has no clear consciousness of law or of justice. I have heard him say, candidly, that the province would never do well till it had no lawyers, that his comrade Ibarra lived tranquilly, and governed well, because he alone, in two cases out of three, decided all causes. Rosas has his best support in Benavides; it is the force of inertia in exercise, calling everything to be quiet and dead, without violence and without parade. The province of San Juan is, with the exception of La Rioja, San Luis, and some other cities, one that has fallen lowest, because Benavides has impressed upon it his materialism, his inertia, his abandonment of all that constitutes public life, which is just what despotism requires. The people eat, they sleep, they talk, they laugh if they can,—and keep quiet, that in twenty years hence, their sons may walk on four feet.
"Benavides had no minister then; all the Federals avoided him, and he alone, with the aid of his troops, carried on his insane designs. Thus men in power, take the name of the people to call themselves governments, after they have degraded and abused them! He had made one Espinosa, a drunken Tucuman, though a valiant fellow, chief of his forces; and one Herrera, a Chilian bandit, taken out of prison, and a comic actor whom I had hissed in the theatre, were called into the service, the latter as captain; the Indian Saavedra, an assassin and highwayman, was another. Juan Fernandez, a young man of good family who had voluntarily descended into the rabble where he passed his time in intoxication and gambling, the most despicable and despised creature then in San Juan, was his aide-de-camp. An Italian impostor, corrupt, clownish, and ignorant, was made mayor. Under the orders of these chiefs, the scoriae of society, many obscure young men of good intentions, but ignorant and from the lowest orders of society, had been called into the service. Some of them,
