Simón Bolívar (The Liberator) Patriot, Warrior, Statesman, Father of Five Nations, a Sketch of His Life and His Work

by Guillermo A. Sherwell

Summarizing the causes of the fall of Venezuela, he attributed it in the first place to the nature of its constitution; secondly, to the discouragement of the government and people; thirdly, to the opposition to the establishment of a regular military organization; fourthly, to earthquakes and superstitions strengthened by those calamities, and fifthly and lastly to "the internal dissensions, which, in fact, were the deadly poison which carried the country to its doom."

The ambition of the European countries is to reduce to slavery the other parts of the world, and all these other parts of the world should endeavor to establish a balance between themselves and Europe in order to destroy the preponderance of the latter. I call this the balance of the world, and it must enter into the calculations of American policies.

A state too large in itself, or together with its dependent territories, finally decays and its free form reverts to a tyrannical one, the principles which should conserve it relax, and at last it evolves into despotism. The characteristic of the small republics is permanency; that of the large ones is varied, but always tends to an empire. Almost all of the former have been of long duration; among the latter Rome alone lived for some centuries, but this was because the capital was a republic, and the rest of her dominions were not, for they governed themselves by different laws and constitutions."

He wanted to live up to the lofty words of Henry Clay, who, in the House of Representatives of the United States, proposed that Colombia should be recognized as a free country, "worthy for many reasons to stand side by side with the most illustrious peoples of the world," a solemn utterance which had little weight at that time in the United States, but which showed for the first time in a semi-official way that the United States was taking notice of the important movement of the South.

In the United States, the question of recognizing the independence of the South American countries finally came before Congress. On March 8, 1822, with James Monroe as President and John Quincy Adams as Secretary of State, the ideas expressed by Henry Clay in 1820 were carried to full fruition. The press had been working in favor of independence, and the message of Monroe in favor of recognition was an interpretation of public opinion at that time. In the report presented to Congress was the following expression: "To deny to the peoples of Spanish America their right to independence would be in fact to renounce our own independence."

He advised them to wait until the election could be held, and said that he would then assume the executive power in case he were chosen in free elections held according to the law. This letter was the last public defense of his career. The last principle he sought to establish was the most sound of Repúblican principles. "The source of legality," he wrote, "is the free will of the people; not the agitation of a mutiny nor the votes of friends."