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PLOUGHING THE SEA.
When the La Plata Congress at Tucuman took the decisive action that severed the bond with Spain, it uttered a prophecy for all Spanish America.

To quote its language: "Vast and fertile regions, climates benign and varied, abundant means of subsistence, treasures of gold and silver...

and fine productions of every sort will attract to our continent innumerable thousands of immigrants, to whom we shall open a safe place of refuge and extend a beneficent protection." More hopeful still were the words of a spokesman for another independent country: "United, neither the empire of the Assyrians, the Medes or the Persians, the Macedonian or the Roman Empire, can ever be compared with this colossal republic." Very different was the vision of Bolivar.

While a refugee in Jamaica he wrote: "We are a little human species; we possess a world apart...