Argentina and Uruguay

CHAPTER II
THE WAR
ITS PRESENT AND PROBABLE FUTURE EFFECTS ON ARGENTINA AND URUGUAY

As has been indicated elsewhere in these pages, the shock of the commencement of the Great War found the River Plate Republics already in a condition of considerable local depression. This was owing to relatively poor harvests, due to a long continuance of exceptional and ill-timed rains; a consequent collapse of land speculation and the usually sinister effects of slump after a long period of boom; and the condition of money markets, for some time past disturbed by the fear of the results of political complications in the Balkans.

The Governments of Argentina and Uruguay must be most warmly congratulated on the vigour and promptitude with which they faced the fact that, with the declaration of war in Europe, they were suddenly left to their own resources to an extent they had never experienced during the few decades which really form the whole period of their true economic history.

Lucky it was for Argentina that such a veteran statesman as Dr. Victorino de la Plaza occupied the Presidential chair, and that he had the aid of a man of such high intelligence and reputation as Dr. Carbó as Minister of Finance; fortunate also for Uruguay in having Dr. Viera (since elected President) at the head of her Ministry of Finance.

Honour is also due to the Officials of the State Banks of both nations and to the private Banks and financiers who lent such an untiring and efficacious aid to both Governments in the hour of pardonable alarm; alarm which was prevented from developing into panic by the prompt and statesmanlike measures adopted.

Really, as Mr. C. A. Tornquist justly observes in an article cited in these pages, it cannot be said that a “crisis” exists in a country while its vital forces are in full development.

Still, in Argentina and Uruguay these forces had not for some time been in full operation, from causes stated above; and, therefore, panic would not have been a surprising result from alarm falling on depression, before cool reason had time to assert its reassuring influence.

It soon did so, however, thanks to the virile and sound handling of the situation by the heads of Government and Finance.

Congresses assembled and their usually heterogeneous political elements unanimously and swiftly agreed to pass the several measures of economic defence placed before them.

During seven days’ Bank Holiday the finance of both Republics was set in good order; not only to avoid ill consequences from the initial and any likely future shocks, but to enable the countries to profit—as there can now be little doubt they are doing and will do—from the political and economic disturbance of Europe.

As Señor Carlos F. Soares, writing in La Nacion (Buenos Aires) under date January 1st, 1915, said:—

Only one Buenos Aires Bank (of comparatively small importance) failed to reopen its doors after the seven days’ holiday; a failure which there is some reason to believe was by no means entirely due to the War.

Not one Bank and very few Commercial Houses availed themselves of the Moratorium; a fact which is highly creditable to the Local Banking and Commercial community.

The arrangements for the deposits of gold at the Legations constitute a feature novel to the system of International Exchange.

After all this accomplished in so short a space of time, who will continue to throw the reproach of “Mañana” at either Argentines or Uruguayans? A reproach long since unjustified by the attitude of the inhabitants of either of the River Plate Republics towards any matter the advantages of which they grasp.

No European Statesmen and Bankers could have more promptly realized and carried out the necessary measures for the economic protection of their country.

The present of Argentina and Uruguay was thus assured. What of their future?

Prophecy, which is generally counted as hazardous, is especially so when it is about to be printed, and may still be read by the light of the experience of several years hence. Still, some Commercial and Financial angels have not feared to tread the ground of prophecy as to the immediate and post-bellum future of Argentina and Uruguay; and not only has competent authority not feared to forecast results in this regard, but there is a remarkable unanimity of influential opinion as to the probably favourable effects of European affairs on the economy of the River Plate Republic. Always supposing, as there seems every reason to suppose, that these Republics continue to have the commercial and common sense to manage their internal affairs in such manner as to be able to derive the greatest possible pecuniary benefits from the troubles of European nations.

One, perhaps the chief, in his courage of declaration of these prophetic authorities is Mr. C. A. Tornquist; a man having very large financial and commercial interests on the River Plate and enjoying a very high local reputation for business acumen and honour. His whole life has been spent in the higher financial circles of Argentina.

Therefore the author has thought well to cite here some portions of an article published by him in the Argentine Press, a translation of which appeared in The Review of the River Plate, under date December 25th, 1914.

In this article Mr. Tornquist says:—

Remains only to be added that Mr. Tornquist appears to have omitted consideration of the possibility of money being withdrawn from South America by European investors, not on account of any lack of confidence, but simply because such investors may under existing conditions have actual need of all the pecuniary resources they are able to realize.

For the getting in of the 1914-15 harvests there has been sufficient labour available; because of the stoppage of much municipal and building work, on account of retrenchment rendered necessary by the situation. But for the future, if, indeed, they are to occupy the prominent place in the world’s economy for which Nature appears to have destined them, the River Plate Republics will have to increase their agricultural populations greatly and speedily.

The need of this is now fully realized in both countries, but, strange to say, it is in Uruguay where there are no fiscal lands that proposals for probably useful legislation to this end have attained the greater maturity. It is there proposed, in effect, that the Government should purchase, at least portions of, the present holdings of the large landowners and colonize the land so purchased on systems similar to that obtaining in, for instance, Canada.

Argentina still has large tracts of fiscal land, but no doubt her large landowners will also aid towards the colonization by granting to colonists greater fixity of tenure and greater facilities for mixed farming than the latter have been hitherto able to obtain.

