display their importance, and within the narrow walls of the modest home of the government, the few inhabitants of this metropolis used to mingle in its marshy, unpaved streets, or in their unpretentious and simple adobe houses. They treated each other with a certain equality, which was due precisely to those conditions of intense individualism developed of necessity in a cattle raising community.

In the northern and central districts society was cast in the Peruvian mold, a reproduction of Spanish civilization, aristocrats adopting primogeniture and, in modified form, the feudal régime of the encomenderos. In the river and mountain region, the urban was a reflection of the rural population, independent, haughty, brave, accustomed to making forays upon horseback over the endless pampas, trusting to its own decision and in the end to the knife, which was a symbol of the worship of personal courage, inherited from Spanish ancestors who had developed it during the centuries of the struggle against the Moors. In the river district the commerce, which in the main was carried on illegally by doggedly persevering merchants who plied their trade fearlessly with pirates and foreign smugglers, caused a certain spirit of self-confidence to grow. This spirit made itself felt in the popular movement of the reconquest of 1806, and in the impulse of the revolution of May, 1810.

From Buenos Ayres started the movement for independence, and the Cabildos of the interior cities fell in with the movement with more or less alacrity. Hence the further inland these cities were, the less enthusiastic. The Paraguayan region isolated itself and followed the conservative policy of the Cabildo of Asuncion. The province of High Peru, in spite of its efforts, was the last to revolt and never followed with any ardor the movement initiated by the metropolis. Indeed, the revolution of May, which had spread to the banks of the Paraguay river and over the plateau of Bolivia, might not, perhaps, have succeeded in so closely cementing, in spite of the righteousness of its cause, the independence proclaimed in Tucuman in 1816, had not the inspiration of San Martin added that powerful impulse which flung armies across the Andes, liberated Chile from Spanish dominion and brought independence to Peru. He might have pursued this glorious course toward the independence of the whole continent, if the colossal egotism of Bolivar in that tragic conference of Guayaquil had not placed our national hero in the dilemma of either eliminating himself and leaving his selfish rival to wear the laurels planted and nurtured by Argentine blood or of sacrificing the fruits of the campaign for independence, by not being able to obtain from him the military assistance he was in need of. He placed his country before his own glory and yielded the field to one to whom personal renown was preferable to all else.

For the social evolution of Argentine the sacrifice of San Martin was of incalculable importance. Upon eliminating himself, he left to his rival the army which he had himself led until then and this country was deprived of its one organizing force. Disintegrating tendencies manifested themselves without counter-check. In the second decade of the century, various little republics were defiantly established in the interior. They were constructed upon the plan of the old settlements which had risen to something greater. They were governed by Cabildos, and these in turn obeyed the local leader, who was raised to dictatorship over the districts. Each province was sufficient unto itself. It barely communicated with the others and retrograded towards barbarism without regularly organized government or other will than that of its respective tyrant and the free-lances who were his immediate followers. Schools closed; families took refuge within the walls of their dwellings; terror pervaded; life was everywhere insecure; those who could, emigrated, leaving behind them on the land the sick, the women and the children. Men were bedfellows in misery; there was no industry, no commerce; sin flourished and virtue was trampled under foot. These thirty years of bloody and merciless civil strife made prominent the idea of the rule of force. People were taken from peaceful work, efficient teaching languished, every social bond was weakened and in the end a society evolved in which not education, ancestry or fortune exercised the least influence, but audacity, the impulse of the local leader, the mob instincts of the city population and of the rural gaucho. The local leaders and their followers alone wielded any real power. They dominated without possibility of counter-check and an entire generation tolerated this condition during that terrible period.

The local leadership, like the legendary tyranny of ancient Rome, demolished everything which tried to rise above the obedient, passive, resigned and common level. It brutally choked it or forced it to emigrate, and Argentine society had to develop in these anaemic surroundings. There was no possibility of foreign immigration, or of establishing industry and commerce.

The idea of nationality was observed by party passion and the factions were ready to launch out upon some fight upon the slightest pretext. Social classes were divided into irreconcilable parties, the reds or federalists, and the blues or centralists, those who believed in the local leader, and those who detested him. The former were called federalists, because they believed that each locality ought to adopt the kind of government which best suited it; the latter were called the centralists, because in their weakness they leaned upon the influence of the national government in order to give to the whole country a common unified administration of which the local government would be the agent.

Rosas met this situation and put an end to it. After the dismemberment of the ephemeral republic of 1825, and the national convention, and following upon the Brazilian war, the centralist party, deceived in its principles and in its men, closed its doors to counsel and committed the error of executing Dorrego at Navarro. The mass of the rural population resisted the straight jacket proposed by the doctrinaires of the centralist party and in this they showed themselves unrelenting. Then Rosas came into power in the government of Buenos Ayres and also secured control of the situation in the provinces. He succeeded in bringing about the organization of each province with a view to forming the Argentine Confederation. He was entrusted by the federation with the management of foreign relations. He left the interior provinces to organize themselves after the pattern of the government of Buenos Ayres. Doubtless, during the long quarter of a century while he was dictator, real security and peace were never enjoyed, for the centralist party was ambitious, arrogant and factious, plotting within itself, and when it was not exciting to rebellion, or leading an invasion it was provoking foreign intervention. Finally the terrible and merciless war between the centralists and the federalists developed a state of terror which culminated in the excesses of the year 1840. The dictator treated his adversaries without mercy and they in their turn had none for him. To be strictly truthful, neither party can be absolved from wicked and culpable action. Nor can I shut my eyes to the fact that the great power bred pride, and that pride bred hatred of the subject class. But this prolonged dictatorship saved the country from the anarchy of the petty republics of 1820, it solidified the country into a sovereign entity and it gave to the different parts the cohesion of a nation capable of victoriously resisting the French and Anglo-French interventions. This much is owed definitely to the centralist party, who in this way solved the difficulty traditional to our national organization and so guided