A nation's image of its past helps to determine its conduct through continuing history. When this image is particularly sharp, it becomes a sacred reference for the formulation of policy. A national image is a melange of fact, fancy, and fiction. Carefully preserved in folklore and enthroned as tradition, this image can be invoked for political purposes that transcend party and class factionalism, and serve to unite the nation in a supreme sacrifice for national purpose.

Paraguay has such an image. In its past the Paraguay of 1928 saw a peaceful, progressive people who had been plunged into a war of extermination. “Veneer ó morir!” was no idle slogan of another era. It was a destroyed, shattered Paraguay that died with the Marshal on the banks of the Aquidabán. From the terrible conflict of 1864-1870, Paraguay emerged with large areas of its claimed territory forever lost, and with much of the rest in jeopardy. The arbitration of 1878, which eliminated one greedy enemy, was still fresh in Paraguayan memories when the Vanguardia incident of 1928 once more sounded the alarm. In the intervening years an image of the Paraguayan War had taken shape.

On May 5, 1865, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento returned to the United States as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary from the Argentine Republic. A more accurate title would have been Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Peripatetic, for no other minister or ambassador has ever spent as much time traveling through the United States, talking to its people, and studying its institutions. He was fifty-four years old now, an aging man whose clothes were formal but untidy, whose manner was truculent and conceited, a passionately opinionated man who stated his beliefs with fire and vigor and was rude to the point of insolence to those who sought to waste his time with frivolity—and yet who managed to form many warm friendships and to arouse in many Americans a personal liking for himself and an interest in his country. He was to spend three years and four months in the United States, and they were to be years crammed with work—studying, collecting information to send to Argentina, traveling, and writing. He wrote constantly. Dozens of letters came to him every day, and he wrote dozens himself. He reported often to Argentina's Minister of Foreign Relations, and he wrote constantly to friends and advisers in the United States. During his stay in America he wrote numerous newspaper articles, on topics as varied as grape culture, votes for women, and export laws. He started a periodical, Ambas Américas, whose mission was to draw the United States and all Latin American countries closer together. He wrote and published two books: Vida de Abrán Lincoln, the first biography of Lincoln in Spanish, and Las escuelas: base de la prosperidad y la república en los Estados Unidos. He translated a book on school architecture and a biography of Horace Mann into Spanish.

In the history of Spain's spiritual conquest of the New World, a definite cycle of enthusiasm may be observed. In the seventeenth century, for example, there was a noticeable falling off of Spanish missionary effort in the direction of the tribes yet to be converted. It is interesting to speculate on the causes of this phenomenon. An obvious cause, and certainly a contributing one, lies in the very nature of man. Human endeavor in the temporal order tends now to wax, now to wane in enthusiasm, and since the mission effort in question was human as well as divine, this cycle would tend to appear here as well. Around midcentury this problem of lessening enthusiasm became acute.

In our preoccupation with the Spaniards of earlier centuries and their subsequent impact on the history of the United States, we have tended to overlook the Spanish immigrants of modern decades. The presence of large numbers of Spanish family names in the United States, particularly in New York City and in western states, has obscured the fact that very few Spaniards have come to the United States directly from Spain. It is the purpose of this paper to investigate the data on modern movements of Spaniards to the Americas in general, with special emphasis on the United States, and to consider the pattern of Spanish settlement in the United States that resulted from these movements.

The publication of a handsome facsimile edition of the Cortés Codex in the National Library at Vienna makes it peculiarly appropriate to raise again the long-disputed question why the volume was prepared and what the circumstances were that brought it to the Imperial Library at Vienna. The story of how the codex came to the attention of scholars is well known. In preparing his History of America, William Robertson hunted for Cortés' first letter in Spain without success. He then thought that since Charles V was in the Germanies when the letter arrived in Spain, it might have been forwarded to him and thereafter deposited in the Hapsburg Imperial Library in Vienna. Through the good offices of Sir Robert Murray, then British ambassador at the imperial court, permission was obtained from Empress Maria Theresa for a search not merely for the letter but also for any papers of interest for the History of America. The search did not bring to light the lost first letter but did uncover the Cortés Codex, and in it the letter of the city council of Veracruz written at the same time as Cortés' first letter. The codex contains also a copy of the fifth carta de relatión of Cortés, unknown until then but now known to exist in other manuscript versions. Since Robertson's day, the Cortés Codex has been consulted continually. It has served as the basis for verifying the texts of those relaciones for which there are other copies, and is the sole source for the letter of the city council of Veracruz, which is usually published as the first carta de relatión.