The note from the Foreign Office to Alexander S. Asboth, April 12, 1867

The note from the Foreign Office to General Asboth.

The following document which we publish deserves to be read very calmly and with great deliberation, in order to discover in its studied phrases the iniquitous, criminal, and shameful policy which has suggested it. It is the most characteristic trial of the men of the situation.

With the greatest effrontery they own therein the unjustifiable tendencies of the alliance, of that compact ominous and unauthorized, since it has no other legal sanction save the will of the men who compose what until to-day has been called the Argentine government.

The speculators on the war have required two months to concoct an answer to his excellency the minister of the United States, because they had to wait until Don Pedro I should deign to manifest to them his imperial will; and those who thus lower the dignity of the Argentine people dare pretend, notwithstanding, to be the representatives of its honor and its glories.

We doubt whether Dr. Elizalde’s note will satisfy the American plenipotentiary, because it is only an agglomeration of futile pretexts, and does not bring forward one single reason that justifies or even palliates the continuation of the war.

Dr. Elizalde’s note is a ridiculous blustering, a stupid bravado, an arrogant bragging, pronounced by order of Pedro I. The Argentine government has not the means of continuing, against the will of the people, the war which has thrown us into mourning and which is our ruin.

But leaving on one side the impossibility of continuing the war, what reason does Dr. Elizalde adduce to palliate this calamity? None. He simply says that “the resolutions presented in so friendly and brotherly a manner by the American minister negative the purposes of the alliance.”

But what are the purposes of the alliance? The treaty, with its protocol, explain them very clearly: to deprive Paraguay of its territory and give it to Brazil; to demolish the Paraguayan fortifications, in order that the Brazilians may, without any obstacle, take possession of the rivers and dictate the conditions that suit them; to strip Paraguay of its arms and all articles of war, and thus depriving it of the possibility of defending itself even from the invasions of the savages of the Chaco; lastly, to oblige Paraguay to pay the expenses of the war; that is to say, make that country for whole centuries a fief of Brazil—these are the purposes of the alliance. And can the Argentine people sacrifice itself one day longer to obtain them?

The first man of the Argentine Confederation, the nation’s highest and only prestige, the enlightened General Urquiza, deeply affected, has exclaimed from his retirement, “peace, union, and fraternity,” understanding by the depth of his genius that only by that means can be cured the deep wounds inflicted on our mother country by her bad sons. And while this distinguished citizen raises his influential voice to put an end to our calamities, while the highest military authority asks for peace, and makes himself the echo of the people’s clamor, the coxcomb Elizalde—he of the international marriage—the ridiculous aspirant, who pretends to raise himself to the presidency of the republic by leaning on the crutch of Pedro I, shouts with a discordant voice, War without truce, slavery, death.

The man inured to dangers, he who has ever shown to our soldiers the road to victory, he who most disinterestedly and with the greatest abnegation is studying the question of the day, asks for peace, as the only termination to our disasters, equally hoaorable as dignified; while he who never has been and never will be amidst dangers, he who by dint of intrigues and menaces has reached the post of minister for foreign affairs, clamors for war. Singular contrast!

One-half of the republic protests, with arms in their hands, against the continuation of the war; our exhausted treasury, our army demoralized and decimated, show us the impossibility of continuing it; and in a situation so precarious the minister for foreign affairs, oblivious of the blood already spilt and of the mourning that afflicts our homes, regardless of anything else save the wishes of the Emperor of Brazil, rejects inconsiderately the high mediation of the American government, which afforded us the opportunity of bringing the struggle to an honorable termination.

What will Entre Rios do in view of the negative given to the United States government’s proposition for an arrangement? Will it continue to sacrifice its children in this struggle, more than sterile, unjustified? Will it continue to lend its countenance to those who speculate on the war? We venture to doubt it.