The colonists brought with them the traditions and manners of the disciplined races, a moral organisation which was the work of centuries of common life. People of rural extraction, when they reached America, upheld the established interests, the government, the law, and the peace; they worked, fought, and laid up treasure. Moreover, only the most enterprising of men emigrated, and they transmitted to the new democracies an element of vitality they had not before known. As early as the second generation the descendants of the foreign colonists were already Argentines, Brazilians, or Peruvians; their patriotism was as ardent and devoted and exclusive as that of their fathers. They completely adopted the local manners. They had been transformed by the action of the American environment.
Basques or Italians have already transformed the Argentine. They arrive as artisans, or labourers, or clerks and traders; they form agricultural colonies and become landowners. They soon break their fetters; their sons become merchants, financial agents, or wealthy plutocrats. Of 1,000 inhabitants there are 128 Italians and only 99 Argentines who own land. These Latins are prolific; in 1904 1,000 Argentine women gave life to 80 infants; 1,000 Spanish women to 123, and 1,000 Italian women to 175.[[3]] These immigrants thus increase the national wealth and people the desert.[[4]] Moreover, their descendants figure in politics and letters. Let us mention only a few Argentine names remarkable on one count or another: Groussac, Magnasco, Becher, Bunge, Ingegnieros, Chiappori, Banchs, and Gerchunoff.
[[1]] The Indianista Society in Mexico and the Pro Indigena in Peru were founded for the protection and rehabilitation of the Indians.
[[2]] The Bolivian sociologist, A. Argüedas, writes of the Aymara Indians: "They are hard, rancorous, egotistic, and cruel. The Indian herdsmen have no ambition other than to increase the number of the heads of cattle which they pasture."
[[3]] V. Gonnard, L'Emigration européenne au XIXe siècle, Paris, 1906, p. 220 et seq.
[[4]] To understand the significance of immigration, it is enough to remark that there are in Mexico 7 inhabitants per square kilometre, in Brazil 1.7, in the Argentine 1.6, while there are 72 in France, 105 in Germany, no in Italy, 120 in England, and 248 in Belgium.