Jealousy entered very freely into the patriot ranks, and the
various chroniclers, however honestly they may have written, and however
deep their convictions may have been, were inevitably swayed to a very
great extent by this.
Thus a partisan of the Carreras would have been a strange being,
according to the lights of these times, had he been able to discern a
spot of goodness in the personality of San Martin, and the admirer of
the heroic Cochrane would have had no higher opinion of the Argentine
Liberator. The reverse of the medal was, of course, shown by San
Martin's adherents, who might safely have been trusted to miss no defect
in Cochrane, or in any other of his party. This condition of affairs
prevailed throughout, and extended for the length and breadth of the
Continent. Bolivar, Sucre, and everyone of note, was a hero to his own
followers, and more or less a villain to the rest of the allied, yet
rival, parties. As a rule these prominent leaders suffered rather than
gained from the situation, since the calumnies of the period are more
abundant than the laudations. It is only now that the history of the
early nineteenth century is beginning to be written calmly and
dispassionately, and as a result the participants in the great deeds of
that epoch appear, with justice, greater to the modern world than they
did in the eyes of their contemporaries.
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