DON MANUEL DE ROSAS.

If the Great Exhibition of 1851 brought us so many specimens of the produce of nature and industry in the different parts of the world, 1852 seems no less prepared to furnish us with rich and rare specimens of eminent and public characters. There are exiles of all countries and quarters of the world amongst us, with moral, political, and miscellaneous ideas, that would no doubt startle and arouse us, were we to take cognizance of them. We have always thought it a most appropriate act of the great Count De Thomar, when he came amongst us last year, banished from Portugal, to go at once to the Great Exhibition, as Themistocles went to the Household Gods of King Admetus. Count Thomar announced himself the first day to the exhibitors of the Portuguese section, as the minister who had sent all these specimens of Portuguese industry. "I am the Count of Thomar," he said; but he did not add, what he might, that he himself was the rarest of the specimens exhibited.

Thomar was the specimen of the despot minister of civilized countries and constitutional governments. There has just arrived on our shores another famous specimen of a notability of savage life. This is no other than General Manuel De Rosas, ex-Dictator of Buenos Ayres, the conqueror of Patagonia, the victor and slayer of one hundred competitors, the despair of European diplomatists,-English and French, but the admiration of those who like the Spanish type of the cold, the proud, and the cruel.

Half the stories told of Rosas are no doubt untrue, and the remaining half exaggerated. But still quite enough remains to constitute him one of the most formidable and romantic characters of the age. General Rosas is accompanied by his daughter, Donna Manuelita, who is said to have kept upon her worktable the salted ears of her father's enemies. General O'Brien, who was here as envoy from Montevideo some years back, used to tell stories ten times more horrible, and swear to the truth and exactitude of them all. But most people have since had reason to accept General O'Brien's accounts with large discounts; and we have known other Englishmen, much respected and long resident in Buenos Ayres, who described Donna Manuelita as one of the most intelligent and not the least amiable of women. One of the peculiarities of the Rosas family was the heroic attachment of each member of it, father, wife, and daughter to each other, and the heroism displayed by both wife and daughter on the most trying occasions.

There are regions and races in which cruelty is not crime. Solyman the Magnificent liked to invite his Grand Viziers to ride with him, and have their heads cut off in the middle of their ride, so that the said heads might roll in the dust before the owners were aware of what was coming, and in the presence of their august master. South America has ever been famed for more Christianity than humanity. The daily spectacles and lessons there are those of blood. In some countries and towns of the world a church is the chief place of resort and of amusement; in others, a theatre; in others, the market-place and forum; in others, the exchange; in others, the promenade, and so on.

The

In the Argentine Republic the chief establishment of each farm and each town is the corral, in other words the slaughter-house. The great work of cruelty, driving, slaughtering, skinning, and cutting up oxen goes on continually. Hides and jerked beef form the great export, the great article of value; and the conversion of the live ox into these interesting materials is the great business of South American life. Is it to be wondered at, if the men are cruel and the women hard-hearted, at least with respect to the effusion of blood? corral is all blood,-a granary of dried flesh, wherein are formed the household ideas of the Argentine Spaniard. Is it astonishing, then, if the rulers of such a country are inhuman and sanguinary in their punishments, rude in their policy, merciless in their vengeance? Like country, like men. Robespierre lived amidst essences, powders, silk waistcoats, ruffles, and pomatum, and in the midst of these sent his victims to the scaffold. This was horrible. Your Argentine Spaniard can be accused of no such inconsistency. Bred in the corral, he applies its principles to politics and to life.

Rosas, now about sixty years of age, the son of a large proprietor of lands and oxen, which stretched nearly to the southern frontier of the province, was thus thirty ere the South Americans flung off their yoke. The great proprietors were anxious to sell their hides to some better customers than the Spaniards, and to receive European goods through some cheaper channel. The Spaniards were soon driven from the country, and then such men as Rosas assuming the command of the mounted drivers and shepherds, called gauchos, ruled each his district in patriarchal fashion. The people at Buenos Ayres talked indeed of following the old precepts of Athens, opening schools, developing freedom, and civilizing the country. But the gauchos were not Greeks - would not go to school; and when they found that civilization, as it was called, required a sacrifice of time and money, they pointed their lances at the town politicians, and maintained the right to be ignorant if they pleased, and ascendant if they could. The Buenos Ayrians employed the army,-a paid, standing army,-to bring these rustics to reason, and did begin by gaining some victories, which they celebrated by the decapitation of those who opposed them.