With regard to Belgian emigration to the River Plate, the fact which cannot be lost sight of is that the Belgian, especially the Fleming, is a person deeply attached to his own land and his own ways of living. It seems certain that if Belgians of the agricultural class are to be colonized in South America, such colonization will have to be effected by means of settlements like those of the Welsh colony in Chubut and the Swiss colony in Colonia.

A Flemish family would view with vehement disgust the ramshackle home of an Argentine or Uruguayan CHACRERO (small farmer); a disgust which, communicated to their friends in Europe, would effectually stop further Belgian immigration.

The Belgian is a good worker, but he is much more “insular” than the British in his scorn of ways of living which differ from his own. He is not adaptable enough, in any way, to be put to live or work among the composite Spanish-Italian-American rural classes of the River Plate.

Probably both Argentine and Uruguayan will continue to work out his own salvation in this vital matter of attracting agricultural colonists to his land. Already the spirit of democratic unrest menaces privilege in Argentina, privilege which has already been destroyed in Uruguay. And the greatest political danger which now seems to threaten Argentina and has for some time past been the bane of Uruguay is doctrinairism; a tendency to pursue to most unpractically illogical consequences theories which seem to their initiators and supporters to be destined to cure all the social and economic ills to which man is prone.

State socialism from high places in Uruguay and socialism of all kinds and varieties from lower social spheres in Argentina are each set on the adoption of its own empiric policy.

Like all young things, these Republics must pick themselves up again when they fall (and, in truth, they display great capability for doing so), but it would be well if, just at the present moment, they were to adopt and fully carry out some provedly sound colonizing policy. Afterwards they might experiment with single-tax, rural Banks, state ownership of land and all upon and within it, as much as they might find themselves able to afford to do.

Meanwhile they must work patiently, in unadventurous fashion, towards the most soundly rapid possible development of their rich natural resources.

During 1915, all extension of activity was at a standstill in both Republics. Little or no land changed hands, unless under practically forced sale; city improvements and private building projects were stayed, and no new railway extensions were put under construction.[8]

A few good harvests[9] will put these things as they were; but the lesson of the War will have been lost for Argentina and Uruguay if they do not see to the matter of the extension of their agricultural industries.

It seems, however, that they now are solidly determined to do so; and that, far from the lesson of recent events being lost for them, the finding of themselves cast on their own resources has led to a most beneficial and self-sacrificing examination of what those resources are in contrast with what they so easily might be.

The real vitality of these countries can be measured by the fact that the prices of their National Securities, which fell with the world-wide shock of July-August, 1914, were by the following September already on the high road to the practically complete recovery they have now attained.

CHAPTER III
HISTORY AND POLITICS

The political history of the River Plate Republics begins with the wars which made possible the great Declaration of Independence from the dominion of Spain on the 25th of May, 1810. Their most romantic history is that of those wars and that of the old Colonial days immediately preceding them. As, however, the only slight pretension of the present book is to be informative on matters of fact, romance must wait on, perchance, the author’s more leisured moments and some outline be presented now of the events which had most influence in making Argentina and Uruguay what they are to-day.

Having overthrown the rule of Spain the former River Plate colonies became involved in a long internecine struggle for supremacy of power. For fifty years the United States of the River Plate were most disunited by local jealousies and the rural districts were only usually unanimous in their refusal to submit to the Government at Buenos Aires, composed of men who, as the rural populations said with a great amount of truth, were endeavouring to rule even more despotically than did the Viceroys and by purely Viceregal methods. Were that submitted to, the revolution would have been in vain as far as concerned the substitution of democratic principles for those of tyranny. This was no doubt true, for the politicians of Buenos Aires neither knew, nor had had any opportunity of knowing, methods of Government other than those under which they themselves had been brought up. Had they known it, though it is only just to them to say that they did not in the least realize the fact, rule under them in the way they proposed to rule, would have been merely an exchange of King Stork for King Log. The country was, however, quick to grasp the menace, and it is only very regrettable that rivalry between its several contemporary would-be saviours produced so long a continuance of political chaos, during which newly acquired Liberty and Independence had no chance to develop the vast natural resources which had lain idle in consequence of the Spanish policy of squeezing the life out of the goose which would otherwise have laid so many golden eggs for Spain. In consequence of civil war it was, as has been indicated, not much before 1860 that it began to lay any appreciable number of such eggs for itself or anyone else. It only began to do so under two tyrants: Rozas in the South and Artígas in the North. Both were strong men and patriots; and both held power, in spite of opposition both open and treacherous, for, as later history has shown, the good of the respective territories they had brought under their sway. Harsh as were their methods, these were suited to lawless times. Of each of them it has been said that he permitted no thief but himself to live.

As a fact neither were thieves nor sought nor attained overmuch wealth for themselves. Both, however, forestalled otherwise inevitable assassination by giving their enemies no shrift at all; once these had been ascertained. And both succeeded in establishing police systems throughout their territories which would rival the European secret services of to-day.

Nothing went on unknown to them; from short-lived conspiracies to petty thefts. And the punishment for each offence inflicted by them was swift and closely fitted to the crime.

No one has yet attempted a complete whitewashing of Rozas; though, in every political crisis in which the Government has shown any apparent weakness, old men have sighed for his reincarnation. Artígas, on the other hand, whose memory not so long ago rivalled those of the most traditionally cruel old-world potentates, is now become the Saviour and National hero of Uruguay. The apostle of the democratic principle.

