Civilization and Barbarism/Biographical Sketch
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.
Don Domingo F. Sarmiento was born in 1811, the year after the Argentine Republic had achieved its independence of Spain, at San Juan, the capital of the province of that name, lying on the eastern skirts of the Andes. He was descended from two distinguished families that figured in the colonization, the Sarmientos and the Albarracines. The latter were descended from a Saracen chief, Al Ben Razin, who, in the middle of the twelfth century, conquered and gave name to a city, and founded a family which afterwards became Christian.
In 1846, Colonel Sarmiento went to see Arab life in the interior of Algiers; he found his family name familiar to the ears of the people, and was himself taken for an Arab, and told that he could easily be mistaken for one of the faithful. He was so ambitious as to emulate them in the wearing of their national garment, the bornoz; and in the exhilaration of the ride into the interior, under the Arab escort that the French commander had furnished him with, boasted that he could ride to the pyramids without halting. They took him at his word, and though the pyramids were not the goal sought, the feat nearly cost him his life; but the vigorous habits of his youth saved him. When he found himself in the tent of a Saracen chief, and looked about him to see the characteristic marks of Arab life, he was struck with amazement to find himself in the midst of surroundings so precisely like those of his native wild plains, that the conviction was brought forcibly home to him, that the gauchos of South America and the Arabs of Africa were one and the same people. It was a disheartening thought to him that he saw in these people one explanation of the difficulty of civilizing the engrafted population of those Spanish colonies, of which they were evidently the fountain-head, distilled through the Catholicism of Spain, and where, though they had perhaps lost the tradition of their origin, they had not lost the elements of vis-inertiæ, and repulsion to civilizing influences.
The Albarracines had the name of remarkable abilities, which had been transmitted from generation to generation, and in South America several distinguished writers were known among the Dominican friars that abounded in the family. Prelates and bishops, historians and logical writers were of the number, and they intermarried with a family of Oros, also of remarkable intellectual ability. The Oros, cousins of his mother, who were curates and friars of education, always had open house and hearts for the young Sarmiento, and their society helped to cultivate the faculties of the brilliant boy, in whom culminated the power of literary expression that had always marked the family. One of these able men, Don José de Oro, a clergyman, had much influence in the formation of his character. He had been chaplain of a regiment in San Martin's army.
After some patriotic efforts for his country in the wars against the Spaniards in Chili, he had left society and retired to the mountainous region of San Luis, where his nephew, then a boy, followed him, and spent three years in the closest intellectual and affectionate intimacy, studying Latin, and listening to the historical and literary reminiscences of the holy man, who fed the active and open mind of the precocious boy with precious principles and a good store of miscellaneous knowledge. History and the polity of governments grew to be the passion of the young Sarmiento's soul. The appearance of Facundo Quiroga and his hordes in his native province and city had made a profound impression upon him, and with the disastrous history of the colonization and of the internal wars of his own country as a point of departure, and the influence of his uncle's keen and vigorous intellect and free and generous views, he was prepared for that remarkable career which has separated him from the body of his contemporaries in letters, in politics, in the consecration of his life.
But I will not anticipate. The earlier domestic history of his life was a still more remarkable preparation. It is striking to see hoy great natures will mould even the most adverse circumstances. One can conceive of no circumstances more adverse to the growth of fine character than the isolated, provincial life of a Spanish colony, ruled by ecclesiastical domination, exercised over an uneducated mass like the remote descendants of Spaniards who have been cut off for two or three generations from means of improvement, and even from the knowledge of the world's progress. Yet here we find noble natures ready to respond to noble teachings.Doña Paula Albarracine was the daughter of Don Cornelio Albarracine, who once owned half the valley of La Zonda, and troops of carts and mules, but died after being bedridden for twelve years, leaving to his fifteen children an inheritance of poverty and various portions of wild land. But I leave the son to describe his own mother.
PREFACE TO "THE RECOLLECTIONS OF A PROVINCE."
"The following pages are purely confidential, addressed to a hundred persons only, and dictated by personal considerations.
"In a letter written to a friend of my childhood, in 1832, I had the indiscretion to call Facundo Quiroga a bandit. All Argentines, both in Europe and America, now agree that it was a just epithet, but at that time my letter was shown to a bad priest, who was President of a Chamber of Representatives. It was read in full session, a sentence was decreed against me, and they had the meanness to put it into the hands of the offended one, who, meaner still than his flatterers, insulted my mother, calling her opprobrious names, and assured her that he should kill me when he pleased, and wherever I could be found. This event, which made it forever impossible for me to return to my country if God did not dispose events differently from what man purposed to do, was repeated sixteen years later with consequences apparently still more alarming. In May, 1843, I wrote another letter to an old benefactor, in which I committed the indiscretion (for which I honor myself,) of characterizing and judging the government of Rosas, according to the dictates of my conscience, and this letter, like that of 1832, was sent to the very man upon whom the judgment was pronounced. All my countrymen know what followed. The government of Buenos Ayres published the letter, made a requisition for me upon the government of Chili, and sent the diplomatic note and the letter with a circular to the confederate governors. The governor of Chili answered, Rosas replied, the circulars were repeated, the answers of the governors of the interior were received; the system of giving publicity to all those meannesses which disgrace the human race more than they can any government, was continued, and apparently the farce will go on without its being possible for any one to foresee the denouement. The presses of all the neighboring countries have reproduced the publications of the government of Buenos Ayres, and in those thirty or more official notes, the name of D. F. Sarmiento has always been accompanied with the epithets, 'infamous, unclean, vile, savage,' with variations such as, 'traitor, madman, contemptible, arrogant' etc. I am thus characterized by men who do not know me, before people who hear my name for the first time. The desire of every good man not to be despised, the aspiration of a patriot to preserve the esteem of his fellow citizens, have induced me to publish this little book, which I abandon to its fate. It is difficult to speak of one's self, one's own good qualities, without exciting contempt and attracting criticism, sometimes with good reason; but it is more difficult to consent to dishonor, and to let even one's own modesty conspire to one's injury, and I have not hesitated a moment which to choose between these opposite extremes."
THE HISTORY OF MY MOTHER.
"I feel an oppression of the heart when I approach the facts I am now to record. The mother is to the man the personification of Providence; is the living earth to which the heart clings as roots to the soil. All who have written of their family, have spoken with tenderness of their mother. St. Augustine lauded his so highly, that the Church placed her at his side upon the altars. Lamartine has said so much of his mother in his 'Confidences,' that human nature has been enriched with one of the most beautiful types of the mother known to history; a mother adorable in the beauty of her countenance, and endowed with a heart which seems to be an unfathomable abyss of goodness, love, and enthusiasm, to say nothing of gifts of supreme intelligence which created the soul of Lamartine, that last offshoot of the old aristocratic society which was transfigured under the maternal wing into the angel of peace, destined to announce to unquiet Europe the advent of the Republic.
"To the affections of the heart, there is no mother equal to the one who has presided over our own fate, but when pages like Lamartine's have been read, all mothers do not leave such an image sculptured upon the mind; mine however, God knows, is worthy the honors of apotheosis, and I should not have written these pages if the vigor of her mind had not inspired me to vindicate myself against the injustice of fate in these last years of her laborious life.
"My poor mother! On the night when I descended from Vesuvius, the fever of the emotions I had felt during the day gave me a horrible nightmare instead of the sleep which my agitated limbs needed. The flames of the volcano, and the darkness of the abyss, mingled I know not what of absurd in the terrified imagination, and on waking from those distracting dreams, one idea alone possessed me, tenacious and persistent as a real fact my mother was dead! I wrote that night to my family; a fortnight after I bought a requiem mass in Rome, that the pensionists of Santa Rosa, my pupils, might sing it in her honor; and I made a vow, which I persevered in while I was under the influence of those sad impressions, to present myself in my country at some future day, and to say to Rosas and Benavides, and all my enemies (hangmen), 'You have had a mother; I come to honor the memory of mine; make a pause then in the brutalities of your policy; profane not an act of filial piety. Let me tell all men who this poor mother was that no longer exists;'—and as God lives, I would have fulfilled it as I have fulfilled so many other good vows, and as I will fulfill many others that I have made. Happily, I have her here at my side, and she instructs me in the events of other times unknown to me, forgotten by all. At seventy-six years of age my mother has crossed the Cordillera of the Andes to bid farewell to her son before descending to the tomb. This act alone may give an idea of the moral energy of her character. Each family is a poem, Lamartine has said, and mine is a sad, a luminous, and a useful one, like those distant paper lanterns of the hamlets, which serve to point the way to those who go astray in the fields.
"My mother preserves scarcely any traces of a severe and modest beauty, at this advanced age. Her lofty stature, her pronounced and bony form, her prominent cheekbones, the sign of decision and energy, are all the features of her exterior that deserve notice, unless it may be the prominent inequalities of her brow, so unusual in her sex. She knew how to read and write in her youth, but lost this facility from disuse in her old age. Her intellect has been little cultivated, and is destitute of all adornment, but so penetrating, that after listening to a class in grammar which I was instructing, while combing her fleeces of wool in the evening, she resolved all the difficulties which had puzzled her daughters, giving the definitions of nouns and verbs, tenses, and other accidents of speech, with rare sagacity and exactness. Apart from this, her soul, her science were educated to a degree of elevation which the loftiest knowledge could not attain by itself. I have been able to study this rare moral beauty, by seeing its operation in circumstances so difficult, so diverse, and so oft-repeated, without ever belying itself or losing its freshness and purity, or temporizing with circumstances, which with others would have sanctified the conceptions made so often in daily life; that here I would trace the genealogy of these moral ideas which were the healthy atmosphere my soul breathed while it was unfolding its powers at the domestic hearth.
"I firmly believe in the transmission of moral aptitude through the organization. I believe in the infusion of the spirit of one man, into the spirit of another, by means of speech and example. Those perverse mortals who rule nations, infect the atmosphere with the breath of their souls, and reproduce their own vices and defects. There are nations who reveal the characters of those who rule over them in all their acts; and the moral life of cultivated and free nations, their monuments and their instruction, preserve the maxims of great master-minds, and would not have arrived at their actual degree of perfection, if a particle of the spirit of Christ, for example, had not been introduced by teaching and preaching into each one of them, improving their moral natures. I wished to know then who had educated my mother, and from her conversation, from citations of the sayings of others, and from her general reminiscences, I have made out almost the whole history of a man of God, whose memory lives in San Juan, and whose doctrine is perpetuated more or less pure in the hearts of our mothers.
"I am suspicious that this holy man knew his eighteenth century, its Rosseau, its Feijoo,[1] and its philosophers as well as he did the Holy Scriptures. Don José Castro had scarcely been named curate, when he wielded the lash of his censure and prohibition upon all the brutal practices of the Church, such as flagellations which inflamed the back with merciless whips, fanatics harnesssed with bridles who walked on four feet, even penitent arm crossings on Holy Week, and processions of the Saints, and mummeries which made their grimaces before the Holy Sacrament. He used his influence also to put to flight the belief in fairies, ghosts, jack-o'-lanterns, and various creations of other religious faiths interpolated into our own in all Christian nations. To this end he used not only ridicule, but from the cathedral made patient and scientific explanations of the natural phenomena which gave rise to these errors. His criticisms also upon the affairs of life, and popular criticisms made without that grossness of censure which is common in ordinary preachers, worked so much more salutary effects since they came accompanied by ridicule so full of wit as to raise a general laugh in the church, he himself laughing till his eyes would fill with tears, adding new sallies, till the immense concourse of people, attracted by the delicious mirth of this comedy, relieved their hearts of every trace of ill-humor, and till the priest, having tranquilized all minds, would say, wiping his face, 'Come, children, we have laughed enough; now lend me your attention. By the sign of the holy cross,' etc., and then came the text of the lesson of the day, followed by a stream of serene and placid light, moral, practical, easily-understood commentaries, applicable to all the exigencies of life. . . . My mother's religion is the most genuine version of the
religious idea of Don José Castro, and I will appeal to the practice of her whole life to explain that religious reform founded in an obscure province, where it is preserved in many privileged souls.
. . . "My mother has few seasons of devotion, but those she has reveal the affinities of her mind to certain illusions, if I may so express myself; for instance, to her relation to the saints in heaven. The Virgin de Dolores is her mother of God. St. Joseph the carpenter, is her Holy Patron Saint, and St. Domingo and St. Vincent Ferras, Dominican friars, bound by many ties to the affections of the family, her order of priesthood. God himself, through all the vicissitudes of her anxious life, has been the true Holy One of her devotion under the invocation of Providence. In this character God entered into all the acts of that laborious life, and was present every day seeing her contests with indigence, and witnessing her accomplishment of her duties. Providence rescued her from all her troubles by visible manifestations authenticated to her. . . . Sometimes she would call the whole family together, when she would give utterance to a supplication full of unction and fervor, a true prayer to God, the purest emanation of a soul which overflowed with thanksgiving for the smallest benefits vouchsafed to her; for it must be said, the Divine beneficence was very scantily meted out to her. I have never seen this profound faith in Providence belie itself for one moment, but ever ward off despair, moderate anxiety, and give to suffering and misery the august character of a holy virtue, practiced with the resignation of a martyr, who does not protest, who does not complain, but hopes always, feeling himself consciously sustained, supported, approved. I know no more religions soul, and yet I have seen no other Christian woman more regardless of religious ceremonies."The curate Castro counseled the mothers not to compromise the decorum of their social position, by going in shabby guise into the street to attend mass, it being proper for a family to present itself always in public with that apparel and decency required by its rank; and this precept my mother followed in her days of extreme poverty, with the modesty and dignity that always characterized her actions. These lessons of profound wisdom were a small part of that seed sown by the holy man, and fructified by the common sense and the moral sentiment upon which it fell in the heart of my mother.
"When a woman of twenty-three years she undertook a work not so much beyond her strength as beyond the usual conceptions of an unmarried maiden. The year before, there had been a great dearth of anascotes, (a kind of woolen stuff that resembles serge, much used for the garments of the religious orders,) and from the proceeds of her weaving, my mother had amassed a small sum of money. With that, and two peons of her aunts, the Irrazavales, she laid the foundations of the house she was to occupy on forming a new family. As these scanty earnings were hardly sufficient for so costly a work, she established her loom under one of the fig-trees which she had inherited in her portion of land, and from there, while throwing her shuttle, she assisted the workmen and their peons in building the little dwelling; sold the cloth she had made in the week on Saturdays, and paid the workmen with the fruit of her labor. In those times an industrious woman—and all were so, even those born and reared in opulence—could depend upon herself to provide for her necessities. Commerce had not pushed its products into the interior of America, nor had European manufactures cheapened productions then as now. A yard of unbleached linen cloth was then worth eight reals for the first quality, five for the ordinary quality, and four for a yard of anascote, the thread being thrown in. My mother wove twelve yards per week, which was the pattern for the dress of a friar, and received six dollars on Saturday, not without trespassing upon the night, to fill the quills with thread for the work of the following day. . . . The branches of industry carried on by my mother are so numerous and so various, that their enumeration would fatigue the memory with names which now signify nothing. . .
"My family has preserved the reputation of industrial omniscience until my day, and the habit of laboring with her hands is an integral part of my mother's existence. We heard her exclaim at Aconcagua, in 1842, 'This is the first time in my life that I have sat down with folded hands!' And at seventy-six years of her age, it has been necessary, in order to prevent her falling into a decline, to invent occupations adapted to her impaired vision, among which are delicate handiwork for ornaments of ladies' dresses, and other superfluities.
"When her home was finished, she married Don José Clemente Sarmiento, my father, a genteel young man of a family which had fallen into decay like her own, and brought to him as a dowry, the chain of privations and miseries in which she passed long years of her life. My father was a man endowed with a thousand good qualities, which balanced others that without being evil, looked in another direction. Like my mother, he had been educated in the rude labors of that epoch, a workman on the paternal farm of La Bebida, a mule-driver in the carrier-trains. He was beautiful in countenance, and with an irresistible passion for the pleasures of youth, deficient in that mechanical constancy which makes fortunes. Inspired by the new ideas which had come in with the Revolution, he had an unconquerable hatred for material labor, unintellectually and rudely as he had been educated. I heard him say to the Presbyter Torres, speaking of me, 'O, no! my son shall never take a spade in his hand!' And the education he gave me showed that it was a fixed idea that had its birth in his profoundly mistaken views of life. In the bosom of poverty, he reared me an hidalgo, and my hands exercised no other forces than those required by my plays and pastimes. My father had one hand made useless by a callus he had acquired in labor.
"When the Revolution of Independence came, his excitable imagination made him waste, in services lent to his country, the small acquisitions he had made. After seeing in 1812 the miseries of Belgrano's army, he returned to San Juan, and undertook to make a collection for the Mother Country, as he was accustomed to call it, which proved quite abundant, and by the suggestion of jealous enemies was denounced to the Municipality as an act of spoliation. When the authorities inquired into the subject, they were so well satisfied, that he was charged with carrying his patriotic offering to the army in person, and this event gave him ever after the sobriquet of 'Mother Country', which, in his old age in Chili, was the origin of a calumny designed to injure his son.
"In 1817, he accompanied San Martin to Chili as an officer of militia in the mechanical service of the army, and from the field of battle of Chacabuco, he was dispatched to San Juan to carry the plausible news[2] of the triumph of the patriots. San Martin remembered him well in 1847,[3] and was much pleased to learn that I was his son.
"With these antecedents, my father passed his whole life in beginning speculations whose products were scattered in badly counseled moments. He worked with tenacity, and fell into discouragement; he again essayed his forces and struggled against every disadvantage, dissipating his energies in long journeys to other provinces, till after my arrival at manhood; and from that time he followed the fate of his son into camps, into banishment and emigration, watching over me like a guardian angel to avert if possible the dangers that threatened me.
"From this evil destiny of my father and the want of a persistent plan of action, the maintenance of the family fell, from the earliest period after marriage, upon the shoulders of my mother, my father only aiding her fruitful labors by occasional cooperation; and under the pressure of the want in which we were nurtured, I ever saw the shining light of that equanimity of mind, of that resignation armed with all the industrial means which she possessed, and of that confidence in Providence which was the best resource of her energetic soul against discouragement and despair. Winters came which the previous autumn had presaged would be scanty in the provision of the roots and dried fruits which were to meet the expenses, and like the pilot of an abandoned ship she prepared with solemn tranquillity to meet the storm. When the day of destitution came, her soul had braced itself to resignation by assiduous labor to meet the trial. She had wealthy relations; the parish curates were her brothers, but those brothers were ignorant of her sufferings. It would have derogated from the sanctity of the poverty which she combated with her labor, to have mitigated it by foreign intervention; it would have been asking quarter in those death-combats with her evil star.
"The fiesta of St. Peter was always celebrated by a splendid banquet given by our uncle the curate, and he knew the rights and the desire of the children of the family to participate in the festivities. Many times the curate asked, 'Why did I not see Domingo?' And to this day he supposes that it was obedience to my mother's orders, instead of poverty, which prevented our attendance.
"I must mention one more characteristic anecdote of my mother. She had a friend of her infancy from whom death separated her at the age of sixty. The two friends had always continued to visit each other, consecrating one whole day to the delight of fusing their families into one, and the same friendship has united the daughters of both. Her friend enjoyed the bounties of wealth, but on the day that my mother passed with her, our own servant went into the friend's kitchen to prepare all the food which we were to consume during the day, the protest of twenty years against the practice having never in the least changed my mother's firm and unalterable resolution, in order that the ineffable pleasure of seeing her friend should not be marred by the possible suspicion that she wished even for a day to lay aside the duty of sustaining her family, or to turn her face away from the inequalities of fortune. Thus was practised at the humble hearth of the family of which I made a part, the noble virtue of poverty. Happy are the poor who have had such a mother!"
"THE PATERNAL HEARTH."
