midland regions to which they were sent. There, in the midst of the Spanish families, with whom they were left, they disseminated ideas of liberty and standards of independence, unknown among the rest of the population, the best classes of which in those days of unrest, were a turbulent and irrepressible element.

The revolution of May, 1810, wrought a fundamental change in the social situation. Distinguished officers of the Napoleonic wars came to the country to offer their military services. English merchants, attracted by the reports of the English invasions of the Argentine Republic in 1806 and 1807, hurried over in increasing numbers. Soon they were influencing the society of Buenos Ayres which adopted London fashions, many of its customs, and became accustomed to the English character. Foreign commerce was concentrated in the hands of the English and many of these merchants finally married in the country. During the colonial epoch only books expurgated by the Inquisition had been admitted, but now the revolutionary movement unmuzzled these mysteries and flung wide the doors through which penetrated a flood of French and English works. The doctrines of the French revolution were at that time the passion of the majority of our public men, and its influence, even its Jacobin and terrorist phases, is traceable from the first instant. This is revealed in the "plan of government" of Moreno. On the other hand, the constitutional doctrines of the Anglo-Saxons were embraced only by the few. Dorrego went to the United States and there absorbed them. During the first decade after the revolution, the educational system scarcely advanced at all but followed closely to the traditional path of teaching taught by the University of Cordoba. The University of Buenos Ayres was founded in the second decade, and made an effort to reform public education. But the war of independence was not yet over and the internal situation of the country at the end of the anarchical dissolution which took place in 1820, was such that a multitude of affairs demanded attention, and as yet it was hardly possible, outside of the large cities, to turn to such questions of reform.

The winning of independence was the cause of the sad dismemberment of the viceroyship of the River Plate and the statesmen of the period could not have prevented it. From what was once a single historic province there have gradually been detached the province of High Peru, to-day the Republic of Bolivia; the province of Paraguay, to-day the Republic of the same name; the eastern missions which now constitute the present Brazilian provinces of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catalina and Sao Paulo. The Banda Oriental has since become the Republic of Uruguay; the Falkland Islands were snatched by England; the territory about the Straits of Magellan was ceded later to Chile, under color of regulating the boundary line. The Argentine Republic, during the first century of its existence as an independent nation, far from acquiring a single square mile of territory, has continued to lose territory at every point of the compass. Her international policy, from that point of view, has been lamentable and the memory of it is still a bitter lesson.

Within the enormous territorial expanse which now constitutes the Argentine Republic political integration was effected slowly. The different populations settled at intervals along the routes which connected Buenos Ayres with Lima on the one side, with the Andes on another and with Asuncion on still another. Each settlement was an oasis of Spanish population set in the midst of a savage country. In order to establish something approaching unity within each section, the people organized themselves after the pattern of the urban centers of Spain with their Cabildo or town council as the communal authority, which controlled and regulated the extremes of opinion and conditions and brought the whole municipal life to a focus. Each settlement lived a life apart, separated from the others. In fact they were cast in the mold of the ancient Spanish village society, and the central authority only made itself felt at infrequent intervals.

The inhabitants of each village thus developed an aptitude for municipal life and for self-government, and a concentration upon local interests which became the basis of their political development. They fostered a local character which was the very foundation and essence of their later federal tendency. To the interests and pretensions of the crown as formulated by the "Council of the Indies," they preferred the authority of the viceroy and of the intendants, but their main preference was the municipality itself, whose frank and loyal mouthpiece was the traditional Cabildo. For this reason, when the movement for independence commenced, each village and each city was led by its own Cabildo, and it was the Cabildo which gave vigor and form to the revolution. Around the Cabildo the inhabitants of the vicinity grouped themselves in the different organic or anarchic revolts which followed. It was for this reason, too, since the present republic possessed no basis of political division, that each one of the cities formed a nucleus in its respective province of the same name, and that the whole territory was subdivided according to the radius of authority exercised by the principal cities of colonial times, without any account being taken of economic autonomy or of demography.

Federal sentiment made its appearance profoundly rooted in tradition and blood, and the tendency towards centralization only emanated from certain groups of dreamers at the metropolis who with their eyes closed to the past believed along with such deluded men as Rivadavia that, by destroying the traditional Cabildo, they would wipe the state clean of such precedents, just as the Jacobins of the French Revolution did with the institutions of the ancient régime. Argentine society issued from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries already shaped toward local self-government and local loyalty. It already appeared a federation in fact which was easily transformed into a federation in law, because the federal idea was at bottom the very heart and soul of things.

The development of our colonization also indicated that of our civilization. As we approach the north, the brilliant center of civilization of Lima society becomes more aristocratic, infatuated with its learning, luxurious and fastidious. The youth of the Plate Valley were attracted to the University of Chuquisaca, where, amidst its cloisters, they acquired a grave and disputacious manner. Later the University of Cordoba, like a pale reflection of the former, drew upon a part of these youths and, if they left its lecture halls also practiced in the art of sophistry, they did not imbibe in return that atmosphere of aristocratic aloofness, pomp and presumption. Buenos Ayres and the river country were without a university and without an aristocracy. At the periodic auctions of titles of nobility, the receipts of which were added to the colonial contributions and were intended to meet a certain deficit in the Spanish treasury, not a purchaser appeared and there was not a single herder of the pampas nor a single rich smuggler who would bid. The titles which were thus put up to sale remained unpurchased, for the people held them in no esteem.

With no resources other than its commerce and industry which were both of a contraband nature, Buenos Ayres developed more rapidly than other cities and with a greater freedom from "red tape" and formalism, in spite of its being the seat of the general government, with its Spanish officials, its civil, military and religious authorities and an administrative machinery identical with that of the other capitals of the viceroyship. For here there was not the same atmosphere, the life was simple and democratic, the officials had no stage from which to