That is the only question, and it is one which they alone can, and soon, we hope, must answer; one way or the other. If they do not want new business or wish that old business should come back to them, there is no more to be said. And no more grumbling to be indulged in about the proportionate falling back of British trade in South America.
It may be objected that the United States, the full manufacturing activities of which remain unimpaired by the withdrawal of labour for military purposes and the output of which is not absorbed to so great an extent as it is with us for war material, have for that reason already a great start of Great Britain in all foreign markets. To this objection I would reply that the time for the struggle for the Argentine and Uruguayan markets is hardly yet; because climatic accident still recently produced results which, coupled with the falling on them of the shadow of the Great Terror, suspended their purchasing power. Two very lean years of cereal production due to weather, the occurrence of two consecutive seasons of which is without parallel in these countries’ history, were followed by another perilously rainy harvest time complicated by shortage of harvest labour due to war risks, and imagined risks, of the transport of the usual army of Italian harvesters who (like the Golondrinas—swallows—after which they are nicknamed in South America) annually go to Argentina and Uruguay[19] and return to Italy after the harvest has been got in. These causes temporarily paralysed Argentine and Uruguayan commercial activity by, as has been said, suspending the purchasing powers of both.
But with the productive recovery[20] of these countries with their enormous natural endowments and producing as they do all the foodstuffs that the populations of poor war-trampled Europe need most, what a call for all kinds of agricultural machinery will come from them in return for their meat and cereals and in order that more and more land may be laid under contribution for the production of these primarily necessary supplies! Failing other labour sources, an augmented stream of Italian “swallow” and permanent emigration will set out for the River Plate, wealth will develop on both shores of that river, and with wealth the demand for all the manufactured things to the desire for which wealth gives rise. Hardware, cutlery, cotton and woollen cloths, electrical appliances and material; the host of things which Britain makes and Germany once sold will come into increasing demand in South America with the spring of the new era on which the whole civilized world will enter when the blackness of devastation shall have passed and the evil which created it be rendered powerless for further ruinous crime.
Would that the millions of able-bodied men murdered by this war could have been utilized instead as an agricultural expeditionary force on the shores of the River Plate! They and their children and the world would have been the richer for their labour carried out under conditions as happy as their present, and for many (alas!) past, task is terrible. They would have supplied that in which Argentina and Uruguay are lacking, namely, the human element, for the development of their natural resources. Countries in which vast areas of land yet await the plough for cereal cultivation and the improvement of their natural rough pasturage and other vast areas of rich alluvial soil need only irrigation to turn them into a terrestrial paradise.
Capital never is and never will be wanting for good investment, but the fund of human labour cannot be drawn upon by a mere signature. And the daily waste of thousands of lives for the full activity of which there is ample room and urgent need on behalf of the millions remaining is, sentiment apart and from a commercial point of view alone, the saddest thing in War.
Europe needs bread and meat not only to fulfil her normal needs but also to replace her own interrupted production of these prime necessities of life. The River Plate countries can produce both in practically unlimited quantities; provided only that they can obtain the necessary labour a ghastly wastage of which is going on daily in Europe, some parts of which are consequently threatened with famine.
Surely if civilization be anything but a mere theoretic expression there will never be another great war!
With this pious hope we may pass to a more concrete subject, namely, commercial credit on both sides of the River Plate.
As has been indicated in another chapter, Uruguay enjoys a more literally creditable reputation than her bigger sister. The causes of this have also been already dealt with.
In practice one can but advise anyone approached by firms in either country to do what it may be taken that any ordinarily prudent man of business would do, viz. to make due enquiry as to his proposed new customer. His means of doing this are really even better than if the latter were established in London or New York, since the commercial community in either Argentina or Uruguay is comparatively small and consequently, to use a current phrase, almost everyone there knows everyone else and a good deal about him and his business.