"My mother's house, the fruit of her industry, whose sunburnt bricks and mud-walls might be computed in yards of linen, woven by her own hands to pay for its construction, has received in the course of the last few years some additions which confound it with other dwellings of a certain moderate rank. Its original form, however, is that to which the poetry of the heart clings, the indelible image which presents itself pertinaciously to my mind when I remember infant pleasures and pastimes, the hours of recreation after returning from school, the various places where whole hours and weeks were passed in ineffable beatitude, making mud saints to be worshipped when completed; or armies of soldiers of the same paste, to feed my pride by the exercise of so much power.
"Towards the southern part of the little territory of thirty yards by forty, was the habitation of the family, divided into two apartments, one serving as a dormitory for our parents, and the large one for the hall of reception, with its lofty dais and cushions, remnant of the tradition of the Arab divan, preserved by the Spanish people. Two tables of the indestructible carob-tree (algarroba), which had passed down from hand to hand since the time when there was no other wood in San Juan but the carob-trees of the fields, and a few chairs of various structure, flanked the hall, while two great pictures in oil of San Domingo and San Vicente Ferrar, adorned the otherwise bare walls; pictures shockingly painted, but most devoutly kept as heir-looms on account of their Dominican habit. At a short distance from the entrance door, the patriarchal fig-tree raised its deep green canopy, which even in my childhood shaded my mother's loom, whose strokes, and the noise of whose wheels, pedals, and shuttles, always waked us before sunrise, announcing that a new day had begun, and with it the necessity of providing for its wants by labor. Some branches of the fig-tree rubbed gently against the walls of the house, and heated by the reflection of the sun's rays, it anticipated the usual season, offering its mellow contribution of early figs to augment the rejoicing of the family on the 23d of November, my father's birthday. I linger with pleasure over these details, for saints and fig-tree were, at a later day, personages of a family drama in which colonial ideas struggled violently with more modern ones. Other industrial resources had their place on the narrow territory of twenty yards not occupied by the family mansion. Three orange-trees shed their fruit in autumn, their shade always. Under a corpulent peach-tree was a little pool of water for the solace of three or four geese, which multiplying, gave their contribution to the complicated and limited system of revenue, upon which reposed the existence of the family; and as all these means were insufficient, there was a garden of esculents of the size of a scapulary, surrounded by a paling, to shelter it from the voracity of the goslings, and which produced such vegetables as enter into South American cookery, the whole sparkling and illuminated by groups of common flowers, a mulberry-colored rose-bush, and various other flowering shrubs. This was a sample of the exquisite economy of land in a Spanish colonial family, and also of the inexhaustible productions which the country people of Europe know how to extract from it. The manure of the fowls and the horse which my father rode, passed daily into use, to give new vigor to that little spot of land which never wearied of yielding its varied and luxuriant growths, and when I wished to suggest to my mother some views of rural economy culled from books, I was deservedly treated as a pedant in the presence of that science of culture, which was the favorite pleasure and occupation of her long life. Now, at seventy-six years of age, if she escapes us from within our dwelling, she is sure to be found propping up some drooping plants, responding to our objections with the violence of feeling that possesses her on seeing them so maltreated.
"Yet in that Noah's ark there was some little corner where were steeped and prepared the colors with which she dyed her webs, and a vat of bran, from whence issued every week a fair proportion of exquisitely white starch. In prosperous times was added to these the manufacture of candles made by the hand, some attempt at baking bread, which always resulted in failure, and a thousand rural operations, which it would be superfluous to enumerate. Such varied occupations were not without method, beginning in the morning with feeding the goslings, gathering the vegetables before they were wilted by the sun, and then establishing herself at her loom, which for long years was her chief occupation. I have in my possession the shuttle of algarroba, polished and blackened by years, which she had inherited from her mother, who received it from her grandmother, a humble relic of colonial life, embracing a period of about two hundred years, during which noble hands had thrown it almost unweariedly; and although one of my sisters has inherited from my mother the habit and the necessity of weaving, my covetousness has prevailed, and I am still the depository of this family jewel. It is a pity that I can never be rich and powerful enough to imitate that Persian king who continued to use the clay pottery which had served him in childhood, in order that he might not grow proud and despise poverty.
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"Such was the domestic hearth near which I grew, and it is impossible that there should not be left, on a loyal nature, indelible impressions of morality, of industry, and of virtue, received in that sublime school in which the most laborious industry, the purest morality, dignity maintained in the midst of poverty, constancy, and resignation, divided all the hours. My sisters enjoyed the deserved reputation of being the most diligent and efficient girls in the whole province, and whatever feminine occupation required consummate skill, was always commended to these supreme artificers who could do everything which required patience and dexterity and very little money."
To complete this picture the author brings into view two accessory personages, "La Toribia," a Zamba domestic, "the key of the house, the right arm of her mistress, the bonne who brought us all up, the cook, the messenger, the huckstress, the washer and ironer, the maid of all work. She died young, nor was her place ever filled, either in the domestic economy or in the heart of my mother, for they were two friends, mistress and maid, two fellow-laborers who discussed together the means of maintaining the family, wrangled, disputed, dissented, and each one then followed her own opinion, both leading to the same end." The other personage was "Na Cleme, the pauper that hung upon the family, for my mother, like the Rigoleta of Sue, who never hoarded anything, had her poor also, whom she helped to live by her scraps." But the family servant and the family pauper, supposed by some to be a witch, and apparently of that opinion herself, must be banished from our pages, although the beneficent relations of the mother to them add another trait to a noble portraiture.
"Our habitation remained as I have described it, until the day when my two elder sisters arrived at the marriageable age, when an interior revolution began which cost two years of debate, and showers of tears to my mother, on finding herself conquered by a new world of ideas, habits, and tastes, which were not those of the colonial existence, of which she was the last and most finished type. The first symptoms of those social revolutions operated by human intelligence in the great foci of civilization are very common and pass unperceived; they extend through the common people, insinuate themselves into ideas, and infiltrate into the customs. The eighteenth century had glittered over France, and undermined the ancient traditions, cooled off faith, and excited hatred and contempt for things hitherto venerated. Its political theories had overturned governments, unbound Spanish America, and opened its colonies to new customs and new habits of life. The time was coming when the industrious life of American women was to be looked upon disdainfully, and with an evil eye; when French fashions were to prevail, and an anxiety for display in the multiplication and distribution of luxuries were to take possession of the domestic circle, when the dining-hour must be delayed from twelve o'clock to two or even four in the afternoon. Who does not know some of those good old people of the ancient stamp, who live, proud of their opulence, in an unencumbered apartment, furnished with four dusty leather chairs, the floor covered with spent cigars, and the table ornamented solely with an enormous inkstand, whose goose-quills, or perchance, condor-quills, are crystallized with dried ink. This was the general aspect, the family picture of colonial life. It is described in the novels of Scott and Dumas, and living proofs of it are still seen in Spain and in South America, the last of the old peoples who have been called upon to rejuvenate themselves. These ideas of regeneration and personal improvement, this impiety of the eighteenth century, entered, who would believe it, into the heads of my two elder sisters. Scarcely arrived at the age when woman feels that her existence is bound to society, which is the end and object of this existence, they began to aspire to new ideas of beauty, of taste, of comfort, which the atmosphere diffused by the revolution had wafted to them. The walls of the common sitting-room were smoothed and whitened anew; a thing to which no reasonable opposition could be offered, but the mania extended to the destruction of the raised dais that occupied one side of the hall, with its carpet and its cushions, a divan as I said before, which came down to us from our Arabic ancestors, a privileged spot on which women alone were permitted to sit, and in whose spacious circumference, reclining upon ottomans, the visitors and hosts carried on their lively chit-chat, that indescribable medley of womanly talk.
"Why has the poetical dais been allowed to disappear from our houses, so convenient for sitting, so adequate for feminine repose, to substitute in its place, chairs, in which one by one or in rows, like soldiers in platoons, the eye reviews the company in our modern saloons? But that dais expressed that man might not publicly approach the young ladies, talk freely, and mix, freely with them, as our modern customs permit, and it was therefore repudiated by themselves, as easily as it had been formerly accepted as a privilege. The dais then yielded its place in the house to the more modern fashion of chairs, notwithstanding the feeble resistance of my mother, who enjoyed sitting upon one extreme of it in the morning to take her cup of mate, with her brazier and boiler of water on the lower step before her, or to reel her cottons or to fill her quills over night for the web of the following day. Not being accustomed to work upon a high seat, she was obliged to adopt the use of a carpet to supply the loss of the dais, which she lamented many long years.
"My sisters' spirit of innovation at last attacked sacred objects. I protest that I did not take part in this sacrilege which the poor little things committed, in obedience to the spirit of the time. Those two saints, so grand, so ancient, Santo Domingo and San Vicente Ferrar, decidedly marred the walls. If my mother could but consent that they should be taken down, and put into a sleeping-room, the little house would take a new aspect of modern and elegant refinement, for it was under the seducing form of good taste, that this iconoclastic impiety of the eighteenth century found its way into the house. Ah, what wounds that error dealt upon the bosom of Spanish America! The South American Colonies had been founded at an epoch when the Spanish fine arts showed proudly to Europe the pencils of Murillo, Velasquez, and Sambrano, as well as the swords of the Duke of Alva, the great captain, and of Cortez. The possession of Flanders added to its products those of Flemish engraving, which, painted in rough lineaments and crude colors the religious scenes which were the foundation of the national poetry. Murillo, in his early years, made innumerable virgins and saints for South America; the second-rate painters sent it whole lives of saints for the convents, the passion of Jesus Christ in immense galleries of pictures, and Flemish engraving, as now French lithography, put within reach of moderate fortunes the history of the Prodigal Son, and virgins and saints of as many types as the calendar furnishes. The walls of our ancestors' and fathers' apartments were tapestried with these images, and not rarely the practiced eye of an artist could discover some line of a master-hand in the midst of all this rubbish. But the revolution pointed its finger against the religious emblems. Ignorant and blind in its antipathies, it averted its eyes from painting which was Spanish, colonial, ancient, and irreconcilable with the new ideas. Devout families hid their pictures of the saints, not to show the bad taste of preserving them; and in San Juan, and other places, there were those who used the canvas for trowsers for their slaves. What treasures of art must have been lost by these stupid profanations in which all South America was an accomplice, for there was a period at which everywhere at once prevailed the fatal demolition of that luxuriant vegetation of the past artistic glory of Spain! European travellers, who passed through South America twenty years ago, collected at very low prices inestimable works of the best masters, which they found cast aside as useless lumber covered with dust and cobwebs; and when the day of the resurrection of the arts came to South America, when the bandage fell from the eyes of the people, the churches, the rising museums, and the amateurs found from time to time some picture of Murillo to expose to view, asking pardon for the injustice of which it had been the victim, now restored to public consideration, and to the lofty position which corresponded to its merits.
| · | · | · | · | · | · | · |
"The strife went on, therefore, between my poor mother, who loved her two Dominican saints as members of her family, and my young sisters who sacrificed the laws of the house to good appearances and the prejudices of the times. Every day, at all hours, under every pretext, the debate was renewed, some threatening glance was cast at the saints, as if to say, "you must leave your places vacant;" while my mother contemplated them with tender looks, exclaiming, "Poor saints! how badly they treat you when you harm no one!" But by this continuous battery, the ear became accustomed to the reproach, resistance was weaker every day, for if they were looked upon as indispensable objects of religion, it was not necessary that they should be in the parlor; the sleeping apartment was a much more appropriate place of worship, where their blessing could be invoked upon the very bed. As a family legacy, they were subject to the same arguments, while as an ornament they were in the worst taste; and from one concession to another, my mother's mind relented little by little, and one morning when her resistance would go no further than the wringing of her hands, when the guardian of that fortress returned from mass, her eyes expanded to see the bare walls where the great black patches had been before. My saints were then removed to the sleeping apartment, and to judge by their faces the change made no great impression upon them. My mother knelt weeping before them to ask their pardon by her prayers, remained out of humor and querulous all day, sad the following day, but resigned the next, till at last time and habit brought the balm which makes bearable the greatest misfortunes. This signal victory gave new animation to the spirit of reform, and after the divan and the saints, in an evil hour, the threatening glance fell upon the fig-tree that stood in the middle of the court-yard, discolored and knotty, by dint of dryness and old age. The matter being looked upon in this aspect, the fig-tree was condemned in the public conception: it sinned against all the rules of decorum and decency; but with my mother it was an economical question which affected her, as well as one which deeply affected her heart. Ah! would that the maturity of my own heart could have been anticipated and brought to her aid, but selfishness made me indifferent to her feelings, or weakly inclined me in her favor for the sake of the early figs! They wished to separate her from that beloved companion in the flower of its life and strength. Ripe age wreathes associations around everything which surrounds us; the domestic hearth is a living being; a tree which we have seen planted, grow, and arrive at maturity, is a person endowed with life, which has acquired rights to existence that it reads in our hearts, and can accuse us as ingrates, and would leave remorse in the conscience if we should sacrifice without a legitimate reason. The sentence of the old fig-tree was discussed for two years, and its champion, wearied with the struggle, abandoned it to its fate; but on making the preparations for its execution, the sentiments which had been outraged in her heart, glowed with new force, and she obstinately refused to permit the destruction of that witness and companion of her labors. One day, however, when the revocation of the permission had lost all its prestige, the blows of the hatchet upon the venerable trunk of the tree, and the rustling of the leaves shaken by the shock, the last sighs of the victim, were heard through the house. It was a sad, sad moment, a scene of mourning and repentance. The blows of the fig-slaying hatchet[4] also shook the heart of my mother; the tears rushed to her eyes, as the sap of the tree to the wound, and her sobs responded to the trembling of the leaves. Every new blow brought a new burst of grief, and my sister and I, repenting too late for having given such acute pain, burst into weeping, the only reparation now possible. The suspension of the work of destruction was ordered, as the family prepared to rush into the yard, and put a stop to the painful re-percussions of the hatchet upon my mother's heart. Two hours afterwards, the fig-tree lay prostrate upon the ground, displaying its hoary head as the fading leaves showed the knotty frame-work of that structure, which for so many years had lent its aid to the protection and sustenance of the family. "After these great reforms, the humble habitation went on slowly and painfully enlarging itself. It fell to me to have the happiness of introducing one substantial change. On the border of our little homestead spot was a piece of ground my father had purchased in a moment of comparative ease. I was an apprentice in a small commercial establishment when sixteen years old. My first plans and economies had for their object the fencing in of this lot of territory, that it might be made productive to the family, and place it beyond the reach of indigence, although it could not make it pass out of the limits of poverty. My mother now had at her disposal a theatre worthy of her agricultural knowledge; to the decrepid fig-tree succeeded in her affections a hundred young trees, whose growth her maternal eye fostered. Hours of every day were consecrated to this plant and to that vine, upon which the family was in future to depend, for a portion of its sustenance.
"When I had accomplished this work, I could say in my joy at having produced such a result, I saw that it was good, and I was happy."
"MY EDUCATION.
"In a school, the details of which I have mentioned elsewhere,[5] and where I entered at five years of age, I remained nine years without having missed a single day, under any pretext, for my mother was there to see that I should fulfill my duty of punctuality, under the penalty of her indescribable severity. At five years of age, I read fluently, in a loud voice, with intonations and emphasis that only a complete comprehension of the subject could give, and so uncommon was this early skill at that period, that I was carried from house to house to display my reading, reaping a great harvest of cakes, embraces, and encomiums, which filled me with vanity." In a letter to his uncle,[6] the illustrious Bishop of Cuyo, written after seeing Pompeii, our author describes himself again with much liveliness.
"I want your highness to do an act of justice in San Juan, seizing by the ear our cousin M. It was your illustrious highness who, when curate, put a little book into my hand, remarking to some one at the same time I have not forgotten it, because I have not forgotten you that at the age of four years I had the reputation of being the most troublesome and vociferous reader you had ever seen. The crude notions which I acquired by my habits of early reading, wandered a long time in my mind, like the clouds in space when they meet with no point of support to form a nucleus, till some little book which accident placed in my hands came to fill a vacuum, or some other, later, to explain a passage not well understood. I had many historical notions at that age, when the generality of children are thinking only of their plays; and now that I have visited Rome I have been able to recognize at first sight, by the image engraven in my memory from the earliest childhood, in which I passed hours poring over a Roman Guide Book, and which was the first book I owned, the monuments I met with. I do not know how nor when I read an account of the ruins of Pompeii, but not being able to keep to myself the novelty and wonder it excited, I attacked people in the street to tell them the portentous story. I told it thus to our cousin M., and instead of standing with open mouth as I had promised, he burst into a fit of laughter; and whenever he saw me where people were assembled, he made me tell the story of Pompeii for the general diversion. I have now seen that Pompeii which so preoccupied my childhood, and it reminds me of the incredulity of M."
From this digression we return to his little book.
"Apart from a natural faculty of comprehending what I read, I had a secret background of images of which the public was ignorant. My poor father, ignorant himself, but solicitous that his children should not be so, sharpened at home this rising thirst for knowledge, and made me read, without pity for my tender years, the 'Critical History of Spain,' in four volumes, the 'Desiderio and Electo,' and other abominable books which I never turned to again, but which left in my mind confused ideas of history, allegories, fables, countries, and proper names. I owe thus to my father that love of reading which has been the constant occupation of my life, and although he could not give me an education because of his poverty, he gave me by his paternal solicitude the powerful instrument by which I have supplied the want through my own efforts, thus fulfilling the most constant and earnest of his wishes.
"I never knew how to spin a top, to bat a ball, to fly a kite, or had any inclination for such boyish sports. At school I learned how to copy the knaves from cards, and afterwards made a copy of San Martin on horseback, from the paper lantern of a grocer, and from acquisition to acquisition, I succeeded, after ten years of perseverance, in divining all the secrets of making caricatures. In a family visit on one occasion, at the house of Doña Barbara Icaste, I occupied the day in copying the face of a San Jeronimo, and that type once acquired, I reproduced it distinctly in the faces of all ages and sexes. My teacher, weary of correcting me in this pastime, concluded by resigning himself to it, and respecting the instinctive mania. When I had an opportunity to be instructed in drawing, the will to perfect myself in it was unfortunately wanting. But later in life I spread through my province a taste for that graphic art, and under my direction or inspiration were formed half a dozen artists, which San Juan now possesses. But that taste was converted in my youth into one for sculpture, which took two different forms, and I made saints and soldiers, the two great objects of my childish fancy.
"My mother raised me with the persuasion that I should be a clergyman, and the curate of San Juan, in imitation of my uncle; and my father had visions for me of military jackets, gold lace, sabres, and other accoutrements to match. Through my mother, I was to follow colonial vocations; through my father, the ideas and preoccupations of that revolutionary epoch were infiltrated into me; and obeying these contradictory impulses, I passed my leisure hours in beatific contemplation of my mud saints, duly painted, leaving them in turn quiet in their niches to give battle in front of the house between two armies which my neighbors and I had been preparing for perhaps a month before by a large hoarding of wax balls, in order to thin out the bedaubed files of shapeless puppet soldiers.
"I should not relate these trifles if they had not, later in life, taken colossal forms and prefigured one of those remembered events which even at this day make me palpitate with glory and vanity. . . . In regard to my sacerdotal vocation, I assisted when a boy of thirteen at a pious chapel in the house of the humpbacked Rodriguez, capable of holding twenty persons, and endowed with a sacristy, belfry, and other requisites, with candlesticks, thuribles, and musical bells made by Don Javier Jofre's negro, Rufino, and of which we made an enormous consumption in pealings and processions. The chapel was consecrated to our family patron, St. Domingo, I administering for two years the august dignity of Provincial of the order of Preachers, by acclamation of the chapter, and to the great edification of the devotees. The friars of the convent of St. Domingo came to hear me sing the mass in which I parodied my uncle, the curate, who sang very well, and I, being his acolyte, watched all the mechanism of the mass, not forgetting to mark the page in the missal in which were the gospel and epistle of the day, in order to reproduce them in perfection in my private mass.
