ARGENTINA
The interest which Argentina arouses is entirely unlike that which
appeals to the traveller's eye and mind in Peru or Bolivia or Chile.
In each of these three countries there is scenery grand in scale
and different in type from what any other part of the world has to
shew. In Peru and Bolivia there are also the remains of a primitive
civilization, scanty, no doubt, but all the more attractive because
they stimulate rather than satisfy our curiosity. They speak of
antiquity, and indeed all three countries have a flavour of antiquity,
though Chile has scarcely any relics coming down from it. But in the
River Plate regions there is (except along the Andes and in the far
north) little natural beauty, and nothing that recalls the past. All is
modern and new; all belongs to the prosperous present and betokens a
still more prosperous future. Argentina is like western North America.
The swift and steady increase in its agricultural production, with an
increase correspondingly large in means of internal transportation,
is what gives its importance to the country and shews that it will
have a great part to play in the world. It is the United States of the
Southern Hemisphere.
Not even the approach by sea to Alexandria or to the mouth of the
Hooghly below Calcutta, is duller than that to Buenos Aires. Before
land is seen, the vessel enters a muddy, reddish brown sea, and
presently the winding channel, marked for a long way by buoys, shews
how shallow is the water on either side. This is the estuary, two
hundred miles long and at this point about thirty miles broad, of
the Rio de la Plata, formed by the union of the great river Uruguay
with the still greater Paraná, streams which between them drain
nearly one-fourth part of the South American continent. Approaching
the Argentine shore, one sees a few masts and many funnels rising
above the tall hulls of steamships, docked in lines alongside huge
wharves. Beyond the open space of the wharf runs a row of offices and
warehouses, but nothing else is seen, nor can one tell, except from
the size of the docks and the crowd of vessels, that a great city lies
behind. Nothing can be seen, because Buenos Aires stands only some
thirty feet above high-water mark in a perfectly flat alluvial plain,
with scarcely any rise in the ground for hundreds of miles, and not
a rock anywhere. On entering the city one is surprised to find that
with a boundless prairie all around, the streets should be so narrow
that in most of them wheeled traffic is allowed to move only one way.
One great thoroughfare, the Avenida de Mayo, traverses the centre
of the city from the large plaza in which the government buildings
stand to the still larger and very handsome plaza which is adorned
by the palace of the legislature. Fortunately it is wide, and being
well planted with trees is altogether a noble street, statelier than
Piccadilly in London, or Unter den Linden in Berlin, or Pennsylvania
Avenue in Washington. In the newer parts of the city more width is now
being given to streets as they are from time to time laid out, but the
congestion of the nucleus is a serious obstacle to rapid locomotion,
which is otherwise well provided for by numerous electric car lines.
No North American city has a better car service. Though skyscrapers
have scarcely yet made their appearance, the houses are much higher
than in the west coast cities, because earthquakes are not feared;
and many mansions in the residential quarters, built in the modern
French style, have architectural merit. So, too, the numerous small
plazas, usually planted with trees or shrubs and furnished with seats,
partly atone for the want of space in the streets. It must be added
that the statues which adorn these plazas do not tempt the passer-by
to linger in æsthetic enjoyment. One is too acutely reminded of the
bronze equestrian warriors so numerous in Washington. The cities of the
western world, having a short history, seem to run to the commemoration
of heroes whose names, little known to other nations, will soon be
forgotten in their own, whereas the old countries, except Italy, seem
forgetful of those whom the western stranger would like to have seen
held up to reverence.
Buenos Aires deserves its name, for its air is clear as well as keen,
there being no large manufacturing works to pollute it with coal smoke.
The streets are well kept; everything is fresh and bright. The most
striking buildings besides those of the new Legislative Chambers,
with their tall and handsome dome, are the Opera-house, the interior
of which equals any in Europe, and the Jockey Club, whose scale and
elaborate appointments surpass even the club-houses of New York.
Buenos Aires is something between Paris and New York. It has the
business rush and the luxury of the one, the gaiety and pleasure-loving
aspect of the other. Everybody seems to have money, and to like
spending it, and to like letting everybody else know that it is
being spent. Betting on horses is the favourite amusement, and the
races the greatest occasion for social display. An immense concourse
gathers at the racing enclosure and fills the grand-stand. The highest
officials of state and city are there, as well as the world of wealth
and fashion. The ladies are decked out with all the Parisian finery
and jewels that money can buy; and although nature has given to many
of them good features and to most of them fine eyes, custom seems to
prescribe that nature shall not be left to herself. On fine afternoons,
there is a wonderful turnout of carriages drawn by handsome horses,
and still more of costly motor cars, in the principal avenues of the
Park; they press so thick that vehicles are often jammed together for
fifteen or twenty minutes, unable to move on. Nowhere in the world does
one get a stronger impression of exuberant wealth and extravagance. The
Park itself, called Palermo, lies on the edge of the city towards the
river, and is approached by a well-designed and well-planted avenue. It
suffers from the absolute flatness of the ground in which there is no
point high enough to give a good view over the estuary, and also from
the newness of the trees, for all this region was till lately a bare
pampa. But what with its great extent and the money and skill that are
being expended on it, this park will in thirty years be a glory to the
city. The Botanical Garden, though all too small, is extremely well
arranged and of the highest interest to a naturalist, who finds in it
an excellent collection of South American trees and shrubs.
