n substance of the nation was steadily improving and becoming
enlightened--a somewhat curious paradox! Even during the tyranny of the
most remorseless of the _caudillos_ the enlightenment was working its
way among the mass of the people.

The influx of foreigners alone worked an enormous influence in this
direction. A country which until the revolution had been governed in a
more autocratic fashion than probably any other in the modern history of
the world had suddenly opened its doors, and its people stood blinking
in the powerful light shining from the European civilization--an outer
world, of which the majority of the colonists had had no previous
conception.

That many of these should have lost their heads was quite inevitable. A
number of intellectuals took France's Jean-Jacques Rousseau and her
other contemporary prophets as models, or rather as gods, before whom
they fell down and worshipped. The trend of the nation became strongly
and even curiously materialistic. In this respect it must be confessed
that Argentina and Uruguay more especially have continued to follow the
French school of thought.

This departure in itself was enough to cause a profound disturbance in
the breasts of the majority of those in themselves neither leaders nor
intellectuals, but plain men imbued with the very true, if intensely
narrow, devotion and piety of the old-fashioned Spaniard. The force of
the convulsion was doubled from the mere fact of its astonishing
suddenness, and the religious and political earthquake, once started,
went rumbling and roaring ceaselessly the length of the startled
Continent.

Speaking quite frankly, there seems very little doubt that in the two
countries mentioned the influence of religion died in the birth
struggles of the Republics. In the course of the innumerable civil wars
which tortured these lands for half a century and more afterwards,
religious emblems were from time to time employed, and priests were
occasionally attached to one faction or the other; but the records of
these latter are such as to show that they had entirely lost to sight
their sacred calling, and a number, such as Felix Aldao, became
politicians and leaders of these bands, and executed and drank with the
wildest of their men. On a few occasions a religious pretext was
actually seized upon by one or two _caudillos_, who in the most
barefaced fashion endeavoured to make this cloak serve their ends.

A notable instance of this