As by the inverse selection of the Spanish Inquisition, the most intelligent and the most cultivated perished. Brutal horsemen occupied the cities in which Spanish civilisation had attained its apogee. Sarmiento has described the assault on the nomad wagons which bore the national _penates_ across the Argentine _pampas_ in a sort of Tartar Odyssey amid the infinite desolation of the plains. Even when the social classes were organised and the economic interests defined the rivality of the leaders continued, and politics remained personal. However, civil war is already no longer the brutal onset of men with neither {372} law nor faith, no longer an irruption of outlaws. The drama has replaced the epic; the conflict of passions and interests succeeds to the battles of semi-divine personages, proud of their tragic mission. Men buy votes; electoral committees falsify the suffrage, as in the United States, by force of money. Thus the plutocracy conquers the benches of Congress. If the continent spontaneously creates dictators then is all the ambitious structure of American politics--parliaments, ministers, and municipalities--merely a delusive invention? In some States in which the economic life is intense, as in the Argentine, Chili, Brazil, and Uruguay, benevolent despotism does not mark the high-water limit of national development; there new parties are forming themselves, and the _caudillos_ will soon disappear. Dr. Ingegnieros foresees the creation in the Argentine of new political groups, with financial tendencies. The rural class which rules in the provinces and possesses the great mass of the national wealth, which is derived from stock-raising and agriculture, and the commercial and industrial middle-class of the cities, will form, like the Tories and Whigs in England, the two parties of the future. Once the secondary parties have disappeared, the two great political organisations will prevail alone.