As the Opera-house and the races and the Park shew one side of the
activities of this sanguine community, so the docks and port shew
another. Twenty years ago sea-going vessels had to lie two or three
miles off Buenos Aires, discharging their cargo by lighters and their
passengers partly by small launches and partly by high-wheeled carts
which carried people from the launches ashore through the shallow
water. Now a long, deep channel has been dug, and is kept open by
dredging, up which large steamers find their way to the very edge
of the city. Docks many miles in length have been constructed to
receive the shipping, and large stretches of land reclaimed, and huge
warehouses erected and railway lines laid down alongside the wharves.
Not Glasgow when she deepened her river to admit the largest ships,
nor Manchester when she made her ship canal, hardly even Chicago
when she planned a new park and lagoons in the lake that washes her
front, shewed greater enterprise and bolder conceptions than did the
men of Buenos Aires when on this exposed and shallow coast they made
alongside their city a great ocean harbour. They are a type of our
time, in their equal devotion to business and pleasure, the two and
only deities of this latest phase of humanity.
If the best parts of Buenos Aires are as tasteful as those of Paris,
there is plenty of ugliness in the worst suburbs. On its land side, the
city dies out into a waste of scattered shanties, or "shacks" (as they
are called in the United States), dirty and squalid, with corrugated
iron roofs, their wooden boards gaping like rents in tattered clothes.
These are inhabited by the newest and poorest of the immigrants from
southern Italy and southern Spain, a large and not very desirable
element among whom anarchism is rife. This district which, if it can
hardly be called city, can still less be called country, stretches far
out over the Pampa. Thus, although the central parts are built closely,
these suburbs are built so sparsely that the town as a whole covers an
immense space of ground. Further out and after passing for some miles
between market gardens and fields divided by wire fences, with never
a hedge, one reaches real country, an outer zone in which some of the
wealthy landowners have laid out their estates and erected pleasant
country houses. We were invited to one such, and admired the art with
which the ground had been planted, various kinds of trees having
been selected with so much taste that even on this unpromising level
picturesqueness and beauty had been attained. Everything that does not
need much moisture grows luxuriantly. We saw rosebushes forty feet
high, pouring down a cataract of blossoms. The hospitable owner had
spent, as rich _estancieros_ often do, large sums upon his live stock,
purchasing in Great Britain valuable pedigree bulls and cows, and by
crossing the best European breeds with the Argentine stock (originally
Spanish) had succeeded in getting together a herd comparable to the
best in England. To have first-rate animals is here a matter of
pride, even more than a matter of business. It is the only interest
that competes with horse-racing. Our friend had a number of Gauchos
as stockmen, and they shewed us feats of riding and lassoing which
recalled the old days of the open Pampas, before high stock-breeding
was dreamt of, when the Gaucho horsemen disputed the control of these
regions with the now vanished Indian.
Though Buenos Aires is often described as a cosmopolitan place, its
population has far fewer elements than would be found in any of the
great cities of the United States. There are English and German
colonies, both composed almost wholly of business and railway men, and
each keeping, for social purposes, pretty closely to itself. There is
a French colony, its upper section including men of intellectual mark,
while the humbler members serve pleasure rather than business. From
the United States not many persons have come to settle as merchants or
ranch owners, but the great meat companies are already at work. Of the
so-called "Latin" element in the inhabitants, half or a little more
is Argentine born, less than a quarter Spanish or Basque, more than
a quarter Italian, largely from Sicily and Calabria. Those Slavonic
parts of central and eastern Europe which have recently flooded the
United States with immigrants have sent very few to South America.
Thus the mass of the population in Buenos Aires is entirely Spanish
or Italian in speech, and the two languages are so similar that the
Italians easily learn Spanish while also modifying it by their own
words and idioms. A mixed, not to say corrupt, Spanish is the result.
That there should be an endless diversity of types of face is not
surprising, when one remembers how great are the diversities as well in
Spain as in Italy among the natives of the various provinces in both
those kingdoms.
The growth of a few great cities at a rate more rapid than that of the
countries to which they belong is one of the most remarkable facts
of recent years and fraught with many consequences. It is especially
visible in the newest countries. In New South Wales the population
of Sydney is nearly two-fifths that of the whole state, in Victoria
that of Melbourne more than two-fifths. In California two great
cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles, have one-third of the whole
population.[77] The same tendency is apparently in South America. Of
the whole population of Argentina, with its immense area of 1,135,000
square miles, one-fifth dwell in the city of Buenos Aires.[78] It is
probable that this ratio may be maintained so that when, thirty years
hence, Argentina counts twenty millions of inhabitants, Buenos Aires
will count four millions. There are other large cities, and one of
them, Cordova, has an ancient university and a society of cultivated
men. But business life and political life, as well as literary and
intellectual life, are so concentrated in Buenos Aires as to make it to
dwarf all the other cities and give to it an influence comparable to
that of Paris in France. The history of the republic was for many years
a history of the struggles between the capital--already pre-eminent in
revolutionary days--and the provinces. So the people of Buenos Aires
divide the Argentine nation into two classes, themselves, who are
called the Porteños (men of the Port), and all the rest, the dwellers
in the Campo or open country.[79] And though the wonderful development
of the railway system has accelerated the settlement of the interior
and brought the comforts of civilization to its towns, Buenos Aires
has continued to maintain its supremacy by constantly drawing people
from the interior. It is, moreover, the gateway through which all must
pass to and from Europe. Thus the Porteño is the type and flower of
Argentina,--the type of its character, the flower of its civilization.
