whole of Hispaniola, only, however, in a few years to lose it again by its declaration of independence, and the formation of a black republic. In the naval conflicts so frequent during that disturbed period England both lost and gained. The Dutch and Spanish were both unwilling confederates of Napoleon, but their connection with him, nevertheless, exposed their foreign possessions to the attack of his declared enemies; and England captured Demerara and Essequibo in Guiana from the former, and the island of Trinidad from the latter. All these were trivial acquisitions, compared with the vast extent of Mexico and Central America, Peru, and New Granada, and the eastern province of Buenos Ayres. Brazil had reverted to Portugal with the firm establishment of the Braganza dynasty, and was nearly all there was left of its once great colonial empire. In March, 1808, the ill fortune of the royal family drove them from their own kingdom to find refuge beyond the seas, and Brazil became an independent empire under the fugitive Portuguese sovereign, whose descendants remained in peaceable and prosperous possession until the revolution which dethroned the late ill-fated Dom Pedro.