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 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.