ARGENTINA AND URUGUAY
BEFORE THE WAR AND AFTER
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
A tale of the Pampa[1] tells how a River Plate farmer of bygone days, seeing his wife and child dead of pestilence and his pastures blackened by fire, fell into a magic slumber born of the lethargy of despair.
He was awakened, many years afterwards, by the scream of a railway engine at his boundary; to find his land fenced in, his flocks and herds improved beyond recognition, and maize and wheat waving where only coarse grass had been before.
This allegory is true.
It tells the whole story of the real development of the River Plate Territories, a development in which the descendant of the original settlers has but comparatively recently begun to take an active part.
He, the Patriarch of the soil, lived on his land while English capital and Italian labour opened up its treasures to the world. In the beginnings of Argentina as a nation, his property consisted of vast herds of long-horned, bony cattle, valuable only for their hides, which roamed the Pampa in savage freedom; untended, save for periodic slaughter and skinning and the yearly rounding up for the marking of the calves.
Later, came the acknowledgment between neighbours, living at vast distances from one another, of boundaries which indicated the huge areas over which each had grazing rights. Later still came the time when the more far-sighted of such men bought wire and, with quebracho posts, ringed in those areas as their own. The foreigner and his railway did the rest to build up the huge fortunes of the children and grandchildren of those far-sighted Patriarchs. For Patriarchs they were, Pastoral Kings surrounded by half-caste gauchos who lived in the familiar vassalage of the great mud-walled, grass-thatched house, and spoke in the familiar second person singular still in use among Argentines towards their servants; otherwise only employed between members of the same family or close friends. Until a very few years ago, these great Argentine families constituted Oligarchies which ruled almost absolutely each over one of the more distant Provinces, the people of which were the descendants of the vassals of their forefathers. The full power of these Provincial Oligarchies was only broken by the centralizing policy of President Dr. Figueroa Alcorta (1906 to 1910). The curtailing of their power was very necessary for the credit of National Finance and Justice, for that power was often exercised with a mediæval high-handedness unsuited to twentieth-century ideas.
The disintegration of the power of local Oligarchies, each of which completely dominated the Congress of its province, was one of the final but quite necessary steps towards putting the house of Argentina into perfect political and financial order; especially as Provincial Governors, hitherto always members of the Oligarchic families, were also almost invariably members of the National Senate. Add to these considerations the further one that the Provincial Courts had somehow or other gained a reputation for not meting out justice to political friend and foe alike, and that much complaint was heard about the difficulties encountered by some persons in even working the way of their cases up to the admirably impartial hearing of the Federal High Court of Appeal; since, for instance, it is difficult to appeal from a decision which has not been given, and which you seem to possess no means to obtain, even as against you.
All these inconveniences and scandals had long called imperatively for reform, but it was reserved for Dr. Figueroa Alcorta to discover the way to successfully bell these powerful provincial cats.