"On Sunday afternoons, the Provincial transformed himself into the general-in-chief of an army of boys, and woe to those who dared to make front to that rain of stones which issued from the bosom of my phalanx."
I omit the details of the boyish battle our autobiographer describes, in which he showed the determination and pluck which have characterized all his maturer acts. I omit it (his later ones were undertaken in better causes), fearing the publication of it might not receive his sanction, though he amused himself and his "hundred friends" with the relation; all the personages engaged in it being probably well known to them.
"This ends what I call the colonial history of my family. What follows, is the slow and painful transition from one mode of life to another, the life of the rising Republic, the struggle of parties, civil war, proscription, and banishment. To the family history succeeds as atmosphere and theatre of action, the history of my native country. I succeed to my progenitors, and I believe that by following my footsteps as those of another in that path, the curioso may linger over the events which form the general picture, incidents of the country known to all, objects of general interest, by the examination of which, the items of my biography, valueless for themselves, will serve as a thread of connection; for in my life, so destitute of aid, so full of contrarieties, and yet so persevering in its aspiration for all that is noble and elevated, may be seen depicted that unhappy South America, agitating itself in its condition of nothingness, making supreme efforts to unfold its wings, lacerating itself at every attempt against the iron bars of the prison in which it is chained.
"Strange emotions must indeed have agitated the souls of our fathers in 1810. The twilight perspective of a new epoch, liberty, independence new words then must have made their fibres tremble deliciously, powerfully excited their imaginations, and sent the blood rushing wildly through their hearts. That year, what anxiety, what happiness, what enthusiasm! There is a story of a king, who trembled like an aspen at the sight of a naked dagger, the effect of his mother's emotions when she carried him under her bosom, and in whose arms a man was stabbed. I was born in 1811, the ninth month after the 25th of May, and my father had thrown himself into the revolution, and my mother was agitated every day by the momentary news of the progress of the insurrection. Before I could speak plainly, they began to familiarize my eyes and my tongue with the alphabet, such was the eagerness with which the colonials who already felt themselves to be citizens fell to educating their children, as may be seen by the decrees of the gubernatorial junta and the other governments of that epoch.
"Full of this holy spirit, the government of San Juan, sent, in 1816, for some men from Buenos Ayres, worthy by their education and moral character to be teachers in Prussia, and on the opening of the school of La Patria, I passed immediately into the troop of four hundred children of all ages and conditions, who were eager to receive the only solid instruction which has been given amongst us in primary schools. The memory of Don Ignacio, and Don José Jenaro Rodriguez, still awaits the reparation due to their immense, their holy services; and I must not die until my country has fulfilled that sacred duty. The sentiment of equality was developed in our hearts by the epithet of Señor, which we were obliged to give each other without regard to condition or race; and by the morality of manners, stimulated by the example of the master; the oral lessons, and the punishments which were only severe and humiliating when inflicted for crimes. . . . When a pupil of the reading school, an elevated seat was constructed at the end of the hall, a sort of throne accessible by steps, and I was placed upon it with the name of 'FIRST CITIZEN.' Don Ignacio Rodriguez, who is still living, can tell if the seat was made for me. A youth named Domingo Moron succeeded me in that honorable place, and it afterwards fell into disuse. This circumstance and the consequent publicity acquired from that time, the praises of which I was always the object and the witness, must have contributed to give to my manners a character of fatuity of which I was not made aware until much later in life. From a child, I believed in my talents, as a rich man does in his money, or a soldier in his warlike deeds. Every one said so, and in nine years of school-life, there were not a dozen out of two thousand children who were before me in their capacity to learn, notwithstanding that at last I hated the school, as well as grammar, algebra, and arithmetic. My school morality also must have become slack by this eternal school-life, for I remember that I finally fell into disfavor with the master. . . .
"It is a deserved tribute to my mother to say that we were brought up in a holy horror of falsehood. I was always distinguished in school for exemplary veracity, and the masters rewarded it by proposing me as a model to others, praising me, and quoting me with encomiums, so that the purpose of being always truthful was deepened more and more in me; a purpose which has formed the foundation of my character, and to which all the acts of my life have testified.
"My school apprenticeship was concluded by one of those acts of injustice so frequent, from which I have guarded myself carefully whenever I have been in similar circumstances. Don Bernardino Rivadavia (then President),— that unfortunate educator whose well-chosen plans were trampled under foot by the horses of Quiroga, Lopez, Rosas, and all the chiefs of the barbarous reaction movement,—summoned from each province six youths of known talents to be educated by the nation, in order that when their studies were concluded, they might return to their respective cities, to assume scientific professions and give lustre to their country. He asked that they should be from decent but poor families, and Don Ignacio Rodriguez came to my father to tell him that my name headed the list of chosen children whom the nation was about to take under its wing. But the covetousness of the rich interfered: lots were drawn; all the city went to the registering, and a list of candidates was made out, and the election was made by ballot. Fortune was not the patron of my family, and I was not one of the six favored ones. What a day of sadness to my parents was that on which the fatal notice came to them! My mother wept in silence! My father buried his face in his hands.
"But the fate that had been unjust to me, was not so to the province, although it knew not how to take advantage, in later days, of the riches that were in preparation for it. The lot fell to Antonio Aberastain, as poor a boy as myself, endowed with remarkable talents, an iron application to study, and a moral sentiment which has made him a shining example to this day. No one knows better than I the depths of his character: we were friends from infancy; I, his protegé in the adult school, when in 1836, we both arrived in San Juan, he from Buenos Ayres, I from Chili; he began to lend me the support of his influence, to raise me in his arms every time the malicious envy of the village overwhelmed me with a wave of disfavor or jealousy, every time that the leveller vulgarity persisted in reducing me to the common herd. Supreme Judge of Doctor Alzadas, he was always there defending me against the rich young men who wished to throw obstacles in my path. I have owed to this good man, even the marrow of my bones. He was full of energy without the appearance of it, humble even to self-annihilation. To him, and to another man in Chili, I owed still later my own self-estimation, by the proofs they lavished upon me of theirs, both serving and upholding me more than a fortune could have done. The esteem of the good acts as galvanism. A glance of benevolence from them can say to Lazarus, 'Arise and walk!' I have never loved any one as I loved Aberastain; no man has left deeper traces of respect and admiration upon my heart.
"After he left San Juan, the Supreme Tribunal of Justice was administered by men without professional education, and often so unfit, poor fellows, that they would have been stupid mule-drivers. Ultimately the honorable House of Representatives declared that even in default of Sanjuanino advocates, no foreigner could be a judge, that is to say, no individual of another confederate province, and this legislative act shows the perversion of mind into which these people have fallen."[7]
On the occasion of laying the corner-stone of the "Sarmiento School" in San Juan, in 1864,—a splendid edifice built within the walls of an abandoned church, partly erected many years before,—Colonel Sarmiento thus speaks of the influence of school-days upon his life."The inspiration to consecrate myself to the education of the people, came to me here in my youth. My labor of thirty years, that of serving the countries where I resided with schools, turns now to its point of departure, to the very simple idea of the importance of primary school education over all other education, to insure the happiness of nations. If I had been born in Buenos Ayres, or Cordova, or in Santiago de Chili, the primary education of this part of the country would not have arrived at this point when all are striving for that end. I should have been preoccupied with the brilliant university, and should have aspired to its honors. But I was born and educated amidst the people of a province where there was no other education than that of the public school, and the 'Escuela de la Patria' was one of the first order, without a rival in any private one, conducted by a man so respected by the people and the government, that at that time the schoolmaster was looked upon as one of the first magistrates of the province. Observe, then, by what singular circumstances the school, as an institution, was destined to acquire in my mind that supreme importance which I have never ceased to give it; and how, at the close of my travels, I found in the United States that the school occupied the same place as in San Juan, and brought forth like results. The truth is, that the first ideas in the child's mind keep the same relative position always, and however slightly they meet with confirmation, grow and develop, and determine the career in life. If I should express all my thoughts, I should say that the School of La Patria, in San Juan, associated in my mind with the recollections of the only form of education with which I was acquainted, went forth with me from this province, and accompanied me in all my wanderings. In Chili it took the form of normal schools; in Europe I connected it with the study of legislation; in the United States with the spectacle of its wonderful results, of its temple school-houses, and of the prominent place it holds among the institutions of that country. In Buenos Ayres I reproduced it as a seed sown in propitious ground, and I return to do the same to-day in San Juan, by reestablishing the School of La Patria, completed as an educational institution, and also as a democratic one, and I bring to it all the acquisitions made in my long and various travels. No longer confined to three halls that contained in all but three hundred pupils, we have here an edifice that will enable us to throw off the swaddling-clothes of infancy. To-day we lay the stone which consecrates to education these beginnings of an unfinished temple. And that you may see how advanced ideas have grown, I will repeat to you what I have replied to those who have wished this edifice kept to its first destination, and who yet abandoned it to sterility and destruction.
"At the corner of the next block, thirty steps from here, thirty years ago, I was a merchant's clerk, and here pursued my solitary studies. Even at that time, I saw that a spacious school-house might be erected within these walls, and with your assistance I now realize my thought after the delay of so many years.[8]
"Observe another class of ideas and events that deserve to be recorded. If the School of La Patria inspired me with this high estimation of primary education which has distinguished me from the generality of the men of my epoch, in my country, its excellence did not come of itself, nor from the advanced condition of the provinces. It was due to a respected family from Buenos Ayres whose head was Don Ignacio Firmen Rodriguez, of venerated memory among Sanjuaninos, and whose image is to-day recalled to you by the foundation of a new school, the continuation of his work. I was asked at Buenos Ayres how it was possible that in the year 1818, so near our middle ages, we had schools and masters so advanced. This question was also put to me during my travels in America and Europe, after I found in Chili and even in Buenos Ayres itself, less advanced public schools than I had left here in my childhood, schools to be compared only with those of Germany and the United States.
"My master explained it to me in the last years of his life, feeling unwilling to accept all the eulogies with which my gratitude and my admiration sought to make his merits known. His explanation was that he had read Scotch treatises upon instruction, and had conformed himself to their principles. In fact, primary education in Scotland has been far superior to that of England, and this was proved from early times by its institutions and science D. Ignacio, for thus he was always called, read, wrote, and ciphered perfectly. He dictated and sent to the press in Buenos Ayres, a grammar, an orthography, and a treatise upon arithmetic. Later, he taught algebra and some geography.
"One year I saw a book upon his table, which showed that he did not yet know Latin, and proposed to learn it.
"He was religious, which appeared less in ceremonies than in precepts, and explanations of the catechism, and especially in the frequent inculcation of the principles of morality.
"His special quality as a master was to. inspire respect, and I ought to say that all education is vain in the presence of a deficiency of this quality as is the case in the generality of masters. To-day, for instance, there is not a single master in San Juan who possesses this primary qualification of his profession.
"In the absence of D. Ignacio, his influence, his shadow, I may say, presided over the school. A dull murmur of conversation might be heard; but it did not come to be noisy, and never rose to a shout; as soon as he was seen to pass by the window, that suppressed murmur began to subside and became silence, and this silence was never disturbed by any one in his presence; there was no necessity of calling to order, to which our masters recur in vain. I preserve still the almost religious impression of this respect which he inspired in us all, without exception, a respect which we saw at home was mixed with love, and which accompanied us to adult years, although many of his pupils have occupied stations more exalted as to social position than his own.
"The sphere of his instruction Jwas not very extensive, but as we only learn by having our intelligence developed, his mode of teaching went straight to the object, and whatever he taught we learned well, because he cultivated the thinking powers from the beginning. In San Juan there were fine readers taught by a new and easy method, long before they could be found in Chili, and the Sanjuaninos of those times were better spellers than there are to-day among the cultivated youth of Buenos Ayres.[9] At first he tried the system of emulation; his pupils were Carthagenians and Romans; but later he modified this system by giving to each pupil one opponent who always ended by being his best friend. At last he adopted Lancaster's method. But the system which he used to perfection was that of simultaneous recitation.
"He tried every system of punishments during the nine years that I was his pupil, according as his views improved, but he never deprived himself of the resource of corporal chastisement, in cases where he deemed it necessary.
"A thousand qualities distinguished this man from the generality of teachers, and established his superiority. Most of his teaching was oral, especially in grammar and arithmetic, and was reasoned out and duly exemplified.
"D. Ignacio has gone to his grave, but his spirit is enshrined in the hearts of a people who preserve the traditions of popular education. His pupils have diffused it, and San Juan and Buenos Ayres, by their improvements in education, testify to the service of the Rodriguez family of blessed memory.
"I have digressed into these details, although by so doing I have detained you too long, in order to rouse you to a great and noble effort. San Juan was the first Argentine province, as I have shown you, which after the revolution of independence elevated primary education to the highest grade of perfection possible at that epoch. From San Juan went forth the impulse which in these later days has stimulated two republics. San Juan owes it to herself to reestablish the fame of her ancient school, and permit me to say, that it is the duty of my country and my compatriots to aid me in the full development of a system of common school education which shall put the seal upon the work of thirty years of my life."
"In regard to my education," he continues, "it may be said that fate intervened to dog my steps. I next went to the seminary of Loreto in Cordova, but was obliged to return without entering, for the revolution of Carita left me without a Latin teacher. In 1825, I began to study mathematics and surveying under M. Barreau, engineer of that province. Together we drew up the plan of the streets of Roji, Desemparados, and Santa Barbara, and from there round to the Pueblo Rajo, and I alone, my teacher having abandoned me, that of the Cathedral Santa Lucia and Legua. That same year I went to San Luis to continue with the clergyman Oro the education which the revolution of 1824 had interrupted. A year later I was summoned by the government to be sent to the College of the Moral Sciences, and arrived at San Juan, after having once refused to go, at the moment when the lancers of Facundo Quiroga appeared from the dusty wood, fluttering their sinister banners through the streets. The next year I entered a commercial house as a timid apprentice,—I, who had been educated by the presbyter Oro, in solitude which so develops the imagination, dreaming of congresses, war, glory, liberty, in short, of the Republic. I was sad for many days, and, like Franklin, whom his parents destined for a soap-boiler, but who was destined to rob the heavens of their lightnings, and tyrants of their sceptres, I 'took an aversion to the road that leads to fortune.' In my musings, in hours of idleness, I returned to the fields of San Luis, where I wandered through the woods with my Latin grammar in my hand studying mascula sunt maribus, and interrupting the repetition by throwing stones at the birds. I missed that sonorous voice which had for two whole years sounded in my ears, placid, friendly, moving my heart-strings, calling out my sentiments, elevating my mind. The reminiscences of that oral shower which fell every day upon my soul, presented themselves like the pictures of a book whose significance we comprehend by the action of the figures. Peoples, history, geography, religion, morals, politics, all these were annotated as in an index, but I missed the book, which gave the details, and I was alone in the world in the midst of parcels of condiments and pieces of chintz, which I was to measure out by the yard to those who came to buy them. But there must be books, I said, which treat specially of all things and teach them to children, and if one understands what he reads, he can learn them without the assistance of a master,—and I rushed to seek those books, and in that remote province, in that hour of taking my resolution, I found what I sought, such as I had conceived it, prepared by exiled patriots who wished well to America, and who had foreseen from London this necessity of South America to educate itself, and responding to my importunities had sent me the catechisms of Akermann which Don Tomas Rojo had introduced into San Juan. 'I have found it,' I could exclaim like Archimedes, for I had foreseen, sought and found those catechisms which later in the year 1829, I gave to Don Saturnino Laspiar for the education of his children.[10] There was ancient history, and that Persia, and that Egypt, those Pyramids, and that Nile, of which the clergyman Oro had told me. I studied the history of Greece by heart, and then that of Rome, feeling myself to be successively Leonidas and Brutus, Aristides, Camillus, Harmodius, and Epaminondas; and this while I was selling herbs and sugar, and making grimaces to those who came to draw me from my newly-discovered world where I wished to live. In the mornings after sweeping the shop, I read, and as a certain Senora passed by on her way from church, and her eyes always fell, day after day, month after month, upon that boy, immovable, insensible to every disturbance, his eyes fixed upon a book, one day, shaking her head, she said to her family, 'That lad cannot be good—if those books were good he would not read them so eagerly!'
"From that time I read every book that fell into my hands, without arrangement, with no other guide than the chance which brought them to me, or the knowledge I had acquired of their existence in the scanty libraries of San Juan. The first was the 'Life of Cicero' by Middleton, with very fine plates, and in that book I lived a long time with the Romans. If I had then had half the means of doing it, I should have studied law to make myself an advocate and defend causes like that distinguished orator who was the object of my passionate love. The second was the 'Life of Franklin,' and no book has ever done me more good. The 'Life of Franklin' was to me what 'Plutarch's Lives ' were to Rousseau, Henry IV., Madame Roland, and so many others. I felt myself to be Franklin,—and why not? I was very poor like him, I studied like him, and following in his footsteps, I might one day come, like him, to be a doctor ad honor em! and to make myself a place in letters and American politics. The 'Life of Franklin' should be in every primary school. His example is so inspiring, the career he ran so glorious, that there would not be a boy at all well-inclined who would not try to be a little Franklin, through that noble tendency of the human mind to imitate models of perfection that commend themselves to it. Holy aspirations of the young soul for the beautiful and the perfect! Where among our books is the type, the practical possible model, which shall guide them? Our preachers propose to us the saints of heaven, that we may imitate their ascetic virtues and scourgings, but however well-intentioned a boy may be, he soon renounces the pretension to perform miracles, for the simple reason that those who counsel him to try it, do not perform any themselves."
It was at this time that he read the Bible with his uncle the presbyter Albarracin, Paley's "Natural Theology and Evidences of Christianity," "The True Idea of the Holy See," and "Feijoo" (a Catholic writer who tried to reason away many of the superstitious observances of the Church, and came very near falling into the hands of the Inquisition for so doing). This completed that eminently religious and raisonneé education which had come to him from the cradle, transmitted from his mother to the schoolmaster, from his mentor Oro to the Presbyter Albarracin.
PUBLIC LIFE.
"At sixteen I entered prison, and came out of it with political opinions diametrically opposed to those of Silvio Pellico, to whom prisons taught the moral of resignation and self-annihilation. From the time 'My Prisons' fell into my hands, I was inspired with a horror of that doctrine of moral discouragement which it went forth to preach through the world, and which was so acceptable to kings, who felt that they were threatened by the energy of their people. How would the human race have advanced, if in order to comprehend the interests of their country, men needed to have spiritual exercises in the dungeons of Spielberg, the Bastille, and Santos Lugares? Woe to the world if the Czar of Russia, the Emperor of Austria, or the tyrant Rosas could teach morality to mankind! Silvio Pellico's book is the death of the soul, the morality of dungeons, the slow poison of degradation of mind. He and his book have happily passed away, and the world has gone on in spite of the cripples, paralytics, and valetudinarians whom political struggles have left.
"I was a shopkeeper by profession in 1827, and I do not remember whether I was also Cicero, Franklin, or Themistocles (it depends upon what book I was reading at the time of the catastrophe), but I was told for the third time to close my shop and mount guard in the character of ensign of militia, to which rank I had of late been promoted. I was very much opposed to that guard, and over my own signature I complained of the service, and used the expression, 'with which we are oppressed.' I was at once relieved of the guard, and summoned into the presence of the colonel of the army of Chili, Don Manuel Quiroga, then Governor of San Juan, who at the moment was taking his ease, seated in the court-yard of the Government House. This circumstance and my extreme youth (sixteen), naturally authorized the Governor, on speaking to me, to keep his seat, and keep on his hat. But it was the first time I had presented myself before one in authority. I was young, ignorant of life, haughty by education, and perhaps by my daily contact with Caesar, Cicero, and other favorite personages, and as the Governor did not answer my respectful salute, before answering his question, 'Is this your signature, sir?' I hurriedly lifted my hat, intentionally put it on again, and answered resolutely, 'Yes, sir.'
