PUENTE DEL INCA; MENDOZA, ARGENTINA
San Juan had to become more prosperous and to begin to pay its way in respectable fashion. It evidently did not in the least want to do so, but it could not any longer see any way by which it could avoid recognition of its just liabilities. Thus are the good old times of this Province vanishing; the good old times which made sufficient provision for an aristocratic oligarchy and in which vassals had no opportunity of acquiring luxurious tastes.
First the railway, slow in this case, however, in its usually tonic effects and then irrigation, which poured water on to a naturally very fertile soil, brought it about that one day San Juan woke up to find itself faced with financial responsibility.
People from the littoral and even from overseas came and bought land and paid good prices in hard cash for it and then planted vines of new, productive kinds; trimmed them in new, productive ways; and made better wine out of them than San Juan had ever deemed at all necessary. Other people planted wheat and alfalfa, and even troubled to grow more maize than there had been before. In fact, if ever a Province had greatness thrust upon it in a bewilderingly short space of time it was San Juan. People are even prospecting and actually exploiting its long-latent mineral wealth, looking for and finding deposits of gold, silver, copper, iron, zinc, lead, sulphur, alum, mica, rock salt, lignite and marble.
The exploitation of many of these has not yet attained any very great commercial importance,[29] but that of others has already done so, and all the companies concerned have brought money into the Province and pay wages to many native workers. All this troublesomeness tends to curtail the daily siesta, but a consequent bundle of full-value national dollars operates as a consolation to even the most conscientious observer of traditional custom. The next generation of San Juan inhabitants will doubtless be as wide awake as their neighbours, and strikes may take the place of old-time rebellion to the orders of patriarchal overlords; while the latter will be put to it to work their ancestral lands intelligently in order to maintain the due measure of their proper dignity.
Not only has the National Government fostered large systems of irrigation in and given irrigation to this Province, but it has also run a railway connecting the City of San Juan with the Federal Capital; thus providing another outlet for its grapes, wines and other produce.
An instance of the former commercial apathy of San Juan, and of its neighbour Mendoza for that matter, was, not long ago, to be found in the manner in which the growers of table-grapes allowed themselves to be continually and methodically jockeyed by the fruit ring of Buenos Aires.
The worthies composing this ring were low-class, ignorant men, who could only grasp the possibilities of monopoly and market rigging on a very small scale. Their simple method was to put only a certain limited quantity of fruit each week on the retail markets of the Federal Capital and to charge exorbitant prices therefor. To the poor, three-quarter Indian, ignorant people of the islands of the Paraná they said that Buenos Aires did not care much for peaches, and so they only went there once a week or so to fetch a few, at miserable prices, for market. The rest of huge crops were left to rot on the trees. San Juan (and Mendoza) were evidently given to understand that a similar situation existed in regard to grapes.