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.

It is rather the fashion among new arrivals in Buenos Aires and Montevideo to laugh at the Argentines and Uruguayans and their ways of managing their affairs, but it appears to me that this is a case of “He laughs best who laughs last.” The native of the River Plate has contrived to get his country developed for him while retaining the entire mastery of it. Men of long residence in these countries have practically adopted their manners and customs simply because experience has taught them that such are best adapted to these countries’ natural conditions. As has been observed earlier in this chapter, the Argentine, especially, is conscious of his own limitations, one of the chief of which is a pretty general incapacity for patient attention to detail in his work. His scientific acquirements are often brilliant as far as study is concerned. He assimilates knowledge rapidly and accurately, but in its application he is often too apt to fail of obtaining satisfactory results just and only because of his lack of patience and appreciation of the value of detail in practice. That is why he prudently abandoned his own past attempts to control certain of his railways which, financial failures under his management, quickly became prosperous concerns in British hands. His hospitals still show many defects due solely to the lack of attention to necessary details on the part of the medical staff. Brilliant exceptions, which unfortunately do not vitiate this rule, are to be found in Mr. Lertora, the Argentine manager of the Western Railway, and Dr. Penna, the President of the National Council of Hygiene and the creator of the magnificently managed Asistencia Publica of Buenos Aires and of all the great sanitary works of that city.

To sum up the average Argentine of the upper classes, in middle age and onward he is a grave and reverend señor; a rather wild and boisterous young gentleman until he has sown a profusion of wild oats.

Throughout his life he shows a childlike pride in his wealth and all it can give to him and his, is lavish in largesse with occasional and seemingly capricious moments of close-fistedness. Courteous to a fault in manner, he has nevertheless ever a keen eye for the main chance in all matter of sufficient magnitude to really interest him.

In fact he has many characteristics which are reminiscent of the less objectionable qualities of mediæval nobility, in common with whom he is quick to resent anything he deems intentional insult to or disparagement of himself. He will forgive anyone for having got the better of him in a deal (though it is fair to him to say that it is not often he finds himself the victim of such an offence), but he will not for any consideration brook clumsily bad manners. He is by no means a puritanical moralist nor severe on the moral peccadillos of his neighbours, and he leaves religion pretty much to his women-folk.

In the lower classes he is still always courteous, expects courtesy from others, and resents, quickly and often fiercely, any defect in that respect in his neighbour’s behaviour.

Neither will he brook pretentious arrogance in any man, his social superior or his equal. Such arrogance meets immediately not only with his quick resentment but his profound and evident disdain. Treat him as he will treat you, and you will find him uniformly pleasant, light-hearted and humorous. Obligatory education is slowly freeing him from the illiteracy which until recently was very general, especially outside the limits of the Capital or one or other of the largest towns. Even now the lower-class Argentine is usually an exceedingly poor scholar. Therefore, and because of his rapidly growing admixture of Italian peasant blood, he is superstitious and still often has a deeper faith in fortune-telling quacks than in qualified medical science. Wise men and women are still much consulted for love-potions and cures and curses of all sorts for man and beast in the country districts, but while mere fortune-tellers are not interfered with by the law, penal restrictions are being more and more stringently enforced against quack doctors; most of whose remedies have come direct from mediæval Spain or Italy.

Argentine women? This is a subject on which one is not only tempted but almost forced to confine oneself to the usual platitudes concerning beauty of the Spanish type: large-eyed and opulent and at its apogee during the decade between 15 and 25 years of age.

It is seldom that an Argentine woman of any class troubles her head with business matters; still less with theories concerning the rights of her sex. She is usually content to do her most apparent duty in the sphere to which it has pleased God to call her.

She manages her household in a quasi-Oriental haphazard way; if of the wealthier classes does little but order that household in such ways as may correspond to her momentary caprice, if of the poorer, naturally, she does the work herself, but in the same capricious fashion.

Saturday is the great day for domestic cleaning up throughout all classes, Sunday a feast day whereon little work is done.

Apart from these general fixtures, household duties may be said never to be begun and never finished. In all houses one may see the servants or the housewife, as the case may be, besom in one hand and mate in the other at any time of day. What is not done to-day is finished to-morrow, that is all; and what can one do more?

To newly arrived Europeans these methods give an idea of continual discomfort, but the sooner such Europeans become accustomed to the ways of the country in this as in other matters the better for their own peace of mind. Of one thing they may be assured from the commencement of their stay on the River Plate, viz. that it is not they who will change those ways by an iota, and that therefore they may as well abandon all notions of what they would consider as reform of good grace to begin with instead of at the end of a more or less lengthy nerve-racking struggle.

The servant difficulty is particularly difficult in these sunny lands where no one need, and very few do, know what it is to suffer the real pinch of want or of hardship other than such as custom sanctions. The European lady who worries her servants with, to them, new ideas of how her household should be conducted will simply cause them to quit her employ with wonderful unanimity and celerity.

They won’t stop, that is all. She may give them sleeping or other accommodation which they may never before have enjoyed nor probably even dreamed of. These attentions strike no sympathetic chord if they be accompanied by what the native Argentine considers silly pettiness of interference with the way in which he or she is accustomed to do his or her work. Any Argentine servant would sooner sleep, as many do, on a mattress thrown down at night in any passage way in the house of a native Argentine family and suffer the alternate friendly familiarity and impassioned scolding of a mistress whose ways they understand and who leaves them to theirs, than occupy the nicest possible servant’s bedroom in a more strictly ordered establishment. The true and main lesson of all which is that the Argentine, to whatever social class he or she may belong, is a child of nature to whom disciplinary fetters of any kind are unbearable and to the freer nature of whom the monotony of much of the punctual regularity which Europeans are apt to consider a necessary factor of real comfort is impossibly burdensome.

On the River Plate one must live as the Rio Platenseans do if one’s stay is not to be one continued struggle for unattainable domestic ideals. In the best hotels, in the millionaire’s palace or the peon’s hut the same happy-go-lucky spirit prevails and dominates domestic, as it also does public, life, in especially, perhaps, Argentina. Everything is muddled through somehow. But it is muddled through to desired results, which, after all, is the chief practical desideratum.

There is much of the Spanish seclusion in the better-class home life of both Argentina and Uruguay, which adds to the obstacles in the way of criticism or appreciation by a foreigner.

That the children are almost universally what we should call spoiled is, however, evident from the most superficial experience of that life. The Argentine theories, if they can be termed such, of bringing up are largely controlled by a fear of crushing the individuality of the child especially if he be a boy. The most usual reply of an Argentine child to any order given to it is “No quiero” (I don’t want to), and there the matter ends. The parents smile indulgently, the child does not do what it did not want to do, and woe betide the governess or tutor who is possessed of too strict disciplinary ideas. Thus, from the cradle to the grave the male Argentine is used to his own sweet way, while his sisters are made to feel few trammels of a purely household kind. These apart, however, Argentine women seldom, if ever, show any symptoms of rebellion against the domestic seclusion which is their accepted lot, especially after marriage.

The Argentine woman is seldom disturbed by intellectual aspirations, likes creature comforts and facilities for the standard of dress pertaining to her station, and she is contented and happy in her home with the theatre as a distraction. At the theatre she only favours performances which demand intellectual effort for their appreciation if and when fashion impels her attendance thereat; so that she may see and be seen in the foyer and hold pleasant receptions in her box, receptions not always confined to the extr’actes.

In a word, she is not intellectual and therefore feels no need for troubling her usually handsome head with intellectuality.

She is a wife and a mother and a lady bountiful to all the feudal dependants of her husband’s house. Childishly fond of dress and admiration but with as little desire for liberty of action as she has for deep thought.

As will have been gathered from the foregoing, much of the Moorish civilization in Spain remains reincarnate in the woman of modern Argentina.

A word may very well be said here for the much-criticized Argentine jeunesse dorée. In the author’s humble opinion the real wonder about him is that his sometimes objectionably intrusive boisterousness in public places does not outstep its actually not very wide limitations.

