What we have just stated regarding Rosas, will suffice to make our readers comprehend his consummate skill; if we add to this an obstinate and resolute character, and a will which has never recoiled before any necessity to attain its ends--did this necessity even involve an assassination or a massacre--and an enormous superiority of intellect over all the men who surround him, the almost boundless power which this man has succeeded in grasping and maintaining in his country, may easily be comprehended. What augments still further the degree of his power, is the secret manner in which it is exercised. Although in reality reigning as absolute sovereign over the country whose constitution and institutions he is daily trampling under foot, Rosas has ever been enabled to dissemble his power, and, nominally at least, shelter himself behind the rampart of legality. Thus, among the apparent rights which he has left to the Chamber of Representatives, if it is necessary that it should give a decision upon any question, he demands it by a public and official message, almost with humility: but by a private letter addressed at the same time to the President, he directs him as to the precise form which is to be adopted by the Chamber in pronouncing the resolution to be taken, as well as the exact day and hour when the said resolution is to be made known to him. To such a point are these things carried, that it is in the very cabinet of Rosas himself that the fulsome votes of thanks periodically passed by the different provincial assemblies of the Confederation to _the hero of the desert_, the _saviour of the country_, the _restorer of the laws_, &c., &c., &c., are drawn up. Rosas attained to power uttering the war whoop of "Death to the Unitarians,"[1] and by giving himself out as the restorer of the federal government; and yet it is a notorious fact, that there is not on the face of the earth a system of government more centralizing, more despotic, more Unitarian, if we must say the word, than that which he has constituted; and it is this fact alone which clearly proves the extraordinary skill of this man. He has been enabled to push beyond the limits of the possible the sciences of audacity and falsehood. It is with the assistance of the federalists that he has been enabled to conquer; true, he has dubbed himself federalist in name, but as far as regards the principle of the thing, he has done his utmost to wipe away from the institutions and customs of the country every thing that might bear the most remote resemblance to this form of government, by collecting together in his own hands more than the sum of the public power--in fact, assuming in all things the sovereign will of an autocratic dictator, from whose decrees there can be no appeal.