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The American War of Independence 323 by the States was so wide and their interests so diverse at that time, that — ^given only the means of communication then available — a disintegration of the Union into separate states on the European scale of size was merely a question of time. Attendance at Wash- ington meant a long, tedious, and insecure journey for the senators and congressmen of the remoter districts, and the mechanical im- pediments to the diffusion of a common education and a common literature and intelligence were practically insurmountable. Forces were at work in the world however that were to arrest the process of differentiation altogether. Presently came the river steamboat and then the railway and the telegraph to save the United States from fragmentation, and weave its dispersed people together again into the first of great modern nations. Twenty-two years later the Spanish colonies in America were to follow the example of the Thirteen and break their connexion with Europe. But being more dispersed over the continent and separated by great mountainous chains and deserts and forests and by the Portuguese empire of Brazil, they did not achieve a union among themselves. They became a constellation of republican states, very prone at first to wars among themselves and to revolutions. Brazi. followed a rather different line towards the inevitable separation. In 1807 the French armies under Napoleon had occu- pied the mother country of Portugal, and the monarchy had fled to Brazil. From that time on until they separated, Portugal was rather a dependency of Brazil than Brazil of Portugal. In 1822 Brazil declared itself a separate Empire under Pedro I, a son of the Portuguese king. But the new world has never been very favour- able to monarchy. In 1889 the Emperor of Brazil was shipped off quietly to Europe, and the United States of Brazil fell into line with the rest of republican America.