Two social classes--the military class and the intellectual or university class--had been in opposition since the origin of the Republic. They disputed the supreme power, or sometimes the intellectuals sided with the generals. The "doctors," by aid of reasonings of Byzantine subtlety, justified the dictatorships as well as the Revolution. A Venezuelan deputy, Coto-Paul, in 1811, pronounced a lyrical eulogy of anarchy. The generals distrusted the lawyers, who represented the intellectual tradition of the colony: Paez hated the juriconsults as Napoleon hated ideologists. And the "doctors," vanquished by the military power, became the docile secretaries of generals and _caudillos_; they drafted laws and constitutions, and expressed in polished formulæ the rude intentions of the chiefs. To the violence of these latter they opposed subtlety; to the ignorance of despots, the scholastic ease and knowledge acquired in the universities of Spain. To the struggles of classes was added the war of races; the half-breeds fought against the national oligarchy; the new American class was hostile to the aristocracy of the capitals. The Indians lived in the towns of the interior, in which the colonial isolation was unchanged; the metropolis--Buenos-Ayres, Lima, or Caracas--was still Spanish and increasingly alien. On the coast, where feeling was more mobile and will more variable, the ideas of reform took root; exotic ideas and customs were introduced; while the Sierra,[1] more American than the coast, remained slow and gloomy, and ignorant {92} of the brilliant unrest of the capitals. Thus a triple movement came into being; inferior castes rose against the colonial aristocracy, the provinces against the all-absorbing metropolis, and the half-caste Sierra against the cosmopolitan seaboard. The provinces desired autonomy; the capitals, monopoly and unity; the metropolis was liberal, the Sierra conservative. The political conflict might know a change of names, but this antagonism was universal. The leaders disguised their deep-seated ambitions under a cloak of general ideas; they supported unity or federation, the military or the civil _régime_, Catholicism or radicalism. In Argentina the provinces fought against the capital; in Venezuela the coloured middle class against the oligarchies; in Chili the liberals against the _pelucones_, the proprietors of the soil; in Mexico the federals fought the monarchists; in Ecuador the radicals opposed the conservatives; in Peru the conflict was between the "civilists" and military _caudillos_. In the diversity of these quarrels we see one essential principle: two classes were in conflict--the proprietors of the _latifundia_ and the poverty-stricken people, the Spaniards and the half-breeds, or the oligarchs and generals of a barbarous democracy.