He did not overlook material progress. His financial reforms were radical; the national budget was instituted; a tax upon rent was imposed, and the customs duties were regularised. The minister Garcia contributed to this financial reformation. Rivadavia understood that the whole future of Buenos-Ayres depended upon that great civiliser, the ocean, and he ordered the construction of four harbours {137} on the coast. He favoured immigration, protected agriculture, improved the ways and means of transport, reformed the police, and contracted the first loan. It was under the government of Rivadavia that the Constitution of 1826 was promulgated. This was inspired by the doctrines of J. J. Rousseau, and his _Contrat social_; but it aimed energetically at centralisation and authority. Senators were to exercise their functions for twelve years; they were the conservative power. The mandate of the deputies and the Director was to last only four years. It was a Unitarian constitution which made Buenos-Ayres, in spite of the protest of the federals, the capital of the United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata, the centre which "rules all the peoples, and upon which all depend." Rivadavia imposed unity, propagated his ideas, multiplied reforms, and checkmated the Church; he was the civiliser _par excellence_. He wished to transform a Spanish province into a European nation, a barbarous people into a democracy, a sluggish and fanatical society into a liberal republic. He governed in the interests of Buenos-Ayres and the seaboard, for the future Latin democracy, and neglected the desert, the anarchy of the provinces, the indomitable sierra, the _caciques_, and the Indian tribes. He was vanquished by feudal barbarism, by a confused democracy, hostile to organisation and unity; but his work remains, in the shape of a constitutional programme. Alberdi writes that he gave America the plan of his progressive improvements and innovations: it is an immense political structure, a gospel of democracy. Were popular myths to rise in spontaneous birth in Buenos-Ayres, before the evocative ocean, as in the Greek cities lovingly bathed by the Mediterranean, then Rivadavia would be the genius of Argentine culture, the patron of the city, the creator of its arts and its laws. {138}