In any other country, if you had a warm-blooded young scion of a sunny land who had grown up under the almost constantly approving smiles of an indulgent father and mother, possessed of great wealth and traditions of spending freely on amusement and outward display and, lastly, a native police which would almost as soon dare to rebel openly against the Government as to lock up for anything short of serious and unconcealable crime any son of a great ruling family, it appears to me more than possible that you would have much more trouble with such a gilded youth, who, moreover, would probably succumb to early physical and financial ruin instead of developing, as has been said, into a grave and reverend señor, capable in either Chamber of Congress or in a ministerial or diplomatic capacity, as the Argentine fils de famille eventually does. That he does so develop and does not succumb, I attribute to his underlying quality of common sense, coupled with his mainly open-air upbringing in the Camp.

Also, the young Argentine may be and often is, exceedingly fond of sowing a vast quantity of wild oats, but he is very seldom ill-natured or fundamentally bad. His very vices are strongly tempered with redeemingly generous qualities.

As good a comparison as any I can hit on between the upper-class Argentine and his Uruguayan cousin is that of the smart Londoner and the resident in a provincial Cathedral town. The latter is less given to display of such wealth as he may have and much less likely to make any pretence of greater. The Uruguayan is usually unpretentious in his way of living and at the same time gives an impression of greater solidity if more modest dimensions of fortune. Among both there is the same aristocratic assuredness of social position; but whereas each better-class Argentine seeks to outvie his immediate associates in luxurious outward appearance, the Uruguayan is content with a more solid if less showy all-round level of comfort. If one may use so discredited a term, the Uruguayan is the much more “eminently respectable” of the two, a man who derives his greatest pride from the fact that his word always has been and is every bit as good as his bond.

He has some contempt for Argentine showiness; while on the other side of the River Plate estuary he himself is considered as too slow-going to be very interesting. The Argentine is certainly jealous of the sounder general credit enjoyed by Uruguay, a jealousy not soothed by a certain quiet assumption of superiority of a nation which has always turned a deaf ear to any suggestions of convenient financial juggling, however critical or difficult the times.

There can be no doubt but that while the Uruguayan is possessed of common sense in much the same degree as is the Argentine, this quality is in the former tempered by a large quantum of Quixotic obstinacy.

Roughly speaking—very roughly, for generalization is almost as hazardous as prophecy—it may be said that while the Argentine is often apt to be guided rather by opportunism than fixed principle, the Uruguayan will only begin to listen to the voice of opportunity when he feels sure that no one of his inflexible principles is likely to be affected by so doing.

As we have seen, both the White and Red political parties in Uruguay have over and over again racked the whole country with civil war for the defence or assertion of pure principles, in regard to which no compromise seemed possible to one side or the other.

Argentina also had her period of Civil War brought about in a very great measure, no doubt, by similar causes; but her politicians have during the last fifty years learned the pecuniary value of, at least apparent, adaptability.

The Uruguayan of to-day is just as inflexible in his convictions as he was a century ago, and if he now chooses peace rather than civil war it is because he has become sincerely persuaded that peace is the only real way to his country’s best good and prosperity. Peace with honour, that is to say. He would rather commit public or individual suicide than accept any other.

For this reason (and for others) there is no likelihood of the Banda Oriental ever becoming a part of Argentina. Uruguayans could never be peacefully governed by Argentine policy, and Argentina would never wish to be burdened by such a troublesome community as would be the Uruguayans if they should come under her nominal rule. As historical fact, Argentina has already refused Uruguayan territory as a gift, and acted wisely in such refusal.

The lower classes and rural populations of Argentina and Uruguay differ, pari passu, as much and in similar fashion, from one another as do their respective social superiors, though Camp life is in many ways Camp life in both Republics alike. But ruggedly uncompromising staunchness to those principles which he has adopted for his own—which, however, may differ from European standards—is as evident in the Uruguayan peon as in his master.

Once you really know the Argentine or the Uruguayan, it is seldom difficult to forecast what either will do in any given circumstances. Needless, perhaps, to add that your study of them must be sympathetic; as must all such study in order to obtain positive or any at all satisfactory results.

CHAPTER V
NATIONAL, PROVINCIAL, AND MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT

The Constitutions of Argentina and Uruguay differ chiefly in that while the former gives a large measure of autonomy to the Provinces (therein, as in other respects, being closely modelled on that of the United States), the latter does not, the whole legislative power being vested in the National Congress.[12]

Argentina has 14 Provinces and 11 National Territories, including the district of the Federal Capital, the city of Buenos Aires. Each of the Provinces has a Governor and a Parliament of its own, chosen by the local electorate, and possesses, as has been said, a very large measure of autonomy in the management of its own fiscal and other internal affairs. Other large areas which are not yet judged by Congress to have attained sufficient development to be able to support the financial burdens and status of autonomous Provinces have remained National Territories under the direct control of the National Government. The Municipal Council of the Federal Capital has wide administrative powers, always subject, however, to the sanction of the National Executive, and the “Lord Mayor” (Intendente Municipal) of Buenos Aires is appointed by the National Government.

The National Territory likely to be the first promoted to the rank of a Province is that of the Pampa Central; now one of the chief cereal areas of the Republic.

The Argentine Provinces and National Territories are the following:

PROVINCES

TERRITORIES

It should be added that all Public Acts and Judicial Decisions of one Province have legal effect in all the others. Sometimes, however, conflicts of jurisdiction afford matter for the decision of the Federal High Court.

Uruguay is divided into 19 Departments, each of which has a Governor appointed by the National Executive and an administrative Council chosen by local popular vote. The Departments of Uruguay are:

It is perhaps not convenient here to discuss the comparative advantages of the two systems; but it must be said that evidence of the defects inherent to the qualities of both is not lacking. In Argentina the Provinces and in Uruguay the National Governments have frequently shown and still show a disposition to make ells out of the inches given them by their respective constitutions.

In Argentina this disposition was considerably scotched though not killed by the Centralizing policy of Dr. Figueroa Alcorta, the immediate predecessor in the Presidential chair of the recently deceased Dr. Roque Saenz Peña. Dr. Alcorta’s policy was fundamentally good and was carried out by him with, doubtless, the best of motives, if the manner of its execution was rather Gilbertian.

The evils he attacked arose from the fact that each of the more distant Provinces was practically under the almost autocratic domination of a great land-owning family; the descendants, usually, of the lords of the soil in the patriarchal days of the River Plate countries.

In those Provinces these families and their nearer ramifications formed powerful oligarchies; ruling over people who in their turn were the descendants of those who in bygone days had been little else than the vassals of the Great House. The head of the leading family was the Governor of his Province by an almost acknowledged right of inheritance; while his sons, nephews, and sons-in-law occupied the chief posts in the Provincial Government.

It is not too much to say that these people had, in measure as the National Government became more and more perfected in its conduct and outlook, become an insufferable obstacle to uniformity of ordered conduct of public affairs. Especially was this so in financial matters.

The outlying and, mostly, poorer Provinces were always needing, or at any rate wanting, money; and at the same time not over-nice about their lack of unpledged security when they found a European financier, as untrammelled by scruple as they themselves, willing to engineer a further Provincial loan under the independent borrowing powers given by the Constitution to each Province. Some of them also wished to continue and even increase the issue of notes the value of which was shockingly depreciated, and which were only legal tender within the boundaries of the particular Province. Almost in vain, the National Government issued diplomatic and consular circulars to the effect that Provincial loans were not Argentine National loans, and that it, the National Government, would only hold itself responsible for the latter. The financiers who floated new Provincial loans were well aware that the majority of those persons whom they could induce to take up such bonds knew little or nothing of the distinction between National and Provincial. The loan was an Argentine one; puffed with perfectly true statistics of the progress and prosperity of the Argentine Republic—without too much insistence on that of the particular Province concerned. Besides, these financiers and, possibly, some of their clients calculated on the extreme probability of the National Government, if an awkward situation really did arise, not allowing its Provinces to be declared defaulters in Europe, because of the consequent slur which must inevitably, though unjustly, fall on the name of “Argentina”; a name the credit of which the untiring and scrupulous efforts of the National Government have built up since the crisis of 1891.

