Japan combined, while its population only approximates that of New York and New Jersey taken together. Its national debt is about fifty millions of dollars and its potential wealth beyond the dreams of avarice;-here and in adjacent Colombia, Raleigh and his adventurers located El Dorado, though theirs was for the most part but the pioneers' bitter guerdon of disappointment. Blind indeed must the traveller be who cannot see that now these Elizabethan dreams, in a still more spacious age, are about to be realised.

The rule of Spain was endured in Venezuela until 1806, when General Miranda, a companion in arms of Washington and a soldier of the French Directory, with the aid of some American volunteers organised an unsuccessful rebellion. Miranda died in chains at Cadiz and his American followers were shot down like dogs on the beach at Puerto Cabello. However, in all South America Miranda is still hailed, and worshipped, at least with lip-service, as "El Precursor" or "The Forerunner," because the movement started by him and carried on by Bolivar ended in the liberation of the continent from Spanish supremacy.

The new and more liberal and enlightened Spain which Bolivar sought to found soon collapsed into hostile groups of absurdly miscalled republics, whose history has been largely a bloody record of civil and international strife. Well might the Liberator have said, as he is reported to have done on his lonely and unattended deathbed at Santa Marta: "I have lived in vain. I have been ploughing the sea.'

Venezuela in 1830 separated from the Greater Colombia which Bolivar founded and a constitution was immediately proclaimed. Eight other constitutions

have been proclaimed since then, each better than its predecessor, but the country has continued to go from bad to worse. The latest, though doubtless not the last, constitution, proclaimed in 1904, provides in its declaration that "The Government of the Union is and shall always be republican, federal, democratic, elective, representative, alternative, and responsible." On the coat-of-arms of the republic are emblazoned the soullifting words: "Independence, Liberty, God, and Federation." These high-sounding professions and promises have served to cloak, very transparently it is true, the exploits of a succession of bandit chieftains perhaps without a parallel in history for rapacity and shamelessness.

Since 1830 fifty-eight well-defined revolutions have swept over the fair land, and of these thirteen have overturned the government of the day and assumed control.

Venezuela's strongest man was, undoubtedly, Guzman Blanco. Personally or by deputy he maintained a rule which was really a dictatorship from 1870 until 1889, although his formal resignation occurred in 1886. From a richly remunerative official seat, he gave his beloved people a liberal dose of the iron hand, very much, however, to their general advantage, although they are not yet done paying for their benefits. It is very largely his legacy which has now involved the United States in the toils of Venezuelan finance. He granted railway concessions to enterprising foreigners, and gathered financial plums all along the line. He improved the system of interior transportation, improved harbours, and granted, in 1883, the asphalt concession which is now the subject of dispute between the

trust which afterward purchased it and the government of Venezuela.

If Blanco could have induced his family to stay at home and not flock to Paris, where his daughter married a duke and the other expenses were heavy, he might have become the Diaz of his country. He was certainly quite as able a man as the Mexican dictator and his task was not nearly so difficult; but even Blanco could not rule his country by cable from the ChampsÉlysées, and when he fell his people tumbled down all

the statues in his honour which he had allowed to be erected during his regency.

A summary of Venezuelan commercial and fiscal conditions is given in another place;* the modern political phase has been so involved with our own development as a world power that many of its details are known to those who follow with intelligent interest the course of current events. In December, 1908, however, a leading article in the Neueste Nachrichten, the Berlin paper which stood closest to Prince Bülow, the then Chancellor, welcomed Castro, the stormy petrel of South America, to Berlin with the following words of revelation, which came as a surprise only to those who do not know that the thread of every anti-American intrigue in Latin-America for ten years past has been spun in the German capital or in the Hansa Ports:

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Intelligent self-interest," wrote the Wilhelm Strasse organ, "should convince the German Government and people that it is the part of wisdom and policy to treat President Castro with every honour and with all consideration.

"It is well known," says this frankly informing pub*See Appendix D, page 432.