These strangers, of course, introduced many progressive ideas and new habits and luxuries into the land.  In non-political matters a cosmopolitan result was soon evident.  At the same time, these foreigners failed to exercise any but a most indirect influence on the internal policy of the nation.  This was undoubtedly perfectly correct, but in the face of the curious political situation which prevailed at this period we have the remarkable spectacle of rapid and definite progress in commercial, industrial, and private life, while at the same time the official methods of the public authorities were degenerating with a rapidity that soon brought the circumstances of government almost to a point of actual savagery.

In the first instance, men of weight and intellect, such as Rivadavia, Pueyrredon, and their numerous colleagues, had strained every nerve to place this new nation of theirs on a par with those of Europe in matters of intelligence and scientific progress.  They had opened colleges, Universities, hospitals, scientific institutions, libraries, and, indeed, had endeavoured to provide the community with every instrument which could further its general progress.  Every species of science was encouraged, even to the introduction of the then novel process of vaccination.

It was all in vain; the move turned out to be premature.  The Spanish policy of the suppression of education and intelligence was now destined to show its baneful results.  A wave of ignorance and anarchy swept over the devoted leaders of the revolution, and overwhelmed them completely, and for the time being even their work.  For half a century rival chieftains rose up one after the other to contend for power.  Many of them employed every conceivable means, whether human or inhuman, to retain it when once they had succeeded in grasping the coveted Dictator’s throne.

So numerous were these men, and so extensive is the catalogue of their callous doings, that it is impossible to refer to them in any other but the briefest fashion here.  So extensive, moreover, was the new Republic of Argentina—­or, rather, at that time the collection of frequently antagonistic provinces which then occupied the area now filled by the modern Republic—­that a single ruler seldom succeeded in maintaining his authority from frontier to frontier.

In general, the main strife may be said to have been waged between the provinces of the littoral and those of the Far West.  Of all the men who fought on either side, the greatest leader was, of course, Juan Manuel Rosas.  This astonishing being, as a matter of fact, was by no means one of the first of these tyrannical Dictators.  He was, on the contrary, the last, so far as Argentina is concerned, but his deeds continued to savour of an early period to the end.