That a man of his ancestry and early associations should have brought this republic to the condition in which he left it when he died is remarkable. Without education himself, he enacted a law requiring the attendance at school of all children between the ages of eight and fourteen years, and rigorously enforced it. People who refused to obey this law, or sent their children to private schools, or educated them at home, were compelled to pay a heavy fine for the privilege. He established a university at Guatemala City and free schools in every city of the republic, to the support of which a larger proportion of the public revenues were appropriated than in any one of the United States or the nations of Europe. He founded hospitals, asylums, and other institutions of charity with his own means, or supported them by appropriations from the public treasury. He compelled physicians to be educated properly before they were allowed to practise; he punished crime so severely that it was almost unknown; he regulated the sale of liquors, so that a drunken man was never seen upon the streets; he enforced the observance of the Sabbath by closing the stores and market-places, which in other Spanish-American republics are always open, and was active for the material as for the moral welfare of the people. During the twelve years he was in power the country made greater progress, and the citizens enjoyed greater prosperity, than during any period of all the three centuries and a half of previous history. His ambition to reunite the five Central American republics in a confederacy was not successful; but it was inspired by a desire to do for the neighboring States what he had done for Guatemala. His ambition was for the advancement and development of Central America; and while the means he used cannot be entirely approved, his purpose should be applauded. His crusade was quite as important in the civilization of this continent as the bloody work England attempted to accomplish in Egypt and the Soudan. He was better than his race, was far in advance of his generation, and while he did not succeed in lifting his people entirely out of the ignorance and degradation in which they were kept by the priests, what he did do cannot but result in the permanent good, not only of Guatemala, but of the nations which surround that republic. [Illustration: CHURCH OF SAN FRANCESCA, GUATEMALA LA ANTIGUA.]