PRESIDENT SARMIENTO.
IT i, we suppose, impossible to excite an interest here in Argentine affairs. Had the projects of 1808 succeeded, —projects which now read like dreams, though we sent armies to carry them out,—we should probably know as much of the valley of La Plata as of the valley of the Ganges ; be as interested in news from Buenos Apes as in intelligence from Bombay ; have Generals among us decorated for victories over the Guaranis ; and be reading with a mixture of curiosity and pride accounts of the laying of a second cable from Liverpool to Monte Video. It is an accident that we are not lords alike of Uruguay and Buenos Ayres. General White- locke, however, missed his spring ; Sir S. Auchmuty's splendid conquest was flung away to secure the safe retreat of the defeated army ; and the opportunity of establishing in South America a fourth branch of the English-speaking race, with territories as rich and as vast as those of the other three, was lost, never to be regained. At present, were it not that Argentine bonds happen, for alphabetical reasons, to be quoted at the top of the foreign list of the Stock Exchange, the mass of Englishmen uninterested in hides, wool, or horns would probably forget the Argentine Republic altogether. Not one political journal in London has, we believe, published even a summary of President Sarmiento's first message, and certainly not one, not even the Standard, has thought of giving it in extenso. It is a remarkable utterance, too, by a remarkable man, delivered under very noteworthy cir- cumstances. The territory of the Argentine Republic is, as far as we know, the only one in the world which attracts an important number of immigrants who neither speak English as their mother tongue, nor intend to acquire it,—which may become a great State, but will not become in any respect Anglo-Saxon. The immigration has been rising of late till it exceeds 30,000 a year, and the President expects this year 45,000, almost the whole of whom, some Irishmen excepted, will be immigrants from Southern Europe. Italians in particular go nowhere else to settle, and their influence, it is said, is one of the many which are gradu- ally solidifying and improving an administration whose first difficulty is the want of a population numerous enough and civilized enough to reduce the Indians, half-breeds, and political fanatics of the interior to obedience and order. So warlike aro the tribes, so vast are the distances, so ingrained are the jealousies of the races, religions, colours, and civiliza- tions in the Republic,—not to speak of the quarrels between the States and the Central Power, and between Governors and Legis- latures,—that for fifty years the maintenance of regular order has been impossible, except through dictatorships supported solely by terror. Successive governments have been so paralyzed by the physical difficulty of making themselves felt, of sending shocks, as it were, through non-conducting materials, that they have been forced to become tyrannies of a type elsewhere extinct in the world, tyrannies supported solely by their power of inflicting death or torture. So regular is this process, and apparently so inevitable, that the President, who has made a life-long study of Spanish America, declares in this message a secret doubt whether there is not something, "innate, historical, traditional," in Spanish America tending to repeat there the forms of Asiatic civilization, whether huge despotisms like those of the Aztec sovereigns, of the Incas, of Rosas, of Francia, are not the expres- sion of some permanent and incurable drift in affairs,—one of the strangest little aperqus into the mind of a Republican ruler we ever remember to have read. He is battling, himself, unless we misread him, against a sort of necessity, which he never- theless feels, for perpetually accreting power. However, the settlers who will establish the bonds now wanting to make the provinces cohere, who will first create opinion and then make it executive, are at last arriving ; and at the same time the Republic has secured as its President the ablest Spanish American alive, the one man among that group of governors who appears to belong to the order of men who can found.
