at Maypo, captured and hanged the next day in the square in Santiago; if the same had happened to the September revolutionaries and the domination of the Spanish had subsisted until today, those great men of the highest rank would be forgotten as obscure rebels worthy of the gallows, where they would atone for their treason.
Passion, in its language of lies and hyperbole, has been able to give the name of treason only to the simple military alliance that the Unitarios made with the forces of England and France.
Treason is a crime, but there is no crime when there is no intention to do evil. It is, then, something more than hasty procedure; it is an act of imbecility to presume that men of sincerity, of fervor, of patriotism such as Lavalle, Suárez, Olavarría, etc., could have harbored the intention of dishonoring the colors that they had defended since childhood
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in a hundred glorious, honorable combats, risking their lives to foreign bullets! If other men had done it, without the precedents of those men, the sophism would be less manifest. But to accuse of treason to their country those who created and founded the homeland with their swords and their blood! Lavalle, Paz, Rodríguez, who had no fortune but their glorious trophies obtained in the war of South American independence, must have had the intention to fight so that after their triumph they would hand over to a foreign power the homeland, its independence, its insignia, and even their personal honor and freedom! The tyrants have worn out the meaning of the word treason in their abuse of it, to the extent that it is rare that anytime, especially in young and warring countries, it is applied justly. But when it is used against the Unitarios of the Argentine Republic, one commits something more than a common error: one commits, as I have said, an act of inexcusable imbecility. Tiberius, the dark and bloody Tiberius, once saw the crime of treason even in a poem, in an indiscreet and confidential word, in a tear, in a smile, in the most insignificant things.21 Dionysius the tyrant condemned to death a man who dreamed he had murdered him. Alter a little the meaning of the word treason, said Montesquieu, and a legal government will become an arbitrary one.
“A grave reproach,” says Chateaubriand, “will be tied to the memory of Bonaparte. Toward the end of his reign his yoke became so heavy that the hostile feelings toward the foreigner softened; and an invasion, today a painful memory, took on at the time it occurred, the air of a campaign of freedom. … The Lafayettes, the Lanjuinais, the Camilo Jordans, the Ducis, the Lemerciers, the Cheniers, the Benjamin Constants, standing erect among the impetuous crowd, dared to spurn the victory and protest against the tyranny” … “Let us abstain, then, from saying that those who are led by fate to fight against a power that belongs to their country must be villains: in all times and countries, from the Greeks to our day, all opinions have backed the forces that could ensure them victory. One day it will be read in our Memoirs the ideas of M. de Malesherbes on the emigration. We do not know in France a single party that has not had men on foreign soil, merging with enemies and marching against France. Benjamin Constant, Bernadotte’s aide-de-camp, served
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in the allied army that entered Paris, and Carrel was caught, arms in hand, in the Spanish ranks.”22
It is needless to say that Lafayette, Chénier, Constant,23 Carrel are names that all the parties in France take pride in counting among their celebrated men. From where does this way of seeing them arise, in spite of those actions, which a sophist would dub treason? From the universal conviction that their intentions in executing them were entirely French and patriotic; and that only a totally exceptional situation could have placed them in the position of seeking the good of the country by means of such a course.
The Unitarios of Buenos Aires have done less than Constant, Carrel,24 and Lafayette in France: they have never marched against anything that could be said to be their country. They have marched with their flag, with their cockade, with their chiefs, along their path, toward their separate and particular ends; after demanding and obtaining solemn written statements, protecting the honor and integrity of the Republic, against all pernicious eyes of the foreigner. It was impossible to use this delicate means of reaction with more discretion, reserve, and prudence than they did. The documents that prove it are well known, as is the justification born from its results.
Other high and noble intentions also explain the conduct of the Argentines who in 1840 joined the French forces to attack the power of General Rosas. That coalition had more farsighted intentions than a simple change of governor in Buenos Aires.—I will mention them with the same sincerity and frankness with which they were manifested then. They may be erroneous: that depends on each man’s way of thinking. But deceit was never in play at their conception. They belonged generally
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to the young men of the opposing party; and they owed them to their political studies at school. To suspect that treason could have mixed with them is to suppose that there were people foolish enough to initiate public law students in the mysteries of that dark diplomacy, which according to some, seeks to change the political principle of government in the Americas.
The transcendent idea of the young defenders of that alliance was to introduce, reconciling it with the perfect nationality of the country, the influence of the civilizing action of Europe by honorable means admitted by the law of nations, in order to establish a feasible political order in the Americas, in which the most advanced and liberal ideas would be supported by a majority of the enlightened population, developed under the influence of laws and institutions that protected such a trend. They wanted, in short, to find a formula that would solve the problem of the establishment of political freedom in the Americas, a problem still unsolved, since the solution does not lie in those written constitutions, which are inadequate and impracticable, and whose only use is frequently to encourage the hypocrisy of freedom, at odds with genuine freedom. Is there anyone unaware that South America, ever since the proclamation of unlimited democracy, is in a false position? That the order practiced until now is transitory because it is inadequate, and that it is necessary to bring things to more normal and genuine bases? Can anyone who sincerely ponders on what our current constitutions are fail to understand the importance and difficulty of this matter and the profound need to deal with it?
So: those young men tackling this question, which concerns the very life of this part of the New World, thought that while the numerical advantage of the ignorant, proletarian multitude prevailed, clothed in the revolution of popular sovereignty, freedom would always be replaced by the despotic military regime of just one man. And that the only means to ensure the preponderance of the enlightened minorities of these countries was to enlarge it with ties and connections with civilized influences from abroad, UNDER CONDITIONS COMPATIBLE WITH AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND DEMOCRACY, IRREVOCABLY PROCLAIMED BY THE REVOLUTION.
Absurd or wise, this was the thought of those who in that period supported the alliance with European forces to subjugate the party of the
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plebeian multitude captained and organized militarily by General Rosas. The supporters of those ideas maintained them publicly and openly in the press, with the candor and disinterest inherent in the character of youth.
That question is so grave, affecting in such a way the political existence of the new states of America, so uncertain and dark, and so few steps have been taken toward its solution, that one would have to be very backward in experience and good political sense to qualify one or another attempted solution as strange. That point has attracted the attention of all men who have given serious thought to the political fate of the New World, and errors of thinking therein have been committed by Bolívar, San Martín, Monteagudo, Rivadavia, Alvear, Gómez,25 and other men no less esteemed for their merit and American patriotism. A thousand others will err behind them in solving this problem, and they will not be the lower
