This was the decisive campaign of the war of independence on the continent. The future of Buenos Aires and Chile, of New Granada and Venezuela, and of all the Spanish settlements depended on the battles that were now to be fought in the mountains of Peru, where the Royalist forces had concentrated, for this was the very heart of the Spanish stronghold. San Martín was not to fight these final battles, but to him is due the credit of conceiving the plan of action, of executing it almost to the end, and of showing, by his retirement in favor of a more convincingly popular fellow-patriot of the north, a modesty, soundness of judgment, and generosity almost unparalleled among statesmen—for in the meantime the northern movement, under the direction of Simon Bolívar, was approaching Peru. It arrived at the coast town of Guayaquil in the spring of 1822. San Martín immediately repaired to that port for a conference, leaving his administration in the hands of the Marquis of Torre Tagle, a member of the old nobility who had turned revolutionist, and Bernardo Monteagudo. The meeting of the two Liberators marked the close of San Martín’s military career. He saw clearly that there could be no room for himself and a brilliant, ambitious, magnetic leader like Bolívar in the same sphere of action, that it was necessary for the welfare of the common cause that one of them should retire. He was great and patriotic enough to make the sacrifice. Returning to Lima, he resigned the supreme authority and retired to Europe. There was no place for him in Buenos Aires, except as a leader in the civil wars which by this time were distracting the country, and this rôle he disdained. In 1850 he died in France at the age of seventy-two, after a thirty years’ struggle with sickness and poverty, but attended always by his devoted daughter. After his death his body was brought to Buenos Aires and reverently placed in a tomb, one of the handsomest in the world, about which stand three marble figures representing Buenos Aires, Chile, and Peru. Bolívar’s career had begun in Venezuela, where he was born. After Spain’s suppression of the _junta_ established in Caracas in 1810, Bolívar, with the revolutionist Miranda, had landed in Venezuela and called into being the first congress of the people, and the independence of the country was proclaimed. In the fighting that followed, the movement thus started met a speedy end—literally shattered by an awful earthquake that occurred on Holy Thursday of 1812, which the Royalists claimed was a stroke of Divine vengeance against those who would have overthrown the anointed of the Lord.