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Rh not without its precedent, under the rule of Artigas and the other barbarous and Tartaric chiefs of the time. The montonera of Artigas waistcoated its enemies; that is, sewed them up in an envelope of raw hide, and left them in the fields in this condition. The reader may imagine all the horrors of this slow death, and this horrible punishment was repeated in 1836, in the case of a colonel in the army. The infliction of death by cutting the throat with a knife instead of by shooting, is the result of the butcherly instinct which led Rosas to encourage cruelty, to give -executions a more barbarous form which he thought would give pleasure to the assassins; in other words, he changed the legal punishments recognized by civil society, for others which he called American, and in the name of which he invited his fellow-Americans to come forward in his defense when the sufferings of Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay invoked the aid of the European powers to assist in their liberation from the cannibal, who was even then overrunning them with his sanguinary hordes. It is impossible to maintain the calmness needed to investigate historic truth when we 'are forced to remember at every step that America and Europe have been so long successfully deluded by a system of assassination and cruelty, scarcely tolerated in the African provinces of Ashantee or Dahomey.

Such is the character presented by the montonera from its first appearance; a singular kind of warfare and civil polity, unprecedented except among the tribes of the Asiatic plains, and not to be confounded with the habits, ideas, and customs of the Argentine cities, which were, like all South American cities, a