As for Uruguay, her chief reliance must be on the deep patriotism of her leading men and on their good sense to keep a peace which is the only true road to the general prosperity of a country the rich natural endowments of which cannot develop if men and horses are taken from the plough, as they constantly were in the past by one party or the other, to partake in the mutual destruction of civil war.
As is insisted on very often in these pages, the chief need of these new countries is population; an end most surely defeated by conditions which not only repelled all immigration but killed off a large proportion of the men already there. There is good reason to believe that all this and more is now fully appreciated by every responsible man in Uruguay; and, once convinced of the right course to be followed for the country’s good, there is not a Uruguayan who will not follow it with all the patriotic doggedness which formerly caused the lamentable continuance of civil war.
Both Argentine and Uruguayan financial policies and methods are now sound. Argentina is prosperous with great future increase of prosperity before her, and Uruguay is now well on the high road to similar prosperity and as brilliant a future. Both are at peace with one another and their neighbouring Republics; all of whom are much too busy with their own interests and too democratic in spirit to dream of aggressive war. Added to which only Uruguay and Paraguay are small enough to need ever to covet further territory.
Brazil does not: Argentina has more than once already in the past refused to take Uruguay into her Federation: Paraguay, except as a constant nuisance to herself and everyone near her, is, and will be for many years to come, a negligible quantity in South American politics. The Andine frontier now fixed between Chile and Argentine is never again likely to be disturbed by either. Uruguay may possibly cast longing eyes one day at the rich grazing lands of Southern Brazil; but she is more than unlikely ever to attempt to acquire these by force. Their annexation by her could only occur on the initiative of the inhabitants of those regions; who, unless Brazil is able in the future to keep her financial and fiscal house in better order than at present, might very conceivably prefer to be under the Government of Montevideo rather than that of Rio de Janeiro. Even then, the question of different languages would present a difficulty to the assimilation of the State of Rio Grande del Sul by its Southern neighbour.
One great step in the democratic progress of the Argentine Republic was made three years ago on the initiative of Dr. Roque Saenz Peña. This was the passing of a law which introduced the ballot and made the exercise of the franchise obligatory on a universal male suffrage of native-born Argentines and foreigners of two years’ residence.
It was a great reform made necessary by many considerations. The chief of which were the public indifference to all matters political which did not immediately concern Industry or Commerce and the profound discredit into which elections, parliamentary and municipal, had fallen as a consequence of that indifference; the whole effect of which was to leave the internal government of the country entirely in the hands of a mostly mercenary caste of professional politicians. This caste was habitually guilty of electoral corruption and malpractices which, in the absence of any interested public opinion, continued to work in a vicious circle by causing complete abstention from any exercise of the vote on the part of all citizens of the Republic except those forming the small gangs which were under the orders of the “Caudillo” or political manager of each district. These gangs went to the poll, at so much per head in cash and many illicit privileges, in order that there should be any voting at all to declare the due re-election of the men who wielded the political power in the National or Provincial Legislatures or in the Councils of the various Municipalities.
The substitution, under the new Law, of genuine for fictitious elections has also operated as another, and, probably, final blow struck at the Provincial Oligarchies, reference to which has been made in another chapter.
No one outside South America would really credit the depths of corrupt absurdity in which elections in Argentina were permitted to remain so late in these days of her general enlightenment and prosperity. That reform in this highly important respect was so long a-coming was due to individual preoccupation with their own affairs of the people of a country the material development of which was being accomplished with bewildering rapidity.
Men had no time to occupy themselves with such a tough, and rather dangerous, job as the dethronement of the professional politician; who, in the higher spheres of Provincial Government, usually belonged to one of the widely influential groups of the historically dominant native families. Public morality had sunk to a strangely low level in comparison with the ever-increasing commercial rectitude of the country, when the most startling tale of electoral fraud or administrative corruption would be received with only a shrug of the shoulders and an indulgent smile, as of wonder why the narrator was making so much ado about such a very ordinary occurrence.
The management of elections in the Federal Capital and in the Provinces differed only in method; the results were uniform triumphs for the party in power. In the Capital the authorities went to the trouble of collecting the certificates of citizenship (the deposit of which at the polling booths was the form of voting under the old system) of dead and absent men and sometimes of hiring others, and with filling in blank forms of these with fictitious names, in sufficient quantities to swamp any attempted voting by an opposition. In the Provinces, the elections were always stage-managed by the district commissary of Police. He led up the necessary gang of peon voters, to whom he served out a dinner of carne con cuero, wine and a $5 bill each, to celebrate the occasion and to indemnify them for any trouble they might have been put to by their attendance. Furthermore, the faithful electors knew that in the case of their getting into any scrape in the future which might otherwise cause trouble between themselves and the police, they would stand every possible chance of dismissal with a friendly caution; while were the case one of assaulting an enemy that enemy would stand a better chance of imprisonment than they. These are not traveller’s tales, but facts well known to every resident in Argentina and, I suspect, similar facts are within the experience of everyone living in one or other of most of the Latin American Republics. So that the quantity of ink spilt in the European papers over the accusations brought against ex-President Huerta, to the effect that he had improperly influenced the late Mexican Presidential Election, reads comically to most South Americans.