Radical counsels prevailed in Buenos Aires. Roca's opponents, seeing that they were at a hopeless disadvantage with the election machinery in Avellaneda's hands, determined to use violence. In June, 1880, the partisans of Tejedor rose against the Federal government. The police and militia of the city joined them and paraded the streets, while the alarm flew to the country, and the troops of the line began to concentrate outside the city. Presently the President and his Cabinet fled for safety to the Federal camp. For a few weeks there was some skirmishing and much negotiating, and in one encounter near the south end of the city a thousand Buenos Aireans were killed. Finally, the two sides came to an agreement by which the Roca party retained substantially all that they had been contending for. The General succeeded to the Presidency without further opposition, and the city of Buenos Aires was detached from the province. The federalisation of the great city was the last step in the process of adaptation that had been going on ever since the expulsion of the Spaniards. Political equilibrium between the provinces and Buenos Aires had been reached. Thenceforth the latter's direct predominance was to be purely intellectual, commercial, and social. For the privilege of being capital of the republic, the city exchanged her provincial autonomy. Buenos Aires province, as formerly constituted, was the greatest menace to a peaceful federal union. In an assembly where the rights and influence of all the provinces were supposed to be equal, the magnitude of Buenos Aires was a constant occasion for the jealousy of her smaller sisters and for aggressions on her own part. Deprived of the city, the remainder of the province was not powerful enough to be dangerous. Now that it is federalised, the city itself proves to be the strongest tie binding together the different parts of the Confederation. The greatest of all the waves of material prosperity reached its culmination during Roca's first administration. Business fairly boomed; foreign commerce increased seventy-five per cent. from 1875 to 1885; the exports of hides, cattle, wool, and wheat swelled from year to year; the railroad mileage tripled in ten years; the revenues mounted sixty per cent. in five years; the use of the post-office, that excellent measure of education, wealth, and higher national energies, tripled. All danger of disturbances serious enough to affect property rights had long since passed; the provincial governors worked harmoniously with the Federal authorities. A part of Roca's system was to rest his power as chief executive on the co-operation of the governors; the members of Congress also bore somewhat the same relation to the President. As a rule, a majority in Congress supported his measures.