The Provincial Oligarchies had also other ways of jockeying National Government. They would ask for all sorts of things, and if refused would proceed to rant shamelessly in the Senate. This was blackmail, nothing more nor less; but frequently effective, since Provincial Governors are practically always members of the National Senate; in which the President must, obviously, have a majority if he is to carry on the Government.

Such situations Dr. Figueroa Alcorta determined to take in hand; and the only way of doing this was to break up the offending Oligarchies.

Much of the humour of his doing so lay in the fact that he owed his high post to an original miscalculation of his character as that of a pleasant enough figure-head certain to be docile in the hands of the wire-pullers. Therefore he was appointed Vice-President to be a negligible quantity under the Presidency of Dr. Manuel Quintana. On whose death he, ipso facto, under the Constitution, became acting President for the remainder of Dr. Quintana’s term of office. The developments of Dr. Figueroa Alcorta were as much a surprise to Argentine politicians as were those of Bret Harte’s “Heathen Chinee” to his associates in “the game he did not understand.” And realization came as late in the day in the one case as in the other.

A veritable epidemic of local Revolutions sprang up in one after the other of the oligarchically ruled Provinces. On each occasion an “Interventor” was, as is provided by the Constitution for such cases, sent down by the National Government to enquire into the causes of the disturbance, and particularly to ascertain if the Province concerned were being ruled “in accordance with the Constitution and democratic principles.” If the answer to this last question were found to be in the affirmative, National troops could be sent down to support the existing Provincial Government; if in the negative, the ruling party, including, of course, the Governor, could be deposed and a successor appointed by the National Government in his stead.

As a result it gradually (but not till it was very nearly all over) dawned on the general intelligence of the country that the Governors who had been found to have ruled their Provinces “in accordance with the constitution, etc.,” were faithful supporters of the Presidential policy; whilst those who had been deposed for misrule happened, strangely enough, to be those who had kicked over, or shown an overt disposition to kick over, the Presidential traces.

This appealed to the public sense of humour and “Revolución de arriba” (Revolution from above, i.e. instigated in high quarters[13]) became a catch phrase. Thus were the Oligarchies brought to naught and the central power greatly strengthened thereby.

Dr. Figueroa Alcorta’s crowning coup d’état was, however, his shutting Congress out of its own Palace in consequence of its conspired refusal to pass one of his budgets. One fine day, the National Senators and Deputies on reaching the Congress building found it in possession of troops who refused them admission. Remonstrance was unavailing, and they perforce returned home. Meanwhile, the President passed the Budget himself, as the Constitution gives him power to do “when Congress is not sitting.”

In the result Dr. Figueroa Alcorta’s Budget (which was a perfectly wise and necessary one) remained operative and the officer who had commanded the troops was heavily fined for disrespect shown to the sacred offices of Senator and Deputy. The gallant officer’s plea in defence that the President whose orders he had obeyed on that occasion was, as constitutional Commander-in-Chief of the Forces, his Military Superior, availed him nothing. Nobody else was one penny the worse. Possibly, the payment of Colonel Calazza’s fine came “de arriba” like the Revolutions.

Soon afterwards Dr. Figueroa Alcorta was the courteous and diplomatic host of Personages (including the Infanta Isabella) at the 1910 Centenary Festivities; and, shortly after that again, vacated the Presidential chair in favour of Dr. Saenz Peña, his successor “by consent.” The usual and graceful, though officially unacknowledged, custom in Argentina being that the Presidential Election shall follow a prearranged course.[14]

With the matter of elections Dr. Saenz Peña’s name is, as has been said, intimately and honourably associated, and it may be repeated that by his death the Republic lost one of its most broad-minded and straightforward statesmen.

Up to the passing of his Electoral Reform Law, no self-respecting private citizen ever dreamed of voting: simply because if he favoured the Government policy his doing so would be a mere work of supererogation, while if he held opposition views it would be sheer waste of time and trouble on his part; and if he were a provincial voter he would certainly find himself the object of unpleasant attention by the police, whose really chief duty was to “conduct” elections to the satisfaction of the ruling party. Anyhow, his voting could not influence the preordained result of the election one way or the other. Voting was done by the mere deposit of a “Libreta” or certificate of citizenship, and libretas deposited in favour of the ruling party were subject to little scrutiny as to whether the persons named in them were alive or dead. They were thrown in at the polling stations in bundles. Some were bought; though at a low figure, because there were thousands of blank libretas at Government House ready to be filled in by quick-writing clerks in the very remote event of any booth being reported to have received a disconcerting number of votes adverse to the Government.

In the Provinces the proceedings were rougher and readier; the comparative smallness of the communities enabling the Police Commissary to know the political views of all persons in his district. Did a would-be opponent of the ruling powers heave in sight, he was hustled as if to make room for others who had arrived before him, and if he were still foolish enough to persist in trying to vote he was arrested for making a disturbance, and locked up till the election was over. The Provincial Police Authorities could hardly be blamed for their share in this scandal, because the successful conduct of elections was really a sine qua non condition of their tenure of office. Failure meant for them being almost immediately superseded.

In Uruguay, no matter whether Reds or Whites (the two great political parties) were in power, the rural population, the true backbone of the agricultural country, were perennially in opposition: because they found that the atmosphere of the capital somehow or another always infected their rulers with ideas of government which, however splendid they might be in theory, were more often than not quite out of harmony with, and often contradictory to, practical agricultural needs and conditions.

Thus, to cite an instance often referred to in this regard, it is not long since a German agricultural expert, specially imported with the best of intentions by the Government, showed them that wheat allowed to mature for a while in stacks had a greater commercial value in Europe than that thrashed simultaneously with reaping and shipped immediately. This is, in itself, undeniable fact; from which, however, the Uruguayan Government drew the conclusion that it would be well to pass a law making it obligatory, under penalty for not doing so, on every farmer in the country to stack all his wheat for a certain period before sending it for export. This proposal naturally raised an outcry throughout the country. Because a practice which presents little practical inconvenience and much advantage in an European country, where small wheat fields and a more or less damp climate are the rule, would be monstrously ridiculous in a land where grain is grown by the square league, and where, accidents of weather apart, the standing crops are well dried by the sun. Just imagine the enormous expense involved in stacking wheat over such vast areas as are covered by cereals in the River Plate countries. In which countries, moreover, the greatest of all difficulties in the way of production is the scarcity of labour! The stacking method would cost vastly more than the difference in the value between stacked and unstacked grain.

Needless to say, this brilliantly conceived law was never passed; but the idea of it stands as an example of the doctrinaire tendencies of Montevidean statesmen of which the rural industries complain.

That there is a mysterious something in the air of Montevideo which influences men in the direction of abstract idealism, and at the same time blinds them to facts which their cherished theories will not fit, seems undeniable. But it is unlikely that Uruguay will ever again be plunged into the ruinous throes of Revolution.

Once the leaders of Uruguayan opinion grasped the fact that Revolution is the greatest possible impediment to the best interests of the country, the peaceful future of the Republic was assured; and they now seem to have grasped it clearly and firmly.

State insurance, State railways, State tramways, water and gas works, electrical power stations and, in fact, State everything was Señor Batlle’s[15] plan for holding Uruguay up to the world as a splendid object-lesson in State Socialism. Here again one sees the fire of patriotism gleaming through a mass of practical difficulties (the obtaining of necessary capital for the purpose, and on the necessary conditions of the execution of such splendid plans, for instance) in the way of the accomplishment of the President’s dream.

Equally patriotic were those who endeavoured to keep the brakes well pressed on to the wheels of the “progressive” Presidential car; hoping for the conclusion of Señor Batlle y Ordoñez’s term of office before too much harm were done. But, mark this, not a sign of overt rebellion in a situation over which only a few years ago the whole country would have been engaged in a fratricidal struggle.