The gauchos in time took a great fancy to war, which opened to them the chance of plunder, and to executions, which were quite to their taste. So they pricked up steed and lance, and, with Rosas at their head, galloped against the city. They took it by a regular cavalry charge, and piked the citizens who displeased them.

This is now some score of years ago, and Rosas has been master of Buenos Ayres ever since, until the other day. How did he manage? His enemies say, by cruelty and terror: his friends say, by good government and skill. Perhaps he himself thinks them synonymous; a fearful but rather a growing political creed.

We have described the corral as the great distinguishing feature of the life of the Buenos Ayrian republic. But the slaughter of oxen, carried permanently on there, proved not the only necessary accompaniment of life; two other pastimes or employs, still more sanguinary and ferocious, and almost as common, were civil war and the war with the Indians. The civil war is well depicted by Colonel King, who lived many years amongst the Argentines, and he well describes the facility with which any military officer, captain or colonel, from pique or weariness

or any other cause, set up his standard, marched against his neighbour, routed his hordes, decapitated his enemy, and plundered a population under his sway. One of the merits of Rosas was, that he put an end to this. He certainly did so by cutting off colonels' heads himself, instead of allowing them to slaughter each other. But the war of town against town, and of one military captain against another, were effectually prevented.

Another greater merit, if possible, was his delivering the province of Buenos Ayres from the incursions of the Indians. The town of Rosas is at the mouth of the several combined streams, which run south of the Plata. South of these streams, and amongst their sources, lived the Indian tribes, stretching off as far as Patagonia. These tribes never felt themselves pressed by hunger, without at once rushing to satisfy it at the farms of the Spanish settlers. These were accordingly obliged to fortify their abodes and corrals. But the Indians, able to watch the opportunity, too often contrived to steal into the enclosure or to scale the wall; and they ended by bringing often the males, but always the females, into slavery. It may be conceived what is slavery with a Patagonian savage for master, said to be the dirtiest and neediest animal of the creation, without a tent, or even a forest, to cover him.

So great were the difficulties and privations in the way of mastering the Indians, and repelling their incursions, that all who undertook the task failed in it, until Rosas was entrusted with the Southern command. He was well acquainted with the localities and the people. He had built himself a kind of fortress at a place called Guardia del Monte, not only impregnable to savage attacks, but most opportune for undertaking expeditions against them. In 1833 General Rosas undertook a huge battu. He hunted the Indians into their fastnesses, and did not scruple, when he had surrounded and caught a tribe, to exterminate them to the last man. The natural ferocity of his followers was heightened by the disastrous state in which they found between two and three thousand Spanish captives, chiefly women. These were all liberated. The joy of their relatives was great, and the glory of the achiever proportionate. Rosas drove the Indians farther south, and only permitted a few inoffensive tribes to remain north of the Rio Negro, on which he established the military station of El Carmen. Such a great addition of territory accrued to Buenos Ayres, that the herds and the population of the province increased in consequence to double of what they were.

The same man may prove a blessing to the human race in one position, and a curse in another. Manuel Rosas, living in Guardia del Monte, governing his district, defending it against the Indians, and even protecting its rights against the authorities of the metropolis, used his power for good purposes. But when his power and his merit in this very position raised him to be the conqueror and arbiter, and, finally, the dictator of the metropolis, Buenos Ayres herself, then his very talents became powerful for harm. Accustomed to command gauchos, and lord it over Indians, he knew not how to temper authority, though exercised over a town population. His education and life made him think the shedding of blood a venial crime. No civic party indeed, stood out against him. The town folk gave up its own resistance and freedom to the irresistible country chief. But other country

chiefs arose. And it was amazing, the rapidity and summary vengeance, with which Rosas got rid of them.

The most curious part of Rosas's conduct was his treatment of European diplomatists. He could not slay them, nor subject them to physical torture; but to mental torment he did put them. Diplomatists in general are treated with extreme courtesy and kindness, even by those sovereigns who may dislike and are even hostile to them. But those who have the fortune to go to South America, have to pay in desagremens for the comforts and attentions paid to all their fraternity in Europe. In the republics of the East and West, the unfortunate diplomatist is always in contest and hot water. Nothing but the guns of a British frigate in the offing can secure his being respected. Even at Rio, where there is an Imperial Court, a British envoy is hourly compelled to rude remonstrance, touching the slave-trade, and to receive such protests against the severity and illegality of our mode of suppression, that Brazil is the very purgatory of our diplomacy. But, if so, Buenos Ayres was the Inferno. He would keep a diplomatist in Coventry for a twelvemonth, and invent a hundred excuses, not even to receive or recognise him. Louis Quatorze never displayed more haughtiness towards them than Rosas, and fortunate were they, if they could get his daughter, Donna Manueleta, to intercede for them.

