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.[1]
"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
- ↑ 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.