Truth about his personality probably lies somewhere between these two views, but there is no doubt but that he and Rozas were men needed for and suited to their times. Fearless and far-sighted, they made order out of chaos, and individually cruel as may have been many of their acts, it was their iron rule which laid the foundations of the admirable constitutions of what are now the separate Republics of Argentina and Uruguay. Rozas really founded the Argentine Republic as much as Artígas did the “Banda Oriental,” part of which is now Uruguay. But the period of strife which succeeded the Declaration of the Independence of the whole of the River Plate Territories had lasted just over half a century when General Mitre was chosen as the first President of a United Federal Argentina.

He was succeeded by Sarmiento, who did much to develop agriculture and was the great pioneer of education. Sarmiento had been a political exile in Europe, where he learned much; and, being a man of exceptional intellect, stored up his acquired knowledge and enlightenment for his country’s subsequent great good.

Since the first Presidency of General Mitre there has only been one political revolution which affected the whole of Argentina, the one which in 1890 ousted President Juarez Celman and was immediately succeeded by the financial crisis with which the name of Baring is chiefly associated in the European mind.

Both that revolution and the crisis were the natural outcome of a disease which would have completely ruined any country less rich in natural resources than Argentina. That disease was complete political and financial corruption; which then came to a head and necessitated drastic operation. Since then the Argentine nation has advanced in political and financial health with extraordinary and unparalleled rapidity.

The history of Uruguay has run on different lines since she emerged from the older Banda Oriental. She has been the almost constant victim, until very recent years, of the fervent patriotism of her rural population; in rebellion, often with much apparent justice, against what it has from time to time considered to be the prejudicial doctrinarianism of the town-bred men who have directed her Government in Montevideo. In any case the rural population has always been in a more or less declared state of rebellion against the Government. For many years the “White” party was in power and the “Red” in revolution. Now for a long period the “Reds” have kept place and nominal power, from which until comparatively very recently the “Whites” have never ceased to endeavour to oust them.

Let it not, however, be thought that either the retention of power by one party or its attempted overthrow by the other has in Uruguay been due to personal ambition or corrupt greed on either side; as has been, unfortunately but very frequently, the case in other South American Republics. To think this would be to do a cruel injustice to the national character, the leading characteristics of which are uprightness and honesty in thought or deed. No Uruguayan would ever have rebelled had he not thought that the policy of the existing Government was gravely prejudicial to the vital interests of his country, nor would an Uruguayan statesman have ever clung to power unless he had been conscientiously convinced that the policy of his party was the only true way to that country’s best development and prosperity.

This may seem to many readers as yet but little acquainted with Uruguayan political and commercial History as the mere expression of an enthusiasm for the Uruguayan character on the part of the present writer. But a closer examination of that History than is within the scope of the present work will show the views just above expressed to be nothing more than a statement of cold fact. In part proof of which stands the total absence from Uruguayan Financial History of any repudiation or avoidance of the National indebtedness. Long periods of Agricultural paralysis, often almost total (in a land which depends exclusively on agricultural products), due to civil strife and all the heavy outlay consequent on such wars, have never led Uruguay to depart from the strictly gold basis of her monetary system. Her paper dollar has always retained its full face value as a token and remains the best dollar on the exchange markets of the world. And the world-wide credit of private Uruguayan firms stands high above that of similar firms in other, even the most prosperous South American Republics. This is due, and due only, to the very high standard of political and commercial morality obtaining, and which has always obtained, in Uruguay.

Now, there is good ground for the hope that the country is persuaded that the best way to attain the greatest possible general prosperity is to beat the sword, once and for ever, into a ploughshare. At the same time it cannot be hidden that “State Socialism gone mad” (to quote an Uruguayan description of the policy introduced and pursued by Señor Batlle y Ordoñez[10]) strained the patience of the rural population and that of a goodly proportion of Montevideans as well, to a degree which was perilously near to breaking point. He wished, not only to improve all conditions of his country, but to make Uruguay an object-lesson in State Socialism to the world. His political enemies, or rather opponents, say that, while he has read the works of Henry George, in some confused translation or other, neither his education nor his acquaintance with such subjects fits him to judge of even the works of a now somewhat discredited political economist; also that he, the ex-President, is a potentially dangerous lunatic. But note that no one, even those who feared most from his persistent political and financial adventures, have ever even so much as hinted that his policy was dictated by other than quite honestly intentioned conviction. Uruguayans are seldom corrupt and seldom suspect venality in their fellow-countrymen.

Modern Argentina history commences with the renaissance of the country immediately after the upheaval of 1891, and that of Uruguay a much less number of years ago. Till these periods, political unrest was a constant factor in both countries. Now, a National revolution has become a thing unthinkable in Argentina; while it grows every day less likely for responsible or influential men in Uruguay to instigate or encourage aught that might impede her triumphal march to rivalry with the prosperity of the great sister Republic on the Southern bank of the River Plate.

The recent death of Dr. Saenz Peña, an Argentine President whose high personal character and statesmanlike rule fully entitled him to the respect he received from all parties and classes throughout the Republic, is a serious loss to his country. Fortunately, however, the Presidential office is now held by Dr. Victorino de la Plaza, formerly Vice-President, a man of acknowledged soundness of judgment and tact and of very many years’ experience in Ministerial, Diplomatic and Parliamentary life.

