time he received advices from Chile that all was ready for the proposed expedition to Peru. San Martin hesitated, but wrote to Government that he was about to march to Buenos Ayres with 2,000 cavalry and eight guns, but should leave his infantry in Alendoza. One battalion of infantry was quartered in San Juan, the grenadiers were in San Luis, and his total force of regular troops in Cuyo was now raised by recruiting to 2,200 men, besides which he had called out the militia of San Luis to the number of 2,000 men.
The idea of Government was to concentrate the whole army in the Province of Buenos Ayres to the number of 8,000 or 10,000 men, ready to act either against the Spaniards or against the Gaucho hordes, but as the latter numbered only 1,500, it was a most cowardly measure to abandon the northern frontier, menaced by the Royalists of Upper Peru, and to break the terms of the alliance with Chile, and could only have ended in the isolation of Buenos Ayres from the rest of the provinces. The civil war was a spontaneous effervescence of the people, and could not be cured by the sabre. It arose not only from the semibarbarous instincts of the masses, but also from the discontent of the more educated classes with a political system which was not in accordance with the principles of the Revolution, and this discontent permeated the ranks of the army itself.
Rondeau, in pursuance of his plan, took the field with the Army of Buenos Ayres, and marched to the northern frontier of the Province, against the Gaucho hordes, seeking a junction with the Army of the North, coming from Cordoba. His army alone was superior in number to the enemy. Why, then, did he send for another army from Cuyo?
The real object of this concentration was that Gomez, the Argentine envoy in Paris, had entered into an arrangement with the French Government to crown the Duke of Luca, a Prince of the House of Bourbon, King of the United Provinces; France engaging on her part to
