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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

accomplished doubtless, in one century, what all humanity has been doing and undoing in six thousand years of history! The Sovereign People!

"I bid you adieu sadly. Write, combat, resist. Agitate the waves of a dead sea, whose surface tends to become hardened with the crust of impurities which escape from its depths, the Spanish colony, the tradition of Rosas, cows, cows, cows! Men, people, nation, republic, future!

"They write me from San Juan that on the twenty-fifth of May, if not before, they shall open the Sarmiento School, a continuation and reflection of the impulse given in Buenos Ayres. It is a monumental structure which would be considered a good one in Boston or New York, capacious enough to hold 1,700 children. But I much fear that it is a body without a soul. The provinces take their inspiration from the capitals. When they throw stones at the elections in Buenos Ayres, it is bon ton to stab each other in Rosario. When the attendance of children in the schools diminishes in cultivated Buenos Ayres, in a whole Buenos Ayres, as they say in the provinces, the children in the mountains will be born dumb so as not to learn to spell."

In 1858, after the Model School-house was finished and opened, and while enthusiasm was at its height about the schools, Señor Sarmiento was elected Senator of the State and Province of Buenos Ayres. He then proposed in his seat that the lands which Rosas had usurped, worth a million dollars, should be devoted to the erection of school-houses throughout the province, and a line of splendid structures is now seen stretching out into the pampas. While Senator, he also proposed many other bills which finally received the sanction of law. One was a sentence of impeach-