As for Uruguay, her chief reliance must be on the deep patriotism of her leading men and on their good sense to keep a peace which is the only true road to the general prosperity of a country the rich natural endowments of which cannot develop if men and horses are taken from the plough, as they constantly were in the past by one party or the other, to partake in the mutual destruction of civil war.

As is insisted on very often in these pages, the chief need of these new countries is population; an end most surely defeated by conditions which not only repelled all immigration but killed off a large proportion of the men already there. There is good reason to believe that all this and more is now fully appreciated by every responsible man in Uruguay; and, once convinced of the right course to be followed for the country’s good, there is not a Uruguayan who will not follow it with all the patriotic doggedness which formerly caused the lamentable continuance of civil war.

Both Argentine and Uruguayan financial policies and methods are now sound. Argentina is prosperous with great future increase of prosperity before her, and Uruguay is now well on the high road to similar prosperity and as brilliant a future. Both are at peace with one another and their neighbouring Republics; all of whom are much too busy with their own interests and too democratic in spirit to dream of aggressive war. Added to which only Uruguay and Paraguay are small enough to need ever to covet further territory.

Brazil does not: Argentina has more than once already in the past refused to take Uruguay into her Federation: Paraguay, except as a constant nuisance to herself and everyone near her, is, and will be for many years to come, a negligible quantity in South American politics. The Andine frontier now fixed between Chile and Argentine is never again likely to be disturbed by either. Uruguay may possibly cast longing eyes one day at the rich grazing lands of Southern Brazil; but she is more than unlikely ever to attempt to acquire these by force. Their annexation by her could only occur on the initiative of the inhabitants of those regions; who, unless Brazil is able in the future to keep her financial and fiscal house in better order than at present, might very conceivably prefer to be under the Government of Montevideo rather than that of Rio de Janeiro. Even then, the question of different languages would present a difficulty to the assimilation of the State of Rio Grande del Sul by its Southern neighbour.

One great step in the democratic progress of the Argentine Republic was made three years ago on the initiative of Dr. Roque Saenz Peña. This was the passing of a law which introduced the ballot and made the exercise of the franchise obligatory on a universal male suffrage of native-born Argentines and foreigners of two years’ residence.

It was a great reform made necessary by many considerations. The chief of which were the public indifference to all matters political which did not immediately concern Industry or Commerce and the profound discredit into which elections, parliamentary and municipal, had fallen as a consequence of that indifference; the whole effect of which was to leave the internal government of the country entirely in the hands of a mostly mercenary caste of professional politicians. This caste was habitually guilty of electoral corruption and malpractices which, in the absence of any interested public opinion, continued to work in a vicious circle by causing complete abstention from any exercise of the vote on the part of all citizens of the Republic except those forming the small gangs which were under the orders of the “Caudillo” or political manager of each district. These gangs went to the poll, at so much per head in cash and many illicit privileges, in order that there should be any voting at all to declare the due re-election of the men who wielded the political power in the National or Provincial Legislatures or in the Councils of the various Municipalities.

The substitution, under the new Law, of genuine for fictitious elections has also operated as another, and, probably, final blow struck at the Provincial Oligarchies, reference to which has been made in another chapter.

No one outside South America would really credit the depths of corrupt absurdity in which elections in Argentina were permitted to remain so late in these days of her general enlightenment and prosperity. That reform in this highly important respect was so long a-coming was due to individual preoccupation with their own affairs of the people of a country the material development of which was being accomplished with bewildering rapidity.

Men had no time to occupy themselves with such a tough, and rather dangerous, job as the dethronement of the professional politician; who, in the higher spheres of Provincial Government, usually belonged to one of the widely influential groups of the historically dominant native families. Public morality had sunk to a strangely low level in comparison with the ever-increasing commercial rectitude of the country, when the most startling tale of electoral fraud or administrative corruption would be received with only a shrug of the shoulders and an indulgent smile, as of wonder why the narrator was making so much ado about such a very ordinary occurrence.

The management of elections in the Federal Capital and in the Provinces differed only in method; the results were uniform triumphs for the party in power. In the Capital the authorities went to the trouble of collecting the certificates of citizenship (the deposit of which at the polling booths was the form of voting under the old system) of dead and absent men and sometimes of hiring others, and with filling in blank forms of these with fictitious names, in sufficient quantities to swamp any attempted voting by an opposition. In the Provinces, the elections were always stage-managed by the district commissary of Police. He led up the necessary gang of peon voters, to whom he served out a dinner of carne con cuero, wine and a $5 bill each, to celebrate the occasion and to indemnify them for any trouble they might have been put to by their attendance. Furthermore, the faithful electors knew that in the case of their getting into any scrape in the future which might otherwise cause trouble between themselves and the police, they would stand every possible chance of dismissal with a friendly caution; while were the case one of assaulting an enemy that enemy would stand a better chance of imprisonment than they. These are not traveller’s tales, but facts well known to every resident in Argentina and, I suspect, similar facts are within the experience of everyone living in one or other of most of the Latin American Republics. So that the quantity of ink spilt in the European papers over the accusations brought against ex-President Huerta, to the effect that he had improperly influenced the late Mexican Presidential Election, reads comically to most South Americans.

