food into nourishment, of abstracting the juices from the hard and resisting substances, of passing a multitude of different elements through its living organs so that they may later form a new tissue, adapted to the present and future needs of the country. From this point of view the present moment in the evolution of Argentine is of immense sociological interest. We are permitted to be present at the visible transmutation of a society, too weak even to direct itself, and absorbed in the fusion of different influences. The direction of this process has been handed over without counter-check to public men who are obliged to dictate and put into practice legislation and administrative rules of every kind, as though they enjoyed absolute power. Furthermore, by the very nature of things, the administrative functions in such periods have to discount the future and effect in the present a series of public works or social regulations which will weigh upon future generations not only from the point of view of the general finances but even from the point of view of national character. The national transformation of the land with ports, canals, railroads, telegraphs and every sort of means of communication, indeed, with every kind of public work, cannot be accomplished with present resources. A call must be made upon those of the future, by means of loans which will be a burden upon coming generations. If such a governmental policy is not accompanied by a skillful and prudent financial management, the burdens of our descendants will be considerably increased. They may even be committed to a policy that will cause eventual bankruptcy and an inevitable retrogression in the national development. The intellectual metamorphosis of the nation by a proper system of primary, secondary and higher education and by special schools of technical training, in order to form the national spirit of the future type of Argentine citizen, is certainly our most difficult governmental problem, because it is a question of molding the very soul of the nation. To teach different and contradictory systems, to do and then undo, each day changing the courses of study to successively adopt antagonistic standards and show a real lack of fixity in pedagogic methods, is to commit the greatest of all crimes, because it is not a crime against the exchequer of posterity but against its very soul. To accomplish a fusion of the currents of foreign immigration, to sort out the best from them, and to direct the formation of the new type which is being evolved, melting it in the crucible of the school, of the army, and of public life, is perhaps, to-day our task of transcendent difficulty. Such a problem is greater than that of directing the stream of foreign capital which, while fructifying the national soil, clings to it like the countless tentacles of a gigantic octopus and absorbs a great part--sometimes too great a part--of the riches produced only to transmit them through the arteries