This ended for a time the capital's pretensions to hegemony. Decentralisation went on apace. Cuyo dissolved into the three provinces of Mendoza, San Luiz, and San Juan; the old intendencia of Salta became four new provinces,--Santiago del Estero, Tucuman, Catamarca, and Salta,--to which a fifth was added when the city of Jujuy erected itself into a separate jurisdiction in 1834. From the Cordoba of colonial times Rioja split off, while the intendencia of Buenos Aires had been divided into four great provinces, Santa Fe, Corrientes, Entre Rios, and Buenos Aires, besides the independent nation of Uruguay. Each of these provinces practically corresponded with the leading city and its dependent territory, and the Cabildo of each municipality was the basis of new local government. This process was spontaneous, and the provinces then formed have ever since been the units of the Argentine confederation. To many intelligent patriots of the time, however, decentralisation seemed to be only a sure sign of swiftly approaching anarchy. Power fell more and more into the hands of the military leaders, and war became almost the normal condition of the country. During the four years from 1820 to 1824, there was no material change in the position of the contending forces. The provinces much desired to make a confederation of which Buenos Aires should be an equal member, but the latter refused and only waited for an opportunity in order to renew her pretensions to hegemony. Two opposing tendencies were, however, at work which soon created two parties within the walls of Buenos Aires itself. Commercial interests had suffered so severely in the civil wars, and communications were so uncertain and so burdened with arbitrary exactions by the provincials, that the property-holding classes began to press hard upon the office-holders of the oligarchy with demands for an accommodation and some sort of a union with the provinces. This was the beginning of the federalist party, which naturally found efficient support among the cattle-herding inhabitants on the great pampas of the province of Buenos Aires. On the other hand, the unitarians were becoming more compact, more determined, and more definite in their purposes. Rivadavia, the greatest constructive statesman of the era, undertook the reform of the laws and the administration. He created the University of Buenos Aires; founded hospitals and asylums; introduced ecclesiastical and military reform; bettered the land laws, and infused into the legislation a modern spirit. The improved tone of political thought tended to stimulate a more general and rational discussion of a _modus vivendi_ with the provinces. The federalists favoured the establishment of a system like that of the United States, while the unitarians clung to the idea of a nation organised more after the model of the French Republic.