S. Sarmiento goes at his work like an Indian Viceroy or an Australian Governor, rather than a Spanish party leader. He tells his Congress that the first necessity for the Republic is means of secure locomotion, that he must have more roads and more security along the roads, and that he is very glad members have had to come so far, and through such discomfort, because they have actually felt the evils he desires to remedy. Hampered as he is by the Paraguayan war, of which he speaks with great bitterness, though he goes on with it, he has, it is reported, during his six months' rule, already effected much in this direction ; and the Central Railway from Buenos Ayres to Cordova, which opens up the mining provinces, will do more. Nothing bothers a highwayman like a locomotive at thirty miles an hour. Then the President is bringing the Army into order. It has been the practice in Buenos Ayres to leave the soldier unpaid, a practice, says S. Sarmiento, with an irrepressible sneer, "neither very chivalrous nor very honour- able," an "injustice which never has long to wait for punish- ment ;" but he is remedying the evil, and doing "what he can, which is saying a great deal," to "restore to the soldiery regard for the Government and for the national institutions," unpaid persons in arms being apt to regard plunder and dona- tives as considerably more advantageous than either. Some sort of discipline seems to have been restored, the soldiers behaving well in Paraguay and in the far interior, where "a latent sense of insecurity" had almost dissolved society ; and the President has further improved the public force by arming it with an American breech-loader, which Indians, half- breeds, and other disorderly persons cannot obtain, and which of itself therefore is an important element of order. Force thus restored to the State, the President set himself to restore the solvency of the Treasury, threatened not so much by the want of revenue, for the revenue has doubled in five years, as by the demoralization of the public services. Everybody was stealing, or bribing to escape taxes, or taking bribes for exemptions, and the President had to hit hard to restore decent order. He says, however, he has nearly done it,—first, by an absolute determination that if the State promised anything the State should pay it ; secondly, by show- ing no " consideration " for individuals ; and thirdly, we believe, though he avoids saying this, by making it unsafe for officials to take bribes ; and he believes, when the work is com- pletely done, that is when the Treasury obtains the whole of the taxes levied from the people, the Republic will have enough for its wants and more without any new taxation. That is a sanguine view, as the country is now passing through a period of severe financial distress, caused by the tendency of the people to postpone every enterprise to sheep-farming, which at the present prices of wool does not pay, but the restoration of security, and the opening up of the mining provinces by the railway, will give opportunity for new industries ; contracts for a new port on a great scale at the railway terminus have been already signed ; and the President is about to attack the grand obstacle to immigration, the preposterous distribution of the soil. Of all the evils which have retarded progress in Spanish America, perhaps the greatest is the tenure forced upon the colonial governments by the circumstances of the original conquest. The land was granted in vast blocks to men who intended to work their grants either through Indian serfs or imported slaves, and though slavery and serfage are alike extinct, the enormous estates worked by their aid are not. There are men in every Spanish-American state who own principalities they cannot people, and in the States of La Plata the system has been carried so far that "one individual owns land sufficient to make a kingdom," that the "thinly-inhabited section of the Republic is all owned, the immigrants cannot find a yard of land the acquisition of which is not exposed to the eventuali- ties of purchase by private bargain," and with an area of 900,000 square miles, and with a population of a million and a half of inhabitants, two-thirds of them know not where to fix their homes, or where to go and find a settlement." The President has resolved that this system should end, and intends apparently to reclaim all the lands belonging to the subordinate states, or even those granted to individuals but not used,—a strong but indispensable measure, in which he will be backed by the whole of the immigrant population.
All this looks like progress, but all this is in the President's judgment useless, unless the Republic can get rid of its per- manent burden,—the ignorance of the population,---to which he ascribes every evil it has endured, the tyranny of Rosas included. Two-thirds of the population, he says, know nothing, not even the laws they have to obey, and till this evil is corrected the people, says the President, are "not civilized." Hitherto the efforts made in this direction have been confined to setting up colleges in each province, whence issue every year "a privileged minority of fifteen hundred students, who leave the masses behind without improving them." S. Sarmiento desires universal education, a desire for it has fortunately sprung up in the provinces, and hampered as he is by the war, he has still prepared bills which will, he believes, bring the means of education home to the body of the people. Of course, the President, like all fanatics of his kind, is a great deal too sanguine. He must find schoolmasters before he can establish schools, just as he must find honest taxgatherers before he can fill his Treasury, and population before his new industries will succeed ; but still, after all allow- ances, there is something to interest politicians in this spectacle of a Spanish-American, a quiet Doctor of Laws, standing up, down there at the bottom of the world, to see if, by the mere exercise of intelligence, he cannot change a population of Spanish owners, Italian peasants, wild Indians, and men who, he says, "must be described by some word between bandits and prairie savages," all dotted in little groups over territories which strain the imagination of geographers, and have, he says, "no bond but a few roads," into the peace- ful citizens of an orderly and wealthy state, organized on civilized principles, and open to all the poverty-stricken among Catholic mankind,—doing it, too, with an obvious effort not to be too despotic, not to advance too fast, not to set up a dic- tatorship in the interests of civilization. Very likely he will fail, for be the cause what it may, whether, as the President seems to suspect, a perpetual contest between the principles of freedom and a necessity for individual government, or some mysterious lassitude in a race which, after conquering and settling a continent, seems unable to retain or even to fill it, there is some deficiency of accumulating power in the Spanish- American mind, some tendency to stereotype society as it is stereotyped in Asia, which may baffle every effort, and render S. Sarmiento's regime a mere speck in history, like the reign of a great Sultan or Shah. Still it is a great thing which is getting itself done, and unless we are far mistaken, the man who is striving to do it, over-philosophical and wordy as he is, —he is " Doctor " through all his message,—is great too, and thoroughly deserves, if man ever deserved, to succeed in the impossible.
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