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centralization, organization of the representative system, electoral system, customs, taxation, rural laws, useful associations, European imports of unheard-of industries? The sum of decrees from his day is a perfect administrative code, just as the decrees of Rosas contain the catechism of the art of subjugating despotically and teaching obeisance with blood.

      Twenty years from now, many states of the Americas will deem themselves advanced because they will be doing what Buenos Aires did thirty years ago: and forty years will elapse before they have their own Rosas. I say their Rosas, because they will have him. Not in vain is he today called

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      Man of the Americas. He truly is, for he is a political type who will be seen around America as a logical product of that which produced him in Buenos Aires and which exists in sister states. In all places the orange tree, when it gets to a certain age, gives oranges. Where there are Spanish republics, formed from former colonies, there will be dictators once development reaches a certain level.

      They should not be upset by this idea. This means that they will advance as much as the Argentine Republic has advanced today, regardless of the means. Rosas is at once a sickness and a cure: America says this of Buenos Aires, and I repeat it as true of the future America.

      This is not a malignant and vengeful omen of a desired evil. Although I oppose Rosas, as a party man, I have said that I write this with Argentine colors.

      Rosas is not a simple tyrant in my eyes. If in his hand there is a bloody rod of iron, I also see on his head the rosette of Belgrano.⁹ I am not so blinded by love of my party as not to recognize what Rosas is, in certain respects.

      I know, for example, that Simón Bolívar did not occupy the world so much with his name as the current governor of Buenos Aires does.

      I know that the name of Washington is worshipped in the world but is no better known than that of Rosas.

      The United States, despite its fame, does not today have a public figure held in higher esteem than General Rosas.—The people speak of him from one end of America to the other, although he has not done as much as Christopher Columbus. He is as well known in Europe as a man in the public eye in England or France. And there is no place in the world where his name is not known, because there is no place outside the reach of the English or French press, which for the last ten years have repeated his name day after day. What orator, what celebrated writer of the nineteenth century has not named him, has not spoken of him on many occasions? Guizot, Thiers, O’Connell, Lamartine, Palmerston, Aberdeen.¹⁰ What celebrated parliamentarian of this era has not

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      mentioned him, speaking to the face of Europe. Shortly he will be a romantic hero: the stage is set for a young genius, remembering what Chateaubriand, Byron,¹¹ and Lamartine gained from their journeys, to set sail across the Atlantic, in search of an immense and virginal territory ripe for poetry, offered by the most beautiful country, the most esteemed and the most abundant in remarkable traits of the New World.

      Byron, who once thought of visiting Venezuela and was so eager to cross the line of the equinox, would have been attracted to the banks of the immense River Plate, if the man who could have offered the most colors through his life and character to the pictures from his diabolical and sublime brush had lived in his day. Byron was the predestined poet of Rosas, the poet of The Corsair, The Pirate, Mazeppa, and Marino Faliero. It would be fitting if the hero, like the singer, were defined as angel or demon, as Lamartine called the author of Childe Harold.

      It would be necessary not to be an Argentine to be unaware of the truth of these facts, and be proud of them, without getting involved in examining the legitimacy of the right with which they cede in honor of the Argentine Republic. It is enough to see that glory is independent sometimes of justice, of usefulness, and even of good common sense.

      So I will say in all sincerity something I consider consistent with what I have expressed here:—if Rosas’ rights to Argentine nationality were lost, I would contribute with no small sacrifice to bringing about their rescue. It is easier for me to declare than to explain the motive, because it pleases me to think that Rosas belongs to the River Plate.

      But, when speaking thus someone names Rosas, he speaks of an Argentine general, he speaks of a man of the Plate, or rather he speaks of the Argentine Republic. To speak of the esteem in which Rosas is held is to speak of the esteem in which Rosas’ country is held. Rosas is not an entity that can be conceived in abstract terms without relation to the people he governs. Like all notable men, the extraordinary development

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      of his character presupposes that of the society to which he belongs. Rosas and the Argentine Republic are two entities implicated in each other. He is what he is because he is Argentine: his elevation implies that of his country; the spirit of his will, the firmness of his nature, the power of his intelligence are not traits of his own, but traits of the people, which he reflects in his person. The idea of a Bolivian or Ecuadorian Rosas is absurd. Only the Plate could today produce a man who has done what Rosas has done. A strong man always implies many others of the same spirit around him. With an army of sheep, a lion at its head would be taken prisoner by a single hunter.

      Suppress Buenos Aires, and its masses and its innumerable able men, and you will have no Rosas.

      The leadership of the Argentine Republic is attributed to him alone. What a great error! He is reasonable enough to listen when he appears to be leading; like his country, he is very capable of ordering when he seems to obey.

      Rosas is no Peter the Great.¹² The greatness of Argentina is older than he. Rosas is forty years later than Liniers;¹³ thirty years later than Moreno, Belgrano, San Martín; twenty years later than Rivadavia. Under his leadership, Buenos Aires sent a haughty no to the allied English and French. In 1807 it did more than that, without having Rosas at its head. In its streets, it tore apart fifteen thousand soldiers of the flower of the British armies, and snatched the one hundred standards that today adorn its temples.

      In 1810, without Rosas at its head, it cast to the ground the crown that Christopher Columbus led to the New World.

      On July 9, 1816, the Argentine Republic wrote the golden page of its independence, and the name of Rosas is not at the foot of that document.

      In that same year, the Argentine armies climbed with cannons and

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      cavalry mountains twice as high as those of Mont-Cenis and St. Bernard, to help Chile to do what had been achieved on the other side. But it was not Rosas who signed the victorious bulletins from Chacabuco and Maypo,¹⁴ but the Argentine José de San Martín.

      All the glory of Rosas, to the square of four and multiplied ten times by itself, does not form a trophy comparable in esteem with Pizarro’s¹⁵ standard, obtained by San Martín in his campaign in Peru in 1821.

      This is not to diminish Rosas’ merit. This is to increase the merit of the Argentine Republic. This is to say that it is not Rosas who has taught it to be brave and heroic.

      From this there follows a very logical and natural conclusion, namely, that as soon as Rosas ceases to be at the head of the Argentine Republic, another man as notable as he with other scenes as memorable as his will be attracting the world’s attention to the Republic, which from the first days of this century has never ceased to be esteemed for its men and for its deeds.

      But today, are Rosas and his party perhaps the only things that Argentina has to offer that are extraordinary and worthy of admiration?

      That would be to see a half-truth, not the whole truth.

      No one is great unless measured against other great men. There is much praise for Rosas’ heroic perseverance. But does not the perseverance of his action imply the perseverance of the resistance that he seeks to snuff out? If the persistence with which Rosas has pursued his enemies for the last twenty years shows that interest in a never-changing will, no less admirable is the invariable tenacity with which they have reacted

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