It was a great reform made necessary by many considerations. The chief of which were the public indifference to all matters political which did not immediately concern Industry or Commerce and the profound discredit into which elections, parliamentary and municipal, had fallen as a consequence of that indifference; the whole effect of which was to leave the internal government of the country entirely in the hands of a mostly mercenary caste of professional politicians. This caste was habitually guilty of electoral corruption and malpractices which, in the absence of any interested public opinion, continued to work in a vicious circle by causing complete abstention from any exercise of the vote on the part of all citizens of the Republic except those forming the small gangs which were under the orders of the “Caudillo” or political manager of each district. These gangs went to the poll, at so much per head in cash and many illicit privileges, in order that there should be any voting at all to declare the due re-election of the men who wielded the political power in the National or Provincial Legislatures or in the Councils of the various Municipalities. The substitution, under the new Law, of genuine for fictitious elections has also operated as another, and, probably, final blow struck at the Provincial Oligarchies, reference to which has been made in another chapter. No one outside South America would really credit the depths of corrupt absurdity in which elections in Argentina were permitted to remain so late in these days of her general enlightenment and prosperity. That reform in this highly important respect was so long a-coming was due to individual preoccupation with their own affairs of the people of a country the material development of which was being accomplished with bewildering rapidity. Men had no time to occupy themselves with such a tough, and rather dangerous, job as the dethronement of the professional politician; who, in the higher spheres of Provincial Government, usually belonged to one of the widely influential groups of the historically dominant native families. Public morality had sunk to a strangely low level in comparison with the ever-increasing commercial rectitude of the country, when the most startling tale of electoral fraud or administrative corruption would be received with only a shrug of the shoulders and an indulgent smile, as of wonder why the narrator was making so much ado about such a very ordinary occurrence.