Now, in Argentina, all qualified persons must vote, or be mulcted in a penalty for not so doing. And it must be your own fault if anyone else knows which way you have voted. Even the innate native conviction that elections are rites instituted for the exclusive benefit of the already elect must have suffered severe shock from Dr. Saenz Peña’s Law. It will now be difficult to obtain a price for a mere promise the fulfilment or otherwise of which cannot be ascertained by the purchaser.

The passing of the new Law really seems a miracle when its interference with long-established custom is considered. It has perhaps crowned the patrician caste with the glory of heroically complete self-sacrifice. Certainly it heralds the twilight of the gods who have guided the country’s destinies since their ancestors led its rough armies to victory under the autumnal sun of May, 1810 (the sun which is blazoned in gold on the blue and white of the National banner), who fought for or opposed Rozas and Artígas and upheld the National prestige in the wearisome conflict with Paraguay.

In the old days of musket or rifle and bandolier, the Argentine patricians freely gave their lives and fortunes for the PATRIA. Now in frock-coats and silk hats, they have given up for her the right to all power not derived from individual merit or capacity. In doing so they have made an offering to democratic Liberty greater by far than any attained during the sixty years of Rebellion and Civil War which began with the dawn of the nineteenth century.

The immediate results of this unchaining of the power of a proletariat which has not yet attained a very high educational or intellectual level will nevertheless be watched with interest not unmingled with anxiety by all concerned with political economy in the abstract and the progress and peaceful welfare of Argentina in particular.

In this connection it is perhaps remarkable that whereas the choice of each New President has for many years been a foregone conclusion during at least the last year or so of his predecessor’s term of office, no such lengthy period of predestination was anywhere observable in the case of the successor to Dr. Victorino de la Plaza, who vacates the Presidential chair this year.

CHAPTER IV
RACIAL ELEMENTS AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS

What will be the result some generations hence of the enormous influx of immigration from all parts of Europe to Argentina and in, as yet, a much less degree to Uruguay? What manner of man will the Argentine of the future be when he has completed his development as a national type? This is a question often asked, but as to which only the most shadowy answer can yet be given. The elements which are going to his formation are so many and the qualities of those elements so difficult to reckon in regard to their respectively possible likelihood of survival in the settled type. The most that can be done here is to enumerate the chief of such elements in their approximate quantitative values.

The true Argentine of the past is the descendant of the Spanish conquerors with usually some admixture of native Indian blood derived from a remote ancestress, while another less remote has perhaps given him a tinge of black blood in remembrance of the days when African slave labour tended his great-grandfather’s sugar canes and maize.

But Spanish blood is predominant and Spanish qualities distinguish most of the Argentine, and all of the Uruguayan, leading families of to-day. Ceremoniously courteous to a fault—the fault of deeming it rude ever to refuse a favour asked; regarding it as a strange lack of savoir vivre on the part of the suppliant should the latter not understand the granting as a mere polite formality, in no way to be taken as a serious engagement.

An Argentine will ask a favour of another as a mere hint that he would be very glad if the latter granted it; a stranger ignorant of Argentine manners and ways might ask it really expecting to receive a substantial response to his request. Both would be met with a charming if vague assertion that nothing would give the person asked greater pleasure than to do anything the asker desired. Each might attain his object or not, as other considerations dictated; but whereas the demand would be credited to the former as finesse, contempt for boorishness would be the lot of the latter did he present himself expectant of the immediate fulfilment of the promise. Almost as well might he turn up unexpectedly to lunch at the home of an Argentine who on first receiving him had said with a graciously comprehensive wave of his hand, “This house is yours.”

As a matter of fact an Argentine’s home is a very difficult castle for a stranger to enter.

This probably for two chief reasons. For the first of these we must trace racial elements back to the Moorish civilization of Spain and the jealous seclusion of women from all male eyes but those of close relations. The second is a general lack of orderliness (also an Oriental characteristic) usually prevailing in even the richest Argentine households; which makes it inconvenient to receive except on special and specially prepared occasions.

We must follow up the Arab-Semitic blood brought in the veins of the Spaniard to the new world through mingling with Native Indian and Negro blood before we come to the heroes who fought for and won independence from Spanish rule now over a century ago. Since then what intermarryings, mostly with natives of Italy but also with British, French, German, Scandinavian and Belgian men and women.

Guthries, Dumas, Murphys, Schneidewinds, Christophersens, De Bruyns, Bunges, not to mention bearers of the historic patronymics of Brown and O’Higgins, are now among the landed aristocracy of Argentina; though, still, the crème de la crème consists of the descendants of the Spanish families of Colonial days. Among the middle and lower classes, especially in the towns, the Italianate element is now overwhelming; though recently again Spanish immigration has begun to exceed Italian. All this goes to make a strange racial mixture; of which the first generation born on Argentine soil knows little about and cares nothing for the language of its parents, but grows up with a pride, comical to the detached observer, in the glorious Wars of Independence (fought at a period when its own ancestry were, as likely as not, peasants in one or another corner of Europe, and wholly ignorant of the fact of the existence of the River Plate) and patriotically devoted to the blue and white Banner and National Anthem (an Italian composition, by the by) of the land of their parents’ adoption.

Everyone born on Argentine or Uruguayan soil is Argentine or Uruguayan of his own very decided will as well as legally; furiously so with the exclusive fervour of the convert. He cannot or will not speak English, French, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish or Flemish as the case may be; nothing but Spanish, River Plate Spanish, that is to say, is worthy of his tongue, and he has a truly Galician contempt for the lisping Spanish of Castile.

