change his course or alter his devotion to the one great purpose of his life. In 1820 he finally started up the coast, and in four months, without a pitched battle, he had rendered the Spanish position on the coast of Peru untenable. He met Bolivar at Guayaquil, and the personal interview between the liberators of the northern and southern halves of South America was the end of San Martin's public career. He went to it with the purpose of arranging a joint campaign to drive the Spanish from their last stronghold, the highlands of Peru. But Bolivar did not see his own way clear to co-operation. San Martin explained his predicament to no one; he uttered no word of complaint or regret; he simply gave up the command of the army which he had led for seven years and resigned the Dictatorship of Peru. There was no place for him in distracted Argentina except as a leader in the civil wars--a role he disdained. He went into exile without saying a word as to the reasons for his action. Rather than precipitate a division between the patriots before the last Spaniard had been driven from South America, he submitted in silence to the reproach of cowardice. Rather than jeopard independence he sacrificed home, money, honours, even reputation itself. The history of the world records few examples of finer civic virtue. The rest of his life he spent poverty-stricken in Paris. Only once he tried to return to his native country. At Montevideo he heard that Buenos Aires was in the throes of another revolution and that his presence might be misconstrued. Without a word, he took the next ship back to Europe. For many years his struggles against poverty and ill-health were pathetic. It was the generosity of a Spaniard, and not a fellow-countryman, that relieved the last days of his life. But throughout those weary thirty years he never wavered in his devotion to South America. His last utterance about public affairs was a vehement laudation of Rosas--tyrant though he thought him--because the latter had defied France and England when they disregarded Argentina's rights as a sovereign member of the family of nations. [Illustration: PLAZADE MAYO AND CATHEDRAL AT BUENOS AIRES. [From a lithograph.]]