Señor Batlle y Ordoñez was an autocratic democrat; desiring and firmly, even obstinately, determined, to rule as absolutely as any Tsar in what he conceived to be the true interests of all classes of the population.

The present writer well remembers hearing him, on the first day of the great general strike of 1911, addressing the strikers from the balcony of Government House at Montevideo.

He told them that were it not for his high office he would be among them and with them; counselled them to stand firmly for their rights; and wound up with a warning that any acts of intimidation or violence on their part would not only injure their just cause, but expose the guilty parties to extremely severe punishment.

By way of underlining this last wholesome admonition, Martial Law was immediately declared, and the next day saw the town filled with Horse, Foot and Artillery. This move (which caused some doubt in the mind of the extreme Labour Party as to which way the Presidential wind was really blowing), and the fact that the flags, illuminations and firework installations were already nailed up for the celebration of the Centenary of Artígas, the National Hero, whose memory has of late years been completely whitewashed by the National Historians, caused the strike to fizzle out and all hands to join, a day or two later, in festivities the brilliance of which confirmed the reputation of the Montevideans as past masters of artistic illumination.

The only net result of the strike appeared to be the fining, in the strict terms of its concession, of the Montevideo Tramways Company for neglecting to run cars according to schedule during a period when it was physically impossible for it to have done so. When no bread was baked and even doctors were forced by the strike leaders to abandon the use of their carriages; when, in fact, the whole city kept a sabbath during which no man might do any manner of work. A state of things enforced by patrols of strikers armed with revolvers—until the troops of their friend the President suddenly appeared upon the scene.

Of both Argentina and Uruguay it may be said that their Constitutions, Laws (National and Provincial) and Municipal by-laws and regulations are as nearly perfect models of what such things should be as can well be imagined. If they were not sometimes honoured in the breach of them and if isolated provisions were not sometimes hauled out to meet cases pretty obviously not exactly contemplated by their framers, all would be even better in lands where, on the whole, Laws and Regulations, as occasionally varied by tacit custom, generally work very well indeed. Such custom, it should be noted here, is not, however, altogether reliable and would be useless as a defence in the frequently recurring event of some Authority or other, perhaps piqued by an ambition to distinguish itself or to be revenged on a torpid liver, suddenly insisting on the observance of the strict letter of the law. In that case, several unsuspecting people get fined; journalists are inspired for paragraphs and even articles; a, say, three days’ wonder is created; and custom resumes her sway until the next temporary upheaval.

The writer once lived in a district of Argentina where, as elsewhere in that country, all dairy farmers must, under penalty, use milk cans duly certified and marked by the Authority appointed for that purpose, as being according to standard measure. A fee is payable on each can so certified. One day, being in a curious mood, one not uncommon in journalists, he asked Authority to show him the standard measures. The latter, a good fellow, was pleased to consider the writer as another; so he laughed and said he had never seen nor asked to have such a thing. He knew that all these milk-cans were turned out accurately enough by the manufacturers. So what was the use of bothering further? He just marked them and took the fee.

Some day, he or his successor or a colleague of some other district, will be caught by some Higher Authority in a fit of zeal and made an example of. Someone will get a profitable contract to furnish Standard milk-cans throughout the Republic, these will duly get lost or be appropriated by Authority’s wife for household purposes, and dairymen’s cans will be certified on sight as before.

It is only just to say that this story is rather illustrative of Argentine life than Uruguayan: the Uruguayan generally takes more strict a view of his duties and obligations than his over-river cousin.

But to return to our subject. Generally speaking, and especially in Argentina with its Provincial Autonomy, the further one journeys from the National Capital the slacker and more irregular one finds the administration of Laws and By-Laws, the greater the resemblance of the manners and methods of Authority to that of the Kadi under a palm tree. And the more one realizes the truth of the proverb that while one man may steal a horse another may not look over a gate. In country districts personal influence is wellnigh everything. If one be on good terms with the Municipal Intendente (Mayor) or the Comisario of Police (it is generally a case of being friendly, if at all, with both and the other members of the official clique; all usually to be found together in the same bar or restaurant), the law looks very indulgently on one, and at a pinch will turn a blind eye to one’s, really only humorous, peccadillos. If not, one must walk carefully like Agag until one has gathered common sense enough to approach Authority in a properly friendly (and acceptable) spirit.

Does the Comisario’s horse go lame, he will ask you to lend him one. You do so, saying at the same time that you have no further need of it. And the next time you have trouble with your peons, or anyone else with less influence than yourself, send for the Comisario, he will soon straighten the matter out for you. Even if your trouble be with an equal or superior in influence, smiling Authority will discover a modus vivendi and drinks all round will seal the friendly compact. It is seldom one meets anyone who is not on good terms with his Authorities. Not to be so would remind one of the story of Carnot, who refused to stand in with Napoleon I. The Emperor told him frankly that he who was not with him was against him, and that he, Carnot, was much too powerful a person with the people to be permitted to be at large in France under the latter condition. He must be exiled, and had better see Fouché on the matter.

Carnot went; and, addressing Fouché, asked sternly, “Where must I go? Traitor!” “Wherever you like. Imbecile!” was Fouché’s cynical retort.

So, in Argentine rural ethics, if you are not friendly with Authority you have only your own folly to thank for the usually inconvenient consequences.

It is wonderful how much money Authority has to spend on amusement when it gets a day or two’s holiday in Buenos Aires; and it is great fun as well as good policy to go round with him, if you also are in funds. Argentine Authority seldom gives or expects anything for nothing; but usually is a pleasant enough fellow withal, if taken the right way.

The Uruguayan, in such regards as in all others, is a less sophisticated and, in country districts, a more primitively minded person; though always hospitable, usually courteous in his manner, and particularly so to strangers.

The most exalted Governmental spheres, those of the National Governments in the Cities of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, respectively, are nowadays almost entirely free from any suggestion of the mildest form of even technical corruption. It certainly is easier to obtain a personal interview with the President or a Minister if one personally knows one of his intimate friends or subordinate officials; but that is all that influence really amounts to as regards any question affecting overseas Commerce, Concessions or Foreign Affairs. In regard to home politics, doubtless a good deal of intrigue is constantly at work at Government House in Buenos Aires, but those are matters which the foreign settler leaves exclusively to the Argentines themselves. So long as they do nothing which may affect trade or credit, even the representatives of the largest foreign interests are careful to avoid any act or word which might savour of interference in the sole management by the Argentine of purely Argentine affairs. As has been indicated elsewhere in these pages, such interference is the one thing regarding which the Argentine is very jealously suspicious. He may have framed most of his Constitution on that of the United States, but he never would have permitted the States or anyone else to do it for him.

Apart from the transparent incorruptibility, from without, at all events, of all members of the National Governments of both Republics, there is a pleasant free-and-easiness about the manner of Presidential and Ministerial receptions.

The salons in which all-comers are received are large, airy and well lighted; and are furnished with leather-covered sofas, seated on which visitors wait their turn for the President or Minister to grant them a few words of conversation; during which his Excellency sits down on the sofa beside them, cigarette in hand like everyone else in the room.

At a longer, special, conference, coffee also is served, hot in winter and iced in summer, even in the offices of subordinate officials; and rumour has it that it is over this inexhaustible supply of Nationally provided coffee and cigarettes that internal politics are “made.” In Argentina politics of this kind are kaleidoscopic; groups and individuals forming fresh combinations and antagonisms too rapidly and from too deeply underlying motives for anyone not profoundly versed and continually engaged in the game to be able to follow it with anything approaching comprehension.

Much of this has doubtless disappeared under the influence of Dr. Saenz Peña; whose fearlessly honourable nature judged, and judged rightly, that the National Government of Argentina is now in a position to face without apprehension any public opinion of its acts and policy.