Contrarily to a generally accepted but quite superficial view, an Uruguayan differs from an Argentine almost if not quite as much as a Portuguese does from a Spaniard; the reason being that the early immigration to the two countries was drawn from different parts of Spain. The first settlement of what is now Uruguay was chiefly drawn from the Canary Islands and the Basque Provinces; the latter origin being easily perceptible from a glance at any list of the names of prominent Uruguayans, past or present. To this fact of early settlement and because Uruguay has, until quite recently, offered much less attraction to the stream of European Emigration which flowed past Montevideo to Buenos Aires, is due the possession of the high degree of many sterling qualities which distinguishes Uruguayans from their cousins of the other shore of the River Plate. These qualities have sustained the National and individual financial credit of Uruguay throughout all troubles and political vicissitudes. She as a Nation and her individual traders have always paid 100 cents gold to each dollar and her commercial community has successfully negatived any attempt on the part of her Governments to depart from the strictly gold basis of her monetary system. The Uruguayan dollar is worth slightly more than that of the United States. This significant fact is due to the uncontaminated preservation of racial qualities derived through the old Colonists from the Northern parts of Spain; especially from the Basques, than whom no honester, nor perhaps more obstinate, people exist.

LANGUAGE

Everyone knows that Spanish is the language of the River Plate Republics; but, while the written Spanish of South America is one with literary Spanish all the world over, the spoken language of Argentina and Uruguay differs from Castilian in many respects.

The first of these, and probably the most interesting, is the survival in South America of words in common use in the days of the early conquistadores and colonists but which have long ago fallen into disuse in Spain.

These words gave a deal of trouble a few years ago to certain Argentine amateur philologists who made more or less ingenious endeavours to derive them from the aboriginal Quichúa or Guaraní.

It was reserved for Mr. Paul Groussac, a Frenchman and the custodian of the Argentine National Library, to inform these derivation hunters, in a coldly sarcastic little pamphlet, that they would find all the words that were puzzling them intact in the works of Cervantes and other old Spanish authors.

So it is with many Britons not learned in philology. There are many words and expressions commonly regarded as Americanisms which in truth went to New England in the Mayflower.

There are also several striking differences between the pronunciation of Spanish on the River Plate and in Spain. Thus the “ll” which is liquid in pure Castilian is given in South America a sound very much like the French “j” in je. This, I believe to have come to the New World with the Galician immigration.[11]

In the beginning of historical times the various Galician dialects prevailed over the whole Peninsula; Galician subsequently developing into modern Portuguese and the Castilian dialect, with much more widely divergent steps of development, becoming the accepted language of Spain.

Also the Argentine and Uruguayan disdain the lisping “θ” sound given by Spaniards to the letter “z” and in a lighter degree to “c.” In South American Spanish “z,” soft “c” and “s” are indistinguishable to the ear; all three being given the same sound as an English “s.” There is also, as might be expected, a distinct difference of intonation between Spanish as she is spoken in South America and in Spain. Everyone who has learned to speak Spanish in a South American country ever afterwards carries with him oral evidence of the place of origin of that linguistic acquirement; just as does a foreigner who has learned English in the United States. So it is with South African Dutch; and (may it be said?) Australian English. And all Colonists of either English, Dutch or Spanish origin are consciously proud of their own particular fashion of speaking and, either secretly or openly, regard the intonation of the older country as rather effeminately affected. De gustibus, etc.

Really, I suppose, there is no good or bad “accent,” as these differences of intonation are commonly called. It is like flavour, chiefly, if not entirely, a matter of custom and taste. Pronunciation, however, seems more frequently a matter of fashion, recurrent as are other fashions in easily dated periods.

Probably the South American pronunciation of Spanish mostly dates back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; with, perhaps, an added blunt plainness born of generations of free rough life on the vast expanses of the Pampa.

Modern innovations in the written or spoken language of Argentina and Uruguay can usually be traced to the great stream of immigration constantly flowing to these countries, chiefly from Italy and Spain.

ARGENTINES AND URUGUAYANS

The inhabitants of the two Republics of Argentina and Uruguay are only similar in appearance and natural characteristics to the superficial or hasty observer. There are several points in which they really differ fundamentally, the difference being due, as has just been observed, to the fact that the original settlements of the two parts of the River Plate Territories were drawn from different parts of Spain and that the later cosmopolitan stream of immigration passed by Montevideo, on account of the constantly politically disturbed condition of Uruguay, and disembarked only at Buenos Aires. Therefore the Uruguayan has retained the characteristics of his Spanish ancestors in far greater purity than has the Argentine.

It is therefore impossible to club the two peoples together in any attempt at a description or even indication of their leading characteristics.

By way of rough comparison it may be said that while the Argentine has gained in polish and versatility by interbreeding with immigrants from many European countries, chiefly from all parts of Italy, the Uruguayan has retained a very large share of the dogged honesty, obstinacy and capacity for sustained effort in hard work of his Basque and Galician ancestors.

In passing from comparison to particular analysis one is at once confronted with the difficult question, “What is an Argentine?”