Such conduct as this speaks little for the wisdom of Rosas. For, however advantageous and fit it might be to repel European dictations and predominance, there was no need of wounding so deeply the pride of so sensitive a country, for example, as France, and thus compelling the French to interfere, from amour-propre, even after ambition and interested views were extinct or worn out. Nothing can describe the hatred that they now bore to Rosas, whether it was Guizot, Thiers, or Molé. The only politician or person, indeed, who was disposed to let him alone, was Louis Philippe, one of whose maxims was, never to make an enemy of a Spaniard, who, he was wont to say, can bide his time, and make his spring with the feline patience and ferocity of the tiger. And if Rosas has fallen, he has at least the comfort of thus leaving no French foe of his to triumph. All his enemies had fallen before him. And Louis Napoleon must have had little friendly feeling for the clever and successful dictator, who ruled and triumphed so long. English diplomatists thought it better to humour Rosas. And Mr. Southerne very lately, by order of the Foreign Office, concluded a treaty with him, leaving the French to pursue their hostilities alone. That they did so with some purpose, in concert with Brazil, the late victory attests.

In any contest of the kind, in any war between the Spanish and the Portuguese race, we have one thing to bear in mind, which is, that the Spaniards, though merciless to each other, have universally emancipated the Negro and the Indian race. There are no slaves in all the regions inhabited by the American Spaniards; and this is, strange to say, one of the obstacles in the way of anything like a constitution; in the Carolinas or Georgias, the whites, form a Republic. Were the slaves free, they would find elections and constitutions difficult. Throughout South America, the dark races are free, and the equal of the whites. But to amalgamate them in the suffrage is no easy task; and this is the true reason of the despotisms which succeed each other in Paraguay.

ANECDOTES OF OSTRICHES.

"Gavest thou the goodly wings unto the peacocks, or wings and feathers unto the ostrich ?

"Which leaveth her eggs in the earth, and warmeth them in the dust?

"And forgetteth, that the foot may crush them, or that the wilde beast may break them.

"She is hardened against her young ones as though they were not hers; her labour is in vain, without fear.

"Because God hath depriveth her of wisdom, neither hath he imparted to her understanding."

FIELD'S Bible, 1653.

THE alleged stupidity of the ostrich and indifference to its young, is, perhaps, the very oldest popular error in existence, and it is principally founded on the above passages in Job. It appears, however, that these passages are open to a different interpretation to that put upon them in the authorised versions of the Old Testament. The word which has been translated "leaveth" her eggs, in the sense of abandoning them, signifies in the original "deposits," and tehhammem signifies actively that she heateth them, namely, by incubation, which is indeed the fact. In the sixteenth verse, the bird is said to be "hardened against her young ones as though they were not hers;" and the same want of affection is alluded to in the third verse of the fourth chapter of Lamentations, "the daughter of my people is become cruel, like the ostriches in the wilderness;" but, in fact, the idea is altogether erroneous. Recent observations show that no bird has a greater affection for its young than the ostrich, that the eggs are carefully watched and tended, and when the offspring have chipped their shells and for some days are unable to run, they are regularly supplied with grass and water by the old birds, who are eager to defend them from harm. Thunberg especially mentions that he once rode past a place where a female was sitting on her nest, when the bird sprang up, and pursued him, evidently with a view of preventing his noticing her eggs or young. Everytime he turned his horse towards her, she retreated ten or twelve paces, but as soon as he rode on again, she pursued him, till he had gone a considerable distance from the place where he started her.

The idea of the stupidity of the ostrich seems to have been universally entertained, being taken for granted without investigation. Job, as we have seen, alludes to it; and Pliny, writing from common report, says, 'A wonder this is in their nature, that whatsoever they eat-and great devourers they be of all things without difference or choice, they concoct and digest it. But the veriest fools they be of all others; for as high as the rest of their body is, yet if they thrust their head and neck once into any shrub or bush, and get it hidden, they think then they are safe enough, and that no man seeth them." Many a pretty nursery tale has been written from this, and many a wise saw founded on it; and yet the hiding of the head is, after all, a mere myth. Sparrman, when in South Africa, expressly inquired in those parts where ostriches most abound, and "never once heard mention made of the ostrich hiding its head when it finds it cannot make its escape." The

VOL. XXXI.

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