Varela, "will ever lie against the greater part of those men who, for the past twelve years, have represented foreign nations in the provinces of the river Plate."

Twelve years ago Rosas threw off all restraint, and after forcing from the senate of Buenos Ayres, not only the concession of "extraordinary powers," but la suma del poder publico, (the entire public power,) proceeded to establish a system of government, "whose foundations (to use the strong language of Varela) are ignorance and falsehood." Corruption, spoliation, outrage, imprisonment, torture, banishment, death!-such have been the means by which the enormous system of the tyrant Rosas has been sustained. And what is the end proposed by this system? The annihilation of every germ of morality, civilization and intellectual advancement-the determination of this modern Nero to govern without restraint the whole of the fertile region of La Plata, as his prototype Francia governed in Paraguay.

With the most culpable and unaccountable apathy have the representatives of foreign nations witnessed the progress of this ominous power, that thus essays to interpose a barrier to the waves that rush onward, "white with the foam of inevitable progress," and to thrust a nation, panting for moral and political freedom, back into the abyss of superstition, anarchy and despotism.

Shall I mention a few of the facts which have been witnessed by the representatives of civilized and Christian nations?-facts which they cannot, which they dare not deny-facts which, with frightful but resistless eloquence, reveal a system of perversity and crime which no mere words can gloze over or conceal. Literary, scientific and humane institutions, which had been established and liberally maintained previous to the administration of Rosas, have long since ceased to receive any support from the government; and the consequence is, that the former are annihilated, and the latter owe a continued but precarious existence to private charity.

In the year 1839, and in the following years, the portrait of Rosas, placed in a triumphal car, was drawn through the streets of Buenos Ayres by the wives and daughters of those associated with him in his iniquitous government, while shouts of "Death to the savage Unitarians!" rent the air. When this shameless procession arrived at the portico of

a church, it has been received by the priests, dressed as for the celebration of high mass. It has been borne to the sound of the organ through the aisles of the deserted temples of God, and, amid the waving of incense and the chanting of the multitude, has been placed upon the illuminated altar, and the solemn rites of religious worship have been informally offered to it by an enslaved and degraded priesthood. The Jesuits-and be it remembered to their honor-refused to assist in these impious rites; and because they refused, were banished from Buenos Ayres, and their property confiscated.

The Unitarians-and by this name all are designated who are not the blind and unquestioning adherents of Rosas-have been denied entrance to the churches, have been repelled from the communion of the Lord's table, have been refused the last rites of their faith, when trembling on the verge of eternity. Their bodies have been denied sepulture; their extermination has been preached from the pulpits by the parasites of Rosas, as an evangelical virtue and a Christian obligation.

"General confiscations, and the sale, at the lowest price, of the confiscated property, have been published officially by the press." It is notorious to every dweller in Buenos Ayres that at these sales-for the most part public auctions— no one dared to bid against the creatures of Rosas, for whom it was well known that this confiscated property was designed. Men, who one day were scarcely more than beggars, have suddenly become possessed of immense fortunes, while the opulent have been as suddenly reduced to the extremest want; and this not from fluctuations in business, but from the corruption of the government under whose auspices these violent and unjust transfers of property have been made.

During the frightful massacres of October, 1840, and April, 1842, the heads of well-known citizens have been paraded through the streets in carts, accompanied by indecent music, and followed by the cries of "Who'll buy peaches? who'll buy oranges?" The bodies of other victims have been exposed naked in the public market place, the severed heads adorned with blue ribbons, and the bodies labeled, "Carne con cuero," (beef with the hide.)

One of the ornaments of the drawingroom of Rosas, which has been seen again and again by foreigners visiting at

his house, is a glass case containing the salted ears of Colonel Borda, which were sent by Don Manuel Oribe to the daughter of Rosas, Doña Manuela, during the time that Oribe commanded the army in Tucuman.

Frightful tortures have been inflicted upon those who have fallen into the hands of this sanguinary tyrant, as prisoners of war; and those who have surrendered themselves by capitulation, under the most solemn guaranty of safety to their lives, have been basely and treacherously assassinated. Witness the murder of the unfortunate General Acha, whose severed head was nailed in a conspicuous place near the city of Mendoza. Witness Altanniano and his brave companions, shot without mercy, after their lives had been guarantied by capitulation. Witness the horrible tortures of Salinas, whose eyes were torn out, whose arms were cut off, whose tongue was wrenched out by the roots, and finally, that these torments might be ended by an appropriate death, his breast was opened and his heart torn out. And who was Salinas, that such refinement of barbarity should have been reserved for him? An inhabitant of Bolivia, distinguished for his high literary attainments. He was the Secretary of the Constitutional Congress, and editor of two periodicals, the "True Friend of the Country," and the "Echo of the Andes."

