I assign so much importance to these lesser points, because they will serve to explain all our social phenomena, and the revolution which has been taking place in the Argentine Republic. The features of this revolution are distorted because described in words from the political dictionary, which disguise and hide them by the mistaken ideas they call up. In the same way that of the Spaniards gave familiar European names to the new animals they encountered upon landing in America; saluting with the terrible name of lion, which calls up the notion of the magnanimity and strength of the king of beasts, a wretched cat called the puma, which runs at the sight of the dogs, and naming the jaguar of our woods the tiger. Evidence will soon be brought to show the firm and indestructible nature of the foundations upon which I assert the civil war to be based, however unstable and ignoble they may appear. The life of the Argentine country people as I have exhibited it is not a mere accident; it is the order of things, a characteristic, normal, and in my judgment unparalleled system of association, and in itself affords a full explanation of our revolution.
Before 1810, two distinct, rival, and incompatible forms of society, two differing kinds of civilization existed in the Argentine Republic: one being Spanish, European, and cultivated, the other barbarous, American, and almost wholly of native growth. The revolution which occurred in the cities acted only as the cause, the impulse, which set these two distinct forms of national existence face to face, and gave occasion for a contest between them, to be ended, after lasting many years, by the absorption of one into the other.
