Thus the rather curious circumstance arose that South America flung off the Spanish dominion (which during its last decade had grown by comparison with the past considerate and beneficent), in order to replace it by the far more tyrannical Governors of their own creation. It was doubtless the fact that these despots who ruled so unmercifully over the South Americans were men of their own race and country that tended to reconcile the private citizens to the very real perils and oppressions which they now had to endure. The social upheaval had been such that, although many of these _caudillos_ or despotic chieftains were descended from aristocratic Spanish colonial families, others were mere children of opportunity, whose ancestry and origin could bear no comparison with their feats, dark though these latter may have been. In the eyes of many European contemporaries, and even in those of a multitude of their own people, the condition of the erstwhile Spanish South American colonists showed no glimmer of hope for a considerable time after the much-desired liberation had actually been obtained. Yet all this time the leaven was working very slowly, but very surely. The fact, indeed, was that, although the acts and circumstances, politically speaking, of the River Plate provinces grew wilder and more desperate, the human substance of the nation was steadily improving and becoming enlightened--a somewhat curious paradox! Even during the tyranny of the most remorseless of the _caudillos_ the enlightenment was working its way among the mass of the people. The influx of foreigners alone worked an enormous influence in this direction. A country which until the revolution had been governed in a more autocratic fashion than probably any other in the modern history of the world had suddenly opened its doors, and its people stood blinking in the powerful light shining from the European civilization--an outer world, of which the majority of the colonists had had no previous conception. That many of these should have lost their heads was quite inevitable. A number of intellectuals took France's Jean-Jacques Rousseau and her other contemporary prophets as models, or rather as gods, before whom they fell down and worshipped. The trend of the nation became strongly and even curiously materialistic. In this respect it must be confessed that Argentina and Uruguay more especially have continued to follow the French school of thought. This departure in itself was enough to cause a profound disturbance in the breasts of the majority of those in themselves neither leaders nor intellectuals, but plain men imbued with the very true, if intensely narrow, devotion and piety of the old-fashioned Spaniard. The force of the convulsion was doubled from the mere fact of its astonishing suddenness, and the religious and political earthquake, once started, went rumbling and roaring ceaselessly the length of the startled Continent.