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.