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viii
Preface.

of the few is painfully contrasted with the utter want of it in the body of the people, that constitute its difference from the other South American Republics, Chili excepted, in which certain influences have brought about certain elements of progress, Colonel Sarmiento being the chief of these favorable influences. If the chances of elections, or in this case rather the brute prowess of the reactionary chieftains, has defeated his election (which took place on the 12th of April), he will return to his country and take his seat in the Senate, to which he has of late been again chosen. He hopes by his influence in either position to increase the importance of his country's relations with the United States, whose great ideas he wishes to see planted in that hemisphere. The sources of information from which the details of his life have been gathered, are two or three small biographies, written in Chili, Peru, and Geneva; a short memoir in Rhode Island, the public documents of the Argentine Republic, the "Journal of the Sessions of the Legislature," the "Journal of the Constitutional Convention," and many periodical works, all containing remarkable speeches upon various subjects. The reports of the Chilian government on "Popular Education" may be added to these, and a little book entitled "Recollections of a Province," which is partly an autobiography written in 1850, while still in exile, under peculiar