"The dumb scene that followed would have perplexed the spectator, doubting which was the chief and which the subaltern, who were defying each other by their glances, the eyes of each wide open and fixed upon each other; the Governor endeavoring to make me cast down mine by the flashes of anger that gleamed from his own, and I with mine fixed unwinking, to make him understand that his rage was aimed at a soul fortified against all intimidation. I conquered, and in a transport of anger, he called an aide-de-camp and sent me to prison.
"Friends flew to see me, among them Laspuir, now minister, who was very fond of me; he advised me to do what he had always done, yield before difficulties. My father came soon, and after I had told him the story, he said, 'You have done a foolish thing, but it is done; now bear the consequences with courage.' The affair was followed up. I was asked if I had heard the government complained of. I answered, 'Yes, by many.' When asked for names, I said, 'Those who had spoken in my presence had not authorized me to communicate their opinions to the authorities.' They insisted; I persisted; they threatened me; I held my tongue; they abandoned the cause, and I was set at liberty.
"I was initiated thus by the authorities themselves into the party questions of the city; into questions which divided the Republic, and it was not in Rome or in Greece that I was to seek for liberty and country, but there, in San Juan, in the horizon where the events opened that were preparing in the last days of Rivadavia's presidency. . . .
"At the fiesta of Pueblo Viejo, I fired a sky-rocket at the hoofs of a group of horses, and Colonel Quiroga, then ex-governor, came out from among the horsemen to maltreat me, attributing to malice prepense what was only a piece of folly. We had a wordy dispute, he on horseback, I on foot. He had a train of fifty horsemen, and I fixed my eyes upon him and his spirited horse to avoid being trampled upon, when I felt something touch me behind in a disagreeable and significant manner. I put my hand behind me, and touched—the barrel of a pistol, which was left in my hand. I was also at that instant the Lead of a phalanx, which had gathered in my defense. The Federal party, headed by Quiroga Carril, was on the point of a hand-to-hand encounter with the Unitario party, whom I served unconsciously at that moment. The ex-governor rode off, confounded by the mocking laughter he heard, and perhaps astonished at being a second time worsted in the presence of a boy who did not arrogantly give him provocation, nor timidly yield when once embarked in a bad undertaking. The next day I was a Unitario; a month later I knew the party questions in their very essence, knew their personages and their views, for from that moment I entered upon the voluminous study of opposing principles.
"When the war broke out, I gave into the hands of my aunt, Doña Angela, the shop I had in charge, enlisted with the troops which had risen in insurrection against Facundo Quiroga in the Quijadas, made the campaign of Jachel, found myself in the encounter at Tafin, escaped being taken prisoner with the carts and horses which I had previously taken in the Posito, under the order of Don Javier Angulo, fled with my father to Mendoza, where the very troops which had conquered us in San Juan had risen against the Aldaos, and shortly after was nominated adjutant."
He was subsequently an approved instructor of recruits, then second director of the Military Academy, to which office he was assigned for his knowledge of cavalry maneuvers and tactics, due to his peculiar habits of study. The campaign of Mendoza, which ended in the horrible tragedy of Pilar, brought on by the bad faith of Aldao, was to him the poetry, the idealization, the realization of his readings. He was only eighteen, a beardless youth, unknown to the world, but he lived in an ecstasy of enthusiasm, ready at any moment to be a hero, to sacrifice himself, or to die, in order to obtain the smallest result in the cause for which he fought,—which was liberty to all as well as to himself. He describes himself as fighting with "demoniac" zeal, the first in pursuit of guerillas, regardless of danger; indeed, so beside himself, that at last his superior officer took away his rifle, as one takes a noisy trumpet from children, till they learn to do what they are bid.
These combats were in the streets of the city, and the conquerors in one were now prisoners in another. His father followed him everywhere like a tutelar angel, but was often unable to restrain his fanaticism. Indeed, on one occasion, when the noble Leprida most affectionately and earnestly, but in vain, endeavored to withdraw him from the combat,—the illustrious Leprida, President of that Congress of Tucuman, which declared the independence of Spanish rule, and before whom the most eminent men of the Republic bowed their heads, as before one of the fathers of their country, and who perished in that terrible massacre,—he also obliged his father to flee without him, who lingering too long on the road, almost beside himself with anxiety and shame for having preserved his own life by flight, was at last taken prisoner and carried to San Juan, where he escaped being shot only by a ransom of two thousand dollars. The young Sarmiento escaped many perils at that time—that of being shot by the order of his own government, from which he was saved by a noble foe, who carried him and other enthusiastic youths who were brought prisoners to him, to the shelter of his own roof, where he protected them at the risk of his own life; the peril of being shot in the barracks by three assassins instigated by Aldao, beside that of innumerable skirmishes and engagements. He says human nature never showed itself more unworthy to him than in that treacherous attack of the drunken friar, Aldao, upon a group of sixty officers, who had assembled after a truce had been agreed upon. It was at that time that two hundred persons fell victims to the atrocities of Aldao, among whom were twenty of Sarmiento's own friends. But such is the elasticity of youth, that while a prisoner in his own house in Mendoza, to escape Aldao, an opportunity offering to study French with a soldier of Napoleon, who did not know Spanish nor the grammar of his own language, in six weeks from the beginning he had made such progress as to have translated twelve volumes.
He kept his books upon the dining-table (it was the sight of a French library in the place that had awakened his zeal), removed them at meal times, extinguished his candle at two in the morning, or when the reading absorbed him entirely, passed two or three days in succession, seated, with his dictionary by his side. Fourteen years afterward, on visiting France, he learned to pronounce the language.
It was after these events that with his family and those of the most prominent citizens of San Juan, he emigrated to Chili, to escape the fearful tyranny described in the work now published. At first he kept school in Los Andes, then was a shopkeeper in Pocuro, with a small capital provided by his family, afterwards a commercial clerk in Valparaiso, then majordomo of mines in Copiapo. While in Valparaiso, earning an ounce a month, he paid half of it to Rickard, the English professor, and two reals a week to the watchman of the ward, to wake him at two in the morning for his English studies. Saturday nights he passed without sleep, to eke out the leisure of Sunday. After he had taken lessons six weeks, Rickard told him that he only wanted the pronunciation, which he did not acquire,
however, till very lately.While majordomo of the Copiapo mines, he translated a volume a day of the sixty volumes of Sir Walter Scott's works, beside some other books. His reading in Valparaiso was very extensive, and these readings, enriched by several languages, spread out before him all the great discussions of philosophical, political, moral, and religious ideas, and to use his own expression, "opened the pores of his intelligence to imbibe them." When the labor of the mining day was over, he met, in a certain kitchen where they partook of refreshment, other Argentine majordomos, foremen, and laborers, exiles like himself, to discuss politics, and in the evenings assembled at the house of another, the only one who had a family establishment there, thus keeping up their habits of civilized life. At these reunions, in his miner's dress,—which consisted of doublet and hose, striped drawers, a red cap, and a broad sash, from which depended a purse capable of holding twenty-five pounds of sugar, but in which he always kept several bundles of tobacco, a dress he had assumed partly from fancy and partly from economy,—he was always the oracle to which all appealed for points of history, geography, or other book learning. Anecdotes are told of the astonishment of strangers at the little learned miner, who was supposed to be only a peon who had strayed into the company. Once, for want of the book, he recited a whole pamphlet he had written upon a plan for planting a colony on the Colorado River, and made converts too—for he was from his youth always eloquent upon the point of cultivating the soil. In the proper place we shall speak of his success in later life in showing to his countrymen the advantages of agriculture over cattle-growing. While at Copiapo it was his habit to entertain the miners by drawings of birds and animals, and he taught French to others, for those who knew less than himself were always objects of interest to him.
In 1836, he returned to San Juan, ill with a cerebral attack, destitute of resources, scarcely known to any one, for few old friends had yet returned from exile. A complicated operation in arithmetic, which the incompetent government needed, brought him again into notice, and after suffering many privations, he gradually took his place again with Cortinez, Aberastain, Quiroga Rosas, and Rodriguez, men of mark and education, worthy to figure in any part of South America. Together they founded a college for young ladies, in aid of which project he had written a forcible appeal for the education of women, and of which he was made director—and another for men, which was not allowed to succeed. The college for ladies lasted but two years, but left its mark upon the society of San Juan. A dramatic society and many public amusements that tended to cultivate and improve manners, were among the improvements made by these young men, stimulated by the undying zeal and executive ability of Sarmiento. Here, in the library of Quiroga Rosas, he found Villemain, and Schlegel; in literature, Jouffroi, Lermennier, Guizot, Cousin; in philosophy, Tocqueville, and Pedro Leroux; the "Encyclopedic Review," as synthesis of all opinions, Charles Didier, and a hundred other authors, whom he devoured with avidity. For two years these books furnished material for impassioned discussions between the friends, and in this school of philosophy, as he considered it, they talked over the new doctrines, attacked, defended, resisted, and were at last more or less conquered by them. Here his own mind, hitherto but a reflecting mirror of the ideas of others, began to move and march on. He now began to think clearly for himself on all subjects.
"The European mind," as he expresses it, "began to transfuse itself into the American mind, and I began to apply to the different circumstances of the two theatres of action the results at which I arrived.
"It was in 1837 that I learned Italian, in company with young Rawson,[11] whose talents had then begun to show themselves strikingly. Several years afterward, when editing the 'Mercurio' in Santiago de Chili, I familiarized myself with Portuguese, which is very easy. In Paris, still later, I shut myself up fifteen days with a German grammar and dictionary, and translated six pages to the satisfaction of an intelligent man who gave me lessons, that supreme effort leaving me an incomplete scholar, although I thought I had caught the structure of that rebellious idiom.
"I taught French to many persons for the sake of spreading good reading among them; and to sundry of my friends I taught it without giving them lessons. To put them in the path which I had trodden, I said, 'You must not fail to study—I am coming.' And when I saw their self-love fairly piqued, I gave them a few lessons upon the way to study for themselves.
"In all these efforts I always had in full activity the organ of instruction, and which was more cultivated in me than any other; educated by the living speech of the presbyter Oro, and the curate Albarracin, and always seeking the society of well-informed men, then and afterwards my friends. Aberastain, Penero, Lopez, Alberdi, Gutierrez, Oro, Tejedor, Fragueiro, Montt, and many others, contributed, without knowing it, to develop my mind, transmitting their ideas to me, and giving me an opportunity to unfold my own as the complement to theirs.
"How are ideas formed? I believe that in the mind of one who studies, it happens as in those inundations of rivers where the waters deposit little by little the particular solids washed down by them, and with which they fertilize the adjacent territory."
With the aid of the old friends whom he found in San Juan, he founded at this time a periodical called "La Zonda," which criticized village manners, promoted the spirit of enthusiasm, and would have been of incalculable benefit, if the government, which the periodical did not attack, had not felt a horrible apprehension of the light it was sending abroad.
"Out of this came my second imprisonment," he says, "for refusing to pay twenty-six dollars, of which in violation of the laws and decrees in force, the government proposed to rob me. Don Antonio Benavides (Governor), and Don Antonio Maradona (Minister), jointly and in solidum owe me twenty-six dollars every day that impends, and they shall pay me, as God lives, one or the other of them, sooner or later, the latter rather than the former, because a minister is put in his place to give counsel to the governor, who does not know so well the laws of his country, too self-willed to be restrained by laws, those frail barriers to his caprice, but which are insuperable through the respect their direct agents deserve among cultivated men. The governor of San Juan, wishing to free the province from the serious evils which might be brought upon it by the publication of a periodical which was edited by four men of letters competent to the task that is, not wishing any one to examine his acts or enlighten public opinion, sent me word that the second number of 'La Zonda' was worth twelve dollars. I ordered the printer to draw so many dollars, and 'La Zonda' died of that suffocation."
One day he received a summons to appear before the governor, who asked him if he had obeyed the order to pay twenty-six dollars for the last number of "La Zonda." He replied that it was an illegal demand, and that he had had no official notice to pay it, for the messenger by whom it was sent, the printer, was not a legal messenger, and the law provided that no money should be required of writers, the publishers having the benefit of sales, in order to encourage publications. Finding him resolute in his refusal, Benavides threw him into prison. His friends visited him and advised him to yield the point, in order to save the college of which he was director. The aide-de-camp came to receive the money, and received a warrant against a merchant, accompanied by his own signature, by which Sarmiento was to recover in due time, in view of the law which was violated to his injury, the sum of which he was despoiled, with damages. Thus ended this affair, but he says,—
"My situation in San Juan became more and more thorny every day, as the political horizon became more and more charged with threatening clouds. Without any plan of life, without influence, repelling the idea of conspiracy, in coffee-houses, and assemblies, as well as in the presence of Benavides, I spoke my convictions with all the sincerity of my nature, and the suspicions of the government closed around me on every side like a cloud of flies buzzing in my ears.
"In 1839 an incident complicated the situation. The friar Aldao was defeated, and his instantaneous arrival in San Juan was announced. The few men who opposed the government feared for their lives. Dr. Aberastain was the only one who would not flee. I prevailed upon him to go,—I begged him to go, and he yielded to my request. I was the only one who knew Aldao well. I alone had been in Mendoza the spectator of atrocities of which two hundred unhappy persons, twenty of whom were my friends and companions, had been the victims. When they spoke to me of preparing for the intended flight, I gave reasons of convenience and duty which obliged me to remain in San Juan, to which they could but give assent. Aldao did not come, but the fears of the government and the rage of the new and hitherto unknown men into whose hands it had put arms, were concentrated upon me.
"At that time I made a supreme effort. I saw Maradona the ex-minister, the representatives of Sala, and as many men as could influence the mind of Benavides, in order that they might restrain him, if possible, from the abyss into which I saw him rushing despotism, chieftainship, the overthrow of all the foundations on which society reposes. The growing tyrant sent for me.
- "'I know that you are conspiring, Don Domingo.'
- "'It is false, sir; I do not conspire.'
- "'You are influencing the Representatives.'
- "Ah! that is another thing; your Excellency sees that there is no conspiracy. I have my right to apply to the magistrates and the representatives of the people, to prevent the calamities which your Excellency is preparing for the country. Your Excellency is alone, isolated, obstinate in carrying out your plan, and I am interested, that those who can and ought to do it, should restrain you in time.'
- "'Don Domingo, you will force me to take measures.'
- "'And what matters it?'
- "'Severe ones.'
- "'And what matters it?'
- "'You do not understand what I mean.'
- "'Yes, I understand—to shoot me, and what matters it?'
"Benavides looked at me as if fascinated; and I protest that he could not see on my countenance any sign of boasting. I was inspired at that moment by the spirit of God. I was the representative of the rights of all, which were about to be trampled on. I saw in the countenance of Benavides symptoms of appreciation, of compassion, of respect, and I wished to respond to this movement of his soul.
"'Sir,' I said, 'do not defile yourself with crime. When you can tolerate me no longer, banish me to Chili; in the mean time, remember that I must labor to restrain you, if possible, from the precipice over which ambition and unbridled passion are hurrying you,' and then I took my leave.
"Some days afterwards I was again summoned to the Governor's house.
- "'I have been convinced that you have received letters from Salta and the encampment of Brinuela.'
- "'Yes, sir; and I was preparing to bring them to you'
- "'I knew the papers had arrived, but I was ignorant,' he added angrily, 'that you wished to show them to me.'
- "'I had not made a fair copy of the representation I had made, with which to accompany them. Your Excellency has both now.'
- "'These proclamations are printed here.'
- "'You are mistaken, sir, they were printed in Salta.'
- "'There! do not deceive me.'
- "'I never deceive, sir. I repeat that they were printed in Salta. The press of San Juan has not this small capital; this other type, that'—
"Benavides insisted, sent for Galaburri the printer, and was convinced of his error.
- "'Give me this paper.'
- "'I will read it to you, sir; it is in manuscript.'
- "'Read it, then.'
"I was silent.
- "Read it.'
- "'Will your Excellency send away the Chief of Police, in whom I do not wish to place confidence.'
"And when he had gone out, while Benavides threw glances upon me that threatened death, as if I ought to pay for his bad education, which made him a third party, I read my factum in a clear expressive voice, pausing upon each conception that I wished to make salient, giving force to those ideas which I wished to make penetrate my auditor. When I had finished reading, which had put me into a state of exaltation, I raised my eyes, and read in the countenance of the chief—indifference! Not one single idea had penetrated his soul, nor had a suspicion arisen in it. His will and his ambition were a cuirass which defended his heart and his intellect.
"Benavides is a cold man; and to this San Juan owes having been less abused than the other provinces. He has an excellent heart, and is tolerant; envy has little part in his mind; he is patient and tenacious. Afterwards I reflected that reason is impotent in a certain state of culture; its edges are blunted and slip over those smooth and hardened surfaces. Like the generality of men in our countries, he has no clear consciousness of law or of justice. I have heard him say, candidly, that the province would never do well till it had no lawyers, that his comrade Ibarra lived tranquilly, and governed well, because he alone, in two cases out of three, decided all causes. Rosas has his best support in Benavides; it is the force of inertia in exercise, calling everything to be quiet and dead, without violence and without parade. The province of San Juan is, with the exception of La Rioja, San Luis, and some other cities, one that has fallen lowest, because Benavides has impressed upon it his materialism, his inertia, his abandonment of all that constitutes public life, which is just what despotism requires. The people eat, they sleep, they talk, they laugh if they can,—and keep quiet, that in twenty years hence, their sons may walk on four feet.
"Benavides had no minister then; all the Federals avoided him, and he alone, with the aid of his troops, carried on his insane designs. Thus men in power, take the name of the people to call themselves governments, after they have degraded and abused them! He had made one Espinosa, a drunken Tucuman, though a valiant fellow, chief of his forces; and one Herrera, a Chilian bandit, taken out of prison, and a comic actor whom I had hissed in the theatre, were called into the service, the latter as captain; the Indian Saavedra, an assassin and highwayman, was another. Juan Fernandez, a young man of good family who had voluntarily descended into the rabble where he passed his time in intoxication and gambling, the most despicable and despised creature then in San Juan, was his aide-de-camp. An Italian impostor, corrupt, clownish, and ignorant, was made mayor. Under the orders of these chiefs, the scoriae of society, many obscure young men of good intentions, but ignorant and from the lowest orders of society, had been called into the service. Some of them, even from that bad school, turned out good members of society, however. Finally, I was summoned a fourth time to the government house. This time I was prepared. I knew that a terrible blow was to be inflicted, and that I was the appointed victim. It was Sunday, and I had taken leave of some friends at home half in jest and half in earnest, and written down that my life was in danger. I obeyed the summons, however, taking with me a servant who could give information of my imprisonment should that event occur. I met on the way one of my friends, and resisted his prayers and supplications that I would not present myself.
- "'They are going to arrest you; everything is prepared.'
- "'Let me alone; Benavides has sent for me by an aide-de-camp, and I should be ashamed not to answer the call'
"They arrested me! And at oration, when the guard presented itself that was to take me to the prison, the noise of swords made my nerves thrill; there was a humming in my ears, and I was afraid! Death, which I believed my doom at that moment, looked to me sad, disgraceful, guilty; and I had not the courage to accept it in that character. Nothing happened then, however, except that I was fastened into my dungeon with shackles. The days passed, and the mind habituated itself to conquer its anxieties and disenchantment, as the eyes habituated themselves to the darkness. I was a passive victim, and except my family, no one seemed to care for my fate. My cause was no one's but my own. I suffered because I had been indiscreet, because I had desired to attack the evil without possessing the means to attack it; to material facts I opposed protests, and solitary abnegation, and the facts took their own course in spite of me.
