Ah well, as all the cities of the independent colony were at different distances from the capital, they were at different stages of national development; consequently all had different and often conflicting interests, necessities and aspirations. The political program, philosophical ideas, literature, ideals and models of art, social usages, moral principles, interpretations of law, cut of dress, and even the vocabulary and phrases of polite society, which--as useless, ugly, harmful, absurd, or disagreeable--had been banished from the capital were found in the provincial cities; and those, which were there proscribed, had taken refuge in the _villas_ and secondary towns. In matter of government the same thing was repeated and those acts by which it displays itself--military equipment, judicial decision, tax levying, seizure of contraband, pursuit of bandits and savages, organization of authority, conspiracies, masonry, political intrigues,--in fact, every political phenomenon which, depended upon or originated in the capital, was repeated in the states, with an imperfectness, so much the greater as the distance separating them from it was greater; and, as the conduct of government depended upon this phenomenon, it at last resulted that the co-ordination and harmony between the states and the centre depended on the time necessary for the communication of official orders. Accord between those who constituted the governing classes of all the cities, villas, and subordinate populations, was, consequently, not only difficult, but was often impossible, and, sometimes, useless. Thus, the country was geographically constructed and populated for an inevitable anarchy; an area within which every union of states, provinces, cities, religions, races, or political parties, had to be theoretical and unstable. The most important corroboration of this law was the separation of Texas, political phenomenon, which, thanks to it, has an explanation actually mathematical. In fact, the settlers, who recognized San Antonio as their centre, did not amount to forty thousand inhabitants scattered over an area larger than that of the French Republic, and depended politically upon the State of Coahuila, of which the capital is Saltillo. The distance which separated, by the cart-roads of that time, these two points, was eight hundred and sixty-eight kilometres, which they traversed in sixteen days in the dry season and in thirty-two days in the period of rains, and the distance from Mexico to Saltillo was nine hundred and forty-seven kilometres--or say, twenty days in the dry and forty days in the wet season. If instead of considering the local capitals, we consider the frontiers of the provinces, distances double and difficulties increase. ATAVISMS.