In the north, as has been said, the era of chaos was not long in asserting itself.  New Granada had been divided into three Republics, those of Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador; while the new State of Bolivia had been set up between the frontiers of Paraguay and Peru.  General Sucre, one of the chief military heroes of the war of liberation in the north, was, appropriately enough, made the first President of this new Republic of Bolivia.  At the start unease and fretfulness marked the relations of each of the new States with the others.  It seemed almost as if the Continent had become so imbued with warlike ideas that it had forgotten how to lay down the sword.

There was, moreover, lamentably small inducement to a life of peaceful labour.  The industrial situation of the north was as gloomy as elsewhere in the Continent.  The labouring classes found that their condition, instead of becoming bettered by the revolution, had suffered to no small degree.  It was not surprising, indeed, that at the time these unfortunate folk could discern no benefit, but only added curses from this state of liberation of which they had heard so much, and of which they were now in the so-called enjoyment.  Very great numbers of the men had been killed in the course of the war, and their wives and children were left behind in a condition of misery and starvation.

Curiously enough, too, although the goods which now entered these countries from abroad had, owing to the intelligent methods of the new Governments, become so reduced in price that in ordinary circumstances they should have been within the range of all, the peasant could no longer afford to pay even for these cheap luxuries.  The rich Spaniards, the employers of labour, were now no longer on the spot to give out work and to pay wages.  In the industrial confusion the peasant only on the rarest occasions found anyone capable of occupying his labour.  He was thus reduced to attempt the formation of a self-contained establishment of his own, a matter which, in the majority of cases, was sufficiently difficult.  Nevertheless, the peasant contrived to support himself on the maize and vegetables which he grew in the neighbourhood of his hut and by the pigs which he reared.  He knew well enough, nevertheless, that, although he might expect to maintain a precarious existence by this means, he could anticipate nothing whatever beyond.

It was many years before the financial benefits of the rebellion filtered through to these humble classes.  The greater part of the peasants, being fond of show and amusement, were Royalist at heart, and were more adapted for a Monarchy than for a Republic.  As is usually the case with folk of a peaceful and tractable disposition, they were not consulted in the matter at all.  They had groaned on occasion under the Monarchy, and on the first establishment of the Republic they continued to groan from an even greater cause.