"On the night of the 17th of November, at two in the morning, a group of horsemen parading in front of the prison, cried out, 'Death to the Unitarios.' So without antecedents was that cry, so coldly and composedly did it proceed out of the mouths of those who pronounced it, that it was evident that it was a thing arranged and agreed upon dispassionately. I understood perfectly that there was some design on foot. At four o'clock the same thing was repeated. I was awake, writing some foolish thing which kept me entertained. At dawn, an Andalusian was brought into the prison who pretended to be drunk, and in the midst of repartees and laughable jokes, designed to distract the attention of the sentinels, in passing me, making an evolution round another prisoner who was with me, he let fall short phrases—'They are going to assassinate them. The troops are coming into the square.—The commandant Espinosa is going to lance Señor Sarmiento!—Save yourself if you can!'
"This time I was equal to the situation. I sent home a boy, wrote to the bishop that he must not be frightened, and that he must try by his presence to save me; but the poor old man did just the contrary; he was frightened, and his legs would not hold him up. The troops came and formed in the square; the boy who stood at the door of the dungeon in the character of a telegraph, communicated to me all the movements. Some cries were heard in the square, and there was much running of horses. I saw the lance of Espinosa pass by. There was a moment of silence, and soon eighty officers collected in a group near the prison, crying, 'Bring down the prisoners!' The officer of the guard came to me and ordered me to go out.
- "'By whose order?'
- "'By Commandant Espinosa's.'
- "'I do not obey.'
"He then passed on to the next cell, and brought out Oro and exhibited him. But on seeing him they cried, 'Come down! Not he! Sarmiento!'
"'Go then,' I said to myself, 'there is no way of getting excused here.' I went out and was saluted with a hurrah of threats and insults by men who did not know me, with the exception of two who had reason to detest me.
- "'Come down! Come down! Crucify him.'
- "'I do not obey! You have no right to send for me."
- "'Officer of the guard, strike him down with your sword!'
- "'Go down,' said the latter to me with his sword uplifted.
- "'I do not obey,' I said, taking hold of the iron railing.
- "'Go down!' and he struck me with his sword.
- "'I do not obey,' I repeated quietly.
- "'Give him the edge!' cried Espinosa, foaming with rage. 'If he stays up there, I will pierce him with my lance, Mr. officer of the guard.'
- "'Go down, sir, for God's sake,' said the good official in a low voice, ashamed, in spite of himself, and half weeping; while he discharged blows upon me with his sword.
- "'I shall give you the edge, indeed I shall.'
- "'Do what you please,' I said. 'I do not obey.'
"Some cries of alarm from two windows in the square from voices which were known to me, on seeing that sword rise and fall, had disturbed me a little. But I wished to die as I had lived, as I had sworn to live, without even willfully consenting to violence. Besides, I must humbly confess that I had a little stratagem in reserve. I had ascertained that Benavides was not in the square, and this datum had enabled me rapidly to arrange my plan of defense. The railing of the City Hall steps was really my table of safety. 'The troops have come to the square,' I said to myself.' Now Benavides has a part in this affair, but he is not here, in order to refer this outrage to the Federal enthusiasm, as Rosas called the assassination of Mana. which he denounced as 'an atrocious license in a moment of profound and immense popular irritation.' The prison is in a straight line, a square and a half from Benavides' house. Sound runs so many leagues a minute, and to go two hundred and twenty-five yards required only a second of time. In vain would the Governor have wished to wash his hands of that anonymous outrage, for here was I in a high and respectable place to send the crime to its source and origin. The servants of Benavides' house, one of his scribes, and his aide-de-camp, ran on seeing the sword glisten as it revolved in the air over my head, and one after another, as they ran into the house, shrieked, 'Sir! sir! they are killing Don Domingo!' I had then caught my cunning gaucho in his own net. Either he confessed himself an accomplice, or he would send the order to leave me in peace. Benavides had not courage at that time to take that responsibility; my blood would have been distilling over his heart drop by drop all the rest of his life!
"When the furies who cried 'come down,' were convinced that I would not die under the hoofs of the horses, it being my pleasure to do that in a decent and clean place, ten or twelve rushed up the steps, and catching me in their arms, carried me down, at the moment when a dozen hussars whom Espinosa had sent for to despatch me, had arrived at the spot. But Espenosa wished to see my face and to terrify me. The comic actor whom I hissed in the theatre, made captain of the Confederacy, held his sword at my breast with his eyes fixed on Espinosa, ready at a signal to thrust it into me. The commandant whirled his lance and pricked me on my side, uttering blasphemies. I kept my countenance composed, stereotyped, just as I wished it to look after death. Espinosa pricked harder, but my countenance remained impassible, if I might judge by the rage it inspired him with, for recovering his lance, he gave me a horrible thrust. The blade was half a yard long and the width of a hand, and I preserved for many a day the scar which was left on my wrist by my effort in wresting it out of my side. Then the brute prepared to satiate his mocking rage. I, inspired by the sentiment of self-preservation, and calculating that it was time for Benavides' aide-de-camp to arrive, raised my hand over my head and said imperiously, 'Listen! Commandant,' and as he lent his attention, I turned round, thrust myself under the gallery to get round the other side of the horses, and as I arrived at the end they fell upon me. I warded off a cloud of bayonets with both hands, and at that moment the Governor's aide arrived with orders to suspend the farce, consenting only that they should shave me, as they had done to many others. If he had not permitted some punishment, Espinosa would have wholly lost the dominion of his passions, and I should not have had sufficient coolness to pull off the mask under which Benavides wished to hide himself. They put me into the lowest dungeon, and then occurred a scene which doubled the terror of the people: my mother and two of my sisters defied the guards, ascended the steps; they were seen to go in and out of the empty cells, then descended like a vision, and rushed to the house of Benavides to demand the son, the brother! O, the agonies that despotism inflicts!
"What passed next many know, but it was not I who supplicated or gave satisfaction! for on no day of that trial did I belie the severity of my principles nor did my spirit flag again. One thing in regard to this event I will record here for the benefit of those who despair of due punishment being meted out to crimes committed with impunity ten years ago. The perpetrators of that bloody farce, all without one exception, have died a bloody death. A fatal ball struck Espinosa at Angaco. Acha, coming suddenly into the street one dark night, fired a few shots out of mere wantonness into the square, and the comic actor, who hoped for Espinosa's signal to stab me, fell dead from his horse; the Indian Saavedra, who had given me a thrust, was assassinated. And the crippled gaucho Fernandez, who wallowed in drunkenness and dissipation, if he yet lives, it is to show who was the Governor's adjutant in those days of madness and infamy. Like my mother, I believe in Providence; and Barcena, Gaetan, Salomon, and all the Mashorqueros (thugs) assassinated by each other, or sentenced by him who had put the dagger into their hands, devoured by remorse, desperation, delirium, and the contempt of men, tormented by epilepsy or wasted by consumption, have made me hope yet for the end which will adjust all things. Rosas is already in despair! His body is a skeleton, trembling and disjointed. The venom of his soul is corroding the vase which holds it, and you will soon hear it crack, that his putrescent existence may give place to the rehabilitation of morality and justice, and to the sentiments of humanity compromised for so many years. Woe, then, to those who have not repented of their crimes! The greatest punishment that can be inflicted upon them is to live, and I wish to inflict upon all, without exception, this punishment.
"My residence of four years in San Juan—and this is the only epoch of my adult life that I have resided in my own country—was a continuous and obstinate combat. I, like others, wished to elevate myself, and the least concession on my part would have opened to me the door to the administration of Benavides, and to a place in his army. He desired it, and in the beginning had a great esteem for me; but I wished to rise in the world without sinning against morality or committing crimes against liberty and civilization. Public balls, societies, masquerades, theatres, I was always at the head of; to the growing ignorance I opposed colleges; to the crime of governing without law or justice I replied with a periodical; against the attempt to suppress such a publication illegally, I gave my person to the prison; against the holding of extraordinary powers I advocated by speech and writing the right of petitioning the representatives in order to make them fulfill their duty; to intimidation I opposed firmness and contempt; to the knife of the 18th of November, an impassible countenance, and patience under mocking impositions and ignoble deceit. Everything that is evil has been said of me, and some evil has been believed of me in San Juan; but no one has ever doubted my honor or my patriotism, and I appeal for the truth of this to the testimony of those who have chosen to call themselves my enemies. I lived honorably, making an efficient workman by means of some rudiments of practical geometry and the art of drawing up plans which I acquired in my childhood. Forced by want of lawyers, I defended some causes; and when Dr. Aberastain was supreme judge of Alzada, and my intimate friend, I lost before his tribunal the two most important ones. If this does not testify to my legal capacity, it at least shows the incorruptibility of the judge."
The next day, on passing through the baths of Zonda into exile, ancf turning his back upon all the comforts and pleasures of life, he wrote with a piece of charcoal, with the hand covered with the scars of his late encounter, that noble protest which he quotes in the prologue to "Civilization and Barbarism"— "On ne tue pas les idées!"
An English writer says of this:—
"Let those acquainted with Senor Sarmiento say whether he has fulfilled his mission. There is in these few words satire which tells volumes. It brands his enemies with ignorance, at the same time that it is extremely ludicrous and cutting. It is not too much to say that less interesting anecdotes than this have appeared in Disraeli's 'Curiosities of Literature.'"[12]
Again he emigrated to Chili, thought seriously of establishing himself there, and had the intention of opening a college, but one of his compatriots dissuaded him from it, and facilitated his writing for the periodic press. By way of experiment, he sent from Santiago to the only journal of Chili, the "Valparaiso Mercury," an anonymous article signed "A Lieutenant of Artillery," upon the battle of Chacabuco, which attracted notice in literary and political society by its freshness of style and elevation of thought.
A mutual jealousy of each other's glory has always prevailed among the States of South America, occasioned by their efforts to establish themselves as distinct nations, with more definite limits than any previously suggested by their geography or by the history of their war for independence. This jealousy has often led to the perversion of history, and, at the time we are considering, Chili had well-nigh erased from her records the glorious name of San Martin, and thrust into the background the share of the Argentines in the battles of Chacabuco and Maypo, which decided the establishment of Chilian independence.The above-mentioned article upon the first of these battles, followed by another upon the second, roused the generous sentiments of the people by its pathos, and earnestly appealed to the justice of the generation then in full enjoyment of the fruits of the great deeds whose contemporaries had of necessity received wounds as well as gifts from the rough hands of war. So timely was this appeal in behalf of a just claim to renown obscured by prejudice and malice, that it gained for its author, hitherto without a name, in two senses, a position in the unfamiliar theatre in which he had thus appeared, and for General San Martin the rank and pay of Captain-General that very year, and subsequently the tokens of gratitude due from a nation to its liberators, visible to-day in the equestrian statue erected to his memory in the finest boulevard of Santiago, facing the Andes and surrounded by the poplars which he himself had planted.
The party which was in the Chilian government at this time asked through one of the secretaries the concurrence of Señor Sarmiento at the approaching election. The first words Don Manuel Montt[13] said to him, were, "Ideas, sir, have no country." From that moment they understood each other. I wish I had space to delineate the character of Don Manuel Montt. "My meeting him in the path of my life," says Señor Sarmiento, in speaking of this gentleman, "gave a new phase to my existence, and if it attains any noble ends, I shall owe it to his aid opportunely tendered."
By request he took the editorship of the "Mercurio," which he successfully carried through the political campaign of that year, and he also founded and edited the "Nacional" in Santiago. Of course, such vigorous articles as he wrote upon all subjects provoked opposition. Even South American apathy was stung into repartee, and he needed all the steadiness and calmness of his friend Montt to enable him to bear the abuse that the "Revista Catolica" and the "Seminario" heaped upon him, but out of this strife came many improvements.
In 1841, at the end of the electoral campaign which secured the triumph of their candidate, he took leave of Don Manuel Montt and the editorship of the "Mercurio" and the "Nacional," to return to fight the battles of his country. Montt opposed his intention, assuring him that there was no safety there for him; that the situation of Colonel La Madrid, who was bravely opposing Rosas, was very critical. But, for that very reason, Señor Sarmiento's resolution was irrevocable. He was determined to offer the aid of his arm in that cause, and furnished with a warm letter of introduction to La Madrid from the Argentine Commission in Chili, who well knew the value of his assistance, and accompanied by three other compatriots, he set out on foot to surmount the Andes and join the General at Mendoza. After the fearful passage of the mountain summits was effected, through the peculiar and repeated dangers incident to such regions, on descending the eastern side, his rencontre with his countrymen was as distressing as unexpected. He and his little party saw afar off, like blots upon the interminable wastes of snow, groups of fleeing soldiers, and looking at each other in dismay, they could only exclaim, "Routed!" and seen from afar by the fugitives, the latter repeated the word "routed," across the snows.At the foot of the Vacas, a lofty summit, they found, in a small hut, the first detachment from Mendoza, and other squads arrived from time to time during the day from the battle-ground of La Cienega del Medio, finding no shelter but that of the rocks, and no food but what each one had brought for himself. Toward night came the rear-guard with La Madrid himself, accompanied by Alvarez and the other chiefs. Many others having been decapitated at Uspellata, among whom were the Commandant Sagrana and six other chiefs. Hundreds had taken refuge in the mountains, and of these, many were youths of the first families of Buenos Ayres and the northern Argentine Provinces, who had volunteered with patriotic enthusiasm to resist the tyrant Rosas. Not a moment was to be lost if he would save the lives of his countrymen. Señor Sarmiento and his companions, without waiting to take rest, retraced their steps over the giant heights to Aconcagua.
At Los Andes, the first town on the other side of the mountains, Senor Sarmiento established himself in the house of a friend, and for twelve hours, with another friend for his secretary, brought into requisition his executive abilities, so often tested in his adventurous life. That very afternoon he sought, contracted for, and despatched twelve mountain laborers to the aid of the exhausted fugitives, purchased, collected, and despatched six loads of substantial comforts, sent an express to the Argentine Commission at Santiago to put them in motion; wrote to Don Manuel Montt, the minister, asking for government aid, physicians, and other help; a letter to certain friends that they might appeal to public charity; one to the director of the theatre, to give an entertainment for their benefit, and an article to the "Mercurio" of Valparaiso to alarm the whole country and awake compassion. When the assistance he had so quickly collected was on the way, and the various couriers despatched with the letters, and his purse emptied to the last maravedi, he was obliged to seek repose, for he had run down the mountains from Los Ojos de Agua to Los Andes without resting from his previous ascent. Within two days he received replies from General las Heras and his friends Gana, Zapata, and Quiroga Rosas, which do honor to themselves as well as to him. In three days sufficient food, medicines, physicians, etc., etc., for a thousand men, were on their way over the giant heights.
The danger of the transit was increased by threats of an approaching storm. Those conversant with the Andes knew by the heavy clouds, always more dangerous than the frozen snows, and on this day, unusually dark and lowering, that it would be of more than ordinary violence. It was easy after the first day to calculate how many out of the thousand would be frozen before succor could reach them. The sublime but heart-rending spectacle of the gently falling snow that covered every rock and quenched every fire that was kindled, chilled the hopes of the relieving party, but no one turned back. After three days of suffering, seven of the fugitives had perished, and many others had lost their limbs by frost before the physicians got to the foot of the Cordilleras. An Argentine artist has immortalized upon canvas the scene in which the first Chilian broke the snow on arriving at the spot. The heat and shelter of the hut had saved three hundred, a leaning rock had sheltered another hundred, and their ponchos, by confining the warmth to their bodies, had saved the rest. But they were nearly starved. Among the refugees was the famous El Chacho, who had succeeded Facundo Quiroga in the chieftainship of the peasantry. He had thrown himself on the side of General La Madrid against Rosas, but had contributed not a little to the loss of the battle by his rashness and want of discipline. He did not know, when his life was then saved by the aid of Señor Sarmiento, that twenty years later he and his hordes would be annihilated by that same deliverer. Like other peasant chiefs, El Chacho, who mingled in all the disputes of the country, sometimes took one side, sometimes the other, and was now a dangerous enemy, and now a dangerous friend, according as his caprices led him. Señor Sarmiento somewhere likens this chieftain to the Radies of Arabia, who receive from every new government some privilege or post, said government shutting its eyes to the risk of treachery should self-interest interpose its claims.
Señor Sarmiento was thus thrown back upon Chili, and his first reception in Santiago was a sad chill over a doubly exiled heart. He was charged through the press with having complained of the hardness of some of the people while he eulogized the generosity of others to his unfortunate countrymen, and then of improper use of the scanty funds he had collected for their necessities. The man who made the charge was not a compatriot, nor had he contributed, nor did he know how the money was appropriated, and must have invented the slander with what Mr. Sarmiento called the "most exquisite evil intention." General Las Heras answered the charge and vindicated him, "but for a long time," he says, "I was frightened by that gratuitous and spontaneous act of depravity, and frozen by it as if a jar of cold water had been poured over me."
He soon resumed the editorship of the "Mercurio," and one of the most active, most agitated, and most fruitful phases of his life—fruitful to himself and to others—ensued. Every interest of society responded to his touch.
He endeavored to organize primary instruction for the people—an idea that had never dawned upon the Chilian mind.
The proposition for a popular tax for education was well received, but there was no thought of any other appropriation of it than to educate the upper classes with it! Señor Sarmiento put the new idea into actual operation for the people. The newspaper he established was the first ever edited in Santiago, the residence of learned and literary Chilians. He wrote the first spelling-book in which the correct sounds of the Spanish alphabet were given, and which was afterwards printed in the United States and illustrated with vignettes; banished from the schools such books as "The Temporal and Eternal," "The Pains of Hell," and others of a similar character, fit only to mislead the minds of youth and imbue them with false ideas, and replaced them with "The Life of Jesus Christ," "Morality in Deed and Life," "The Conscience of a Child," "The Life of Franklin," "The Why, or the Science of Things," etc., etc. He presented to the university of Chili the first paper upon orthography that ever saw the light in Spanish America, where the language had become sadly corrupted; founded the "Monitor for Schools," a large periodical in which he treated in a masterly manner the most difficult questions upon popular education, stimulating the teachers and defending them against arbitrary acts and stupid decrees. This periodical he wished to call by a more comprehensive title, which should commend it to the perusal of all classes, of literary men as well as of schoolmasters, but this was thought too pretentious by the government, in whose name everything was done, without rendering any credit to the real author of books or measures, because indeed he was a foreigner! Not till long after he left the country, when the editorship of this valuable work was resumed after an interval of many years, was his name ever publicly mentioned in connection with it. This tardy recognition saved the credit of the country, but Senor Sarmiento did not have its aid in the difficult days when he made bricks without straw.
It was at this period, 1842, that he founded the first Normal School that was opened on this side the Atlantic. For three years he directed it in person, and it is remarkable to observe, that unaided and alone he thought out and put in practice all those methods of instruction most approved by advanced minds at the present day. Indeed, it was living instruction such as we can hardly boast in our days of text books, when the mine from which the teaching is done is not always in the mind of the teacher. Señor Sarmiento had few text-books, nor did he need them. Everything he taught was practically illustrated and embellished from the vast stores of his varied acquirements.
Don José Suarez, his Chilian biographer, describes his methods of instruction minutely. He dwells much upon his moral influence, which was of the noblest kind. He says of him in this relation:—
"Sarmiento always treated us as friends, inspiring us with that respectful confidence which makes a superior so dear. He was always ready to favor us and to help us in our misfortunes; he often despoiled himself of his own garments to give them to his pupils, the greater part of whom were poor. He often invited us to accompany him in his afternoon walks in order to give us importance in the eyes of others, and to comfort our hearts by encouragement. It was my happiness often to accompany him to the Convent of la Dominica, and to other places. He lways gave us his arm in these walks. When he returned from Europe in 1847, he who traces these remembrances, on the occasion of visiting him at his place of residence, was presented with all the etiquette of fashion, and as if he were a distinguished man, to the Minister of the Interior, Don Manuel Montt, who had come to welcome him home. In our career of schoolmaster, we do not remember that the hand of so distinguished a Chilian ever touched our humble one as on that occasion. We had previously been presented to the Seiior General Las Heras, Dr. Ocampo, and other Argentines of importance, who visited Sarmiento. He treated his pupils thus, not because we were individually worthy of the honor, but to give importance to our profession, then humiliated, calumniated, and despised.[14] But he himself, in spite of his learning and his influential relatives, was called by the disdainful epithets of clerk and schoolmaster, and was insulted every day to his face by the supercilious Chilians, my compatriots!"
