A MODEL STATESMAN.

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 258, 31 October 1925, Page 8

A MODEL STATESMAN.

President Coolidge was guilty of exaggeration when, during the week, in accepting a monument of General Jose de San Martin, the Argentine soldier and, statesman, as a gift to the United States from the Southern Republic, he held up South American statesmanship as a model for the world. But although, outside his own country, little is remembered to-day of this famous Argentinian, who led the revolutionary forces to the liberation of Peru and Chile, yet he must be accounted as one of the heroes of history. In 1817 he led his Argentine army to deliver Chile from the yoke of Spain across mountain ridges twice as high as those crossed by Hannibal and Napoleon in their passages of the Alps. Military historians of authority have pronounced this passage of the Andes to be one of tbe most remarkable operations ever accomplished in mountain warfare. He divided his army into two parts, one of which crossed by the Uspallata Pass, over the Cumbre, while tbe larger, under San Martin himself, moved by the much longer and colder, though less lofty route over the pass of Los Patos to the north of Aconcagua. The two parts of the aimy effected a rendezvous at the exact point that their general had chosen, and San Martin managed so to deceive and perplex the commander of the Spanish army in Chile that he was induced to scatter his greatly superior force over much too long a line and thus when the Argentine general marched straight upon Santiago he was able to overpower the forces opposed to him. San Martin had served under the Duke of Wellington in Spain, and he is often called the George Washington of Spanish America. A strong, silent man, he never aimed at popular applause, and his character and achievements have been little known or appreciated outside his own country. Yet he was a truly heroic figure, in whom brilliant military and political talents were united to a lofty and disinterested character. In spite of a strong desire on the part of many South Americans in the days of the Revolution for some monarchical form of government, San Martin held firm to his idea of a republic based on a limited suffrage. He did not beneve in universal suffrage, but rather preferred what he himself once referred to as an "honest oligarchy," which he said was better than a sham democracy. San Martin was well deserving of the mpnument just presented to the United States, and it will serve to draw attention to one whose history has ' hitherto been too little known.