After the adoption of the new constitution of 1830, Bolivar retired to the province of Carthagena, exhausted both in body and mind. He died at Santa Martha, December 17, 1830, leaving a character on the merits of which it is difficult to pronounce a decided opinion. His name will not soon be forgotten, for it is indissolubly connected with the cause of independence in South America: but, in reviewing the progress and prospects of North and South America, it is impossible not to remark Bolivar’s inferiority to Washington, both in talent and virtue, and not to reflect with regret how different, in all probability, the conduct and the prosperity of the South American republics would have been if they had possessed such a leader as the first President of the United States.
The chief books which have been consulted for this sketch have been the ‘Annual Register,’ General Ducoudray Holstein’s ‘Memoirs of Bolivar,’ a work evidently written under strong feelings of personal hostility, the article Bolivar in the ‘Encyclopædia Americana,’ and a short account of the Liberator in the ‘Memoirs of General Miller.’ In these works there is so much discrepancy, not only of opinions, but of facts and dates, that we do not venture to hope that we have escaped errors. A clear and impartial history of the war of independence is still a desideratum.
Under the Superintendance of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
_London, Published by Charles Knight, Ludgate Street._ ]
In the history of trade there is nothing so remarkable as the rapid and immense increase of the British cotton manufacture during the last thirty years of the eighteenth century. Two nearly contemporaneous discoveries concurred to produce that increase: the invention of machinery for spinning; and the improvement, we might almost say completion, of the steam-engine by James Watt. To his eminent merits we have borne our testimony in the first volume of this work; and scarcely less important, though less imposing, have been the services of the ingenious men who contrived to spin thread without the use of the human hand. We do not hesitate to take Arkwright as the representative of those who wrought this great revolution in our manufacturing system, for though recent evidence has refuted his claim to the invention, properly speaking, of spinning by machinery, he was the first person who rendered that invention profitable.