Naturally the spirit of intrigue, the love of which, almost for itself, has roots deep down in Argentine human nature, cannot yet be reckoned as dead; but it is certainly in the course of being driven further and further away from the centres of higher civilization by a superior ethical conception of the duties of Government; even as the long-horned native cattle have been ousted to frontier districts by the appreciation by Estancieros of the incomparable advantages, to themselves, of Shorthorns and Herefords.

In Uruguay there always has been much less tendency to intrigue. There, a man was a Red or a White, a conscientious supporter of the Rural or Urban party. While as for Finance the Commercial Community has always and unswervingly seen to it that its realm be kept clean and untarnished by even the breath of scandal. It may here be objected that now and again, foreign concessionaires have made bargains with the National Government strangely profitable to themselves. The true answer to such an observation would be that in such cases the Government has invariably been the quite innocent victim of greater experience and far-sightedness in such matters than its own advisers had ever had opportunity to attain.

Uruguayans would maintain the National credit by emptying their own private pockets if need be and, in fact, have expressed their intention of doing so on more than one occasion when, as is mentioned in another chapter, the Government allowed itself to be frightened into proposals for issues of paper currency not founded on a strictly gold basis. A proceeding which would have spelt repudiation of a portion of the National liabilities; in the manner of the Argentine “Conversion Law.”

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. And it is no sign of bias to give Uruguay credit for plain facts which incontrovertibly prove her sense of the sanctity of moral as well as legal obligation.

True, she was never in quite such a financial tangle as that in which Argentina found herself in 1891; but she has often been poverty-stricken, and yet has always paid to the utmost centesimo.

Generally, it may be said that a similar honesty prevails in all branches of Government and fiscal affairs throughout Uruguay.

For a glance at some small ways that are dark and tricks that are vain, before these are entirely swept away, as they now are being, before the healthy wind of moral improvement (healthy even though, as some cynics assert, it has been raised only by perception of the fact that in the long run, honesty is the best policy) one must go to distant parts of Argentina and there grope amid the intricacies of Provincial and Municipal Administration. There, undoubtedly, we may come across semi-obscure corners from which a highly respectable chartered accountant would fly horror-stricken. But we should also recognize that the whole small fabric of intrigue and petty robbery is a Punchinello’s secret; well known to and sympathetically approved by the whole surrounding populace, whose attitude to the robber is that of “Good luck to him! I should do the same if I had his chance.” Of no use to endeavour to stir up public opinion to demand the prosecution or dismissal of Authorities or Officials who are perfectly well known to have been defrauding the public for years.

Not a bit of it. You would only get for an answer, “What? get rid of him now that he’s fat and get a lean one in his place who would be far worse!” Meaning that a needy man would steal more than a rich one. Local opinion would hold that that way lay madness only; and the would-be reformer would be merely regarded with pitying scorn.

No. The change is coming and coming rapidly with the spirit of the age, and cannot be hastened in its inevitable course; and this change will be thorough, for it will only encounter the ineffectual opposition of a quite infantile dishonesty which has never seriously tried to keep secret the practices which its vanity considered as so much evidence of its own admirable cleverness.

Do you think the milk-can inspector did not delight in telling that he had never seen a standard measure? Of course he did; and a Municipal Intendente of a small country town gets just as much pleasure from the knowledge that, while ten men appear on his Municipality’s monthly wage-sheets as road-menders, there are in fact only two and the remaining eight receipts are signed, for a consideration, per signature, by independent persons. A proceeding which, of course, is perfectly well known to and indeed accepted as immemorial custom by the general public. In these cases no one ever gets caught; because those chiefly concerned have always a pull in Provincial politics—otherwise they would never have found themselves occupying the positions they are in.

But, as the reader can see, all these are childish things; already vanishing and soon to be completely put away by the general and swift advance, moral as well as material, of the Republic.

CHAPTER VI
MONTEVIDEO AND BUENOS AIRES

Montevideo, the first discovered point of the River Plate countries, is also the first stopping-place for passenger boats from Europe; and if the traveller from thence be in no immediate hurry to reach Buenos Aires he might do much worse than spend, say a week, in the clean, cool, pleasant capital of La Republica de la Banda Oriental del Uruguay.

Leaving his baggage to be sent for later, he will walk, or take a convenient tram, from the harbour up the fairly steep incline of a narrow street and find himself at a corner of the ancient Plaza of the City; the Plaza with History represented on two of its sides, to his right and left respectively, by the Cathedral and the old Congress buildings. Facing him, he will see modernity embodied in the palatial Club Uruguayo, while immediately on his left hand, at his back, is a little front door and staircase leading to the comfortable and hospitable English club.

The middle of the square is occupied by fine subtropical and other plants surrounding a band-stand from which very sweet music indeed proceeds at night in the summer-time; which, including Spring and Autumn, lasts for nine months of the year.

Afterwards, he will find his way to the Plaza Independencia on one side of which is Government House, and almost behind which is Montevideo’s Opera House, the Soler Theatre. Later he can visit Pocitos, Ramirez and other delightful, white-sanded bathing beaches, with which Montevideo abounds; for this city on a hill occupies a small peninsula which juts out just where the estuary of the River merges into the Atlantic Ocean.

All the streets leading from three sides of the old Plaza go downhill to the sea; and up one parallel set or another of them comes a fresh breeze at all times of the day and night and at all seasons of the year. One seldom or never suffers in Montevideo from the stifling oppression sometimes so painful in the dog-days of Buenos Aires.

With so many natural advantages, it can be readily understood that Montevideo has an ambition and that that ambition should be to become the seaside resort of South America.

Towards the realization of this desire the Government and the Municipality spare no expense at all commensurate with their means. Fine broad motor drives and promenades run, or are being constructed to run, all round the three water-bound sides which, by the test of school geographies, indicate a true peninsula.

Gaily striped bathing tents can be hired by the hour, day, week or season on what have just been said to be delightful soft, warm, sandy beaches. To come out of the water and roll oneself dry in this fine clean sand is an experience not to be missed and certainly to be remembered, apart from its proclaimed virtues as a sovereign cure for rheumatism.

That malady must, however, surely be an imported article; one does not naturally associate it with the bright dry climate of Montevideo.

Municipal bands, good operatic and dramatic companies are added lures for holiday-makers of the wealthier class from neighbouring Republics; while Montevideo sustains the ancient custom of keeping carnival, masked and with illuminations, flower-throwing and costumed corsos, in a fashion which entirely throws into the shade the now moribund carnival of Buenos Aires.

THE PLAZA LIBERTAD, MONTEVIDEO

At Montevideo, all is done to please and nothing to annoy, so that the throwing of water which was a leading feature of the old-time carnival is now strictly prohibited by authority enforced by the police; as is also the case in Buenos Aires.

Thousands of people cross each year from Buenos Aires for the Montevideo carnival, the whole available fleet of the company which runs luxurious boats between the two cities are pressed into the service of this occasion and become floating hotels; the normal hotel accommodation of Montevideo being insufficient to meet such an influx of visitors during these few days.

By the way, the origin of this fine steamboat service is an interesting example of the progress made by the two countries and the fortunes which have been amassed in them during existing lifetimes.

Before the building of the present dock system of Buenos Aires, one of the boatmen who used to land and embark passengers from or on the ocean-going ships was a man named Nicolas Mihanovich; evidently a very level-headed and at that time at least, a very frugal and saving person indeed.

With his row-boat he gained sufficient to enable him to purchase a sailing vessel which he used for regular traffic to and fro across the broad mouth of the River Plate. So, his enterprise grew; and only a very few years ago he turned his own private company into a public one with larger aims, in which latter company he nevertheless retains a very large interest. The one-time boatman is now a multi-millionaire. The present service leaves Buenos Aires, or Montevideo as the case may be, at about ten o’clock each evening and lands its passengers, after a good sleep in comfortable beds, on the other side at about seven o’clock the following morning.

Many are the true tales of fortunes amassed, sometimes one may almost say won, in Argentina, especially, within living memory.