I could cite many more of these instances of inhuman cruelty, but I weary of enumerating horrors, the remembrance of which chills my blood. Let the revelations which I rejoice to see that the noble and fearless O'Brien is making in England, prove by their corroborative testimony that I am relating no idle tales of an overwrought fancy, The voice of the companion in arms of the brave and illustrious Lord Cochran will surely be heard and credited.

Banishments innumerable have taken place; and these have not been confined to men, who might with some show of justice be supposed to be guilty of political offences, but defenceless women and children have been thrust from their desecrated houses, and, without being allowed even a change of raiment, have been banished at a few hours' warning from their native land. There are now hundreds of these families residing in Montevideo, either sustained by charity, or earning a scanty subsistence by such efforts as those can make who have been bred in ease

and affluence, and are in an instant reduced to the extremest poverty.

All written transactions with the government of Buenos Ayres, of whatever nature, must be executed upon stamped paper, which, in addition to the arms of the country, bears the sanguinary motto, impressed in crimson characters, “Mueren los salvages Unitarios," (Death to the savage Unitarians.) Merchants who boast of a birth-place in enlightened and civilized Europe, and those whose first vital breath was inhaled in the land of Washington, have, without one word of remonstrance or one expression of disgust, been content to see this deathdenouncing motto inscribed on every custom-house permit, and every paper containing any commercial arrangement or business transaction with this iniquitous government.

Not a single denunciation of the enormous crimes to which they have been daily witnesses has been heard from the accredited agents of civilized Europe or free North America; although these agents have seen the system of Rosas in all its deformity, have fully comprehended its whole tendency, and have shuddered at the thought of such a system of government being by any possibility established in their own country. These persons, unmindful of the responsibility which rests upon their honor, their public station, or their sentiments as men, have basely kept silence, and have shown a servile respect to the founder and sustainer of this execrable system.

That Rosas possesses a subtil divination of the weaknesses, and passions, and vices of men, and that by means of these weaknesses, passions or vices he sways them to his purposes, none can deny; and that he has thus obtained an ascendancy over the representatives of foreign powers resident in Buenos Ayres is equally certain. Nay, there have been those who have even raised their voices in favor of the man and his systematic tyranny. On this point, let me quote again from Varela: "It may be," he says, "that some foreign powers do not even yet comprehend the careless or culpable conduct of their representatives in the provinces of La Plata, because, having no other organ through which to become acquainted with our countries than these same persons, they naturally receive vitiated information from vitiated minds. Without comprehending what they unfortunately have not taken the trouble to

study-the causes of the anarchy and disorders which they have witnessedthey have laid down as a primary principle, that it is impossible to govern these countries but by an iron despotism, which they have dignified by the name of a strong government. First their blindness, and afterwards the compromises into which they fell, have urged them to support the empire of the despot, and to give credit to the horrible system of extraordinary powers,' by procuring for it the sympathies of European governments. Even when the corrosive action of the irresponsible and brutal system has annihilated commerce, has caused wealth to disappear, and has decimated the consuming population-then, even then, the foreign agents have deceived their governments and their fellow-countrymen with false explanations of these results, whenever they have begun to call the attention, by injuring the interests, of the manufacturing centres of Europe."

In proof of these assertions of Varela, I wuold simply refer to a work written by Sir Woodbine Parish, entitled, "Buenos Ayres and the Provinces of the Rio de la Plata," published in London, 1838. Although this author, for many years the representative of the English government in Buenos Ayres, by a reprehensible silence on many points, shows himself to be a partisan of Rosas, yet the plain language of arithmetical statistics cannot be set aside or misunderstood.

From the reluctant admissions of Sir Woodbine Parish, we learn that during the years of the dictatorship of Rosas, the importations were nearly one-third less than during those which preceded his administration. That while the consumption of common cotton fabrics was greatly augmented, that of silks and woolens was almost as strikingly diminished; and this, too, while the population has been constantly decreasing, and no manufactories have been established. The greater consumption of cottons by a diminished population, is a startling and eloquent proof of the retrogradation and poverty of the remaining consumers, and of the great impoverishment of Buenos Ayres under the irresponsible despotism of Rosas.