According to Argentine Law, all children born on Argentine soil are ipso facto Argentines, but to attempt classification of the offspring of mixed marriages in several degrees of remoteness of parentage would immediately become a complex impossibility. Certain influences, however, imposed by the life and surroundings in Argentina, affect all individuals brought up there, no matter what may be or have been the nationality of their immediate or remoter ancestry.

But, with this exception, any description or setting forth of the leading characteristics of “Argentines” can only safely be submitted in regard to the direct descendants of the Spanish Conquistadores and early settlers and of the mixed unions between these and the aboriginal Indian women. The further but much rarer admixture of African blood introduced by slave labour, is almost a negligible quantity in the upper classes, though of considerable and noticeable influence in the lower, especially in the Northern Provinces, in which the mixture of Indian and Negro blood is very considerable.

Nevertheless, these elements of Spanish, Indian and Negro became fused into a national type the picturesqueness of which is now (alas!) being rapidly absorbed and transformed in the melting-pot in which it meets strange elements from every part of civilized Europe.

Still, the chivalrous and courteous Argentine to be found to-day not only in the National Senate (and in the Presidential chair), but also in the maize fields and sugar plantations of the far Western and Northern Provinces cannot be overlooked either as very important prime material for the coming race or as possessing many qualities the dilution of which can only be viewed with a sincere, if partly sentimental, regret.

Are you a travelling stranger? The gaucho will offer you of the very best his humble ranch affords with the same native charm and dignity of manner which will strike you on your arrival and welcome on the estancia of his ancestral overlord.

There are still corners of Argentina where the patriarchal system has not yet died out, where every peon and vaquero considers himself a child of the great house whose señora sees to the creature comforts and small luxuries of his wife and children on feast-days and in the time of need.

No stately old-world courtesy could ever have surpassed that of an Argentine host of the old school. Truly, on his estancia, all is yours, and he will frequently make you a daily offering of fruit, chosen by him, picked with his own hand, especially and exclusively for you, his guest. The aristocratic Argentine of the old school is a very dignified gentleman indeed, notwithstanding a century of democratic profession. I say “profession,” for though I believe the leading families of the Republic are quite sincere in a conviction that they rank among the world’s most advanced democrats, the government of the country has remained almost exclusively in their truly patrician hands since the days of the Declaration of Independence. What may happen in the present newly commenced era of compulsory exercise of a universal franchise no one can well say, but most of the landed influence still belongs to the great historic Argentine families; who, moreover, form a caste which keeps even the plutocracy of more recently foreign origin at a quite respectful distance. It will be a long time, at any rate, before the prestige of these families ceases to make its influence felt in the capital as well as in the districts over which they have ruled for, practically, at least a century. The apparent familiarity which exists between them and their dependants or humbler provincial neighbours is the outcome of the loyal affection which at one time existed in England between squire and farmer or villager. A feeling born of and sustained by the patriarchal system and very widely different to the “I am as good as you are” pretensions of new democracy.

The true Argentine, be he patrician, estanciero or gaucho peon is never boorish even when he seeks to pick a quarrel with studied insult; and if his humour and language would, at times, severely shock European ears polite, he is studiously careful to keep that sort of talk for the intimacy of his own household and associates. If you are admitted to that intimacy, well, so much the worse for you, if you are of a prudish disposition, but you can console yourself that your privilege is a very special and rare one; bestowed on you by virtue of some exceptionally sympathetic quality with which your host’s kindly imagination has endowed you. He is a kindly, charitable man, the real Argentine: an odd mixture of infantile vanity and strong common sense, hospitable to anyone arriving at his house through force of circumstance or if he can find a reasonable excuse to himself for breaking through the rule of almost hareem-like privacy of his home and intimate family affairs. Courteous himself, he expects courtesy, and will not brook clumsiness of speech or manner. Leisurely in his ways, he will not be hustled over any business. Try to hurry him, and he not only resents your lack of good manners but also suspects that you are endeavouring to lead him into some kind of sharp-dealing trap. Anyway, he not only will not budge an inch from his own deliberate attitude but most probably will oppose the inertia of a closed front door to all your further endeavours to approach him. This Argentine characteristic is a rock on which many a Yankee hustler has seen his best thought-out propositions founder.

In any business or other intercourse with a true Argentine you must not expect him to keep verbally made appointments nor to apologize subsequently for not having done so. Usually you need not trouble to keep them yourself. Whatever you have in hand with him will prosper better and progress just as, or even more, quickly if you are content to take the matter up where you left it at your last interview, the next time you happen to meet him by chance at any at all convenient place or time. Do not talk him to death about it, he is very quick at understanding your wishes and proposed plans from the merest hint. If not, he will ask you very plain questions.

But he must conduct the negotiations, he must clothe your ideas until they bear a respectable appearance of being of his own originating. That is his vanity; but only then may you venture to strip them of certain new features which on close examination will be seen to be more favourable to his interests than your own.

During the changes which your propositions will inevitably undergo in the course of negotiations, he may, if you are not careful, get the better of you in the deal. That also is his vanity; a vanity to guard against without ever committing the solecism of a too bluntly apparent discovery of his aim. If he finds you always politely firm as a gentleman should be, you will have gained his friendship and respect—often valuable assets even if your original business should not go through.

In a word, in Argentina, as elsewhere, one must respect the native customs and conventionalities unless one wishes to encounter opposition. And the vis inertia of the opposition which an Argentine can and does offer to persons and ideas with which he is out of sympathy is invincible.

