The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 09, July, 1858 by Various
page 129 of 292 (44%)
page 129 of 292 (44%)
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Did these people ever think,--as they watched the sombre, stubborn Gaucho
sweating over a _tapia_, subjecting a drove of peons to his authority, or, stretched upon a hide, growing ferocious as the luck went against him at cards,--that here was one of those forces which mould or overturn the world? Could it ever have occurred to the Godoys of San Juan, to the worthy municipality of Mendoza, that this scowling savage was yet to place his heel upon their prostrate forms, and most thoroughly to exhibit, through weary, sanguinary years, the reality of that tremendous saying,-- "The State? _I_ am the State!"? Doubtless no. Little as the comrades of Maximin imagined that the truculent Goth was yet to wear the blood-stained purple, little as the clients of Robespierre dreamed of the vortex toward which he was being insensibly hurried by the stream of years, did the men, whose names are thrown out from their obscurity by the glare of his misdeeds, conceive that their fortunes, their lives, all things but their souls, were shortly to depend upon the capricious breath of this servant who so quietly pounds away upon their mud inclosures. He does not long, however, remain the companion of peons. Eighteen hundred and ten has come, bringing with it liberty, and bloodshed, and universal discord. The sun of May beams down upon a desolated land. For the mild, although repressive viceregal sway is substituted that of a swarm of military chieftains, who, fighting as patriots against Liniers and his ill-fated troops, as rivals with each other, or as _montanero_-freebooters against all combined, swept the plains with their harrying lancers from the seacoast to the base of the Cordillera. In this period of anarchy we catch another glimpse of Juan Facundo. He has worked his way down to Buenos Ayres, nine hundred miles from home, and |
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