Don José is partially right in saying this. In 1843 he founded and edited the periodical called "El Progreso," the first paper that had ever been printed in Santiago de Chili, the residence of learned Chilians. He also edited the "Argentine Herald," in behalf of his countrymen, unjustly abused by Rosas. Envy, jealousy, hatred, prejudice, and ill-will were his portion for a long time, growing out of his active effort to ameliorate evils. Rival papers heaped abuses upon him; he was sensitive to blame; his patriotic heart was doubly sore with the repeated and apparently incurable miseries of his country; the word foreigner, when applied to him, was a dagger in a heart like his that was ready to toil for his adopted country as if it were his own. The impetuosity of his nature was not yet softened even into apparent concession to a present evil. He was unceremonious in speaking the truth, and the truth is the sharpest of swords to the evil disposed or the apathetic. There was no peace for any one in his sphere who stood in the way of the reforms which he felt to be vital to the very existence of civilized society, certainly to the continuance of free governments in those unhappy countries. He did not make personal attacks, but the strife of pens waxed hot, and such was the exasperation of his mind that one day, as he describes it,—
"It touched upon delirium; I was frantic, demented, and conceived the sublime idea of castigating all Chili; declaring it ungrateful, infamous, vile. I wrote I know not what diatribe, put my name to it, and carried it to the press of 'el Progreso,' giving it directly into the hands of the compositors. I then returned home in silence, loaded my pistols, and awaited the explosion of the mine I had laid for my own destruction, but I felt avenged, and satisfied that I had achieved a great act of justice. Nations, I said to myself, may be criminal, and are so at times, and there is no judge who can punish them adequately but their own tyrants or their own writers. I complained of the President, of Montt, of the Viales, in order that no one should escape my justice; and to the writers and the public in general I told horrible, humiliating truths, enough to rouse the indignation of a whole city, till beside itself with anger it should demand the head of the audacious one who could so insult it.
"From this certain danger I was saved by the kindness of Don Jacobo Vial, to whom the frightened compositors had shown my manuscript. Don Antonio came to my house looking very sad, and spoke to me in the gentle and compassionate voice with which one is wont to address a lunatic. No sign of displeasure or of resentment appeared in his countenance.
- "'Don Domingo,' he said, 'the printers have shown me the article you left with them this morning.'
- "' I hear you.'
- "'Have you considered the consequences?'
- "'Perfectly,' looking at my pistols.
- "'It is useless.'
- "'I know it; leave me in peace!'
- "'Has Lopez seen it?'
- "'No.'
"Don Antonio took his hat and went to Lopez and to the minister, to advise Don Manuel Montt of what I had done. Lopez came and made me consent that he should see the article, and erase some words. This was at three in the afternoon; at twelve that night, Don Antonio brought me a note from Lopez in which he told me that he had given up erasing words, for this was making concessions; that if I insisted upon publishing the article in spite of the disapprobation of my friends, I should immediately take a post-chaise and escape to Valparaiso.
"Lopez, with his usual sagacity, had touched the chord that would make me yield. First, he did not oppose me arbitrarily, because that will not answer with the demented. Secondly, he disapproved of me, and that made an impression. Thirdly, he showed me that it would be weakness to soften my phrases, and he knew I would not consent to show weakness. Fourth, he pointed out to me what way to flee, and this humbled me. No. I did not understand the thing thus; if I wounded them to the death I would stay and take the consequences.
"The pillow came to bring me its counsels, if not slumber. Very early the next day the minister sent for me; he spoke to me of indifferent things, of the Normal School, of I know not what common topics. At last he circumspectly touched the wound, enforcing himself by applying the balsam and pointing out to me how many persons esteemed me and treated me with distinction in compensation for these vulgar injuries which had no evil consequences. I replied; was very exalted in my reply, then paused, and at the moment when I was about to lose all the respect due to the minister and the friend, the door was opened by Don Miguel de la Barra, who either by accident or intention, arrived at the precise moment to prevent a scandal.
"Thus that Chili which I wished to dress in state's prison garments (ensambenitar), to display its crimes more surely to the public gaze, showed me at the very moment virtues worthy of respect, a delicacy and infinite toleration, and proofs of sympathy and appreciation which made the suicide I had prepared for myself wholly unjustifiable. From that time the public and the writer understood each other reciprocally. That learnt to be tolerant, and to do justice to good intentions, and I habituated myself to look at it as a necessary part of my existence, and neither to fear its anger nor to provoke it. I am now unanimously acknowledged to be a good and loyal Chilian. But woe to him who persisted in calling me a foreigner! It was safer for him to emigrate to California."
In 1845 he wrote the lives of the Presbyter Balmaceda, of Colonel Pereira, of the Senator Gaudarillas, of Facundo Quiroga (three editions of the latter were published, and though proscribed by Rosas, together with his other works, was largely read in the Republic), the life of the priest Castro y Barros, and of General San Martin. At this epoch he united with the celebrated Garcia del Rivera, in the editorship of the "Museum of both Americas."
Don Manuel Montt saved Señor Sarmiento more than once from rash acts. When he gave up the editorship of the "Progreso" the first time, because he could not bear the criticisms upon it, he said to him in his quiet, commanding way, "You must write a book upon what you wish, and confound them;" thus restoring him to his own self-reliance. When he thought of going to Bolivar, under whom he had been promised place, Montt decidedly opposed it; he told him it would look like a defeat (for he had again resigned the post of public writer to escape persecution); he said Bolivar's cause was like a game of cards "and did you not think of going to Europe?" The European expedition was decided upon, and when he took leave of his friend, the latter said to him, "You will return to your own country according to present appearances; if you ever wish to return to Chili, you shall take any place you wish. Undeceive yourself; these enmities which trouble you are wholly upon the surface. No one despises you, many esteem you."
"Such a statesman," to use the words of Señor Sarmiento, in speaking of this true and appreciative friend, whose words on their first meeting were, "Sir, ideas are of no country," "can, like Deucalion, make men out of stones. In Europe his letters followed me everywhere, even more constantly than those of my own family, and in every one was a suggestion of some point to be studied, or a hope that I should do such or such a thing, which hope was a sure indication that I would do it."
Colonel Sarmiento's "Travels in Europe, Algiers, and America," are full of lively pictures of all that is most interesting and instructive to observe in other lands. He studied not only education, but legislation, and all the nations he visited seemed to yield up to his well-prepared inspection the secret of their being for evil or for good. In France he saw and conversed with Thiers, Guizot, and Humboldt, and was made a member of the Historical Society. He visited Spain at the moment when the Duke of Montpensier entered Madrid to marry the Infanta. The Spanish nation were averse to this marriage, and though they treated the Duke with courtesy and offered him no insult, it was easy to see their want of sympathy. The ancient splendors of the national customs were invoked to cover this wound to their national pride. Royal bull-fights, which always take the Spanish people off their feet, were instituted with the most gorgeous displays, and the spectacles brought out all the Argentine poetry and the native brilliancy of our author's pen.
Señor Sarmiento's insight into the sorrows and evils of Spain was undoubtedly such as few travellers were prepared to exercise, and he saw very plainly that the Spain of to-day was the Spain of three centuries ago. More interesting to him than all the remains and the momentary resuscitation of ancient splendor, was his interview with Cobden in Barcelona, which he must describe in his own words, for the impulse it gave to his life and labors was very great, giving him a method which he has since used with great effect to breathe the breath of life into the apathetic children of the Spanish colony, that incubus upon the souls of men.
COBDEN.
"You imagine Cobden a lively, caustic O'Connell, an enthusiast, ardent in politics, rapid, startling in reply? How you deceive yourself, my poor Victorino! He is perfectly simple, fastidious like an Englishman, calm as an axiom, cold, vulgar, if I may so express it, like all great truths. We were friends in two hours; we talked alone almost all night; he related to me his adventures, his struggles; he showed me his mode of action, the strategy of his speech, the little stories with which it was necessary to entertain the people that they might not go to sleep as they listened to him. He lamented the almost insuperable difficulty which the masses offer by their incapacity of comprehending and their prejudices. He gave me a card by which I could find him in Manchester, and we did not separate till we reached the door of my hotel, I overwhelmed with happiness, humbled by such greatness and such simplicity, meditating upon means so noble and results so gigantic. I did not sleep that night. I was in a fever. It seemed to me that war was about to become ridiculous when that system of aggregation of wills and juxtaposition of masses could be so generalized and put into practice to destroy abuses, governments, laws, and institutions.
"What more simple thing! To-day we are two, tomorrow four, next year a thousand, publicly united in the same design. The government will resist? It is because we are not many, because many more remain in favor of the abuse. Then let the preaching come on, and the pamphlets, the daily papers, the association, the league. The Government and the Chambers know the day and the hour in which they are conquered,—and yield! Go and plant such a beautiful system in America!
"Cobden had destroyed, or attacked before commencing his specific work, all the great principles on which the science of the government reposed. The European equilibrium (balance of power), declared him a maniac, thus to perplex the ministers by mixing up foreign affairs with theirs. The colonies were the only means of furnishing employment to the younger sons of the lords. The commercial balance was the resumé of ignorance in political economy, and politics, with all its pretensions of science, was the charlatanism of dunces and blackguards; protection of natural industry an innocent means of stealing money on the wing, ruining the consumer, and turning the protected manufacturer into the street. For all these truths, hitherto considered fundamental, he substituted good sense, the common sense of all men, more fit to judge than the interested science of lords and ministers."
In Spain, Señor Sarmiento was made a member of the Literary Society of Professors, and published in Madrid a paper against the projected expedition of General Flores, whose object it was to found a monarchy in South America, of which the natural son of Queen Christina was to be the head. This document opened many eyes by its exhaustive investigation of the subject. The expedition was given up.
In England, Señor Sarmiento found the English reprint of Mr. Mann's Report of his educational tour in Europe. He came to the United States after his own more extended one, sought out Mr. Mann, and become acquainted, through his aid, with the common school system of Massachusetts, which on his return to Chili he introduced there with great effect. He embodied his observations upon education in Europe and America in a noble work on "Popular Education."
When in Paris he had studied the art of silk-culture under the elder Mundo, the first authority in the world, and on his return to Chili he founded the "American Silk-growing Society," for whose use he introduced at his own expense the best machines and other utensils, seeds, and books known in Europe.
In 1849 he began the publication of "La Cronica," a periodical which contains the only authentic collection of documents in South America upon the subject of immigration, a cause which he had industriously promoted since 1839, when his attention first became fixed upon its advantages. On each one of the topics he treated, a law was proposed, and even Rosas established a periodical in Mendoza to combat it. Rosas could hardly have been punished more effectually for his ill-treatment of Señor Sarmiento than he unceasingly was by the liberal views of government and the intense activity of that patriotic gentleman. It was at this time that the grateful letter he wrote to his old friend and deliverer Ramirez, grateful for past services and confident of continued friendship, but which contained his characterization of Rosas, was shown by that apostate friend to the tyrant, thus perpetuating his banishment indefinitely.
In 1850 he wrote "Argiropolis, or the Capital of the Confederate States," in which he proposed a new capital instead of Buenos Ayres; and the "Recollections of a Province."
In 1851 he published the "South America," another periodical, and his "Travels;" also a "Memorial of German Emigration," which was reviewed and highly commended by Dr. Wappaus, professor of geography and statistics in the University of Gottingen. BUENOS AYRES.
Thus prepared, and matured by study, experience, travels in foreign lands, and years of beneficent action in a true cosmopolitan spirit, he left Chili in 1851 with the present President, Colonel Mitre, and the present General Paunero, to incorporate himself in the army of General Urquiza, who was about to open the campaign against Rosas. The battle of Caseros, which disposed of Rosas, took place on the third of February, 1852, and Seiior, now Colonel Sarmiento, had the pleasure of writing a description of it upon the tyrant's own table with the tyrant's own pen. Six days after, he left Urquiza's army, for he saw that that old servant of Rosas meant no good to the country, but purposed to make himself a tyrant in Rosas' place. Durqué had been made President, who fell in with Urquiza's plans. The event proved that his prophecy was right, though Urquiza was not wholly successful.
He left a note for Urquiza, in which he told him it was his profound conviction that he was entering upon a thorny path, dissipating sooner or later, but not less fatally, the glory which for a moment had hung round his name.
Colonel Sarmiento returned to Chili, this time a voluntary exile. He went by way of Rio Janeiro, and passed a few weeks in close intimacy with its enlightened Emperor, who had read and admired his works and received him with much distinction. The Emperor had made an alliance with the Republic, to which he had formerly been opposed, and wished to converse with Colonel Sarmiento upon its status and its prospects.In October, 1852, he wrote a pamphlet upon San Juan, its men, and its acts in the regeneration of the Republic; the restoration of Benavides and the peoples' conduct towards him. When elected by San Juan Deputy to the National Congress, which office he declined, he published a letter to General Urquiza giving his reasons, and subsequently a pamphlet entitled "Convention of Sanatuolas de los Arreyos," in which he treats of the condition of the government in the Republic and the reactionary policy of Buenos Ayres. In 1853 he began to publish the second volume of "The Cronica," a political and literary periodical, and also his "Commentary on the Constitution of the Argentine Republic," with numerous documents illustrative of the text. In the following year he published a letter to the electors of Buenos Ayres, who had chosen him for their deputy, an appointment which he did not accept.
He finally took up his residence in Buenos Ayres as a private citizen. In that year he was nominated Deputy to Congress from Tucuman, but did not accept the nomination for some political reasons. In 1857 he solicited and obtained the direction of the department of schools, and was also made Councillor of the Municipality of Buenos Ayres, Durqué being still President. The difficulties which he encountered in carrying out his purpose of introducing the North American system of common schools into Buenos Ayres as a starting-point, are described in a very graphic and lively manner in a letter to the Señora Juana Manso, too long for insertion here. Three ministries went out, which made the acceptance of his bill the sine qua non of their acceptance of the ministry, but after waiting and working a year in the most indefatigable and persevering manner, and allowing himself to be the subject of much abuse, he succeeded in setting the matter in operation, in the midst of intestine political difficulties of various kinds, invasion by the Indians, attempts at usurpation, and capture of the city by warlike and ambitious chiefs, and various modes of opposition to his views. A resolution had been offered to appropriate 600 dollars in gold to set in motion all the schools of Buenos Ayres! He succeeded at last in obtaining $127,000, and erected a splendid building called the Model School, which was afterwards emulated in another parish of the city. Monsieur Banvard, the architect of school-houses in France, said there was not in all France such architecture, such apparatus, and such luxury of appliances consecrated to the education of the people. The furniture and apparatus were procured in the United States. In 1860, when he left Buenos Ayres, there were 17,279 children in the schools. The Señora Manso had written him in 1864, that since his departure the number had decreased by five thousand. To this he replies, that by the natural increase the number should then have been 35,000, instead of 12,450, as she reports:—
"I assure you," he says, "that the revelation of so sad a fact has killed me, and I am tempted to leave behind me useless honors of position, and present myself again to the provincial government of Buenos Ayres, saying to it, 'Give me the department of schools—this is all the future of the Republic.' . . . 'The United States, with their schools from the beginning, as a basis, have accomplished doubtless, in one century, what all humanity has been doing and undoing in six thousand years of history! The Sovereign People!
"I bid you adieu sadly. Write, combat, resist. Agitate the waves of a dead sea, whose surface tends to become hardened with the crust of impurities which escape from its depths, the Spanish colony, the tradition of Rosas, cows, cows, cows! Men, people, nation, republic, future!
"They write me from San Juan that on the twenty-fifth of May, if not before, they shall open the Sarmiento School, a continuation and reflection of the impulse given in Buenos Ayres. It is a monumental structure which would be considered a good one in Boston or New York, capacious enough to hold 1,700 children. But I much fear that it is a body without a soul. The provinces take their inspiration from the capitals. When they throw stones at the elections in Buenos Ayres, it is bon ton to stab each other in Rosario. When the attendance of children in the schools diminishes in cultivated Buenos Ayres, in a whole Buenos Ayres, as they say in the provinces, the children in the mountains will be born dumb so as not to learn to spell."
In 1858, after the Model School-house was finished and opened, and while enthusiasm was at its height about the schools, Señor Sarmiento was elected Senator of the State and Province of Buenos Ayres. He then proposed in his seat that the lands which Rosas had usurped, worth a million dollars, should be devoted to the erection of school-houses throughout the province, and a line of splendid structures is now seen stretching out into the pampas. While Senator, he also proposed many other bills which finally received the sanction of law. One was a sentence of impeachment against Rosas. Another was the adoption of the metrical system of weights and measures; also, a law of election by ballots, like that of New York and Maine, voters being previously registered. The adoption of the Commercial Code, which he brought up three successive years till he was successful; a law to punish printed slanders against individuals, and the law which transformed the district of Chivilcoi from barren pampas to a paradise of cultivated farms, were others.
It was in 1859, as we learn from the "Diario of the Sessions of Buenos Ayres, 1860," that General Urquiza, then general-in-chief of the army of Buenos Ayres, made another attempt to usurp the government. Colonel Sarmiento had been made chief-of-staff of the army of reserve. Urquiza was resisted at Cepada, where, however, he gained a partial victory, the citizens losing their infantry and artillery. But they fled back to the city to defend it, for emboldened by apparent success, Urquiza had dared to besiege it. He was kept at bay, however, and still holding the city in terror, listened to proposals for a treaty which had been made to the government in 1858 by Colonel Sarmiento and others, ex-officially. These were for two conventions, one to be held at Buenos Ayres to make amendments to the Constitution, and also a national convention, at which said amendments should be discussed and either ratified or rejected. Urquiza now accepted them on three conditions. One of these was to reincorporate into the army all the soldiers who had been dismissed from it for whatever cause. This included the creatures of Rosas; another was that the actual governor, Dr. Alsini, should be deposed. The force in the city was sufficient to defend it, but there was a panic, and the estancieros (landed proprietors) and cattle-growers feared it would be lost; some intriguers were in the legislature, and taking advantage of the panic, they wished to depose the governor to please Urquiza, whom they feared.
Colonel Sarmiento, who was still Senator, was absent from his seat at the moment, visiting one of the forts. He entered the antechamber of the Senate just as it had sent the requisition to the Governor to resign. He demanded the floor, but the President of the Senate did not grant it; he persisted in demanding it, and the sixth time, in spite of much opposition and exclamations, such as, "we are all agreed," he obtained it. He then said that he did not propose to them to revoke what they had done; it was too late for that, and might endanger the situation in the presence of the enemy, but he wished his name to be recorded as protesting against the act, which he designated as a crime; and he also proposed that the assembly that had destroyed the executive power should nominate another, and not leave them without a government. The latter was assented to, but the former was objected to as against the rules. It was put to a vote, and eight joined him in the protest. When the votes were counted, eleven voted for it, and that being a majority, their honor was saved, and the eighth of November is ever remembered as a nefarious day. In the afternoon they saw their error.