When we try to understand and appraise the Argentine nation, which for
Argentina is the most interesting and indeed (apart from statistics of
production) the only subject of study, it is on him that the eye must
be fixed. Nevertheless he is far from being the only factor. The nation
is spread over a vast space. To conjecture its future we must think
of the physical and economic conditions under which it will develop.
These, therefore, I will try to sketch briefly, admitting that my own
personal knowledge is confined to Buenos Aires and its neighbourhood,
and to the region round Mendoza, mentioned in Chapter VII. I shall
speak first of the natural features of the country, and then of the
natives and of the colonists who came among them, before describing the
Argentina of our own time.
The northwestern part of the republic, lying east of northern Chile and
south of western Bolivia, is a tableland, sometimes rugged, sometimes
undulating, the higher parts of it much like the adjoining plateau of
Bolivia. But the rest of the country, nine-tenths of the whole, is an
immense plain more than two thousand miles long from Magellan's Straits
to the frontiers of eastern Bolivia and Paraguay. It is interrupted in
a few points by low ranges, but, speaking generally, is a prairie like
that which in North America lies between the hills of southern Oklahoma
and the Canadian border, though more level, for it wants the undulating
swells and ridges of Kansas and Iowa, and is less seamed by river beds.
The climate varies with the latitude. It is severe in the Patagonian
south, and almost tropical in the north. But in the region called the
Pampas, that is to say, a sort of square, six hundred miles wide from
the estuary of the Rio de la Plata to the outlying foothills of the
Andes and about as long from north to south, it resembles that of west
central Europe, for the heat is great only during the middle of summer
and the winter cold is moderate. Except in the far north, which has a
wet summer season with a heavy precipitation, the rainfall is scanty
and diminishes as one goes from east to west, so that much of the
western belt, lying under the Andes, is too dry to be cultivated except
by irrigation. Fortunately, the streams that descend from the snows
provide irrigation along their banks. Many of them lose themselves in
the arid ground on their course further eastward, but as this ground
has a slight uniform fall towards the east, they supply a certain
amount of subterranean moisture, so that in many districts where there
are no superficial streams, water can be had by digging.
All this level Pampa, except that subtropical northern section I have
referred to, is bare and open prairie, covered, as were the former
prairies of North America, with grass and flowers, the grass sometimes
six or seven feet high; but with no trees save here and there along the
beds of the few and feeble streams. The native fauna, especially in
the families to which the larger mammals belong, was poorer than that
of western North America and far scantier than that of the southern
parts of Africa in the same latitude. There were no buffaloes or elk,
and few horned creatures corresponding to the elands and hartebeests
and antelopes of South Africa. So remarkable a contrast is doubtless
explicable by the different geological histories of the two continents.
When the Spaniards arrived, this vast region was occupied only by a few
wandering Indian tribes, most of them low in the scale of civilization.
They did not cultivate the soil, they had no milk-giving animals, and
indeed hardly any animals to feed upon except the guanaco and the small
South American ostrich. As the chase furnished but little food to these
nomads, their numbers did not increase. Only in the hilly regions of
the northwest were there settled tribes which had learnt some of the
arts of life from their Peruvian neighbours. The rest of the country
was a vast open wilderness like the lands beyond the Missouri, but the
tribes were fewer and less formidable than the Sioux or Pawnees or
Comanches.
For three centuries after their arrival the Spaniards did little to
explore or settle the western or southern parts of the country. They
founded small posts from Buenos Aires northwards along the Paraná and
Paraguay rivers, and through them kept up communication with Potosi
and Lima across the vast Andean plateau. As the government forbade the
Argentines to trade with Europe direct, Spanish merchandise had to be
brought to them by a long and difficult land route _via_ Panama and
the ports of Peru, and thence over the Andes. The inconveniences of
this monstrous system, devised in the interests of a group of Spanish
traders, were mitigated by the smuggling into Buenos Aires, which was
carried on by means of English and Dutch ships. Life was not secure,
for the Indian tribes sometimes raided up to the gates of the little
towns, such as Cordova and Tucuman, but as the savages had no firearms
and no discipline, it was generally easy to repulse them. Meanwhile
some cattle and horses which had been turned loose in the Pampas after
the middle of the sixteenth century began to multiply, till by the
beginning of the eighteenth there were vast herds of both all over the
plains, wherever grass grew, as far south as Patagonia.
