GENERAL William Miller had played a leading role in the independence of Peru and Bolivia from Spain, working with the chief leaders of the independence movement, and had held civil posts of distinction as president of Puno and president of Potosí. Bad health, however, caused by the many wounds suffered in the wars, had made it advisable that he return to England for treatment. But, unlike so many other foreign legionnaires, Miller's role in the history of Peru did not end with independence.

YUCATAN has been a relatively autonomous part of Mexico. The civilized northern tip of the peninsula, centering around the city of Mérida, has been a kind of socio-political island equidistant by water from Veracruz, New Orleans, Havana, and Belize, British Honduras. South and east of this civilized area extends Indian territory which has remained quite primitive, quite isolated from the north, and in rather close contact with British Honduras further to the south. In the colonial epoch Yucatan was brought under Spanish dominion with considerable difficulty; only the crudest forms of surveillance could be maintained over Indians of the peninsula. With independence the limitations of the central government's control remained distressingly apparent. Whenever the government in Mexico City fell on hard times, as it frequently did, Yucatan as a whole tended toward autonomy. At such times the provincial government at Mérida gained freedom from federal restraint but lost federal support, and in consequence usually lost control over the Indians of southern Yucatan.

There is no doubt that manuscripts proceeding from or referring to Ibero-America which are preserved in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress constitute an interesting collection for the historian of the Hispanic world. This collection was begun in the second half of the nineteenth century when the library started to receive writings, documents, correspondence, and diverse papers relating to the past history of these northern regions and of other countries south of the frontiers of the United States. It was the moment when the North American collectors and antiquarians began to frequent the auctions of papers and books, when individuals and universities began to make their collections of material from which historians could procure documentation for their writings. The Library of Congress did not stay on the fringe of this movement, and some outstanding examples of documentation began to arrive in this depository, so much so that in 1900 the head of the Manuscript Division sent to the Congress of Americanists meeting in Paris a catalogue of the fifteen items relating to Mexico to be found under his care.