[27] The Nacion publishes a Library of translations of the best works in French (fifty per cent. of the whole), English, Russian, German, Italian, to say nothing of Spanish and Argentine works in the original.
[28] I regret to say that Brazil is backward in this respect. Let us hope she will not let Russia get ahead of her!
[CHAPTER VIII]
PAMPAS LIFE
Every capital is a world in itself—a world in which national and foreign elements blend; but to understand the life of a nation one must go out into the country. A vast territory, ten times the size of France, extending from Patagonia to Paraguay and Bolivia, will naturally offer the greatest diversity of soil and climate, representing differing conditions of labour as well as of customs and sometimes of morals. Our ancient Europe can in the same way show ethnical groups with sufficiently marked features (such as in our French provinces) which a long history has not been able to destroy or even to modify.
It is quite another matter when, on a continent with no history at all, you get men of every origin spread over it, brought thither by a community of interest and in the hope of cultivating the soil by their labour. I have already said what racial characteristics subsist. The colonist will, of course, at first do all he can to remain what the land of his birth has made him; the first evidence of this is his tendency to fall into groups and form national colonies. But the land of his adoption will in time surely force upon him the inevitable conditions of a new mode of life, the very necessity of adapting himself to changed conditions making of him a new creature, to be later definitely moulded by success.
The Pampas are not the Argentine. They form, however, so predominant a part that they have shaped the man and the race by imposing on them their organisation of agricultural labour and the development of their natural resources. Whilst manufactures are still in a rudimentary state and are likely to remain so for a long time to come owing to the lack of coal, the Pampas from the Andes to the ocean offer an immense plain of the same alluvial soil from end to end, ready to respond in the same degree to the same effort of stock-raising or agriculture. An identical stretch of unbroken ground, with identical surface, identical pools of subterranean water, no special features to call for other than the unchanging life of the Campo.
Naturally, the first experiments were made in the most rudimentary fashion on the half-wild herds of cattle that could not be improved unless the European market were thrown open. As soon as this outlet was assured the whole effort of skill and money was directed towards the improvement of stock, and the progress made in a few years of work far exceeded the brightest hopes of those early days. And as at the same time a powerful impetus was given to wheat-growing, the Pampas from one end to the other of their vast extent immediately took on a dual aspect: cattle farms (herds grazing on natural or artificial pastures), and acres of grain (wheat, oats, maize, and flax)—this is the only picture that the Pampas offer or ever can offer to the traveller. The system of cattle-breeding, primitive in the extreme at a distance from railroads, improves in proportion as the line draws nearer; wherever the iron road passes there is an immediate development of land under cultivation.