It is not my purpose here to enter into the history of the domestic troubles and civil dissensions which brought about this state of things in the new republic: it is an unsatisfactory, and to most of my readers would be a very unintelligible, narrative. Suffice it to say, that whilst the political importance of Buenos Ayres has been apparently not a little diminished; on the other hand, it may be questioned if the provinces have reaped any substantial advantage by shaking off their immediate dependence upon the metropolis. Most of them have suffered all the calamitous consequences of party struggles for power, and have fallen under the arbitrary rule of the military chiefs, who, in turn, have either by fair means or foul obtained the ascendency; and if in some of them the semblance of a representative junta has been set up in imitation of that of Buenos Ayres, it will be found, I believe, that such assemblies have, in most instances, proved little more than an occasional convocation of the partisans of the governor for the time being, much more likely to confirm than to control his despotic sway. The present political state of the provinces of La Plata is certainly very different from what was expected by the generality of those who originally took an interest in the fate of these new countries. It is, however, a state of things not confined to this republic; we shall find, more or less, the same scenes; the same violent party struggles, the same continual changes of government; the same apparent incapacity for arriving at anything like a settled political organization in almost every one of the several independent states into which the old possessions of Spain on the New Continent have resolved themselves; and this under circumstances, to all appearance, the most dissimilar with regard to the locality, climate, soil, language, wants, and physical condition of the inhabitants; with no one common element, in fact, in their composition, save their having all been brought up in, and habituated to, the same colonial system of the mother country. What, then, is the conclusion we must draw from this fact? Is it not evident that it was that colonial system which, wherever applied, unfitted the people for a state of independence, and left them worse than helpless when thrown upon their own resources?