When the development of the country had received an impetus by
the creation in 1776 of a viceroyalty at Buenos Aires, and by the
permission given to the Atlantic ports to trade with Europe, the
cattle and horses became a source of wealth, men took to ranching, and
colonization spread out into the wilderness. Then, in 1810, came the
revolution which freed Argentina from Spain, and gave her people the
opportunity of making their own prosperity. Unfortunately a period of
civil wars followed, and it was not till the fall of the dictator Rosas
in 1852 that the era of real progress began.
All this time the native Indians had been disappearing, partly by war,
partly from the causes which usually break down aborigines in contact
with white men. A campaign organized against them in 1879 practically
blotted out the last of those who had roved over the central Pampas.
The more civilized Indians of the northwestern plateau are quiet and
industrious. A few nomads, now quite harmless, survive in Patagonia,
and some fiercer tribes maintain a virtual independence in the forest
and swamp country of the Gran Chaco in the far north. Otherwise the
aborigines have vanished, leaving no trace, and having poured only a
very slight infusion of native blood into the veins of the modern
Argentine. Meanwhile the strife with the Indians and the long civil
wars which followed independence, as well as the occupation first
of catching wild cattle and horses and then of herding tame ones,
had produced a type of frontiersman and cattleman not unlike that
of western North America between 1800 and 1880 and more distantly
resembling the Cossack of southern Russia a century and a half ago.
This was the Gaucho, a word said to be drawn from one of the native
languages, in which it means "stranger." He was above all things a
horseman, never dismounting from his animal except to sleep beside it.
His weapons against cattle and men were the lasso and the _boletas_,
balls of metal (or stone) fastened together by a thong, and so hurled
as to coil round the legs of the creature at which they were aimed.
Such missiles were used in war by some of the Andean tribes. His dress
was the poncho, a square piece of woollen cloth with a hole cut for the
head to go through, and a pair of drawers. He could live on next to
nothing and knew no fatigue. Round him clings all the romance of the
Pampas, for he was taken as the embodiment of the primitive virtues of
daring, endurance, and loyalty. Now he, too, is gone, as North American
frontiersmen like Daniel Boone went eighty or ninety years ago, and as
the cow-boy of Texas and Wyoming is now fast going.
Such was the country and such those who dwelt in it: boundless plains,
bare and featureless, but fertile wherever there was rain enough to
water them, and not too hot for the outdoor labour of a south European
race, a land fit for cattle and for crops, easy to traverse, easy to
till, because there were neither stones to be removed nor trees to be
felled. Yet in 1852 only an insignificant fraction of it was used for
tillage, and such wealth as there was consisted of the vast herds of
cattle. The population had scarcely reached a million and a half. What
is it now?
With the comparative peace that followed the fall of Rosas there came
the new factors which have enabled the country to advance so quickly:
the entrance of European capital, chiefly expended in providing means
of transportation, and the arrival of immigrants from Italy and Spain.
No country offers greater facilities for the construction of railways.
Quickly and cheaply built over a surface everywhere smooth and level,
they radiate out from the capital, and have now penetrated every part
of the country except the marshy wilderness of the Gran Chaco in the
north and the arid wilderness of remote Patagonia in the south. The
central part of the republic within three hundred miles of Buenos Aires
is as thickly scored with lines of steel as is Westphalia or Ohio.
Settlers, mostly following the railroads, have now put under crops
or laid out in well-appointed stock farms all this central region
and a good deal more of land to the north of it. The rest of the
plain is occupied by cattle ranches or sheep-farms, except where the
want of water makes stock raising impossible. Out of the 253,000,000
acres which are roughly estimated as being the area available for
agricultural or pastural purposes in Argentina--the total area of the
country being 728,000,000 acres--47,000,000 were under cultivation
in 1910, this, of course, including the slopes of the Andes in the
northwest round Tucuman and Jujuy, where sugar and other semi-tropical
products are grown.
An enormous area still remains available for tillage, though nothing
but experiment can determine to what extent lands hitherto deemed too
arid may be made productive by the new methods of dry farming, now
prosecuted so successfully in western North America, and beginning to
be tried in South Africa and Australia also. Of this central tract
already brought under cultivation, by far the largest part is fertile.
There are sandy bits here and there, but the bulk of it is a rich, deep
loam, giving large returns in its natural state. Thus the waving plains
of grass over which the wandering Indian roamed and the Gaucho careered
lassoing the wild cattle are now being rapidly turned into a settled
farming country.
The history of these regions and the process of their settlement
resembles in many points that of the western United States and
western Canada, but differs in one point of great significance. In
North America the settlement of the new lands has from first to
last been conducted by agricultural settlers drawn from the middle
or working-class of the older parts of the country or of Europe,
and the land has been allotted to them in small properties, seldom
exceeding one hundred and sixty acres. Thus over all the Mississippi
Valley states and over the Canadian northwest there has grown up a
population of small farmers, owning the land they till, and furnishing
a solid basis for the establishment of democratic institutions among
intelligent and educated men who have an interest in order and good
administration. In Argentina, however,--and the same is generally true
of Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Brazil,--the land, before or when it began
to be regularly settled, passed in large blocks into comparatively few
hands. There was no class like the men who settled New England in the
seventeenth century and whose descendants settled the Great West in
the nineteenth. The ideas of Spanish feudalism still lived among the
Argentine colonists of a century ago. Leading men or rich men took as
much land as they could get on the Pampas; and, seeing that there was
little competition, each could get pretty much all he wanted. Thus the
country became and is a country of great estates. They are measured
by the square league, which contains about six thousand acres. Though
a tendency to subdivision has set in and will doubtless continue,
_estancias_ of sixty thousand acres are not uncommon; and the average
holding is said to be even now about six square miles.
