distinguished heads, since the only ones for whom the question is already solved are the demagogues who deceive the multitude and the limited spirits who deceive themselves.
If, then, the Argentine parties have fallen into error in the adoption of their means, it has not been due to vice nor to cowardice of the spirit, but to passion that, while still noble and pure in its intentions, is almost always blind to the use of its means, and the lack of experience that the new states of this continent suffer from as regards the path along which they must take their steps in public life.
No, the Argentine Republic is not a depraved country, as is supposed by those who judge it by the precepts she has given herself in the delirium of revolutionary fever. It is her political parties who have defamed her abroad, mutually exaggerating their faults in the heat of the fight and implying others as a vulgar means of attack and destruction. To judge the Argentine Republic by what her parties at arms write in the press is to judge France by the lugubrious portraits made by the impatient misanthropy of some of her great writers who, living in the perfection of the future, see in the present only vices, disorder, iniquity, and lies.
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Every party has taken care to hide or disfigure the advantages and merits of its rival. According to the Rosas press, the more educated half of the Argentine Republic is equal to the southern hordes of Pehuenches and Pampas.26 It is made up of savage Unitarios (as if to say the progressive savages, union being the most advanced term, the highest ideal of political science). The Unitarios, for their part, have often seen in their rivals the Carib Indians of the Orinoco. When one day they share the peaceful embrace in which the most enflamed struggles end, how different will be the picture of the Argentine Republic painted by the sons of both camps.
What noble confessions will not be heard sometime from the mouths of the frenetic Federales! And the Unitarios, with what pleasure will they not see men of honor and great hearts come out from beneath that frightful mask under which their rivals today disguise themselves, giving way to the tyrannical demands of the situation!
In the meantime, it is not necessary to make felons of the writers who involuntarily damage the country, damaging themselves also, even though Michelet says that it diminishes their luster in the eyes of the foreigner. The representative peoples must live today like the Roman who wanted to dwell in a glass house to show off the transparency of his private life. It is necessary to live a life of truth and show it to the world as it is, with its faults and its merits. To right the wrong it is necessary to say it out loud: society and power are deaf: for them to hear, one must speak with the trumpet of the press and from the rostrum. But it is impossible to raise one’s voice at home without the neighbor hearing. There is nothing else for it than to take shelter under the comforting axiom that says—I am a man and I consider myself alien to nothing. If some peoples have no errors to lament, it is because they have not begun to live. The great nations have left their stains behind. The backward peoples have them in their future. In the people, as in the man, disease is an abnormal and transitory state: our country is nearing the end of its maladies.
One hears also that the Argentine Republic suffers a general backwardness as a consequence of its long and bloody war. This error, generally accepted outside its frontiers, also comes from the same causes as the
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other. Doubtless war is less fecund in certain advances than peace: but it brings with it certain others that are peculiar to war, and the Argentine parties have obtained them with an effectiveness equal to the intensity of their suffering.
The Argentine Republic has more experience than all her brethren of the south, for the simple reason that she has suffered more than any other. She has traveled a road that the others are about to begin.
As she is closer to Europe, she has received sooner the influx of her progressive ideas, which were put into practice by the revolution of May 1810, and sooner than all others she reaped the good and bad fruits of her development: being for this reason at all times, future for the states further from the trans-Atlantic spring of American progress, which constitutes the past of the states of the Plate. Thus, even in what today is taken as a signal of backwardness in the neighboring republic, it is more advanced than those who claim to be exempt from these setbacks, because they have not yet begun to experience them.
A noteworthy fact, a part of the definitive organization of the Argentine Republic has prospered through her wars, receiving important services even from her adversaries. That fact is the centralization of national power. Rivadavia proclaimed the idea of unity: Rosas has achieved it. Among Federales and Unitarios, the Republic has been centralized, which means that the issue is only about voices that merely harbor the high spirits of young peoples; and which ultimately, both one and the other, have served their homeland, promoting its national unity. The Unitarios have lost, but unity has triumphed. The Federales have conquered, but federation has succumbed. The fact is that from the heart of this war of names, power has emerged fully formed, without which society is unachievable and freedom itself impossible.
Power implies the habit of obedience as the basis of its firm existence. That habit has put down roots in both parties. Within the country, Rosas has taught his supporters and his enemies to obey; outside the country, his absent enemies, without the right to govern, have spent their lives in obedience, and one way or another, both have reached the same goal.
In this regard, no country of South America has more powerful means of inner order than the Argentine Republic.
There is no country in the Americas that brings together greater practical knowledge of the Spanish American states than that Republic, because
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it is the country that has had the greatest number of capable men scattered outside its territory, and living regularly inserted in the acts of public life of the states where they reside. The day when those men return to their country and meet at deliberative assemblies, what useful applications, comparative terms, practical knowledge, and curious allusions will they bring from their memories of their past lives abroad!
If men learn and gain with their travels, what won’t happen to the people? It can be said that one-half of the Argentine Republic has been traveling in the world for ten or twenty years. Made up especially of young men, who are the homeland of tomorrow, when they return to their native soil after a life wandering, they will come in possession of foreign languages, legislation, industries, habits, which are then ties of brotherhood with the other peoples of the world. And how many, as well as knowledge, will bring capital to the national wealth! The Argentine Republic will not gain less if it leaves some of its sons scattered around the world, connected forever to foreign countries, because those very sons will extend the source of attachment to the country that gave them the life that they pass on to their children.
The Argentine Republic had the arrogance of youth. Half of its inhabitants have become modest, suffering from the despotism that commands without right to reply: and the other half, carrying out the instructive existence of the foreigner.
The plebeian masses, elevated into power, have softened their ferocity in that atmosphere of culture that the others left behind, to descend in search of the warmth of the soul, which in morals as in geology is greater the further one descends. This transitory change of roles must have been advantageous for the general progress of the country. One learns to govern by obeying; and vice versa.
While the Republic has not advanced in glory, it has done so at least in fame and renown; and on this point it owes such results to the two parties in equal measure. While Rosas deserved admiration for having repelled the foreign powers, his enemies have merited no less for having moved those powers to their advantage. The first party in the Americas to have repelled the states of Europe