Señor Santamarina, now deceased, left on his huge estate at Tandíl, one of his many properties, the original two-wheeled high cart which was his only fortune when he commenced life as what in other countries would be called a transport rider. This cart is, or till recently was, preserved in a glass house erected specially by him to house and exhibit it to all visitors to the estancia.

Another history is that of a millionaire family whose immediate ancestor certainly won fortune by an astuteness which may or may not be considered commendable.

He rented a large—large even for the Argentina of those roomy days—tract of land from a man who foresaw wealth in tree-planting. The latter was right; but his personal calculations did not, as will be seen, turn out as he had planned. He made it a condition that not less than a certain number of trees should be planted on the land within the period of the lease, and that for every tree above that number planted he should, on the termination of the lease, pay the sum of $1 to the outgoing tenant.

The wily lessee immediately set to work to plant trees as fast as ever he could, and at the expiration of his lease had millions of them, over and above the stipulated number, to show for his pains. The unfortunate lessor could not pay so many million dollars, and to end the affair was glad to let his former lessee have full freehold possession of the land and so call quits.

That land, still in the possession of the original lessee’s family, is worth a huge fortune to-day, and its produce represents a very large income indeed—forestry apart.

And now, as these stories have taken us to Argentina, the reader may as well prepare to follow them by embarking on one of the “Mihanovich” boats; as they still are and probably always will be called, in spite of the longer name of the new company, and find himself in Buenos Aires next morning.

By leaving his baggage for further consideration, as he did at Montevideo, he can go on foot in about five minutes from the landing-place across the gardens of the Paseo de Julio, which name is a first reminiscence of the birth of the Republic, round one or the other side of the “Casa Rosada” or pink-coloured Government House, and find himself immediately in the Plaza Victoria with on his right the Stock Exchange lying between the Calles 25 de Mayo and San Martin—further reminiscences of the wars of Liberty. Keeping his back towards the Casa Rosada, he will look straight up the broad Avenida de Mayo with the historic old Cabildo or Town Hall on the left corner of the commencement of the avenue and the fine new Municipality opposite.

At the far end of the avenue rises the splendid edifice of the new Congress Building, the “Palace of Gold” as it is called in quasi-humorous reference to its costliness. This is, however, not a new joke. Formerly it was applied to the Casa Rosada, now become a comparatively humble edifice. Besides, if an Argentine calls one’s attention to the scandalous cost of a public monument or building, it does not necessarily mean that he is really so very angry about it. On the contrary, it may well be that he is proud of belonging to a Nation which can bravely bear such expenditure.

Under the Avenida de Mayo is the “tube” which runs from the Once station (which is situate on the western side of the town and is the terminus of the Buenos Aires Western Railway) to the Docks. The Once marks the point of departure of the first six miles of Railway built on the River Plate.

The new-comer will at once notice that the City of Buenos Aires is laid out on the chessboard pattern with its streets running North and South and East and West, a variation of the pattern being now introduced by the new diagonal avenues converging towards the Plaza Victoria, in course of construction.

Along almost every street, except Calle Florida, the Avenida de Mayo, and the diagonal avenues, runs a tramline on which the cars all go in one direction in one street and in the contrary direction in the next and so on. Ten cents is the fare for a single journey anywhere within the length or breadth of the Federal Capital, but one cannot take tickets entitling one to any change of car; and for that one must buy another ten cents ticket.

This matter of change of car may have been overlooked by the Municipality when the concession was granted to the Anglo-Argentine Tramways Company, of which concession the universal 10 cent fare was a sine qua non condition; perhaps, on the other hand, the Company stuck out on that point. Anyhow, if one wishes to get full value for his 10 cents on a Buenos Aires tramline he must stick to the car in which he has begun his ride. By doing so, he can often take a long round trip and come back to his point of departure. This observation also applies to the Tramways in Montevideo, but there, with due knowledge and careful selection, one can practically get all over the place, without changing; owing to the more erratic routes taken by the lines.

For a variety of reasons, the Buenos Aires Tramway system is considered by authorities on such matters to be the best in the world. It is mostly in the hands of the Anglo-Argentine Tramways Company.

Another company is the Lacroze, a private company largely interested also in the Buenos Aires Central Railway. Its trams run through the Capital and to the Western suburban districts.

A third company runs trams out of the Capital to the Southern Suburban districts.

It may here be said that a good supply of taxi-cabs is to be found both in Montevideo and Buenos Aires.

One advantage, suggested by the mention of taxi-cabs, of visiting Montevideo before Buenos Aires, is that that way one feels richer after the journey between the two than one would if the itinerary had been reversed.

THE AVENIDA DE MAYO, BUENOS AIRES

Living is not cheap in Buenos Aires, but its cost is a relief after a sojourn in the Uruguayan Capital; though expense there is again as nothing if one has experienced that of Rio de Janeiro, the dearest place, probably, in the whole world, and the one in which, scenery apart, one gets as little satisfaction for one’s money as anywhere.

In Montevideo one has, it is true, plenty of satisfaction of a quiet, pleasant kind, but those (actually, although founded on a firm gold basis) paper dollars—only four of them and 70 cents worth of mixed change for a British Sovereign—melt quickly into inappreciable small silver and nickel; none of which seems to be worth much, though a 50-cent bit is really worth more than a British florin. For exchange purposes that is; in its native land its purchasing power is strikingly small. After Montevideo, there is some satisfaction about the feel of the bundle of Argentine paper dollars one gets for one’s Uruguayan money. And in Buenos Aires several quite useful things can be got for $1, National (paper) money. Although the purchasing power of this last (its exchange value is 1s. 8¾d.) is not that of one shilling in England.

In neither country does one often see an actual gold coin, in Argentina practically never in ordinary everyday life; most of the gold against which the current paper is issued going, as will be seen in the Chapter on Finance and Commerce, into the “Conversion” strong rooms and staying there.

The passion for amusement must indeed be overpowering in anyone who is not satisfied with what Buenos Aires provides of all kinds in that regard. Two Opera Houses, the older one, stately and comfortable in its interior arrangements, and the new Municipal Opera House, the Colon Theatre, gorgeous in velvet and marble; and powdered, gold-mace bearing lackeys to bow one in at its wide portals.

Great is the rivalry between these two houses to secure the best stars and companies; and between them they certainly get the best that Europe can provide. In some cases they have anticipated Europe, notably in the instances of Caruso and Maria Gay, both of whom appeared in Buenos Aires before Europe had even heard of them. One feature is common to the policy of both Opera Houses, viz., a scale of charges for admission so high that it is impossible for anyone who wishes to be considered somebody not to have his or her box at one or both of them for the season.

After the Opera House comes, in degree of prestige, perhaps, the Odeon Theatre; most frequently devoted to the representation of classic or serious drama. After it come many theatres; the finest among them being the Coliseo in which good companies, chiefly Italian, give first-rate performances of every kind from Grand Guignol to Light Opera. After these, again, come the purely Argentine Theatres; in which drama and comedy faithfully reflecting the true native life are performed.

Such performances should not be missed (as they too often are because they are not fashionable in a country where fashion’s favour is almost exclusively bestowed on imported wares) by anyone having sufficient Argentine Spanish to appreciate the purport and point of their dialogue; which, in true Argentine fashion, includes a liberal use of words and phrases capable of double meanings.

Brilliantly lighted, sumptuously panelled and upholstered cafés with tables spreading over the pavement outside them, tend to keep life in Buenos Aires awake till the wee sma’ hours begin to grow large.

“See Naples and die” runs the Neapolitan saying. “See Buenos Aires and stop there as long as you can” is likely to prove acceptable advice to anyone with a taste for easy gaiety and with a disposition for not doing to-day anything of an irksome or disagreeable nature which can possibly be put off till the morrow. Much native encouragement will be afforded him to postpone it till the Greek Kalends; and then to change his mind about doing it at all.

