33 that the government should be in the hands of the best element, proper selection having been made from among those best fitted for the work. This was the practice of the first president of this great country.
Selection was Washington advice; and it was also that of Franklin. It is necessary to select men, to select all the time, and to teach the people the difficult task of making wise selection. There is no better way in which this teaching can be accomplished than by educating the young generations in a profound love for truth and justice, so that they may practice these virtues during their entire lives as the most agreeable and sacred of their social duties.
The contrary practice is exactly the greatest evil from which Spanish America is suffering, that is to say proneness to falsehood and conventional hypocrisy. The true and just man among us is destined to martyrdom, because he is not understood, and because he is hated by individuals and by the multitude. These vices are inculcated in the home and in the schools where children are brought up in fear of denouncing vice and with an aversion to work, especially to the cultivation of the soil.
To correct our social defects it is necessary that education be imparted by English or United States teachers, as truth is their pre eminent virtue. Teachers to succeed them could be formed from the present and the coming Central American generations, by means of education in a large pedagogic institute supported by the United States, Guatemala, Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama. There could be five hundred pupils from