316 
DOTTINGS ON THE ROADSIDE. [Chap. XIX.—B. P. 
At the close of the eighteenth century, the best 
authorities give the number of settlers and their de¬ 
pendants at 1200, while the aborigines themselves 
did not probably exceed 10,000. 
The nineteenth century was ushered in with signs 
and portents of convulsion; the veil which had en¬ 
shrouded Spanish America for three centuries was now 
destined to be rudely and completely torn aside, and 
retributive justice was at last about to overtake the 
descendants of those whose inhuman crimes had filled 
their footprints with blood. The revolt of the North 
American Colonies from the British Crown, after seven¬ 
teen years of dispute and fighting, namely from 1766 
to 1783, severed for ever the political bond which up 
to that time had united them to the mother-country. 
This event was followed, scarcely seven years after, 
by the great French Revolution—a convulsion of not 
only such magnitude as endangered every throne in 
Europe, but reverberated with an earthquake-shock 
from the confines of Chili to the extreme northern 
possessions of the Spaniards in California, and that 
with such startling effect that, between the years 1810 
and 1826, Spain found herself deprived of every inch 
of ground on the great continent she had discovered, 
and once so proudly called her own. 
The following tabular statement will show at a 
glance the population and area of the vast possessions 
lost to the mother-country when the descendants of 
the conquerors threw off the yoke of Spain; and what 
those descendants have since accomplished with the 
possession of more liberty and equality than they know 
what to do with. 