This feature has, of course, had important effects on the character of
the rural population. It consists, broadly speaking, of two classes,
the rich _estancieros_ or landholders, and the labourers. Though a
good many Englishmen and other foreigners have bought farms and mean
to stay on them, so that they or their children will doubtless end by
becoming Argentines, still most of the large landholders are Argentine
born. Many have become or are becoming opulent, not only by the sale
of their crops and their live stock, but simply by the rapid rise
in the value of land. They live in a liberal, easy, open-air way in
straggling mansions of the bungalow type, low and large, which they are
now, thanks to the railways, able to furnish with the modern appliances
of comfort. The labouring class, who gather like feudal dependents
round the _estancia_, are of two classes. Some are native, largely the
offspring of the old Gauchos, who have now settled down to work as
_peons_ (labourers), unlearning their wild ways, and beginning to send
their children to school. The rest are immigrants drawn from Italy and
Spain by the immense demand for labour. Most numerous are the natives
of northern Italy, hard-working men who do not fear the heat and can
live on very little. Many of them come out for the harvesting weeks
of December and January, and return home to reap their own harvest or
gather their own vines in the Italian summer and autumn, thus making
the best of both hemispheres, much as the sleepless herdsman in the
Odyssey could earn wages by working day and night. As the native peons
are the men qualified to handle live stock, so these Italians are the
most valuable for all kinds of agriculture. Some receive wages: some
who stay for a few years on the farm receive land to till and bring
into condition, and pay a part, perhaps one-quarter, of the crop by way
of rent. They seem to take to the country, and though many return to
Europe when they have accumulated what is to them a fortune, a large
and increasing number remain. Probably more and more of them will try
to acquire small holdings, and as the price of land rises, many great
landowners may, since the habit of extravagance is always growing,
be tempted to sell off bits of their estates. Thus a middle class of
peasant proprietors may grow up between the big _estanciero_ and the
lowly peon. But at the present moment small properties are rare. The
country is not, like western Canada, a place suitable for British or
Scandinavian immigrants of small means, not merely on account of the
climate, but because they could not easily get small farms and the
means of working them. At present it is only persons with some capital
who can be advised to come hither from England to farm.
Agricultural prosperity, more general here than almost anywhere else
in the world, is tempered by two risks, either of which may destroy
the profits of the year. One is drought. As the average rainfall is,
in most parts of the country, only just sufficient to give moisture
to the arable land, together with drink and grass to the animals, a
deficient rainfall means scanty crops and the loss of cattle. It is
only along the skirts of the Andes that much can be done by irrigation,
for the permanent rivers are few and the lagoons, which at one time
were frequent, have been drying up. Besides, they are often brackish.
The other danger is a plague of locusts. These horrible creatures come
in swarms so vast as to be practically irresistible. Expedients may
be used to destroy them while they are walking along the ground by
digging trenches in their path, tumbling them in and burning them, but
many survive these efforts, and when they get on the wing, nothing can
be done to check their devastating flight. Did the swarms come every
year, the land would not be worth tilling, but at present the yield of
good years more than covers the losses both of droughts and of locust
invasions. Men talk of erecting a gigantic fence of zinc to stop the
march of the creatures southward from the Gran Chaco, for here, as in
South Africa, they seem to come out of a wilderness. When the Gran
Chaco itself begins to be reclaimed, the plague may perhaps be stayed.
As aridity is the weak point of the Pampas in their agricultural
aspect, so monotony is the defect of their scenery. There is a certain
beauty in a vast plain, but this one is so absolutely dead a level
that you cannot see its vastness. There would be a charming variety
of colour in it, the vivid green of the alfalfa and the light blue
profusion of the flax blossoms contrasting with the yellowing wheat and
the more sober greyish tints of the maize and the bleached pasture,
but all these, as well as the shadows of the passing clouds, are not
visible when one is standing on the ground and can see no further than
a mile or two. The Pampa country has now been turned from a prairie
of grass and flowers into huge fields divided by wire fences and
intersected by straight roads, or rather cart tracks, marked by the
line of brown dust that a drove of cattle or a vehicle raises. The
landscape was in Gaucho days the same for hundreds of miles. It is so
still, but now it wants the wildness and the flowers, nor has it the
deep river channels and their overhanging bluffs which here and there
relieve the uniformity of the North American prairie states. However,
in many places orchards and clumps of other trees are being grown round
the mansion house. Such a clump, being the only sort of eminence that
breaks the skyline, is called a _Monte_. The swift-growing Australian
gum, which has now domesticated itself in most of the warmer parts of
the world, waves its pliant tops in the breeze, more picturesque in the
distance than it is close at hand. If man's hand takes something away
from the wild charm of nature, he also by degrees creates that other
charm which belongs to rural life, so this land will come in time to
be less dull and more homelike. Pleasure grounds round the _estancias_
will mitigate the roughness of a first settlement, and there will be
groves with dim recesses in their thickets to stir the imagination
of children. There is always in the Pampas an amplitude of air and a
solemn splendour of the sunset glow to carry the mind away beyond its
near surroundings.
