The work of Rosas was profoundly Argentine. It presents a triple civilising significance; it overcame the partial _caudillos_, conquered the wilderness, and founded an organic confederation. Traditional, for it respected ancient liberties; opportunist, adapted at the critical moment of national evolution, for it prevented the disaggregation of the provinces by the labours of unconscious leaders. Like Porfirio Diaz, Rosas destroyed the provincial _caudillos_; he was a Machiavelli of the pampas. He dissembled his unificatory aims; he caused division among the governors, stimulated their mutual hatred, presided over their quarrels; he grouped or isolated his disciples, who cut a lively figure on the hustings. When the power of Quiroga increased, he protected Lopez, and exposed the former to the hatred of the Reinafé; Quiroga once murdered, he had the latter accused. He expected the governors to submit to his _exequatur_; the demi-gods fell before the stroke of his imperial axe. "Rosas is the Louis XI. of Argentine history," said Ernesto Quesada, with justice; for over the heads of the feudal barons he raised a magnificent Unitarian structure; he was the creator of Argentine nationality. [Illustration: ROSAS, THE ARGENTINE TYRANT. (1829-1852.) To face p. 142.] Rosas surrounded himself with chosen men: the Lopez, Anchorenas, Mansillas, Sarrateas, Riglos. The cultivated classes demanded a strong government, renounced their liberty with a Dionysiac {143} delight, and conferred "unlimited power" upon Rosas. The tyrant governed, in short, above the law and above custom. He enacted laws to prohibit the carnival, that popular souvenir of the pagan Bacchanalia, and to establish the rules of mourning; he himself was the law, was reason, was the _logos_; intoxicated with docility, a whole nation bowed before his Cæsarian will, without hierarchic distinctions. His rule was a supreme levelling, a universal servitude; the Terror. Rosas, impelled and favoured by the supreme traditions of a race, became the Cæsar of a democracy. _Gauchos_ and negroes supported him; with the aid of the people he subjected the ruling classes. He unified; he destroyed social privileges; he inverted the order of the hierarchies in the Unitarian, aristocratic city. His political methods were of the simplest. Instinctively he applied infallible psychological truths. He knew the power of repetition, of habit, of formulæ; he understood the enervating effect of panic; the effect of vivid colours and sounding words upon the half-breed mob. "Federation or death!" he reiterated, in his proclamations. "Savages, infamous Unitarians--impious Unitarians," one read day by day in the journals, and in official documents; that vivid colour, red, was the symbol of federalism. Rosas wrote to Lopez: "Repeat the word, savage! repeat it to satiety, to boredom, to exhaustion."