A little later, Facundo, seeing an officer strike two soldiers who were fighting, with the flat of his sword, called him up and attacked him with his lance; the officer used his own for the defense of his life, and presently disarmed Quiroga, whose lance he then picked up and returned respectfully. Quiroga again attacked him; there was another encounter, and he was again disarmed. He then called six men, had the officer seized, and stretched across the window-frame with his hands and feet tied fast, and ran him through with a lance again and again, until life was entirely extinct. His rage was without bounds; General Huidobro, his second, was also threatened with his lance, and prepared to defend his life.
And yet Facundo was not cruel or blood-thirsty in comparison with other barbarians; he was only a barbarian, who did not know how to restrain his passions, and these once aroused were without limit, without restraint; he was a terrorist who, on entering a city, shoots one, and perhaps lashes another, but for a reason. The person shot is blind, or paralyzed; the unhappy victim of the lash is a respectable citizen, a young man of one of the first families. His brutalities to women come from a want of delicacy; the humiliations imposed upon the citizens from the coarse desire to ill-treat and to mortify the self-respect of those by whom he feels himself to be despised. It is the same motive which makes terror a means of government. What would Rosas have done without it in a society like that of Buenos Ayres? How else could he have commanded from an intelligent people that respect which they never willingly show for persons who are
