Liberal Thought in Argentina, 1837–1940. Группа авторовЧитать онлайн книгу.
than a simple change of governor in Buenos Aires.—I will mention them with the same sincerity and frankness with which they were manifested then. They may be erroneous: that depends on each man’s way of thinking. But deceit was never in play at their conception. They belonged generally
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to the young men of the opposing party; and they owed them to their political studies at school. To suspect that treason could have mixed with them is to suppose that there were people foolish enough to initiate public law students in the mysteries of that dark diplomacy, which according to some, seeks to change the political principle of government in the Americas.
The transcendent idea of the young defenders of that alliance was to introduce, reconciling it with the perfect nationality of the country, the influence of the civilizing action of Europe by honorable means admitted by the law of nations, in order to establish a feasible political order in the Americas, in which the most advanced and liberal ideas would be supported by a majority of the enlightened population, developed under the influence of laws and institutions that protected such a trend. They wanted, in short, to find a formula that would solve the problem of the establishment of political freedom in the Americas, a problem still unsolved, since the solution does not lie in those written constitutions, which are inadequate and impracticable, and whose only use is frequently to encourage the hypocrisy of freedom, at odds with genuine freedom. Is there anyone unaware that South America, ever since the proclamation of unlimited democracy, is in a false position? That the order practiced until now is transitory because it is inadequate, and that it is necessary to bring things to more normal and genuine bases? Can anyone who sincerely ponders on what our current constitutions are fail to understand the importance and difficulty of this matter and the profound need to deal with it?
So: those young men tackling this question, which concerns the very life of this part of the New World, thought that while the numerical advantage of the ignorant, proletarian multitude prevailed, clothed in the revolution of popular sovereignty, freedom would always be replaced by the despotic military regime of just one man. And that the only means to ensure the preponderance of the enlightened minorities of these countries was to enlarge it with ties and connections with civilized influences from abroad, UNDER CONDITIONS COMPATIBLE WITH AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE AND DEMOCRACY, IRREVOCABLY PROCLAIMED BY THE REVOLUTION.
Absurd or wise, this was the thought of those who in that period supported the alliance with European forces to subjugate the party of the
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plebeian multitude captained and organized militarily by General Rosas. The supporters of those ideas maintained them publicly and openly in the press, with the candor and disinterest inherent in the character of youth.
That question is so grave, affecting in such a way the political existence of the new states of America, so uncertain and dark, and so few steps have been taken toward its solution, that one would have to be very backward in experience and good political sense to qualify one or another attempted solution as strange. That point has attracted the attention of all men who have given serious thought to the political fate of the New World, and errors of thinking therein have been committed by Bolívar, San Martín, Monteagudo, Rivadavia, Alvear, Gómez,25 and other men no less esteemed for their merit and American patriotism. A thousand others will err behind them in solving this problem, and they will not be the lower or less distinguished heads, since the only ones for whom the question is already solved are the demagogues who deceive the multitude and the limited spirits who deceive themselves.
If, then, the Argentine parties have fallen into error in the adoption of their means, it has not been due to vice nor to cowardice of the spirit, but to passion that, while still noble and pure in its intentions, is almost always blind to the use of its means, and the lack of experience that the new states of this continent suffer from as regards the path along which they must take their steps in public life.
No, the Argentine Republic is not a depraved country, as is supposed by those who judge it by the precepts she has given herself in the delirium of revolutionary fever. It is her political parties who have defamed her abroad, mutually exaggerating their faults in the heat of the fight and implying others as a vulgar means of attack and destruction. To judge the Argentine Republic by what her parties at arms write in the press is to judge France by the lugubrious portraits made by the impatient misanthropy of some of her great writers who, living in the perfection of the future, see in the present only vices, disorder, iniquity, and lies.
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Every party has taken care to hide or disfigure the advantages and merits of its rival. According to the Rosas press, the more educated half of the Argentine Republic is equal to the southern hordes of Pehuenches and Pampas.26 It is made up of savage Unitarios (as if to say the progressive savages, union being the most advanced term, the highest ideal of political science). The Unitarios, for their part, have often seen in their rivals the Carib Indians of the Orinoco. When one day they share the peaceful embrace in which the most enflamed struggles end, how different will be the picture of the Argentine Republic painted by the sons of both camps.
What noble confessions will not be heard sometime from the mouths of the frenetic Federales! And the Unitarios, with what pleasure will they not see men of honor and great hearts come out from beneath that frightful mask under which their rivals today disguise themselves, giving way to the tyrannical demands of the situation!
In the meantime, it is not necessary to make felons of the writers who involuntarily damage the country, damaging themselves also, even though Michelet says that it diminishes their luster in the eyes of the foreigner. The representative peoples must live today like the Roman who wanted to dwell in a glass house to show off the transparency of his private life. It is necessary to live a life of truth and show it to the world as it is, with its faults and its merits. To right the wrong it is necessary to say it out loud: society and power are deaf: for them to hear, one must speak with the trumpet of the press and from the rostrum. But it is impossible to raise one’s voice at home without the neighbor hearing. There is nothing else for it than to take shelter under the comforting axiom that says—I am a man and I consider myself alien to nothing. If some peoples have no errors to lament, it is because they have not begun to live. The great nations have left their stains behind. The backward peoples have them in their future. In the people, as in the man, disease is an abnormal and transitory state: our country is nearing the end of its maladies.
One hears also that the Argentine Republic suffers a general backwardness as a consequence of its long and bloody war. This error, generally accepted outside its frontiers, also comes from the same causes as the
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other. Doubtless war is less fecund in certain advances than peace: but it brings with it certain others that are peculiar to war, and the Argentine parties have obtained them with an effectiveness equal to the intensity of their suffering.
The Argentine Republic has more experience than all her brethren of the south, for the simple reason that she has suffered more than any other. She has traveled a road that the others are about to begin.
As she is closer to Europe, she has received sooner the influx of her progressive ideas, which were put into practice by the revolution of May 1810, and sooner than all others she reaped the good and bad fruits of her development: being for this reason at all times, future for the states further from the trans-Atlantic spring of American progress, which constitutes the past of the states of the Plate. Thus, even in what today is taken as a signal of backwardness in the neighboring republic, it is more advanced than those who claim to be exempt from these setbacks, because they have not yet begun to experience them.
A noteworthy fact, a part of the definitive organization of the Argentine Republic has prospered through her wars, receiving important services even from her adversaries. That fact is the centralization of national power. Rivadavia proclaimed the idea of unity: Rosas has achieved it. Among Federales and Unitarios, the Republic has been centralized, which means that the issue is only about voices that merely harbor the high spirits of young peoples; and which ultimately, both one and the other, have served their homeland, promoting its national unity. The Unitarios