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394 Aberastain, "a Cato assassinated in another Utica," Dr. Velez, the author of the "Codes of Law," of which M. Laboulaye says it is the most advanced work on that subject in the world, with many other personages too numerous to name and of whom nothing is known here. But none of them have had the opportunity, like the subject of this sketch, to acquire that knowledge which, when well directed, serves to change radically the condition of a nation. Even the circumstance of not having received that kind of education which is given in universities may have served to preserve his mind free from those leading-strings of national tradition which often becomes a second nature in the individual, destroying all originality and perpetuating errors of opinion. A man who has contended with barbarism in South America, and has studied the sources of the development of other nations, during residence therein, must have acquired by practice and by comparison, rich materials for thought, and a fund of ideas of no common order. That of diffusing education among the people, from which nothing has distracted him for thirty years, neither war nor exile, the poverty of his private life, nor the seductions of exalted position, has given a special character to his life. The present minister of the government of Buenos Ayres, speaking of education, in his report to the legislature of this year, says, "We cannot speak of education without naming Colonel Sarmiento;" and this saying will be often repeated in different parts of South America, for his new Review, the "Ambas Americas," a work specially designed to impart to the southern hemisphere the knowledge and the ideas that have been acquired in