Nevertheless one is glad not to have been born in the Pampas.
Perhaps those whose early years have been passed in flat countries do
not feel the need for hills in the landscape in the same way as do the
natives of Scotland or New England. Could any one of the latter class
dwell for twelve months in Argentina without longing to rush off for
refreshment to the mountains and lakes of the South Chilean Andes.
One word more on the economic aspects of Argentina before I come to the
people. The wealth of the land is in tillage and live stock. Its three
great agricultural products are wheat, maize, and linseed, in each of
which it is now in the front rank of exporting countries. Sugar and
cotton are grown in the north, and may increase largely there as that
region gets settled, and wine is made at Mendoza for home consumption.
Cereals will, however, remain the most important crops. Vast as has
been the increase of live stock, the limits of the ranching area have
not yet been reached.[80] The export of meat received a great stimulus
from the introduction of systems of cold storage and transport, and now
an enormous amount of European and North American as well as Argentine
capital is embarked in this trade. There is, so far as known, hardly
any coal in the country, and the sources of water-power are only along
the Southern Andes, so that manufacturing industries have not been
established on any large scale. The slopes of the Cordilleras furnish
mines of gold, silver, copper, and lead, but the production of these
minerals is small compared to that of Peru and Bolivia. The people have
not taken to the sea either as mercantile mariners or as fishermen,
and the demand for agricultural labour has been so large that there
was no occasion for any one to seek his living in those employments.
Thus we may say that among those great countries of the world which
Europeans have peopled, Argentina is that which is now, and is likely
to continue, the most purely agricultural in its industrial character.
The best evidence or illustration of the swift progress of the republic
and of the confidence which European investors feel in its resources is
to be found in the development of its railway system. The first railway
line was opened in 1857 and was twelve miles long. In 1911 there were
nearly 20,000 miles in operation, and the receipts in 1910 amounted
to £20,000,000. Most of these railways, many of which are of a gauge
broader than those of the United States or Great Britain, have been
built and are worked by British companies, a few by the government.[81]
In this immense fertile and temperate country with hardly six people
to a square mile, what limit can we set to the growth of wealth and
population? Already the nation is larger than the Dutch or Portuguese
or Swedish. Within thirty years it may equal Italy. Within fifty years
it may approach France or England, even if the present rate of its
increase be reduced. It may one day be the most numerous among all the
peoples that speak a tongue of Latin origin, as the United States is
already the most numerous of all that speak a Teutonic one. Many things
may happen to change its present character, yet the unformed character
of the youth before whom such a future seems to lie is well worth
studying.
First a few words about the race. No other Spanish-American state,
except Uruguay, has a people of a stock so predominantly European.
The aboriginal Indian element is too small to be worth regarding. It
is now practically confined to the Gran Chaco in the extreme north,
but elsewhere the influence of Indian blood is undiscernible among
the people to-day.[82] The aborigines of the central Pampas have
disappeared,--nearly all were killed off,--and those of Patagonia have
been dying out. We have, therefore, a nation practically of pure South
European blood, whose differences from the parent stock are due, not to
the infusion of native elements, but to local and historical causes.
Till thirty or forty years ago this population was almost entirely of
Spanish stock. Then the rapid development of the Pampas for tillage
began to create a demand for labour, which, while it increased
immigration from Spain, brought in a new and larger flow from Italy.
The Spaniards who came were largely from the northern provinces and
among them there were many Basques, a race as honest and energetic as
any in Europe. So far back as 1875 one used to see in the French Basque
country between Biarritz and the pass of Roncesvalles plenty of neat
and comfortable houses erected by men who had bought back their savings
from the River Plate. The Italians have flocked in from all parts of
their peninsula, but the natives of the north take to the land, and
furnish a very large part of the agricultural labour, while the men
from the southern provinces, usually called Napolitanos, stay in the
towns and work as railway and wharf porters, or as boatmen, and at
various odd jobs. In 1909, out of 1,750,000 persons of foreign birth
in the republic,[83] there were twice as many Italians as Spaniards,
besides one hundred thousand from France, the latter including many
French Basques, who are no more French than Spanish. Between 1904
and 1909 the influx of immigrants had risen from 125,000 annually to
255,000. The Spaniards, of course, blend naturally and quickly with the
natives, who speak the same tongue. The Italians have not yet blent,
for there has hardly yet been time for them to do so, but there is
so much similarity, not indeed in character but in language and ways
of life, that they will evidently become absorbed into the general
population. Children born in the country grow up to be Argentines in
sentiment, and are, perhaps, even more vehemently patriotic than the
youth of native stock.
