The revolutionists of America hastily sought for an ideology which should ratify their victory. By virtue of French ideas they had demolished an ancient organisation, had thrown off the Spanish tyranny, and had exalted anarchy in speech and in verse. To raise future cities in the wilderness they had need of a political gospel. They founded the Republic, imported institutions from abroad, and granted all the political liberties to an amorphous crowd. The first disputes were already audible between the defenders of the old order and the radicals who sought to destroy it; conservatives and liberals appeared at an identical moment of republican life. Militarism, revolutions, and the warfare of _caudillos_ were in part explained by the profound differences between the champions of tradition and the soldiers of liberty. Dominated by the need to live, these nations created a political philosophy. They disregarded criticism and analysis; they affirmed and constructed; they required a faith as intolerant as the archaic dogmas. Democracy and liberalism were the essential articles of this secular religion. To the eyes of the new orthodoxy the convictions of the {236} monarchists and absolutists were dangerous heresies: royalists were prosecuted as free-thinkers had been of old. Thought was not divorced from action. It reflected the political unrest; it prepared or justified political transformations. A species of pragmatism was characteristic of American thought. Poetry was rhymed oratory, lyrical declamation; the poet condemned any form of civil autocracy; he execrated tyrants, or evoked ingenuous liberties; he could not conceive of pure thought as divorced from life. Alberdi, an Argentine thinker, wrote: "Philosophy is meant for politics, morality, industry, and history, and if it does not serve them it is a puerile and a trifling science." He condemned the analysis of the eighteenth century, which "dissolves and corrupts everything"; to vain ideology, to the question whether "ideas and sensations, memory and reminiscence are distinct faculties," he preferred "an Argentine philosophy in which are distilled the social and moral needs of our country; a clear, democratic, progressive, and popular philosophy, with ideas like those of Condorcet; human perfectibility, continual progress of the human species; a philosophy which inspires men with the love of country and the love of humanity." The champions of liberalism defined the principles of the new social state; they were brilliant commentators, their subject being the ideas of French and Spanish philosophy. Their action in a society in which the old colonial prejudices were still triumphant was categorical and magistral. They created institutions and laws, and applied foreign doctrines to the troubles of the time. Sometimes they seemed inspired in the Biblical sense; they prophesied and condemned, as did Bilbao and Echeverria.