Such persons or schemes will be remitted by him to a “Mañana” which never comes.

That is the true inward meaning in Argentina of mañana; a polite excuse for temporarily or definitely postponing matters which have not made a favourable impression. It is not, as is so often thought, a mere lazy pretext for not doing to-day anything that possibly can be put off till to-morrow.

The Argentine is not in the least lazy. On the contrary, he has reserve stores of latent energy the sudden calling into action of which, when he considers such action called for, is apt to astonish those who have formed superficial and hasty judgments on his nature.

It would seem trite to say that the first step to success in a country is intelligent study of the inhabitants were it not so constantly evident that new arrivals, who really ought to know better, seem to bring with them the idea that along with their business, whatever it may be, they have brought a mission to mould Argentine methods on the latest European or North American forms, forms which are the outcome of entirely different racial and climatic conditions. Thus, they, at the outset, impose upon themselves the Sisyphus task of rolling their pet stones up the hill of customs which really are the outcome of the racial and physical necessities of the people and country.

You cannot grow wheat in a swamp nor make much of a retriever out of a pointer, but the swamp may yield good rice and a pointer may be a very good dog in his way.

The sooner an immigrant, be he financier or farmer, realizes such facts the better for his success on the River Plate or elsewhere. By not doing so he fails in his enterprise and blames the failure on to the people or country to which he took projects predoomed only by his own lack of intelligent adaptability.

Another word of didactic advice to the intending emigrant to Argentina. Always be sure, no matter what his appearance and manners may seem to indicate to your first glance at him, that every action of an Argentine is firmly founded on a perfectly common-sense view of circumstances and their influence on his own best interests, although that foundation may lie under, and, for those who do not really know him, be hidden by various strata of personal vanity and easily aroused but ephemeral enthusiasm. He is no fool and most emphatically not a lazy man, but only one who is rather cynically apt to let other people work for him as much and as often as they will. When he cannot get things done for him he can and will do them, very effectively, for himself.

And lest, to some people, the foregoing observations and counsel might seem so much word-embroidery on a canvas composed mostly of the author’s imagination, the reader is humbly asked to compare it with the known facts of Argentine economic history.

In 1810, the beginning of the country’s real development, the great River Plate landowner was a rural patriarch, much after the fashion of the shepherd kings of Palestine.

He ousted the Master-Stranger from his land and only afterwards permitted him and encouraged him to return to it as the servant of himself, the true overlord of the soil. On that soil its patriarchs extended their proprietary rights ever more and more while foreign railways and all kinds of other enterprise constantly enhanced the value of the land held, always almost exclusively, by Argentines. His railway and dock-building servants from overseas got very good wages indeed for their work, as they still do in common with others who have made tramways and constructed water, gas and electrical power works. But he who up to now has had the most durable and the chief profit from all this is the Argentine or Uruguayan; the man who holds and will hold the Government of the two Republics and retains all the appreciated value of the much greater part of the soil of their vast territories. Concessions of land to foreigners made in the past by way of part wages are nowadays secretly regarded as having been errors committed in ignorance of the real value of what was then parted with and with such self-accusation of error goes the resolve not to repeat it. Still it should be stated that at the time of making such grants some such inducement was necessary in a part of the world which had only very recently emerged from half a century of civil war.

It is, of course, self-evident that no new railway enterprise will get a huge grant of land; as did the Central Argentine Company as an inducement to construct. The attitude of the Argentine to-day to all foreigners is that they may come to his country and there enjoy similar rights and liberties with himself coupled with rather less than his own responsibilities. They may keep the profits they make, and very good profits are obtainable by well-conducted, necessary enterprise, after deduction of certain percentage by way of rent for their concessions or licences; but the real property, the value of which is constantly being increased by the activity of foreign industry and commerce, remains in, and even as to formerly alienated parts of it gradually tends to drift more and more into, native hands.

The Argentine is, as I have said, not a fool, even still less is the Uruguayan; on the contrary, he is especially wise in his appreciation of his own natural limitations. He is by long heredity and his own upbringing a farmer, not a commercial man nor a speculator in aught else but land. And to land, therefore as well as for the other good reasons already pointed out, he devotes his best attention.

He cannot, perhaps, build nor manage railways, nor has he generally a genius for banking, but he can and does breed as fine cattle and sheep and grow as good quality maize and wheat as any imported European farm manager. In farming, the special subject which he does thoroughly understand, he gives practical evidence of his judgment in assimilation of the best farming science and of adapting it, or such part of it as is most capable of adaptation, to the conditions and requirements of his own particular lands.

The finest and the most up-to-date model estancias in Argentina and Uruguay belong to and have been brought to their present state of perfection by Argentines and Uruguayans.

Probably these facts dispose of the accusation of dilatory laziness so often brought against him.

In this chapter I have attempted to inform intending emigrants and not to formulate a defence of the Argentine or Uruguayan against the ignorance of his calumniators. He needs none. With a charmingly cynical indifference, which is all his own but which it does not at all times suit his interests to manifest, he goes on piling up colossal fortunes amid surroundings much more congenial to his nature than even the European Grand Hotels or Cafés in which he likes from time to time to disport himself and display his wealth. His estancia always remains his home, in which he spends the best and greatest portion of his life, surrounded by the peons whose great-grandfathers were vassals of his own.