The influx of foreigners alone worked an enormous influence in this
direction. A country which until the revolution had been governed in a
more autocratic fashion than probably any other in the modern history of
the world had suddenly opened its doors, and its people stood blinking
in the powerful light shining from the European civilization--an outer
world, of which the majority of the colonists had had no previous
conception.
That many of these should have lost their heads was quite inevitable. A
number of intellectuals took France's Jean-Jacques Rousseau and her
other contemporary prophets as models, or rather as gods, before whom
they fell down and worshipped. The trend of the nation became strongly
and even curiously materialistic. In this respect it must be confessed
that Argentina and Uruguay more especially have continued to follow the
French school of thought.
This departure in itself was enough to cause a profound disturbance in
the breasts of the majority of those in themselves neither leaders nor
intellectuals, but plain men imbued with the very true, if intensely
narrow, devotion and piety of the old-fashioned Spaniard. The force of
the convulsion was doubled from the mere fact of its astonishing
suddenness, and the religious and political earthquake, once started,
went rumbling and roaring ceaselessly the length of the startled
Continent.
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