ROSAS, THE ARGENTINE TYRANT.
(1829-1852.)
Rosas surrounded himself with chosen men: the Lopez, Anchorenas, Mansillas, Sarrateas, Riglos. The cultivated classes demanded a strong government, renounced their liberty with a Dionysiac delight, and conferred "unlimited power" upon Rosas. The tyrant governed, in short, above the law and above custom. He enacted laws to prohibit the carnival, that popular souvenir of the pagan Bacchanalia, and to establish the rules of mourning; he himself was the law, was reason, was the logos; intoxicated with docility, a whole nation bowed before his Cæsarian will, without hierarchic distinctions. His rule was a supreme levelling, a universal servitude; the Terror. Rosas, impelled and favoured by the supreme traditions of a race, became the Cæsar of a democracy.
Gauchos and negroes supported him; with the aid of the people he subjected the ruling classes. He unified; he destroyed social privileges; he inverted the order of the hierarchies in the Unitarian, aristocratic city. His political methods were of the simplest. Instinctively he applied infallible psychological truths. He knew the power of repetition, of habit, of formulæ; he understood the enervating effect of panic; the effect of vivid colours and sounding words upon the half-breed mob. "Federation or death!" he reiterated, in his proclamations. "Savages, infamous Unitarians—impious Unitarians," one read day by day in the journals, and in official documents; that vivid colour, red, was the symbol of federalism. Rosas wrote to Lopez: "Repeat the word, savage! repeat it to satiety, to boredom, to exhaustion."
What such influences did not obtain was produced by that effectual levelling agent, terror. Rosas crushed rebellious wills; he overpowered his enemies, the impious, infamous, savage Unitarians; he was the Jacobin of the Federation. A prætorian legion, the Mazorca, chopped off such heads as raised themselves. He was a fanatical democrat, a lay Inquisitor; if he discovered a political heresy he condemned it without pity. As national caudillo he protected religion, attracted the clergy, and attacked the Unitarians, not only because they were savage, but also because they were impious. Like Portales, he made a tool of religion. He defended the "patrons," and condemned the Jesuits as conspirators, not from religious motives. The clergy saw in him the man chosen by God "to preside over the destinies of the country which saw his birth." Rosas governed according to tradition and history by making use of the hatred of the masses and classes, the fanaticism of the mob, the servility of the natives; he was therefore a Catholic and a democrat.
Like all great American dictators, Rosas proved to be an eminent administrator of the public finances. In a time of national disturbance and military expenditure he displayed an extraordinary zeal in organising and publishing the national accounts. His method was simple rather than scrupulous; he appointed honest men to high representative posts. The official journals published the fiscal balance-sheet monthly; receipts and expenditure, the fluctuations of paper-money, and the state of the national debt. Rosas was vigorous in assuring the service of the external debt; he accumulated neither loans nor fresh taxes. His economic policy was orderly and far-seeing. To him we owe the construction of many of the public works of Buenos-Ayres, including a magnificent promenade, Palermo, where he built his autocratic residence. His invulnerable dictatorship was based upon material progress and fiscal order.
He was also the defender of the continent against European invasion. Like Juarez and Guzman-Blanco, he professed a jealous individualism; his work was bound up with race and territory. Continuing the revolutionary movement of 1810, he desired not merely freedom from Spain but autonomy against the whole world.
In the twenty-four years, 1829 to 1852, Rosas made federal unity a reality. He was first of all governor and leader of the gauchos; in 1835 he won the absolute power for five years, which term was extended by several re-elections. Before him was the anarchy of 1820 and the Unitarian bankruptcy of 1826; after him, the powerful unity of 1853 and 1860, and the triumphal progress of the Argentine democracy. Between this discord and this unity came his fruitful despotism, a necessary Terror. His dictatorship was more efficacious than the autocracy of Guzman-Blanco or the ecclesiastic tyranny of Garcia-Moreno. Porfirio Diaz and Portales, two founders of political unity, were his disciples. He was the builder of a practicable federation, because he was a gaucho and could interpret the inner voices of his race; he governed as an American, without borrowing anything from European methods. Without him anarchy would have been perpetuated, and the vice-kingdom of La Plata would have been irremediably disintegrated. Like the Roman deity Janus, Rosas had two faces; he closed one epoch and opened another; a past of warfare and terror and a future of unity, peace, democratic development, and industrial progress.
He defended the country against the territorial aggression of foreign coalitions, and his own power against conspiracy and revolt; against the avenging stanzas of Marmol, the aggressive journalism of Rivera Indarte, and Varela, the rude pamphlets of Sarmiento, and the meticulous dialectic of Alberdi. To Unitarian insult he opposed the bloody campaign of the Mazorqueros; to European tutelage, the individualism of the gauchos.