administrative
districts over which the national authority should exercise full sway.
Their direct opponents, the Federalists, resembled to some extent the
Antifederalists rather than the party bearing the former title in the
earlier history of the United States; but even here an exact
analogy fails. They did not seek to have the provinces enjoy local
self-government or to have perpetuated the traditions of a sort of
municipal home rule handed down from the colonial cabildos, so much
as to secure the recognition of a number of isolated villages or small
towns as sovereign states--which meant turning them over as fiefs to
their local chieftains. Federalism, therefore, was the Spanish American
expression for a feudalism upheld by military lordlets and their
retainers.

Among the measures of reform introduced by one republic or another
during the revolutionary period, abolition of the Inquisition had been
one of the foremost; otherwise comparatively little was done to curb
the influence of the Church. Indeed the earlier constitutions regularly
contained articles declaring Roman Catholicism the sole legal faith as
well as the religion of the state, and safeguarding in other respects
its prestige in the community. Here was an institution, wealthy, proud,
and influential, which declined to yield its ancient prerogatives and
privileges and to that end relied upon the support of clericals and
conservatives who disliked innovations of a democratic sort and viewed
askance the entry of immigrants professing an alien faith. Opposed
to the Church stood governments verging on bankruptcy, desirous of
exercising supreme control, and dominated by individuals eager to put
theories of democracy into practice and to throw open the doors of the
republic freely to newcomers from other lands. In the opinion of these
radicals the Church ought to be deprived both of its property and of its
monopoly of education. The one should be turned over to the nation,
to which it properly belonged, and should be converted into public
utilities; the other should be made absolutely secular, in order to
destroy clerical influence over the youthful mind. In this program
radicals and liberals concurred with varying degrees of intensity,
while the moderates strove to hold the balance between them and their
opponents.

Out of this complex situation civil commotions were bound to arise.
Occasionally these were real wars, but as a rule only skirmishes or
sporad