Liberal Thought in Argentina, 1837–1940 - Группа авторов

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action of all of man’s faculties and cannot be made firm without the assistance of enlightenment and morality.

      Democracy, arising from the principle of class equality, seeks to take root in the ideas, customs, and sentiments of the people and elaborates its laws and institutions so that they might extend and strengthen its predominance.

      All the efforts of our governments and legislators must be directed toward fulfilling the aims of democracy.

      The Association of the Young Argentine Generation believes that the seed of democracy exists in our society; its mission is to preach, to spread its spirit, and to devote the action of its faculties so that one day democracy will be established in the Republic.

      It knows that many obstacles will be placed in its path by certain aristocratic remnants, certain retrograde traditions and laws, the lack of enlightenment and of morality.

      The Association knows that the work of organizing democracy is not done in a day; that constitutions are not improvised; that liberty can be based only on the foundations of enlightenment and customs; that a society is not enlightened and moralized at a single stroke; that the reason of a people aspiring to be free can ripen only with time; but, having faith in the future and believing that the high aims of the revolution were not only to bring down the former social order, but also to rebuild a new order, will work with the full extent of its faculties so that the generations to come, reaping the fruit of its labor, may have in their hands better elements than us to organize and constitute Argentine society on the unshakeable foundation of equality and democratic liberty.

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      Je demande à l’historien l’amour de l’humanité ou de la liberté; sa justice impartiale ne doit pas être impassive. Il faut, au contraire, qu’il souhaite, qu’il espère, qu’il souffre, ou soit heureux de ce qu’il raconte.—Villemain, Cours de littérature2

      I will evoke you, dread shadow of Facundo, so that, shaking off the bloodstained dust that covers your ashes, you may rise up to explain the secret life and internal convulsions tearing at the innards of a noble people! You hold the secret: reveal it to us! Ten years after your tragic death, the man of the cities and the gaucho of the Argentine plains, when taking different trails through the desert, would say: “No, he is not dead! He is still alive! He will return!”

      True! Facundo is not dead; he is alive in the popular traditions, in the politics and revolutions of Argentina; in Rosas, his heir, his complement: his soul has passed into this other, more finished, more perfect mold; and what was in him merely instinct, beginning, tendency, became in Rosas system, effect, and end. Rustic, colonial, barbaric nature changed in this metamorphosis into art, system, and regular policy capable of presenting itself to the face of the world as the way of being

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      of a people embodied in one man who has aspired to take on the airs of a genius dominating events, men, and things.

      Facundo, provincial, barbaric, courageous, bold, was replaced by Rosas,3 the son of cultured Buenos Aires, without being so himself; by Rosas, false, cold-hearted, calculating mind, who does evil without passion and slowly organizes despotism with all the intelligence of a Machiavelli. A tyrant without rival today on Earth, why do his enemies want to deny him the title of Great, which his courtiers lavish on him? Yes, great and very great he is, to the glory and shame of his homeland, for if he has found thousands of degraded beings to yoke themselves to his wagon and haul it over corpses, there are also thousands of generous souls who, in fifteen years of bloody combat, have not given up hope of vanquishing the monster presented to us by the enigma of the political organization of the Republic. A day will finally come when they will solve it; and the Argentine Sphinx, half cowardly woman, half bloodthirsty tiger, shall die at their feet, giving the Thebes of the Plate the elevated rank that is its due among the nations of the New World.

      It is necessary, however, to untie this knot that the sword has been unable to cut, to study thoroughly the twists and turns of the threads that form it, and search in our national precedents, in the physiognomy of our soil, in our popular customs and traditions, the places where they are attached.

      The Argentine Republic is today the region of Hispanic America that, in its outward expression, has drawn the preferential attention of the European nations, which on no few occasions have found themselves embroiled in its disturbances, or drawn, as if by a maelstrom, toward the center where such conflicting elements swirl. France was on the point of giving in to this attraction and, not without great efforts of rowing and sailing, not without losing the rudder, managed to steer away and remain at a distance. Its most skilled politicians have been unable to understand anything their eyes have seen when casting a hasty glance over the American power challenging that great nation. On seeing the burning lavas that churn, boil, crash, and roar in this great hub of internecine struggle, those who hold themselves to be best informed have said: “It is an insignificant volcano, without a name, one of many that appear in America: soon it will be extinguished”; and they have turned their gaze

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      elsewhere, satisfied at having provided a solution as easy as it is exact to the social phenomena they have seen only superficially as a group. South America in general, and especially the Argentine Republic, has lacked a Tocqueville who, equipped beforehand with the knowledge of social theories, like the scientific traveler with barometer, octant, and compass, would come to penetrate into the interior of our political life, as into a vast field not yet explored or described by science, and reveal to Europe, to France, so eager for new phases in the life of the different portions of humanity, this new way of life, which has no known, clearly marked precedent. The mystery of the obstinate struggle tearing the Republic to shreds would then have been explained; the conflicting, unconquerable elements that collide would have been classified distinctly: the configuration of the land and the habits that this engenders; the Spanish traditions and the iniquitous, plebeian national consciousness left by the Inquisition and Hispanic absolutism; the influence of the opposing ideas that have disrupted the political world; indigenous barbarism; European civilization; the democracy enshrined by the revolution of 1810; equality, whose dogma has penetrated to the lowest layers of society, all these would have been allocated their part. This study, which we are not yet in a state to conduct due to our lack of philosophical and historical instruction, conducted by competent observers, would have revealed to the astonished eyes of Europe a new world in politics, a naïve, frank, and primitive struggle between the latest progress of the human spirit and the rudiments of savage life, between populous cities and shady forests. The problem of Spain would then have become clearer, that straggler behind Europe which, cast between the Mediterranean and the ocean, between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, joined to cultured Europe by a broad isthmus and separated from barbaric Africa by a narrow strait, is teetering between two opposing forces, now rising up on the scales of the free peoples, now falling on those of despotism; now unholy, now fanatical; now a declared constitutionalist, now an imprudent despot; sometimes cursing its broken chains, now folding its arms and crying out for the yoke to be imposed upon it, which appears to be its condition and its mode of existence. What! The problem of European Spain could not be resolved by a minute examination of American Spain, as the ideas and morality of the parents are traced through the education and habits of the children? What! Does it mean nothing for

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      history and philosophy this eternal struggle of the Hispanic American peoples, that supine dearth of political and industrial ability that has them worried and twisting and turning with no fixed north, no precise object, no knowing why they cannot find a day of rest, nor

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