Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/194



164 A DAY AT BUENOS AIRES.

epidemic disorders of other lands, and without some sanitary measures it may look forward to a plague or yellow jack. The whole city, I have said, is built upon and undermined by the foulest impurities, and as at Zanzibar, the loose soil permits percolation into the wells and rain cisterns.

August the IGth"^ finally announced as President-elect Citizen D. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, surnamed Cara- pachay (of the Cara tree), from the islands of the Parana, which he and others have celebrated as the Tempe Argen- tina. A biographical sketch of Don Yo (Mr. I.), as this statesman is called in recognition of a somewhat tough and determined will, has been prefixed by Mrs. Horace Mann (New York, Hurd, 1868) to her translation of his well-known work, " Civilization and Barbarism.'-' Rockets were being fired, vivas rang, and bells pealed ; changed hands in the "camp" sheep and cows, and in the city hats and boxes of cigars, and the public expressed its general joy at the defeat of D. Rufino Elizalde, the chosen candidate and nominee of ex-President Mitre. This lawyer, justly enough disliked in the provinces because he is known to be an un- scrupulous partisan, supposed to favour the " triple alliance" in the interest of the Brazil, with which he is connected by marriage and other ways, numbered only twenty-two votes to seventy-nine.

D. Domingo has a stiff task before him. He has cam- paigned, but he is rather a civilian than a soldier. The later rule of Spain has familiarized, I have said, genera- tions to the sway of Generals, not Doctores, and his only bourgeois predecessor. Dr. Derqui, lasted about a year. He is pledged by the promise of all his career to make sacrifices in the cause of extended popular education, and in this he

â– power October 12 ; 1 p.m. begins the constitutional period.
 * Preliminary elections, April 12 ; final, August 16. President assumes