Considering that the situation of the country rendered
it necessary, he resumed power and arrested various attempts at
revolutions. In 1875, however, he was assassinated. A statesman of
disinterested merit and high ideals, he was generally mourned by the
populace.
Venezuela began its fateful career under the guardianship of General
Paez, one of the principal heroes of the revolution. It was Paez who had
led his Llanero cavalry so often to victory against the Spaniards, and
who, as already related in these pages, had achieved the unique feat of
capturing a flotilla of Spanish gunboats--or, to be more accurate,
gun-barges--by means of this very cavalry. Those were certainly
remarkable men who swam their horses into the river where the flotilla
was anchored, and succeeded in this most extraordinary onslaught!
Paez, whose strain was half Spanish and half Indian, was intensely
practical in his views of government. Caring nothing for idealists and
for those who indulged in abstract theories, he severed himself abruptly
from Bolivar shortly after the final patriot victories, and in the end
was the chief cause of the exile of the Liberator. There is no doubt
that both his views and those of the Liberator had changed considerably
in the interval, for it is said that in 1826 General Paez had implored
Bolivar to mount the throne of the new kingdom which it was proposed to
found.
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