Here, as in the United States, the birth-rate is higher among
immigrants than among natives. In the case of Italians it is twice, in
that of Spaniards one and a half times, as great.
What effect upon the type and tendencies of the future nation this
Italian infusion will have it is hard to predict, because no one knows
how far national character is affected by blood admixture. We have
no data for estimating the comparative importance of heredity and of
environment upon a population which is the product of two elements,
the foreign one injected into a larger native element whose prepotent
influences modify the offspring of new-comers.[84]
In considering the probable result of the commingling, and as a fact
explaining the readiness with which Italian immigrants allow themselves
to be Argentinized, one must remember that these come from the humblest
and least educated strata of Italian society. They are, like all
Italians, naturally intelligent, but they have not reached that grade
of knowledge which attaches men to the literature and the historical
traditions of their own country. Thus, the scantiness of their
education prevents them from making either to the intellectual life or
to the art of their adopted country those contributions which one might
expect from a people which has always held a place in the front rank
of European letters, art, and science. It may be expected, however,
that in the course of a generation or two inborn Italian capacity will
assert itself in the descendants of the immigrants.
The other foreigners, French, English (business men and landowning
farmers), and German (chiefly business men in the cities) are hardly
numerous enough to affect the Argentine type, and the two latter have
hitherto remained as distinct elements, being mostly Protestants and
marrying persons of their own race. They occupy themselves entirely
with business and have not entered Argentine public life; yet as many
of them mean to remain in the country, and their children born in it
become thereby Argentine citizens, it is likely that they, also, will
presently be absorbed, and their Argentine descendants may figure in
politics here, as families of Irish and British origin do in Chile.
The social structure of the nation is the result of the economic
conditions already described. In the rural districts there are two
classes only,--landowners, often with vast domains, and labourers,
the native labourers settled, the Italians to some extent migratory.
In the cities there exists, between the wealthy and the workingmen, a
considerable body of professional men, shopkeepers, and clerks, who are
rather less of a defined middle class than they would be in European
countries. Society is something like that of North American cities,
for the lines between classes are not sharply drawn, and the spirit of
social equality has gone further than in France, and, of course, far
further than in Germany or Spain. One cannot speak of an aristocracy,
even in the qualified sense in which the word could be used in Peru or
Chile, for though a few old colonial families have the Spanish pride of
lineage, it is, as a rule, wealth and wealth only that gives station
and social eminence. Manners, which everywhere in South America have
lost something of the courtliness of Castile, are here rather more
"modern" than in Mexico or Lima, because the growth of wealth has
brought up new men and has made money the criterion of eminence, or at
least of prominence. Here, as in England and the United States, one
sees that though the constitution is democratic, society has some of
the characteristics of a plutocracy.
The little that I have to say about the political life of the country
must be reserved for another and more general chapter, so I will
here note only two facts peculiar to Argentina. It is, of all the
Spanish-American republics, that in which the church has least to do
with politics. Though Roman Catholicism is declared by the constitution
to be supported by the state, and the president and vice-president
must profess it, that freedom of religious worship which is guaranteed
by law is fully carried out in practice, and all denominations may,
without let or hindrance, erect churches and preach and teach. The
legislature has shewn itself so broad-minded as to grant subventions
to a system of Protestant schools founded originally as a missionary
enterprise by a Protestant Episcopal clergyman, and many of the Roman
Catholic families of Buenos Aires send their children to schools
provided by the American Methodist Episcopal Church. In liberality of
spirit, Argentina is rather more advanced than either Peru or Chile,
not to speak of bigoted Ecuador. Still more noteworthy is it that
there seems to be little or no effort on the part of the church to
influence public affairs. No political party is allied with the clergy,
no clerical influence is felt in elections. The happy detachment of
the two spheres which travellers observe and admire in North America
deserves even more credit when found in a country where intolerance
long reigned supreme.
The other phenomenon which no one will connect with religious freedom,
inasmuch as it has appeared in nearly every country of Europe and of
North America, whatever be the religious conditions that prevail, is
the emergence here and nowhere else in South America of a vehement
anarchist propaganda. Among the immigrants from Italy and from eastern
Spain there have been enough persons engaged in this movement to cause
great alarm to the government. Not long ago the chief of the police
was killed by an explosive thrown by a Russian anarchist, and in the
summer of 1910 a bomb was exploded in the great Opera-house during a
performance, wounding a number of persons. These occurrences led to
the proclamation of a state of siege which was maintained for many
weeks. The police is said to be efficient,[85] and the Executive did
not hesitate to use powers which it would be less easy to obtain or
use in the United States or in England. Our age has seen too many
strange incidents to be surprised that these acts of violence should
be perpetrated in a country where, though no doubt there is an
ostentatious display of wealth, work is more abundant and wages are
higher than in any other part of the world. Such acts are aimed not at
oppression, nor at bad industrial conditions, but at government itself.
