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LIFE IN THE ARGENTINE REPUBLIC.
his country, established himself quietly at Cordova, which congratulated itself for having thus robbed the nation of one of its armies. Bustos created an irresponsible colonial government, introduced court etiquette and the perennial torpor of Spain, and thus prepared, Cordova entered upon the year 1828, when the question before the country was the organization of the Republic and the establishment of the revolutionary system with all its consequences.[1]
- ↑ On going over the pages of this first historical essay, the author regrets certain defects which cannot be expunged without recasting the whole work, for it would thus be impossible to preserve the thread of the ideas. The heat of the early years of exile, the impossibility of verifying details in such circumstances, and the prejudices of party feeling, have left some indelible traces. The description of Cordova is stained with this capital vice, and the author would willingly expunge it, if it did not contain a certain malicious exaggeration which make striking the contrast of the modern spirit which characterized Buenos Ayres in 1825. But the author owes to the friendly frankness of Dr. Alsina, corrections upon this and several other points, which as a point of honor as well as an excuse, he submits to the examination of the reader, thus making every possible reparation for error without destroying the spirit of the original text. "I seem to see," he says in these notes, "a capital defect in this book, that of exaggeration, independent of a certain vivacity, if not in the ideas, in their allocution. If you do not propose to write a romance or an epic, but a veritable history, political, social, and military, your rule must be not to depart from rigid historical exactness, and exaggeration is inconsistent with this. You show a penchant for systems, and in social science, systems do not constitute the best means of arriving at the truth. When the mind is occupied with a previous idea, and proposes to make that triumph in its demonstration of it, it exposes itself to original errors without being aware of it. Then instead of proceeding analytically, instead of examining each fact in itself, to see what can be deduced from it, and from these collected deductions and observations, to bring out a general deduction or result, instead of proceeding thus, a writer uses synthesis, that is to say, he poses a certain leading idea, reviews whatever facts present themselves, not to examine them philosophically and in detail, but to make them prove his favorite idea, and to construct by their means the edifice of his system. The natural result of this is, that when he meets with a fact which supportg his idea, he exaggerates and amplifies it, and when he finds another