Another fact I would mention in connection with this. While the consumption of those articles which reveal the wealth and progress of refined taste in nations was thus decreasing, that of the instruments of destruction and

death received an ominous augmentation. "In the year 1830, when Rosas was but rising to power, and had not yet developed his system of extermination, the value of arms and ammunition imported from England was one hundred and fifty-eight pounds sterling." In the short period of five years this importation had increased to six thousand three hundred and eighty-eight pounds sterling. The horrible significance of this fact needs no comment.

I have said that the population of the Province of the Rio de la Plata has been decimated during the administration of Rosas. Lest I should exceed the limits which I have prescribed to myself in this article, I will simply make an extract from a work called "Rosas and his opponents," published in Montevideo, 1843, by Don José Rivera Indarte. After a fearfully significant document, entitled "Tables of Blood," in which the names of the principal victims of Rosas, with the manner and time of their death, is narrated, he gives the following "Resumen:"

Here are more than twenty-two thousand victims to the sanguinary despotism of a single tyrant; and, according to the same author, there are not less than thirty thousand more, who have either been banished by express order of the Dictator, during the same period, or have fled from his oppressive government, and have found a refuge in the Republic of Montevideo, in Brazil, in Chili, Peru and Bolivia.

I am fully aware that even the faint delineation I have given of the enormities of which Rosas has made the provinces of the Rio de la Plata the blood-stained theatre, may be looked upon as incredible; the more so, as the venal press of Buenos Ayres (which is well known to every dweller in that ill-fated city to be wholly under the control of the Dictator,) labors unceasingly to give a false coloring to everything connected with the present state

of things in that part of South Ame

rica.

And this false coloring is heightened by the representations of those who have, for some years past, mis-represented the free and enlightened States of North America in Buenos Ayres. Of one, it is sufficient to say that he is now employing his pen in favor of Rosas, in denunciation of his opponents, and in inflammatory articles touching the Anglo-French Intervention, which has been solicited by the independent, yet strug gling Republic of the Banda Oriental. Another, whose diplomatic rank was somewhat higher, finding that the infirmities of age and the inadequacy of his pay rendered the cares of housekeeping a dreaded burden, gladly accepted the invitation which, at the suggestion of Rosas, was given him by Hallett, to become his guest; and when the poor old man wanted a little recreation in the country, Gilbert (as I see by the date of some of his dispatches) invited him to enjoy the luxuries of his country-seat.

Hallett and Gilbert are closely connected with the official organs of the monstrous government of Rosas;* and both well known by all who have lived in Buenos Ayres or Montevideo, (if they dare speak the truth,) to be the purchased bond-slaves of the tyrant. Add to this most worthy companionship for the representative of the liberty-loving United States, the fact that, as the good old man did not understand the Spanish language--and was too feeble and too advanced in years to acquire it-it was necessary that he should employ an interpreter; and his interpreter was Rosas' dragoman.

How clear a knowledge of the true relations of the Banda Oriental to Buenos Ayres-how just an appreciation of the justice of the present struggle between these two independent powers -and how clear a conception of the right of either to call in the aid of a foreign alliance to protect it from the aggressions of the other, a man far past the prime and vigor of manhood could acquire, under the circumstances I have mentioned, I leave to any

candid and enlightened mind to determine.

When the Argentine Government demanded of the Foreign Powers the recognition of a strict blockade of the port of Montevideo, after a partial blockade of that port had been for more than a year recognized and enforced, the naval commanders of the squadrons of France and England refused to sanction any other blockade than that to which they had already given their sanction. Our well-meaning Chargé, (fancying the while that he saw with his own eyes, and heard with his own ears, and that his conclusions were formed by the unbiassed and uninfluenced operations of his own mind,) with a formidable flourish of trumpets, made a Protest against the unwarrantable conduct of France and England in not re-recognizing a new blockade; and this he called trampling upon the laws of nations, and the rights of an independent and sovereign people."

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I was residing in Montevideo at the time of this very absurd protest, and well remember the deriding laugh that its ridiculous pretensions excited; while those who truly esteemed the blinded but honest-hearted old man by whom it was made, knew too well the source from which it emanated to blame what they regretted so deeply.

Of a similar character to this, is the attempt to regulate the terms of the Anglo-French mediation, so long and ardently solicited by the struggling Montevideans, and so tardily awarded by those Powers. Much time has been consumed by these now allied mediators, in watchful and jealous observation of each other's movements, in this important question of "Shall the Province of the Banda Oriental be swallowed up in the wide domination of the Argentine Confederation, and subjected to the irresponsible tyranny of its Dictator; or shall the independent existence guarantied by England to this Republic by the Convention of 1828 be maintained, and the encroachments of Rosas resisted ?”

The Macedonian cry of the beleaguered Montevideans has at last been heard, and