The result of the treaty was the meeting of both conventions. Colonel Sarmiento had much influence in both, and was largely instrumental in bringing about the desired results, one of which was to incorporate the province of Buenos Ayres into the Confederacy. He also made a speech in this Convention of Buenos Ayres, in opposition to the proposition to have a state religion, and perfect practical toleration was declared to every form of opinion. There are now, thanks to him, as many Protestant as Catholic churches. This was agreeable to the instincts of Buenos Ayres, which had always manifested a liberal spirit in this respect. It needed only the word of a master-spirit to settle the question forever. The speech was printed at the time.
The debates of this deliberative assembly have been published, and from the elevation of the ideas expressed in them, and from their matter as a model of parliamentary tactics, they bear a character which has gained for them the reputation of being the most important documents of the kind extant. Colonel Sarmiento took the most important part in them. It has been said by his friends and biographers, that the most able of his speeches were made in secret session. It was ever his aim to moderate the spirit of reform, while he was the rock upon which were shattered the attempts of a wavering majority to resist every change. The general tendency of his propositions was to assimilate the Argentine Constitution to that of the United States.
Although in other respects an innovator, he dreaded the introduction of any variation from the original, for fear, as he said, "that a stream of blood might escape through any opening left in the machinery of government by the omission of some wheel, the purpose of which, through inexperience, had not been appreciated." This doctrine was maintained in all his writings and speeches, and any departure from it in practice has been attended by the same penalties that attached to what he calls "French novelties," current in all parts of South America.
This debate, marked by the conflict of such opposite parties, ideas, and interests, was closed with the proclamation of the Union by Colonel Sarmiento, as a member of the Convention, under the endeared name of the United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata. The measure was ratified by acclamation, all members of the Convention, including the President, rising to their feet, an example followed by the throng of spectators, under the enthusiasm awakened by this sublime movement of generous self-sacrifice. If it is borne in mind that the subsequent Convention of Santa Fé was divided by passions even more highly inflamed, that it ended with a similar scene of acclamation, and that its proceedings are allowed to have been influenced to a still greater degree by the counsels of Colonel Sarmiento, it will certainly be admitted that his invariable ardor in the support of his principles must have been regulated by kindly feeling and by an unusual power of carrying a required point and exercising, at the same time, a conciliatory influence upon opposing minds.
In the interval between these two Conventions, occurred another scene of so noble a character, as to compensate for many others which have disfigured the history of the same period by the hatred and violence displayed in them. This occasion presented the spectacle of the reconciliation of enemies whose inveterate hostility had been exercised both by the strife of reproaches and recriminations in the press, and by actual warfare in the field. On the day of which we speak, the multitude of a hundred thousand souls assembled upon the Mole of Buenos Ayres, was traversed by the government carriage containing Generals Urquiza and Mitre, President Durqué, and Colonel Sarmiento, in his capacity of minister, to which place he had been elevated,—these men, the principal antagonists in the long contest which had lately ceased, cordially embraced each other in the presence of the people and deposited their former hatred upon the altar of the common interests of their country. No more touching or humanizing scene was ever witnessed by any people, nor has the reconciliation of political enemies ever been more sincere. Yet they were again to meet upon the field of battle only a year later, impelled by a current of events which it was not granted them to control, and by the errors committed by each of the hostile parties.
The next eight years after this victory was achieved over apathy and ignorance, and after General Urquiza had retired to Entre Rios, his native province, were very eventful to the Republic, and the changes wrought and the improvements made, were due in the largest measure to the energy of Colonel Sarmiento. His various writings upon education, the report to the Chilian government upon the results of his mission to Europe and North America, his reports upon the state of public instruction in Buenos Ayres, the educational census taken in Chili, San Juan, and Buenos Ayres, his able work on popular education, and a series of occasional pamphlets upon similar topics, were but the heralds of deeds in which the spirit was to be embodied. While holding in succession the offices of senator, minister, and chief of staff, he founded and edited the "Annals of Education," with the object of disseminating information and exciting interest in his measures for the education of the people. He induced some of the best men in the city to take the personal supervision of the schools, and he regarded as his most important work, great as was his reputation as a writer, his "Progressive Method of Reading," which the government had stereotyped with vignettes in the United States. In Tucuman, Salta, and La Rioja, the symbol of a crossed pen and sword is employed in memory of him.
But his influence and his activity were by no means confined to educational labors, unless his practical illustrations of beneficent legislation may be looked upon as the highest branch of it. The tendency of the public administration bore the marks of his ripe age, and of the official training he had undergone in Chili in the service of a government accused of erring on the side of an excessive exercise of its authority by the people of countries which are ever wavering between the Scylla of despotism and the Chary bdis of anarchy. He somewhere quotes Mr. Webster's speech before the Supreme Court of Rhode Island, in the case of Dorr, condemned to perpetual imprisonment for his share in the insurrection of Rhode Island. Mr. Webster says,—"Is it not obvious enough, that men cannot get together and count themselves, and say they are so many hundreds and so many thousands, and judge of their own qualifications, and call themselves the people, and set up a government? Why, another set of men, forty miles off on the same day, with the same propriety, with as good qualifications, and in as large numbers, may meet and set up another government; one may meet at Newport and another at Chepachet, and both may call themselves the people. What is this but anarchy? What liberty is there here but a tumultuary, tempestuous, violent, stormy liberty, a sort of South American liberty, without power except in its spasms, a liberty supported by arms to-day, crushed by arms to-morrow? Is that our liberty?"
And holding up these forcible words Colonel Sarmiento adds,—
"If the liberal party in South America which has been overthrown by more than one tyrant, beholds itself in this terrible mirror, will it not turn away its face from the unsightly image?"
Both in Chili and in Buenos Ayres, Colonel Sarmiento has been noted, even by his adversaries, for his inclination to limit the injurious extension attempted to be given to the rights of the people. On his first appearance in the Chilian press, when he had it in his power to choose between the political parties of the country, both of which solicited his support, he decided in favor of that which proposed, while applying liberal ideas to public action, to aim at the stability of the power which was to represent them. Twenty years have since elapsed, and no tyrant has appeared in Chili, although the doings of the government have not always been justifiable.
He followed the same course in the Argentine Republic. On the one hand he opposed the mutilated confederation that excluded Buenos Ayres, which was but a disguise for the old method of arbitrary rule by partisan leaders, and on the other he inclined to the incorporation of this estate, although the people were yet unfamiliar with the use of the liberties it had gained.
His influence in the city became in innumerable ways very conspicuous. When he entered upon his duties as Senator, the galleries, which had been accustomed to control the debates by hisses and applauses, designed to produce disturbance, and disorderly conduct, covered the amphitheatre with pasquinades against the new Senator. Three years later, the same area was the scene of the heated debates of the Provincial Convention, assembled to propose reforms in the Federal Constitution,—those remarkable debates already alluded to. The reader will look in vain for an instance of applause, still less of disorder, on the part of the listeners to these speeches, the excitement attending which was confined to the Convention itself. The eager multitude of spectators held their breath to listen to the debate; and the fifty members of the Convention, animated as were their contests with each other, were treated with a religious respect which made them seem true Patres Conscripti. To what was this change due? Simply to the influence of one man, who through the press, by spoken discourses, and by legal measures, had taught the persons who were present at the sessions of the legislature that they were not the people, and that it was ruinous to the Republic for them to taint the atmosphere of absolute liberty, which the representative of the people should breathe, by expressing their own crude opinions in the sanctuary of the law. On the withdrawal of that salutary and restraining influence, it is reported that Buenos Ayres became again the theatre of that tumultuous and stormy liberty of which Webster spoke, and which gives other nations such cause for scandal. It was the same spirit which impelled him on more than half a dozen occasions, to maintain from his place in the Senate the rights of the executive authority against the encroachments of the legislature; and to one governor, who had summoned to his audience-chamber the leaders of various factions, in order to advise with them upon the nomination of a minister, he said, as appears from subsequent speeches in the Senate, the following prophetic words: "In less than a year we shall have to go and pick up from the rubbish of the streets the fragments of the executive power which our governors are throwing away, one after the other, for want of courage enough to perform their duties."
A year had not elapsed, when, in the presence of the enemy, on November 8, 1859, tkis same governor was deposed by the coalition in the legislature already described, which was led astray by the fear of some, the ill-will of others, and perhaps the treason of a very small number.
While member of a senatorial commission, Colonel Sarmiento proposed a new law for the regulation of elections, designed to cure the constantly recurring defects of the one then in operation, as well as to close the door against the shameless frauds, and to punish the violence prevalent at the elections of Buenos Ayres, by furnishing definitions of these illegal actions. Buenos Ayres would have spared itself many days of disgrace and disturbance by the prompt passage of this law, which was agreed to by the Senate, but owing to its very perfection, was indefinitely postponed in the House of Representatives, an evidence of oversight in not making the legal use of rights the basis of liberty, which that body had afterwards reason to deplore.
In every form this far-seeing patriot had warred against the nomadic life of the cattle-grower, which was an insurmountable barrier to the improvement of the rural districts. After two years' discussion he succeeded in getting permission from the government to survey and lay out in small farms, in the North American mode, an extensive tract which was in possession of squatters, and these farms he sold cheaply, in part to the squatters themselves, and in part to emigrants from other lands. He personally superintended laying out the squares with broad streets, and planting them with trees, which grow as if by magic on the rich pampa lands whose native growth is only rich grass, that feeds countless herds of cattle without any labor to the owners. This survey was made in Chivilcoi in 1858, and last year, a railroad was completed to it from Buenos Ayres. On the occasion of opening the station, many persons accompanied the Governor to witness the ceremony, and all were amazed beyond expression to see the spectacle. It was a Chicago in the desert, as Colonel Sarmiento has expressed it. For the first time within the life of one man, was a region in South America so transformed. It contained a church which Colonel Sarmiento had dedicated, a beautiful public school-house, for the front of which he had induced a native artist to carve a marble group of Christ blessing the children, and which was raised to its place on the same festival, with an eloquent address; a bank of discount; various private schools, and a fine railroad station. Where the industrial movement is most conspicuous, at this railroad station, the only square called for a living man bears the name of Sarmiento. The 25th of May (the anniversary of their successful battle against Spanish rule), the 9th of July (their independence day), Washington, and Lincoln; Moreno and Belgrave (generals of the war of independence); Florencio Varela, the first martyr assassinated by Rosas, and Echevarria, the poet, give names to the other squares.
At the three days' banquet of the festival, the name of Sarmiento was toasted from one end of the long tables to the other, by the representatives of every public interest, each of which he had fostered; and subsequently thousands poured out to see with their own eyes how a little enterprise could make the desert blossom as the rose. In a land where cows were the chief object of interest, milk could not be supplied for the cities or even for the country, and the art of butter-making was lost! To this day it is imported, and is one of the most expensive articles of luxury. Cereals and vegetables are now brought to Buenos Ayres from Chivilcoi, as well as from the Isles of the Parana, a South American Venice, which by Colonel Sarmiento's means have been redeemed from the waters and made the source of millions of revenue to the owners.
Thirty-nine individuals possessed the lands of Chivilcoi in 1858; now twenty thousand happy, prosperous farming people occupy the country, and enjoy all the conveniences of civilized life. There are no immense fortunes made, but great riches are distributed to all, and are increasing rapidly and wonderfully. The cultivation of the Isles of the Parana, another enterprise of our author, resulted as brilliantly as the surveying of land in Chivilcoi. He often escaped from the burning debates of the Chambers, the press, and the schools, to the enchanting region at the mouth of the Parana, which is a delta of thirty miles by twenty, of islands, of a fertility unexampled perhaps in the world. In sailing up those channels bordered with the most luxuriant natural vegetation, he saw with the eye of a San Juan agriculturist, that if redeemed from the waters, they might become a source of immense wealth to the province. It did not take long for a brilliant thought to come to a white heat in his mind, and securing to himself from government the right to take possession of them, he seized his most romantic pen, and began to kindle the public with descriptions of their beauty, and of their immense agricultural future, if they could be cultivated judiciously—already a rural Venice whose canals Nature had supplied. By hundreds people put their hands to the work of clearing the rubbish, planting trees on the borders of the channels, etc. Dr. Francia, the tyrant of Paraguay, spent four hundred thousand francs in the enterprise. Not only Colonel Sarmiento, but all the persons interested, lived in a state of ecstasy, navigating their boats from island to island, enjoying the primitive and unsurpassed scenery, and scattering seed on the earth just snatched from the dominion of the waters. They had what he describes as a "frantic vegetation," for the territory was inundated every fifteen days, though only for a few hours at a time, so that everything that was planted was choked by the natural grasses, stimulated by the cultivation to unwonted growth. The result to those engaged in the undertaking was utter ruin at the end of two years. But at the end of five years, the aspect of the canals was one of magical beauty; they were planted with poplar-trees for leagues and leagues, and barques of all descriptions were navigating them, receiving the showers of peaches that fell from the trees for miles together. Finding the spot so humid, he consummated his labors by sending a courier to Chili for a species of osier for basket-making, and presented a twig to every planter. Now, millions of money are made by it, and they have cause to remember the speech which he made on the occasion, prophesying the riches that would accrue from this development of their industry, but which was then made the subject of ridicule. There is perhaps no place in the world so picturesque or of such dreamlike beauty as these channels bordered with trees. They are the delight of all the dwellers upon the River La Plata.
After immense opposition, Colonel Sarmiento succeeded in carrying a railroad from San Fernando, on the mainland opposite the islands, to Buenos Ayres, by which fruits, vegetables, and timber, are transported to its markets. As a reward for his labors, he enjoys the life-right of a perpetual seat in the railroad trains, while thousands are enriching themselves with the fruits of his enterprise.
One disgraceful feature of the recent mutilated Confederation was the perpetuation in the provinces of the rule of irresponsible and irremovable chieftains. Benavides, for sixteen years a supporter of Rosas, went on as a supporter of Urquiza, after the fight of Caseros. To suppress insurrections among the people, Urquiza had to interfere by force in 1852, not to secure to San Juan "a republican form of government" in accordance with the Federal constitution, but violently to impose upon it the rule of its old master. In 1857 he made an unsuccessful attempt to reestablish him again; and he interfered in 1858 to punish the community for the death of Benavides, who had been taken prisoner, and had lost his life in an affray occasioned by an attempt to rescue him.
Instead of avoiding direct conflict with this obstinate resistance, the national government, which Urquiza actually controlled, sent a governor to San Juan, who had been previously known only by his violent conduct and his vices, to serve as a sort of executioner. The result which might have been expected, soon followed in a terrible outbreak, during which the band of outsiders sent to torment the people perished at their hands.
Colonel Sarmiento, then Minister of State at Buenos Ayres, was informed of the first symptoms of this outbreak by a message sent him by his friend, the irreproachable and venerable Dr. Aberastain, and he availed himself of the information to urge with earnestness upon the President and upon General Urquiza the importance of saving the Republic from a day of mourning, by removing Virasoro, their recent gubernatorial appointee.
On the 16th of November, they published a joint letter, signed also by the Governor of Buenos Ayres, which at last gained what had been so anxiously solicited; but on the very day that President Durqué revoked the appointment, Virasoro fell in a frightful conflict with the rebellious people.
A commission was despatched to San Juan, for the purpose of pacifying the disturbance, but while on its way, the old hostility of faction poisoned the minds of its members, and under the influence of General Urquiza, then living apart on his own estates, who tampered with the forces that passed by his residence, it became the instrument of a bloody revenge. Among other victims, Dr. Aberastain, who had been made governor after the fall of Virasoro, was cruelly and uselessly sacrificed in a horrible massacre, among hundreds of other victims, by that very Saa, who within a year has again headed an insurrection in the western provinces.
Everything was again thrown into confusion, and on the receipt of the news, Colonel Sarmiento withdrew from the ministry, as his continuance in office would have misled the public as to the nature of the resolutions forced upon the government of Buenos Ayres, for circumstances made it seem the personal interest of the minister that this war should be made, while in fact the contest which he fain would have averted, had already become inevitable. At this time he also refused the embassy to the United States, because he would not receive from the hands of the President the bribe of $14,000 with which he tempted him to withdraw his resignation.
The battle of Pavon terminated these unhappy consequences of an evil which a conciliatory policy had failed to subdue. Urquiza was routed, the national government was dissolved, and as it was expedient for an army to be sent into the interior, to secure and increase the results of the victory, Colonel Sarmiento was made commander-in-chief and official representative of the political views of his party. A pamphlet written by him describes this campaign, which began with the rout of a force entrenched behind the Carcaraña.
In pursuance of the operations of the war, and having captured two pieces of artillery from San Juan at San Luis, he was the first to reach the city of Mendoza, on January 1, 1862, attended by the victorious troops of Buenos Ayres. Proceeding at once to San Juan, he met with the reception to be looked for from the people of his birthplace upon their release from so long a series of disasters endured in behalf of a cause whose triumph had demanded a sacrifice of which they were the victims, as well as the generous sympathy thus awakened in Buenos Ayres; for it is positively known that it was the odium of the San Juan massacres that solved the difficulties previously insuperable either by political combinations, treaties, or battles. On January 11, he celebrated, as governor of the province, an office to which the general voice had called him, the obsequies of the illustrious men who had fallen in those massacres, and thenceforward zealously availed himself of the means just placed in his hands to abate the evil effects of so many years of confusion.
The many years he had spent in connection with the Chilian administration, at that time farther advanced in the path of progress than any other to be found in South America, his many travels, his steady devotion to public life, all made him worthy of a wider field of usefulness than that afforded by an interior province. But the moral importance of a community which had undergone such trials, and the liberal instincts it had always shown, were enough to make amends for its scanty population in lending importance to his labors. An era of tranquillity in the interior followed the storms of the past, while new sources of disturbance made their appearance in the capital.
He availed himself rather of the deference with which he was regarded, than of his official power, to render acceptable various reforms in administration and in the collection of revenue, setting on foot, also, some public works, while the people, but for him, would have been disinclined to any changes. A Topographical Department, entrusted to European engineers, was employed in the work of mapping and surveying the country, a work required by a method of agriculture dependent on canals for irrigation. The map of the province has since been lithographed.
Public education, as was to be expected, received a great impulse, in the foundation of a college for advanced studies, the nucleus of a future university; a high school for children of each sex, and primary schools in each ward, parish, or department. Upon the foundation of an abandoned church in the city, the building devoted to educational purposes was at once begun, of which former mention was made. The following public enterprises also deserve notice: a normal farm, for the promotion and improvement of agricultural art; a large cemetery which was urgently required by public decency, the old one being overcrowded; a public promenade, shaded by groups of trees, with iron benches beneath them; numerous repairs of existing structures; the paving of two leagues of streets; the construction of bridges of quarried marble over the canals, etc.; and the opening of straight roads thirty yards wide between the departments, to facilitate the wagon traffic.
He endeavored to bring back the refinements of cultivated society to a province so remote and which had been so exposed to conditions detrimental to progress, by the observance of public ceremonies and festivities on such occasions as the laying of corner-stones of new buildings, at the opening of various new works, and by military parades, all photographed at the time, in all of which were employed the forms, ornaments, and symbols used for such purposes by all civilized nations. The halcyon days of his short rule must have seemed after their late misfortunes like a dream of the night.
In his first addresses to the provincial legislature, he proposed the development of the mining interest; for San Juan, an oasis in the desert of the Travesias, as the barren region around the province is called, is full of mining wealth. Three years had passed in fruitless endeavors to extract the silver which showed itself in numerous localities throughout the province.Mr. Rickard was sent for from Chili, and, after an examination of the principal mining districts, he made a report of them favorable enough to encourage the formation of a mining company, with a capital of a hundred thousand dollars in gold; and when the stock was subscribed for, he went to England for materials, machinery, and workmen, stopping at Buenos Ayres to obtain more subscriptions and assistance from the government. No more fortunate choice of an agent could have been made. Mr. Rickard not only fulfilled all the objects of his expedition, but enlisted English capital in the enterprise, by publishing his "Mining Journey across the Andes," which made the public familiar with the name of the new mining district and other public works (trabajos publicos). A Review was established at the same time to keep the public informed of the results of the undertaking.
