ENTRANCE TO THE SUMMIT TUNNEL THROUGH THE ANDES (CHILEAN SIDE)
With all this, if Mendoza has drawn somewhat on the future to foot the bill of its many embellishments, it has done no more than many other cities of the still new South American countries, and with more immediate prospect of justification for its expenditure than have several others. What Mendoza has got to do now is to create an export trade for its wines, on the condition precedent that it manufacture wines that will keep and will improve with keeping. Otherwise with increased irrigation it may run the risk of over-production, since the home consumption is as yet a limited one. The increase of the population of the River Plate countries is, as we have seen, still slow, and outside the towns very little wine is drunk by the majority of the people except on special and rare occasions; mate sufficing for their habits and needs.
Mendoza sends large quantities of table-grapes and other fruit to Buenos Aires, and hopes one day to send them overseas. This latter consideration depends greatly on the adoption of improved methods of picking and packing, matters to which the management of the Buenos Aires Pacific Railway has given much practical attention. Care in such details is, however, but little in the Argentine nature generally, and even in a less degree in that of the strong mixture of Indian blood which marks the working classes of Mendoza, as it does in all except the littoral Provinces. Very good canned peaches come from the Mendoza factories and are in large demand throughout the Republic.
Coal and petroleum have both been found in the Province, but further working tests are needed before their probable commercial value can be ascertained.
From the City of Mendoza the Buenos Aires Pacific Railway (familiarly B.A.P.) strikes upward to where it passes through the Transandine tunnel; on the Mendoza side of which is the famous Puente del Inca (the Inca’s bridge), a vast block of stone which, lying across a ravine, makes a natural bridge, recalling the giant-built palace of the old Norse Gods. Here are also some hot mineral springs celebrated for treatment of rheumatism; to which treatment the dry, rarefied mountain air perhaps contributes its less recognized quota.
SAN JUAN
This Province is bounded on the North and East by the Province of La Rioja, on the West by Chile, and on the South and South-East by the Provinces of Mendoza and San Luis respectively.
Of all the Argentine Provinces San Juan has shown itself, until very recent times indeed, probably the most recalcitrant towards financial orderliness. A repeated non possumus was the only answer its inertness returned to the many periodical fulminations and menaces of the National Government in respect of its treasury bonds or depreciated Provincial paper money. So depreciated, in fact, that it was worth nothing at all outside the Province itself, and was by no means welcome, although legal, tender within its boundaries.
San Juan pleaded that it could not call this paper in since it had nothing with which to replace it—all the little National money it got for its wines and other produce went immediately back to Buenos Aires again for necessary purchases.
The National Government insisted that San Juan must remove the disgrace from its financial escutcheon or all sorts of things would happen. San Juan regretted deeply and asked for time. In the meanwhile it contrived to raise another of those loans, without much more than a shadow of adequate security or provision, which long have been the nightmare of the National Government, and it still kept on using its depreciated notes. So, and in many other ways for long, very long, did San Juan wrestle, successfully according to its lights, with the spirit of progress until irrigation, fostered by the National Government, came to the aid of the latter in a way there was no denying.