THE CATHEDRAL AND PLAZA VICTORIA, BUENOS AIRES

Till the morrow’s sun shines, that is. Then he will see the City, which overnight he may have thought wholly absorbed by pleasure-seeking, transformed into a quick-moving, alert commercial centre. Surely the Argentine when in Buenos Aires burns his candle at both ends. The well-to-do have, however, their Estancias on which to vary town life with mentally restful, if often physically laborious, days spent in superintending their agricultural interests.

Fine-looking new buildings are ever springing up in Buenos Aires with such surprising suddenness and rapidity as to render any description of the chief edifices of that city out of date almost before it can get into print. Even the palatial home of the Jockey Club, renowned as the most splendidly luxurious Club House in the world, is soon to be abandoned by its members for another more gorgeously wonderful still.

One leaves the City for a few weeks in the Camp wondering what the former will look like on one’s return.

That is one did, until very recently. Just now, the War has called a temporary halt in the commencement of many projected building operations.

One cannot, however, leave Buenos Aires without mention of the beautiful, park-like suburb of Palermo; with the broad Avenida de Alvear leading from the northern part of the City to it. It may here be observed that fashion has not travelled westward in Buenos Aires; the Northern parts of the City being the most fashionable and adorned with the most palatial new dwellings.

A wide palm-bordered avenue leads to others winding round grassy spaces in which backwaters of the Tigre River glint under overhanging trees; amid all of which is a great restaurant, after the fashion of those in the Parisian Bois de Boulogne.

That restaurant is, to the author’s mind, the one great tawdry blot on the picture; but it is only fair to add that every afternoon and evening, during a long season, it is crowded with gaily dressed people who all seem happy and vociferously contented with the refreshments and music it provides.

The Palermo Avenue is the fashionable drive, the Corso of the Élite of Buenos Aires Society; and also of others desirous of attracting attention to their equipages and themselves. Everyone the aspirant to social distinction ought—and ought not—to know is to be seen at Palermo on a fine late afternoon or evening in Spring. In Summer most of them are, naturally, at Mar-del-Plata.

Adjoining the Park is the Palermo race-course, over which the Jockey Club rules absolute. It should be added that the Buenos Aires Jockey Club is not only an association of racing men, but is in reality the hub of social intercourse in Buenos Aires.

Its large and small dining-rooms are available to members, and even to very distinguished strangers, for private dinners; which are exquisitely cooked and served by the numerous and highly expert staff of the Club.

In fact the Jockey Club is a very influential body indeed; quite apart from racing matters.

There can be no manner of doubt that the gambling element in racing is far too popular in Buenos Aires. There is a race meeting on every day in the week, Sundays, of course, included, during a season which lasts nearly all the year round. And these meetings are thronged by youths and other people who most certainly should be, and would much better be, at work.

Whatever may be thought of the system of weekly National Lotteries (these are at least carried on with unimpeachable fairness and 10% of the amounts subscribed to them, in payment for tickets, goes, after paying working expenses, printing, etc., to charity) the totalizer appeals far too sympathetically to the Latin-American natural love of gambling; and that love, as always in a new country where so many fortunes seem to have had their origin in luck, has developed dangerously on the right bank of the River Plate.

Close also to Palermo Park is the scene of the annual Agricultural and Live Stock Show; now a world-renowned Exhibition of as fine cattle and sheep as can be seen anywhere. Horses and Poultry also are splendidly represented at this show; which is perhaps the greatest event in the Argentine Calendar.

Further out from the city, past and beyond Palermo, is Hurlingham; an ever-enlarging group of English red-brick villas inhabited for the most part by English people. These villas surround the ample grounds of the Hurlingham Club, where polo and riding and driving competitions, etc., follow the lines of its English prototype. The Club house is comfortable, the food good, and a huge swimming bath is among its many undoubted attractions. It also has a drag hunt.

Further out again are beautiful reaches of the Tigre River, famous for boating; and on which an annual regatta, the Henley of South America, is held.

The Avenida de Alvear, above referred to, runs through the most fashionable residential quarter of Buenos Aires, a quarter filled with veritable huge palaces which with their gardens surround the Recoleta, the fashionable cemetery. A strange city of the dead in which the coffins are seen on shelves contained in small plate-glass fronted temples, so that all may view the last outward casings of generations.

On “The Day of the Dead” (All Saints’ Day) the Recoleta is a blaze of beautiful wreaths and floral tributes; afterwards too often replaced, alas, by ugly contrivances in porcelain or, worse still, enamelled iron.

Returning to Buenos Aires proper one must not, cannot, forget Calle Florida, “The Bond Street of the South.” So called because in it are situate most of the finest shops in South America for the sale of what are sometimes officially described as articles of luxury; wearing apparel of the best and costliest, for both sexes, jewellery, stationery, etc. It is, in fact, to Buenos Aires all Bond Street once was, and old Bond Street to some extent still is, to London.

Needless, almost, to say, Florida deals exclusively in imported goods and a very great majority of its shopkeepers are foreigners; among whom the purveyors of “Modes,” “Robes” and “Lingerie” are, naturally, mostly French.

No vehicular traffic whatever is now allowed in Calle Florida between certain hours of the afternoon; in order not to incommode the throngs of fashionable shoppers with whom it is usually crowded. It is the only street in which Argentine ladies of high degree are to be seen on foot. In bygone and less crowded times it was the scene of the afternoon Corso; when play was made with fans and gallants ogled from the edges of the pavement.

There is at present still a lack of Hotel accommodation suitable for Europeans of moderate means. There are great numbers of Hotels in Buenos Aires, but the good ones are very expensive while the cheaper ones are not very good. That is to say, one must have got accustomed to the South American haphazard fashion of service and general arrangements before being able to regard the latter as in any way comfortable. Montevideo is still worse off; having few Hotels which can be regarded as good (though there are one or two), while prices, as in everything else, run higher than in Buenos Aires.

A word must be said in defence of the latter City against a prevailing impression, created, goodness knows how, of its intense immorality. This charge simply is not true. Buenos Aires is no more immoral than and certainly not as vicious as are most European Capitals.

True, it is not in South American human nature to be puritanical but the lower classes in Argentina and Uruguay are but non-moral, to use a somewhat fashionable term, with the non-morality of grown-up children, which they are. They have not the faintest idea of the vice which abounds in the great cities of the Northern Hemisphere. Montevideo is more staid than cosmopolitan Buenos Aires; even at Carnival time the former City seems to take its merrymaking seriously. Any real vice which can be found in either Capital is an imported article.

If among the lower classes of both countries the whole advantages of the marriage ceremony seem not to be duly appreciated, this is due, in the vast majority of cases, to motives of economy. A religious marriage service is a costly item in the equipment of a young couple, and a purely civil ceremony is even less favourably looked on by neighbours than a postponement of any ceremony at all. Later, such couples usually do marry with due pomp and circumstance, including the invitation of all and sundry to the humble wedding feast. After that, all is in order in the case of the death of the husband and father; for marriage legitimatizes previously born children. Indeed, the writer was once present at a fiesta in a rural district, not forty minutes’ run by train from the City of Buenos Aires, organized to honour the occasion of the visit of a Priest who in a very short space of time married the parents and christened a whole batch of their children.

An old custom still chiefly prevailing among the humbler classes, both urban and rural, is one which may be called the “waking” of the dead. The news of a bereavement spreads quickly among neighbours; who do not wait to be invited but arrive, in groups organized extemporaneously by themselves, at the house of mourning. There, one of such groups succeeds another, and so on throughout the night after a death; sitting silently and only moving to partake of the necessary refreshment provided in view of their sure coming.

As in most other countries where modernity has not yet suppressed all local colour with its neutral tints, the lower classes in both Argentina and Uruguay are much the most interesting. The free-and-easy Bohemian sort of life in a conventillo[16] is curious. In each of its many rooms lives a family, while the court is common to all for cooking (a charcoal brazier usually stands at the side of each door), washing of clothes and, last but not least, the discussion of mate and gossip. All sorts of people dwell in a single conventillo, artisans, hawkers, washerwomen, milliners, factory hands, poor employees, etc. etc., and all group themselves in the common courtyard of an evening when work is done, frequently to the music of a guitar.

