The Hispanic American Historical Review Author:American Historical Association This is an OCR reprint of the original rare book. There may be typos or missing text and there are no illustrations. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. — Excerpt from book: THE GOVERNMENT OF ARGENTINA1 The Argentine consti... more »tution is especially interesting to the student of political institutions, because it furnishes an excellent example of the hybrid offspring produced by planting Anglo- Saxon institutions upon Hispanic soil. With but few modifications, the people of Argentina took for their fundamental law the constitution of the United States of America. This is equally true, of course, of every other Hispanic American country except Chile, which went to England for its model; but Argentina furnishes the best example of Anglo-Saxon laws under Hispanic administration. Brazil has been a republic for but a few decades, and only the "A. B. C." countries of the world south of the Rio Grande can boast of being republics in fact as well as in name. In the preamble to the Argentine constitution, which sets forth the reasons for the adoption of the instrument, we find two significant deviations from the phraseology of its model. The representatives who gathered together in the constituent congress of Santa Fe were not representatives of United States or Provinces, but of the Argentine nation. This is technically true notwithstanding the opposition emanating from the provinces toward the federal government. The provinces, while retaining all powers not granted to the nation, conferred upon the central authority far greater powers than were originally granted to the general government of the United States. ...« less