Power implies the habit of obedience as the basis of its firm existence. That habit has put down roots in both parties. Within the country, Rosas has taught his supporters and his enemies to obey; outside the country, his absent enemies, without the right to govern, have spent their lives in obedience, and one way or another, both have reached the same goal.
In this regard, no country of South America has more powerful means of inner order than the Argentine Republic.
There is no country in the Americas that brings together greater practical knowledge of the Spanish American states than that Republic, because
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it is the country that has had the greatest number of capable men scattered outside its territory, and living regularly inserted in the acts of public life of the states where they reside. The day when those men return to their country and meet at deliberative assemblies, what useful applications, comparative terms, practical knowledge, and curious allusions will they bring from their memories of their past lives abroad!
If men learn and gain with their travels, what won’t happen to the people? It can be said that one-half of the Argentine Republic has been traveling in the world for ten or twenty years. Made up especially of young men, who are the homeland of tomorrow, when they return to their native soil after a life wandering, they will come in possession of foreign languages, legislation, industries, habits, which are then ties of brotherhood with the other peoples of the world. And how many, as well as knowledge, will bring capital to the national wealth! The Argentine Republic will not gain less if it leaves some of its sons scattered around the world, connected forever to foreign countries, because those very sons will extend the source of attachment to the country that gave them the life that they pass on to their children.
The Argentine Republic had the arrogance of youth. Half of its inhabitants have become modest, suffering from the despotism that commands without right to reply: and the other half, carrying out the instructive existence of the foreigner.
The plebeian masses, elevated into power, have softened their ferocity in that atmosphere of culture that the others left behind, to descend in search of the warmth of the soul, which in morals as in geology is greater the further one descends. This transitory change of roles must have been advantageous for the general progress of the country. One learns to govern by obeying; and vice versa.
While the Republic has not advanced in glory, it has done so at least in fame and renown; and on this point it owes such results to the two parties in equal measure. While Rosas deserved admiration for having repelled the foreign powers, his enemies have merited no less for having moved those powers to their advantage. The first party in the Americas to have repelled the states of Europe is that of Rosas; and the first to have been capable of moving them to take an active part in supporting them is the Unitario Party. The Argentine Republic is, then, the South American state that has most strongly made its action felt in its relations with the great powers of Europe.
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The affairs of the Plate have for many years attracted the attention of the French Chambers and the English Parliament.
The Times of London—the world’s leading newspaper—has concerned itself with Rosas five hundred times, no matter in what regard. The Revue des Deux Mondes, Le Constitutionnel, La Presse, Le Journal des Debats, and all the political newspapers of Paris have for the last eight years shown as much interest in the Plate as in any other European state.
The greatest orators of this century have brought their fervor into play one hundred times when dealing with the River Plate, and they are familiar with its affairs.
Argentine gold is the first to have been used by any state of the Americas to pay foreign writers, in Europe and on this continent, to write favorably and systematically about Rosas.
There is no press better known in all of South America than that of Buenos Aires, and in the neighboring states unlimited numbers of newspapers have existed destined to live in thrall to the affairs of the River Plate, in favor of either one party or the other. Those foreign newspapers, when not Unitarios, have been Rosistas, but always Argentine. Dealing with something from the neighboring country, they have paid tribute to it with courtesy and respect. Le gouvernement espagnol se fait journaliste,27 as Girardin once said: for a long time now, that of Buenos Aires has become Gaceta, British Packet, and Archivo Americano.
All this is all the more likely to flatter the Argentine Republic, all the more so given that it is the smallest state of all Hispanic America by population, with the exception of the Republic of Uruguay. It is difficult to find a smaller and more boisterous family in the world than the Argentine family. It would be rightly called a loud-mouthed charlatan if it were not the Spanish American state that has produced the most numerous and extraordinary things. It is the only one in which an entire respectable European army has been overcome without a single man escaping, nor a single standard. It is the only one where the reaction against the Spanish government was not defeated, not even for a single day, after the day it started, May 25, 1810. It is the only one to have defeated the empire of Brazil, beating it in battles and taking from it a whole fleet, an infinity of flags, and forcing it to relinquish, by means
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of glorious treaties, rights that it expected to hold onto all its life. It is the only one that possesses the standard of the Spanish conquest on this continent, the country that today receives greater spontaneous signals of something more than respect and consideration from the American states that surround it; the only one that in its recent wars, within and without, has aroused the amazement of all, for its constancy, its heroism, its ability, and its strength, whether this is judged in the person of one party or another.
In thinking of all this, any Argentine, wherever he is in the world, may see the light of May shine, with no regret for belonging to the nation of his birth.
However, all this is not enough. All this does not satisfy the true fate of the Argentine Republic. All this is extraordinary, lucid, surprising. But the Argentine Republic, in order to be a happy people in itself, has a need for more modest, useful, and real cases than all that brilliance of military triumphs and intelligent splendor. She has dazzled the world with the precociousness of her ideas. She has martial glories that peoples who have lived ten times more than she do not possess. She has so many flags taken in victorious combat that she could decorate her forehead with a turban made up of all the colors of the rainbow, or fly a flag as high as the Colonne de Vendôme, and more radiant than the bronze of Austerlitz.—What is the use of this, without other advantages, which, the poor thing, are still necessary in such number?
She has already done more than enough for fame; and very little for happiness.
She possesses immense glories; but, alas! She does not have a single liberty. May they be eternal, thank heavens, the laurels that she succeeded in winning, as she swore not to live without them. But remember that the first words of her revolutionary genesis were those three that form together a holy code and a sublime verse, saying: liberty, liberty, liberty.
Fortunately, she knows already, at the cost of blood and tears, that the enjoyment of that benefit is subject to difficult and gradual conditions that it is necessary to fulfill. Thus, if in the early days she was eager for liberty, today she will be happy with a more than moderate liberty.
In her first songs of victory she forgot a word less resonant than that of liberty, but which represents a counterweight that helps liberty to stay on her feet: order.
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One order, one rule, one law: this is the supreme need of her political situation.
She needs this because she does not have it.
She can possess it because she has the necessary means.
There