This lack of increase in the rural population is not due to Argentina being a country unknown to the appropriate class of people. There are thousands of Italian peasants who go there regularly every year as harvesters, and who return to their own country as soon as the crops are gathered in. They know Argentina and the natural richness of her resources as well as do born Argentines, but they also know that they cannot get land. Only wages; the purchasing power of which is so much greater in Italy that there they can live on them in semi-idleness for the remainder of the year, whereas they would attain no greater pecuniary advantage by remaining and working permanently in Argentina, where the cost of living is relatively very great. So they remain “swallows” as they are called, coming and going with the beginning and close of the harvest season.
If Argentina wants settlers, and she does need them badly, she must make up her mind to give them land.
And she must also make a thorough overhaul of the titles to all lands as yet not under cultivation. Because many of such lands are merely traps for the unwary who may be induced to occupy and develop them only to find himself, after he has ploughed and planted, called upon to pay rent to some resident in Buenos Aires or some other town whose property they turn out to be, under some long-forgotten Government grant, and who has not only never visited them, but has also practically lain in wait for some innocent settler to develop them under the impression that they were his own. Cases of this kind have happened over and over again; and the deluded settler, who may have even purchased the land in question at a public auction or have obtained it from some self-styled colonizing Company, finds himself with nothing but a vista of wearisome and costly litigation before he can hope to grasp a usually very elusive remedy for his wrong. Generally, he gives the whole thing up in despair and becomes a tenant of the land on which he has already spent all his small capital. These things are also known to the Italian harvester, and the knowledge of them acts as a further deterrent to his becoming a settler.
As Argentina is blessed with almost the best possible laws about everything sublunary, she has, naturally, first-rate colonization regulations. Only these are confined to her statute books and sundry pamphlets which lie in dust-covered heaps in the Ministry of Agriculture. But there is as yet no real working machinery for the carrying out in practice of all these excellent embodiments of the results of experience of farming colonization all the world over. There are no officials whose exclusive duty it is to attend to the multiple exigencies of true colonization, and none capable of such work if they were suddenly called upon to do it, for lack of the necessary experience.
An intending colonist may therefore land in Buenos Aires with a small but sufficient amount of capital for a reasonable start in, say, Australia or Canada, and may wander about that city till, if he be foolish enough, his money is all spent without ever having found any Government office or official willing or in a position to put him into possession of the land he wants.
He usually, after a few weeks of fruitless search, goes back to Australia or New Zealand or wherever else he may have come from, disgusted with Argentina and her ways; of which he, on getting back, gives an account which effectually damps off any existing enthusiasm in his neighbourhood for emigration to the River Plate for a long while to come.
The Argentine Government spends plenty of money in advertisement, and true advertisement, of the fertility and marvellous climates of a Republic which extends over 35 degrees of latitude, but neglects to make provision for those who may desire to respond actively to its propaganda. This neglect is due, really, to an inherent incapacity for detail, part of the Argentine nature which, therefore, is terribly prone to get tired half-way through a job. In South America, generally, a wonderful amount of enthusiasm is always available for the planning of new schemes. The declamatory exposition of their sovereign virtues and glory amid the acclamations of sympathetic Board or Committee meetings is a grateful task; as is that of the dissemination of these discourses in pamphlet form, in which also the full list of the names of the originators and supporters of the scheme appears. It is, however, when practice shows unworkable flaws in splendid theories, when the drudgery of adapting high-flown principles to plain everyday drab facts must take the place of inaugural banquets and florid speeches, that Argentine enthusiasm has a regrettable way of petering out. Soon, something newer and of a different kind is started by someone else. The meetings and banquets are held in its honour by other groups and the former scheme passes to a shadowy land, the way to which is always kept paved with a plenitude of good intentions.
Capital will always be forthcoming for profitable enterprise; as will Labour if that enterprise be made profitable to the worker—a good and useful class of whom can only be induced to emigrate by the prospect of permanent betterment of the conditions of life. The natural ambition of every man is to work for himself, to be the master of the results of his own efforts and to possess those results as a provision for his old age and his children. This a new country or colony must offer if it would obtain the high level of intelligent labour which it needs for its fullest and best development.
On the other hand no one need starve or go hungry for long in any of the countries of the River Plate; unless he elects to be and to remain a persistent loafer in one of the large towns. Even then he has only to ask and he will receive food, at almost any restaurant or private house. If he refuse to beg or to leave town, he may suffer hunger and thirst, otherwise he cannot. To begin with he can always get a job at one thing or another from any of the numerous private agencies which have standing orders for labour, and even schoolmasters, for the “Camp,” and which are as avid of candidates for such jobs as any crimp of the old days was for men of any kind to sling aboard a ship.
Once in the camp any man who has had the grit to go there is sure of finding someone wanting some kind of work which he can do in some sort of fashion. There he will recover such of his normal health and strength as he may have lost as a city unemployed, and will soon shake into a capacity for, and get, something better to do than his first job.[3]