The Unitaries wished to have a system of government modeled upon that of France. They wanted the various provinces made into administrative districts over which the national authority should exercise full sway. Their direct opponents, the Federalists, resembled to some extent the Antifederalists rather than the party bearing the former title in the earlier history of the United States; but even here an exact analogy fails. They did not seek to have the provinces enjoy local self-government or to have perpetuated the traditions of a sort of municipal home rule handed down from the colonial cabildos, so much as to secure the recognition of a number of isolated villages or small towns as sovereign states--which meant turning them over as fiefs to their local chieftains. Federalism, therefore, was the Spanish American expression for a feudalism upheld by military lordlets and their retainers. Among the measures of reform introduced by one republic or another during the revolutionary period, abolition of the Inquisition had been one of the foremost; otherwise comparatively little was done to curb the influence of the Church. Indeed the earlier constitutions regularly contained articles declaring Roman Catholicism the sole legal faith as well as the religion of the state, and safeguarding in other respects its prestige in the community. Here was an institution, wealthy, proud, and influential, which declined to yield its ancient prerogatives and privileges and to that end relied upon the support of clericals and conservatives who disliked innovations of a democratic sort and viewed askance the entry of immigrants professing an alien faith. Opposed to the Church stood governments verging on bankruptcy, desirous of exercising supreme control, and dominated by individuals eager to put theories of democracy into practice and to throw open the doors of the republic freely to newcomers from other lands. In the opinion of these radicals the Church ought to be deprived both of its property and of its monopoly of education. The one should be turned over to the nation, to which it properly belonged, and should be converted into public utilities; the other should be made absolutely secular, in order to destroy clerical influence over the youthful mind. In this program radicals and liberals concurred with varying degrees of intensity, while the moderates strove to hold the balance between them and their opponents.