If the richness and permanence of these mines, and the skillful method of working them which have been adopted, answer the well-grounded hopes which have been formed of them, it is supposed that their shares will soon be quoted at the London Exchange, and the "Mining Journal" will inform the world of their products. Facing the central chain of the Andes, five thousand feet above the sea-level, in the beautiful and cultivated valley of Colingasta, enhancing the grandeur of one of the most superb views among the mountains, arise the columns of smoke emitted from the lofty chimney of the Smelting and Amalgamating Works of the San Juan Mining Company, situated near the mines of Fontal and of Castano, which are connected with the plain by a cart-road, and offer an inexhaustible stock of metallic wealth to English capital and metallurgical science. Mr. Rickard has bought up all the stock in order to extend the enterprise by the introduction of more capital.
It will soon be known whether these mineral districts, with their thousands of argentiferous veins, can rival the mines of Mexico or Potosi in richness and productiveness.
But all this fair promise of peace and progress was disturbed and saddened from the outset by the incursions of banditti which distracted the neighboring provinces, and were carried even to the gates of San Juan, which thus found itself threatened with ruin while it was intent upon paving its streets and making bridges and roads. On January 1, 1863, a letter conveying the compliments of the season was sent to the Governor of San Juan by one of the ministers of the general government, containing the expression, "We are sailing over a sea of flowers." Another minister stated on March 22, "We have never enjoyed a period of greater good fortune; at peace, as we are, with all the world, and on friendly terms with Urquiza and El Chacho." These dreams of a government which, owing to its location at one extremity and in the most civilized part of the Republic, had fallen into a false security, were dispelled by the fight of La Punta del Agua, which happened ten days later, on the 2d of April. On this occasion, no political pretext was assigned for their plundering inroads by the troops of horsemen coming from the open country of La Rioja, San Luis, and Cordova, and headed by El Chacho, a leader who had been used to making war on the towns with impunity under all the successive governments, for thirty years past. The national government entrusted to the Governor of San Juan the suppression of these disturbances, assigning to the duty the National Guard of San Juan and Mendoza, a battalion of regulars, and the First Regiment of the Line, commanded by Colonel Sanders, who was famous for having received up to that time fifty-one wounds from knife, bullet, lance, rapier, and sword.
Governor Sarmiento received his appointment to the direction of these military operations on the 8th of April. He had been informed on the 6th of an invasion of Mendoza by adventurers crossing from Chili in his rear. This intelligence, and the outbreak of insurrection in all directions, made the instructions he had received useless and inapplicable, and forced him to rely upon the inspiration of the moment, and to act as the facts of the case required.
Seventeen military expeditions were successively despatched from San Juan, towards the south, east, and north. The conflict of April 2 in San Luis was followed by several others: one in Mendoza, April 13; one in La Rioja, May 21; one in the Playas de Cordova, June 29; one in the Chanar, between the last-named provinces, July 8; one in the Bajo Hondo, between San Juan and La Rioja, August 14, and a final and decisive engagement at Causete, near the gate of the city of San Juan, on October 29. The Argentine montonera, although everywhere beaten, continually reappeared, unexpectedly threatening the place they supposed to be weakest, and mocking the vigilance of the armies in pursuit of them.Eight hours after his entrance into the rural departments of San Juan, El Chacho had been routed and was in flight towards the desert, trusting to that and to the speed of his horses for his safety; but this time he failed to find in it the security which had enabled him to laugh at the pursuit of regular troops for thirty years. The author of "Civilization and Barbarism," who has given us so lively a description of the warfare of the pampas, had, in this instance, departed from his ordinary course, and pursued the brigand with such energy as to surprise him in his last fastness, where he was seized and executed.
The want of space forbids the insertion of the story of his capture, which did credit to the skill and military tactics of the commander.
While governor of San Juan, upon the invasion of the province, he twice placed it in a state of siege under a proclamation of martial law. This course was unjustly and imprudently disapproved by the national government, and singular to relate, the two persons suspected of dealings with the insurgents, who were released from imprisonment by the national authorities, met the melancholy fate of obscure deaths in inglorious combats such as too often occur in those unhappy countries,—domestic broils involving whole hecatombs of lives.
Upon the capture, arms in hand, of Clavero, one of the ringleaders of the insurrection of Mendoza, a place subjected by the President himself to the control of Governor Sarmiento, commander-in-chief, he was tried before a council of war and condemned to death. The sentence, according to rule, was referred to the commander-in-chief. Governor Sarmiento felt convinced that he judged aright in sanctioning it, but the national government, ignorant till long after of the actual occurrences connected with this series of operations, failed to do justice to the director of this complicated and obstinate warfare, until information was received of the decisive affair at Causete. Clavero was set at liberty. At this day, government sees its mistake. In speaking of this transaction, Colonel Sarmiento again quotes Webster in his able speech about martial law and its occasional necessity, and in his "Life of Abraham Lincoln," dwells with much force upon that statesman's action in circumstances not wholly unlike those in which he then took part. He wrote several articles at the time upon the question of state rights which arose out of all these circumstances, which were afterwards published in the "Nacional" at Buenos Ayres, and still later reproduced in a pamphlet entitled "The State of Siege according to Dr. Rawson," who was Secretary of State.[15]
The future of San Juan became secure upon the disappearance of El Chacho, who had plundered it more than once during his residence in the neighborhood and since the organization of its mining wealth had set it on the road to wealth. The National Government again applied to Congress for authority to appoint the Governor of San Juan to the diplomatic mission to the United States. After resigning his office of Governor, with the view of accepting this appointment, he went to Chili to execute a similar mission, for he was made ambassador both to that country and to Peru at the same time.
He took occasion, while at Valparaiso, to protest against the unprecedented conduct of Admiral Pinzon in seizing the Chincha Islands. This protest was couched in concise language, which clearly indicated, however, how the principles of international law had in this instance been trampled under foot. A still greater sensation was occasioned in Chili and in Peru by his address to the President of the Chilian Republic upon presenting his credentials, due, perhaps, to the expressive phrases in which this discourse recalled the glories of the War of Independence against Spain, the common glory of Peru, Chili, and the United Provinces.
Colonel Sarmiento's resignation of the government of San Juan, gives occasion for the remark that his principles have made themselves manifest throughout his public career by the repeated withdrawal from situations of personal advantage whenever his retention of them would have interfered with a public interest or a sound political principle.
When sixteen years old, he had quitted the management of a prosperous establishment to join an army which took the field against Facundo Quiroga; in 1842 he gave up the high position won in Chili by his writings, to attach himself to another Argentine army. In 1851 he did the same, to join the final war against Rosas. After being disappointed in the ability and disposition of General Urquiza, the commander of the expedition against Rosas, to give a settled or a better government, he alone of all his countrymen withdrew entirely from the scene of operations, as has been before mentioned, in order neither to countenance by his presence the evil rule he foresaw, nor to attempt a forcible resistance to it.
In 1856 he had twice declined a seat in the Congress, because he could not take it consistently with his principles, preferring to establish himself in Buenos Ayres without any public office, and contend alone against the then mutilated confederation. In 1861 he refused the embassy to the United States for kindred reasons, and again withdrew from the ministry on learning the news of the violent proceedings at San Juan and the consequent death of his friend, Dr. Aberastain.
Before his departure from the Argentine Republic, the attention of the world had been called to the United States and its public men by our civil war, and by European attempts to introduce monarchy into Mexico. He still watches the political struggle with the deepest interest and the eye of a philosopher and a legislator, from whom we may learn much. A letter addressed of late to Senator Sumner on the occasion of the suspension of the Department of Education, may well put to shame the backwardness of our National Congress in reference to that cause whose neglected claims are the strongest possible comment upon the superficial education of our people.[16]
From Chili he went to Peru. During his stay in Lima he was invited by the plenipotentiaries sent to the South American Congress, to which he had never been accredited by his government, to take part in its deliberations, and give it the benefit of his knowledge. He assisted in drawing up the treaties of alliance agreed to by the accredited plenipotentiaries, and did much to couch the alliance in such terms as would least impair the sovereignty of each State.
The Chilian press has preserved the memory of several remarkable predictions of Colonel Sarmiento in respect to the consequences of political conditions whose significance his sagacity enabled him to penetrate with remarkable insight, as the events proved.
In September, 1847, he assured Señor Carbello, the Chilian Minister Plenipotentiary at Washington, of the close approach of the French Revolution which took place in February, 1848, at which latter time he had returned from his travels, and was again in Chili, whence he wrote, in March, before any tidings could have reached Chili, inquiring for the details of an event that he was confident had happened. His prediction of the present condition of the United States, published last winter in "The Commonwealth," deserved to stand side by side with those prophecies which Mr. Sumner collected in his striking article in "The Atlantic." At that time he traversed the United States from end to end, saw its growing prosperity with a fresh eye,—fresh from the apathy of South America and Spain; fresh from the complicated conditions of the most advanced countries of Europe, where he had detected the clogs in the machinery of despotic and indeed of all monarchical or personal governments. He also detected the flaws in our country, and saw where liberty was travestied by the continued existence of slavery, but looking through all these obstacles he confidently predicted that in twenty years this would be the Great Republic of the world, and command the respect of all nations, possessing vitality enough to cure its own internal sores. It is still more remarkable to find a passage in his travels wherein, speaking of the division of the religious world into sects, he recognizes the principles of Roger Williams into whose spirit he intelligently enters, and prophesies that America is a land where eventually all sects will be merged in a pure practice of Christianity which shall repudiate all discordant forms and show the spectacle of a religious nation in which only the principles of Christianity shall be recognized without its forms.
Perhaps the most remarkable instance of his foresight was his celebrated letter to General Urquiza in 1860, in which he told him that a year later he should require him to answer for the consequences of that invasion of San Juan which ended in the death of Dr. Aberastain. In 1861, and as it happened on the same day of the same month, while moving on San Juan with an army, he addressed a letter from Villanueva to General Urquiza, who had been just defeated at Pavon, to remind him of his former letter which had been justified by the event.
During his late residence in the United States, Colonel Sarmiento has given all his leisure time to the subject of education and to the preparation of papers descriptive of American industry and American progress, and of valuable works, to send home to his country.
An able "Life of Lincoln," compiled from the best authorities then known, and made up largely of his best and most effective speeches, taken as far back as the debates upon the Mexican war, and prefaced by a very instructive Introduction, he has printed and sent to South America, offering it "in unlimited quantities" if they will but read it. The skill with which he made prominent in it, topics upon which South America needed instruction, was very marked. The burst of sympathy which followed in the Argentine Republic, the death of our beloved President, was quite touching, and has been but little known and appreciated here. They too observed public mourning for the event, and their hearts were opened to receive the instruction his life and death afforded. Indeed the interest with which they watch our career is very worthy of note, and the noble speech and defense of our country made by Hector Florence Varela, one of the most accomplished of their citizens, at the Peace Congress in Geneva in 1867, a speech for which General Dix sent him an official note of thanks,[17] show how intelligent is their appreciation.
His book entitled "The Schools the Basis of the Prosperity of the United States," is a large work, containing a mine of information and wisdom. Many of its papers are descriptive of South American wants, to which the remedy is pointed out in others upon North American prosperity. This book is highly spoken of by Mr. Laboulaye, as well as by the best patriots and literary men of South America w r ho have had the good fortune to read it; but an edition of a thousand copies, which Colonel Sarmiento sent home for distribution, was stored in the government house, which shortly after was burnt down with all its treasures, books, and archives. Only a few individuals, who knew the edition was there, and insisted upon having copies, obtained the books. The catastrophe seems almost symbolic of the disasters that ever and anon befall the devoted Republic, which from time to time rises phoenix-like from its own ashes, and after having vainly fluttered its wings for a flight into the empyrean, falls back to earth with broken pinion. May it prove of immortal vigor in the end, like the patriot educator, who never tires of scattering the good seed broadcast, sure that in the nature of things it is indestructible; that a little vegetation will first spring up and cover the naked rock, disintegrating the surface by striking its slender roots, and this will make a richer bed for the next seed to fall upon, till at last the desert shall blossom as the rose. What undying faith in principles is needed to keep alive even such indomitable energies!
When Colonel Sarmiento was in Europe in 1847, he was solicited to make the "Revue des Deux Mondes" answer to its name by his own contributions to it. He did not accept the offer, but the last publication he has undertaken is a Review of his own called "Ambas Americas," or "The Two Americas," in which he purposes to embody all the current educational literature and improvements of the time. He has sent home a large edition of the first number to be distributed not only in his own Republic but in the sister Republics. Many of these are hardly yet acquainted with the movement set on foot in Chili and the Argentine Republic thirty years ago. In such portions of the country, the education of the people as a people has never yet been contemplated, and this very able Review will give the first intimation of such a plan to many of them. He hopes for assistance from this country to enrich his work.
His able coadjutor, La Señora Juana Manso, inspired by his example, still continues in her able editorship of the "Common-School Annals," founded many years since by Colonel Sarmiento. She is resolved that her compatriots shall not want for the best theories upon every branch of the subject. In one of her last issues, speaking of this last effort of Colonel Sarmiento, she joyfully exclaims, "the giant is on his feet again!" Like Antæus, of old, when he falls to the earth, he rebounds from it with new motives for exertion, and apparently with new powers of execution. The foundation and execution of the "Ambas Americas" was the first effort which Colonel Sarmiento made after hearing of the death of his noble and only son in the Paraguayan war. The thought of what the sixty thousand children of the Republic needed drew him out of his deep sadness for that immeasurable and irreparable loss, for his son was a young man of the finest promise, spoken of by his eulogists as the "hope of the nation," the "coming man," the "idol of society," and young as he was (but twenty-one), "the intelligent and pure patriot" to whose future career the most experienced men of his country looked with expectation and confidence. He was educated by his father from earliest infancy, and was just about to graduate at the University of Buenos Ayres, when the call to fight for liberty and his country snatched him from his studies. The motives of the allies in that war were not conquest, for they mutually agreed not to occupy Paraguay, but simply to dethrone the tyrant and restore the country to its enslaved people.[18] The motive of young Captain Sarmiento and his Lieutenant Paz who fell on the same field of battle, and were brought home and buried together in the tomb of the martyred Varela, by request of his sons, was as pure as those which actuated our noblest young men to fight for the liberty of all, as well as in defense of their country.
At the instance of his government, which consisted of his personal as well as political friends, who thought his mind might be temporarily diverted from his sorrows by a change of scene, Colonel Sarmiento visited the French Exposition in 1867, and was present at the awarding of medals to his countrymen for their superior wools.
Such are the principal events in the life of a statesman of South America, of which we have known so little. Perhaps they have many more men of merit, for in his works we meet the names of many who have been distinguished, and of whom he speaks in terms of high respect, such as the Generals of the War of Independence, Pueyrredon, San Martin, and Las Heras, statesmen like Don Manuel Montt, ex-president of Chili, the celebrated litterateur Bello, the virtuous Aberastain, "a Cato assassinated in another Utica," Dr. Velez, the author of the "Codes of Law," of which M. Laboulaye says it is the most advanced work on that subject in the world, with many other personages too numerous to name and of whom nothing is known here. But none of them have had the opportunity, like the subject of this sketch, to acquire that knowledge which, when well directed, serves to change radically the condition of a nation. Even the circumstance of not having received that kind of education which is given in universities may have served to preserve his mind free from those leading-strings of national tradition which often becomes a second nature in the individual, destroying all originality and perpetuating errors of opinion. A man who has contended with barbarism in South America, and has studied the sources of the development of other nations, during residence therein, must have acquired by practice and by comparison, rich materials for thought, and a fund of ideas of no common order. That of diffusing education among the people, from which nothing has distracted him for thirty years, neither war nor exile, the poverty of his private life, nor the seductions of exalted position, has given a special character to his life. The present minister of the government of Buenos Ayres, speaking of education, in his report to the legislature of this year, says, "We cannot speak of education without naming Colonel Sarmiento;" and this saying will be often repeated in different parts of South America, for his new Review, the "Ambas Americas," a work specially designed to impart to the southern hemisphere the knowledge and the ideas that have been acquired in the northern, will spread the knowledge of his character and efforts, as well as of his great theme, Popular Education.
It may be said of him in reference to the subject of education, as was said of a contemporary by Plutarch, "He is more than an echo of Socrates in the practice of morality, he is even a disciple." Who like him has during a long life pursued the one aim of saving a nation from decay by proposing to rouse the dormant moral sentiments of the human soul?
Will his example be followed in his own country? He has had so little encouragement in his laborious career that it had been feared few would be found to follow him in a path so bristling with difficulties, but the present sympathy of his countrymen, whom a great calamity has waked from their long apathy, inspires better hopes.
It is but justice to do so much honor to his country, as to say, that by what we have seen of the correspondence of "Ambas Americas," and through the political articles of the New York papers, it is evident that there are everywhere some who appreciate the true value of his labors, and there is a party there that understands how much it might be benefited by putting the reins of government into such able and experienced hands. "It is like the judgment of posterity," one letter says, "this opinion that is held to-day of the same ideas and efforts which ten years ago met with such resistance."
In countries so little experienced in republican practices as South America must be, the material facts of an election are not always the expression of the most dominant opinion of the best minds, but rather of the accidental influences of the moment. It is therefore doubtful whether Colonel Sarmiento, being so far from the theatre of party movements, can effectually serve his country otherwise than by his advice or his writings, but that they are now esteemed worthy of consideration there, is a powerful stimulus to his perseverance in his life-long work.
- ↑ Feijoo, whose real name was Benedict Jerom, was a Spanish Benedictine monk, who attempted by his writings and example to correct and reform the vitiated religion and superstitious notions of his countrymen. This unusual boldness against the prejudices of the times proved very offensive to the Church, and the author was with difficulty saved from the horrors of the Inquisition.
- ↑ This news, true at the moment apparently, proved to be a fallacy.
- ↑ In 1847 Colonel Sanniento sought out San Martin in his French retreat.
- ↑ The Spanish word is higuericida, the fig-i-cidal.
- ↑ In a work upon Popular Education.
- ↑ Taken from Travels in Europe, Africa, and America, in 1846–7.
- ↑ In his biography of his friend, he relates that such was the common feeling of respect for Aberastain among his fellow-pupils in childhood, such his almost morbid conscientiousness, that he went by the soubriquet of "God-the-Father." We can hardly appreciate this Spanish custom of nicknaming, as we call it. In those communities, half the people are known by some fancy name growing out of personal or accidental or characteristic qualities.
- ↑ The citizens of San Juan, of all classes, contributed to the erection of the Sarmiento School, some by the produce of their farms and other labors, the ladies by theatrical exhibitions, concerts, fairs, and many liberal men by their money. It was erected within the ruins of an abandoned church.
- ↑ The Spanish language has been very much adulterated in South America.—Ed.
- ↑ These were some young men whom the youthful Sarmiento taught to read, though much older than himself, and the sons of a wealthy man.
- ↑ Late Secretary of State in the Republic.
- ↑ River Plate Magazine, No. 3, page 151.
- ↑ Then Minister of State in Chili.
- ↑ Not ten years before the foundation of the Normal School, the Court of Santiago had condemned a robber who had stolen the candelabra of the Virgin in the Church of San Merced, "to serve as a schoolmaster in Copiapo for the term of three years," as they would have condemned him to be whipped or to labor in the Penitentiary.
- ↑ At this moment, 1868, a change of cabinet has thrown Dr. Rawson out of this position, and Colonel Sarmiento has been appointed Secretary of State by the present administration, but he declines to take the place in this last hour of its existence.
- ↑ See Appendix.
- ↑ The speech and the note have been published in the April number of the Boston Radical.
- ↑ It is not clearly understood in this country that the object of Lopez, tyrant of Paraguay, was not to found or defend a republic, but to found an empire extending over Entrerios, Corxientes, and Uruguay.