How this could have been so is hard to understand, except on the ground of extreme apathy on the part of the Provinces concerned, for lots of vineyard owners live at least half the year in Buenos Aires, and could have told of the scarcity and high price of fruit in that city.
However this may have been, the fact remained that so many kilos of table-grapes, and no more, went down to Buenos Aires in specially constructed trucks placed on the B.A.P. trains three days per week. Until the General Manager, Mr. J. A. Goudge, decided to act in the better interests of the Provinces concerned and, incidentally, also in those of his company, by running grape trains six days a week.
He thought, perhaps, that the Buenos Aires fruit merchants would call at his offices with illuminated testimonials. If he did so he was entirely mistaken. They did call, but it was to curse not bless. He would ruin them all, they said; they had comfortably arranged for such and such supplies of grapes, but more would upset their plans and businesses completely! They left Mr. Goudge unconvinced. So much so, indeed, that considering the menace of the ring to boycott his new trains, he hit on the simple but adequate expedient of running three grape trains per week from San Juan, non-stopping at Mendoza, and three starting from the latter place. San Juan needed its three trains, so did Mendoza, and therefore no one could boycott either service. Result, the arrival at Buenos Aires of six grape trains per week. The ring soon accommodated itself to the extra supply and went on robbing the busy, light-hearted Porteños (as people born in Buenos Aires are called) till the continued efforts of a paternally wise Municipality at last, after a long and bitter struggle, crushed the power of all the food rings in that formerly ring-ridden city.
This little piece of economic history is here intended to show the depths of somnolence and blindness to their own interests in which the grape growers of San Juan and Mendoza reposed till, so to speak, only the other day.
San Juan is capable of producing good quality cotton and tobacco. Its general climate is warm, hot in summer, and in parts very dry; though the humidity of the soil and atmosphere of the chief vine areas are greater than in those of Mendoza. Hence the relative general superiority and freedom from insect pests of the Mendoza vineyards.
The city of San Juan is Colonial in almost all its aspects, and its public and private gardens, filled with mingled tropical and temperate zone trees, shrubs and flowers, exhale the lazy atmosphere of days the memory of which is so constantly recurrent in all distant Argentine towns. Sleepy hollow; maybe, but its charm! A charm which will not nor can ever be “reconstructed,” try all those of us who are afflicted with unhappy artistic temperaments, never so hard. But that charm is still in San Juan, in Misiones (the one-time “Jesuit Empire”), Salta and Jujuy; in spite of new Government and Municipal Buildings, electric light and trams.
Later, we will go to the Falls of Iguazú, greater and more magnificent than Niagara or the Victoria Falls. These wonderful Falls are in the great up-to-date, go-ahead Argentine Republic. What proportion of our “Man-in-the-street” has ever heard of them? And how many good intelligent inhabitants of Buenos Aires have any clear idea of what they are really like?