work on popular education, and a series of occasional pamphlets upon similar topics, were but the heralds of deeds in which the spirit was to be embodied. While holding in succession the offices of senator, minister, and chief of staff, he founded and edited the "Annals of Education," with the object of disseminating information and exciting interest in his measures for the education of the people. He induced some of the best men in the city to take the personal supervision of the schools, and he regarded as his most important work, great as was his reputation as a writer, his "Progressive Method of Reading," which the government had stereotyped with vignettes in the United States. In Tucuman, Salta, and La Rioja, the symbol of a crossed pen and sword is employed in memory of him.
But his influence and his activity were by no means confined to educational labors, unless his practical illustrations of beneficent legislation may be looked upon as the highest branch of it. The tendency of the public administration bore the marks of his ripe age, and of the official training he had undergone in Chili in the service of a government accused of erring on the side of an excessive exercise of its authority by the people of countries which are ever wavering between the Scylla of despotism and the Chary bdis of anarchy. He somewhere quotes Mr. Webster's speech before the Supreme Court of Rhode Island, in the case of Dorr, condemned to perpetual imprisonment for his share in the insurrection of Rhode Island. Mr. Webster says,—