Here, as generally in South America, though less in Chile than
elsewhere, politics is mainly in the hands of the lawyers. A great
deal of the best intellect of the country, probably more in proportion
than in any European country or in the United States, goes into this
profession; and the contributions to the world's store of thought and
learning made by Argentine writers have been perhaps more considerable
in this branch of enquiry than in any other. In the sphere of
historical or philosophical or imaginative literature, not much has
yet been done, nor is the class prepared to read such books a large
one. Fiction is supplied by France. The press is a factor in public
affairs whose power is comparable to that exercised by the leading
newspapers in Australia. It is conducted on large and bold lines,
especially conspicuous in two journals of the capital[86] which have
now a long record of vigour and success behind them. The concentration
of political and commercial activities in Buenos Aires gives to them
the same advantage that belongs to the leading organs of Sydney and
Melbourne.
The world is to-day ruled by physical science and by business, which,
in the vast proportions industry and commerce have now attained, is
itself the child of physical science. Argentina is thoroughly modern
in the predominance of business over all other interests. Only one
other comes near it. The Bostonian man of letters who complained that
London was no place to live in because people talked of nothing but
sport and politics, would have been even less happy in Buenos Aires,
because there, when men do not talk of sport, they talk of business.
Politics is left to the politicians; it is the _estancia_, its cattle
and its crops, and the race-course, with its betting, that are always
in the mind and on the tongue, and are moulding the character, of the
wealthier class. Business is no doubt still so largely in the hands of
foreigners that one cannot say that the average Argentine has developed
a talent for it comparable to that of those whom he calls the North
Americans, seeing that much of his wealth has come to him by the rise
in the values of his land and the immense demand for its products. He
is seldom a hard worker, for it has been his ill fortune to be able
to get by sitting still what others have had to work for, but he does
not yield to New York in what is called a "go-ahead spirit." He is
completely up to date. He has both that jubilant patriotism and that
exuberant confidence in his country which marked the North American of
1830-1860. His pride in his city has had the excellent result of making
him eager to put it, and keep it, in the forefront of progress, with
buildings as fine, parks as large, a water supply as ample, provisions
for public health as perfect, as money can buy or science can devise.
The wealth and the expansion of Buenos Aires inspire him, as the
wealth and expansion of Chicago have inspired her citizens, and give
him, if not all of their forceful energy, yet a great deal of their
civic idealism.
It is the only kind of idealism that one finds in the city or the
country. Every visitor is struck by the dominance of material interests
and a material view of things. Compared with the raking in of money and
the spending it in betting or in ostentatious luxury, a passion for
the development of the country's resources and the adornment of its
capital stand out as aims that widen the vision and elevate the soul. A
recent acute and friendly observer has said that patriotism among the
Argentines amounts to a mania. Such excess of sentiment is not only
natural in a young and growing nation, and innocent too (so long as
it is not aggressive), but is helpful in giving men something beyond
their own material enjoyments and vanities to think of and to work for.
It makes them wish to stand well in the world's eyes, and do in the
best way what they see others doing. If there is an excess, time will
correct it.
Loitering in the great Avenida de Mayo and watching the hurrying
crowd and the whirl of motor cars, and the gay shop-windows, and
the open-air cafés on the sidewalks, and the Parisian glitter of
the women's dresses, one feels much nearer to Europe than anywhere
else in South America. Bolivia suggests the seventeenth century and
Peru the eighteenth, and even in energetic Chile there is an air of
the elder time, and a soothing sense of detachment. But here all is
twentieth century, with suggestions of the twenty-first. Yet, modern
as they are, and reminding one sometimes of the gaiety of Paris and
sometimes of the stir and hurry of Kansas City, the Argentines are
essentially unlike either Europeans or North Americans. To say in what
the difference consists is all the harder because one doubts whether
there yet exists a definite Argentine type. They have ceased to be
Spaniards without becoming something new of their own. They seem to be
a nation in the making, not yet made. Elements more than half of which
are Spanish and Basque, and one-third of which are Italian, are all
being shaken up together and beginning to mix and fuse under conditions
not before seen in South American life. That which will emerge, if
more Spanish than Italian in blood, will be entirely South American in
sentiment and largely French in its ways of thinking, for from France
come the intellectual influences that chiefly play upon it. It will
spring from new conditions and new forces, acting on people who have
left all their traditions and many of their habits behind them, and
have retained but little of that religion which was the strongest of
all powers in their former home. Men now living may see this nation,
what with its growing numbers and its wealth, take rank beside France,
Italy, and Spain. It may be, in the New World, the head and champion
of what are called the Latin races. Will the artistic and literary
genius of Italy, France, and Spain flower again in their transplanted
descendants, now that they seem to have at last emerged from those long
civil wars and revolutions which followed their separation from Spain?
The very magnitude of the interests which any fresh civil wars would
endanger furnishes a security against their recurrence, and the temper
of the people seems entirely disposed to internal peace. No race or
colour questions have arisen, and religious questions have ceased to
vex them. They have an agricultural area still undeveloped which for
fifty years to come will be large enough both to attract immigrants
and to provide for the needs of their own citizens. Seldom has Nature
lavished gifts upon a people with a more bountiful hand.