The upper classes, on the other hand, strive chiefly to reflect the latest moods of European fashion in general and of that of Paris in particular—even, since the War, to the extent of making retrenchment in living expenses the fashion. A fashion which, if it last, will not be the least of the good which has come to Argentina from the European upheaval which has forced the River Plate countries to learn to rely on their own resources and individual efforts. Gone, already, are the battalions of motor-cars of very latest pattern with which every wealthy Argentine family has hitherto thought it necessary to its dignity to be provided—one each for father, mother and each son and daughter—economy is now “De Moda” and ostentation therefore become old-fashioned and bad taste. An immense change to have taken place, as it did, in the course of only a few months.

Montevideo had no need of such a volte face of habit. Uruguayans never developed the love of display so characteristic of Argentine aristocracy.

With its some 1½ million inhabitants, Buenos Aires has the largest population of any Capital City in America. Montevideo, with some 400,000 inhabitants, surpasses Washington in this respect.

CHAPTER VII
FINANCE AND COMMERCE

Owing to their dependence on the Northern Hemisphere for the Capital necessary for the continuance of their development, the River Plate countries, and South American countries generally, are as a barometer, and an extremely sensitive one, in regard to the conditions of the Money markets of the Older World.

Thus already in 1913, the fear of Balkan complications in both Argentina and Uruguay was represented by a general fall in what previously may have been somewhat inflated, or at least too anticipatory, land values.

This fall, coupled with and increased by relatively bad harvests, marked the commencement of rather bad times in both Republics. In this regard it may be well to say that comparatively bad times come easily and swiftly on a country like Argentina, the prosperity of which depends very largely indeed on its cereal production and in which landowners and agriculturists from the largest Estanciero to the smallest Chacrero have long been encouraged by Nature to regard each coming year as inevitably more prosperous than its predecessor. The result of this optimism, usually justified by the event, is that when any set-back, caused, say, by late frosts or early rains, such as farmers in less favoured lands would take as an ordinary risk of their occupation, does occur, the streets of Buenos Aires are immediately filled with men with long faces running to the Banks and anxiously discussing the ruin which, apparently, seems to them to be staring them in the face, notwithstanding that most of them must often have been through similar “crises” before.

One need only go “on ’Change” to be almost convinced that the whole vaunted prosperity of the Republic is tumbling about its ears. Even newspapers, which, by this time at least, ought to know better, join in the panic cry.

At such times people possessed of Capital and common sense make good investments; the Banks tide everyone else over quite comfortably enough not to interfere with the socially obligatory summer gathering at Mar-del-Plata; the following harvest is a bumper; and all is well again in the best and sunniest of all possible Republics.

That is the usual course of happenings after inferior harvests but, as is easy to imagine, the present situation is as unique in South America as it is in all other parts of the world. On the River Plate, indeed, it was, if one may be permitted the expression, aggravated by anticipation consequent on the (almost miraculous for these countries) following of yet another rainy harvest-time.

On the top of all came August with its declarations of European War, the first result of which in the River Plate Republics was intimate realization of the extent to which they had been dependent on Europe since the commencement of their real commercial development.

They were thrown entirely on their own resources and ability with no chance of any immediate help from outside.

It is to the credit of both Republics that they rose to the situation. Seven days of Bank Holiday were at once proclaimed in Argentina; during which time the Ministry of Finance and other Government departments were loyally assisted by both native and foreign bankers and financiers to devise necessary measures.

In the result Laws were summarily passed by Congress to prevent all exportation of gold; outgoing ships might only take with them sufficient coal to last them till they reached the next port in South America (Argentina and Uruguay as yet produce no practically valuable coal, so that they are dependent on import for their stocks of this fuel), and provision was made that cereal exports should be limited to the surplus of such produce after the retention of a liberal allowance for home consumption until the next harvests.

Uruguay adopted similar protective measures.

So far so good, but the Argentine Banks, generally, were faced with the necessity for immediate decision under conditions which, unfortunately, are all too frequently recurrent in rapidly progressing countries. Many of the securities held by them were obviously not worth the value that they had been taken for, in consequence of the previous shrinkage of values above alluded to.

This was a momentous matter for consideration during the seven days’ Bank holiday.

In the result, all Banks adopted the policy of cutting losses even at the risk, amounting to extreme likelihood, of letting their weaker customers drown,[17] while mercy was only extended to those evidently strong enough to keep afloat throughout the crisis and its after effects.

This decision taken, and enforced on the reopening of the Banks, scarcely any credit establishment took any advantage of the Moratorium declared by the Government.

In Uruguay the situation proved easier on account of a comparative absence of the complication of securities based on inflated values. Here again the Uruguayan showed his superiority in the matter of cautiously prudent finance over his more enthusiastically volatile over-river cousin.

This observation notwithstanding, it is now clear that although a severe financial pinch is still felt in both countries, the Argentine and Uruguayan ships of State are both fully trimmed to enable them to ride over bad financial weather, the first shock of which was the most perilous to meet and needed the most prompt and intelligent handling.

In the result neither country will eventually be any worse for the moral effects of having suddenly been left to its own resources.

Meanwhile land, especially, perhaps, in Argentina, offers an opportunity to Capital such as, as has been said elsewhere in these pages, everyone for humanitarian reasons must hope will never occur again.

Given knowledge of just where and what to buy, large fortunes await those with courage and capital to purchase either town lots or agricultural and pastoral land in either Republic; in Argentina preferably for earlier realization.

Once peace is declared, and even before, it needs little imagination to perceive the wealth to be secured by the agricultural and live-stock produce on markets suddenly deprived of much of the usual output of sources of cereal supply as Russia and Canada, through withdrawal of labour for military purposes, and faced with an enormously increased demand for meat and grain caused by the necessary shortage of production over all War-infected areas.

In fact Argentina and Uruguay are likely soon to experience the truth of the proverb, “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good,” and they are among the very few countries of the world about the commercial conditions of which, after the war, it is pretty safe to prophesy in the direction of a prompt return, in an enhanced degree, to their normal course of ever-growing prosperity.

Always with the factor of population and consequent sufficiency of agricultural labour being reserved for consideration after the event. A large and very serious reservation which cannot safely be lost sight of by anyone desirous of land speculation in either of the two countries under discussion.

Let the reader pardon this recurrent insistence on this question of population, made in the hope that it may help to open the eyes of the Authorities concerned, especially Argentine, to the crying necessity in their country’s interests for practically workable inducements to true colonization, as distinguished from mere partial exploitation of necessitous wage-earners. And the eyes not only of the Authorities, but of everyone having a pecuniary interest of any sort in either Republic, so that their Congresses and landowners may be forced to consider the question in the liberal and enlightened spirit which alone can remove the greatest menace to their country’s economic progress.

If the two Governments and great landowners would only devote one-tenth part of the admirable ingenuity and energy with which they, and the Argentine especially, have very successfully combated locust invasions to the attraction of small-holding proprietary agriculturalists, the River Plate Territories would soon break into an irruption of statues of the originators of such measures which would outrival the vast quantity of those erected to the memories of Generals San Martin, Artígas and Urquíza. (One could travel far in Argentina without discovering a town which does not possess a statue of the first-named deliverer of his country. Uruguay has also many San Martin statues, but runs preferably, as is natural, to Urquíza and, lately, in consequence of the whitewashing efforts of modern historians, Artígas.)

In view of the actual situation, financial and commercial statistics relating to the ante-war era necessarily seem to savour mustily of the back-number. This savour is, however, more due to imagination than to actual fact, since such statistics are just as interesting as ever they were and really show the normal trend of things economic to be resumed and likely to be followed in even a more favourable course, as far at least as Export is concerned. As for the Import of manufactured goods an attempt to deal with some of the probabilities or possibilities of this question in its future aspects is made later in this chapter.