The revolution of May, 1810, wrought a fundamental change in the social situation. Distinguished officers of the Napoleonic wars came to the country to offer their military services. English merchants, attracted by the reports of the English invasions of the Argentine Republic in 1806 and 1807, hurried over in increasing numbers. Soon they were influencing the society of Buenos Ayres which adopted London fashions, many of its customs, and became accustomed to the English character. Foreign commerce was concentrated in the hands of the English and many of these merchants finally married in the country. During the colonial epoch only books expurgated by the Inquisition had been admitted, but now the revolutionary movement unmuzzled these mysteries and flung wide the doors through which penetrated a flood of French and English works. The doctrines of the French revolution were at that time the passion of the majority of our public men, and its influence, even its Jacobin and terrorist phases, is traceable from the first instant. This is revealed in the "plan of government" of Moreno. On the other hand, the constitutional doctrines of the Anglo-Saxons were embraced only by the few. Dorrego went to the United States and there absorbed them. During the first decade after the revolution, the educational system scarcely advanced at all but followed closely to the traditional path of teaching taught by the University of Cordoba. The University of Buenos Ayres was founded in the second decade, and made an effort to reform public education. But the war of independence was not yet over and the internal situation of the country at the end of the anarchical dissolution which took place in 1820, was such that a multitude of affairs demanded attention, and as yet it was hardly possible, outside of the large cities, to turn to such questions of reform. The winning of independence was the cause of the sad dismemberment of the viceroyship of the River Plate and the statesmen of the period could not have prevented it. From what was once a single historic province there have gradually been detached the province of High Peru, to-day the Republic of Bolivia; the province of Paraguay, to-day the Republic of the same name; the eastern missions which now constitute the present Brazilian provinces of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catalina and Sao Paulo. The Banda Oriental has since become the Republic of Uruguay; the Falkland Islands were snatched by England; the territory about the Straits of Magellan was ceded later to Chile, under color of regulating the boundary line. The Argentine Republic, during the first century of its existence as an independent nation, far from acquiring a single square mile of territory, has continued to lose territory at every point of the compass. Her international policy, from that point of view, has been lamentable and the memory of it is still a bitter lesson.