It has a stable and enlightened government, constituted on the same general plan as our own, and advancing rapidly to a near approximation to our own in efficiency. It has a history rich, in its later years, in traditions of statesmanship and patriotism, bearing on its roll of honor the names of such statesmen, soldiers, educators, and executives as Belgrano, San Martín, Alvear, Puyrredón, Rivadavia, Mitré, and Sarmiento, names worthy of special reverence among a people familiar with the standards set by Washington and Lincoln. In a word, with all this material greatness, and such a record of energetic and enlightened adaptation to world progress, Argentina may, in the not distant future, turn the jest against its northern perpetrators; for a country with a population of seven millions, which could feed two hundred million people and give lodging to half that number, is a competitor to be reckoned with seriously in the struggle for commercial supremacy.
Such, then, is the country of superlatives that opens up before the visitor who enters at its gateway, Buenos Aires, and breathes in the wholesome, equable breezes from the pampas—the vast green plains that stretch away for hundreds of miles in three directions; he agrees at once that the City of Good Airs was well named by Pedro de Mendoza when he planted his ill-fated settlement on its site in 1535.
It is to be regretted that this wide-awake, rapidly growing community buys so much more largely in the European markets than ours. In 1910, of the total amount they paid for imports ($351,770,056), our share was only $48,418,892. But then, as they point out, they are our competitors in the markets of Europe. Their cereals and beef and hides and wool have no place in the United States, a country that produces and exports the same things, and they manufacture no articles that we want; so it is only fair that they should deal with those who buy of them. When it came to a question of who should build their last two big battleships, however, they did favor our shipyards with the contracts. Both of these are of the super-dreadnought type and have already been launched.
The Parisian is pleased to say, “Paris is France”; with even greater significance may the Buenos Airean say that Buenos Aires is Argentina. Out of his pride in his great city, the Porteño will tell one that Argentina really has but two parts, as a matter of fact: the one, Buenos Aires; the other—all the rest of the country—called El Campo (the Camp), regardless that he includes in this sweeping assertion such other railroad centers and ports as Rosario, La Plata, Paraná, Tucumán, Córdoba, or Bahia Blanca—all of them cities exceeding fifty thousand in population and one of them, Rosario, exceeding one hundred thousand. And, indeed, the Bonarenses may well be proud of their metropolis. One-fifth of the country’s inhabitants is absorbed into its teeming life of industry and luxury; it is the crystallization of all that this modernized young giant stands for in the world of commerce; it is the greatest Spanish-speaking city in the world.
Its dominant position was not achieved, however, without years of contention with other centers of industry in the country. During the three hundred years of Spain’s stifling economic policies in this, once the agricultural unit of her golden empire, Argentina made small progress. The settlements founded in Santiago (1553), in Tucumán (1565), and in Córdoba and Santa Fé (1573), by the immigration of Spaniards from Peru, Chile, and the early settlement of Buenos Aires, all led an isolated and neglected existence during the colonial period up to the year 1776, when Spain, awakened from her dream of endless mineral riches in South America to a realization of the importance of the fertile country of La Plata, and erected it into a separate viceroyalty, independent of the Viceroyalty of Peru. The viceroys, freed from the poisoning influence of Andean gold lust, did much to develop a sense of nationalism among the scattered agricultural centers. With the growth of this nationalism, the protests against Spain’s repression increased until 1810, when the people asserted their right to an unrestricted, independent national life. May twenty-fifth of that year is their Fourth of July, and is perpetuated to-day in the name of the superb Avenida de Mayo in their capital city.
During the formative period that followed, Argentine politics revolved chiefly about the question of Unitarianism or Federalism—whether the rich and progressive province at the gateway of the nation (Buenos Aires) should form a separate unit of government, or remain part of a confederation and be accorded the leading rôle in national affairs that its importance merited. In 1862 federalism prevailed and the integrity of the Argentine Republic was assured, under the presidency of General Mitré. The capital was later removed from Santa Fé to Buenos Aires and the latter city erected into a federal district (of some seventy square miles) somewhat similar to our own District of Columbia. The capital of the Province of Buenos Aires, however, is La Plata, a few miles distant from the national capital, on the shores of the great river.
This period marks the beginning of the real history of the Argentine nation. Under the enlightened statesmanship of Bartolomé Mitré and Sarmiento, the two chief figures in Argentina’s rapid development from this point, the great influx of British and German capital began. Immigration was encouraged for the working of the fields; a solid foundation was given to educational development; railroads were constructed, and the machinery of government made adequate to the vigorous strides of the solidified nation. In the short space of time that has passed since 1881, over two billions of dollars of British and German gold have been invested; some eighteen thousand miles of well-equipped railways have been constructed, almost wholly by English capital; immigration has doubled the population of the country so that now half its present inhabitants are foreign-born—during the last ten years alone two millions have come in—and a thorough system of education has been perfected, embracing, among all sorts of primary, military, and industrial institutions, three great universities, one of which, at Buenos Aires, graduated over five thousand young men last year and, with the University of Córdoba (founded in 1613), ranks with Harvard and Yale. In 1910 they celebrated the centennial anniversary of their independence with a superb industrial exposition that was a revelation even to themselves, and festivities that are said to have cost $20,000,000.
The city of Buenos Aires has not the picturesque environment that adds so much to the natural beauty of the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Mexico, nor the harbor capacity of New York; nor are its culture and civic personality, perhaps, as deep-rooted as in Boston; it makes little pretension to the aristocracy of blood boasted by the still essentially Spanish Lima; nor has it yet attained such distinction as a national center of art, literature, and music as has the Brazilian capital. It may be best compared with Chicago, for it is conspicuously modern, its present development having been begun and achieved within the last quarter of a century, although the city itself is nearly four hundred years old, and is the industrial complement of an agricultural and pastoral activity even greater than that of our Middle West. Indeed, its banks and clearing houses are said to transact quite as much business as those of Chicago.
The docks of Buenos Aires, like those of our great lake city, are most impressive; they represent an outlay of $50,000,000. Only fifteen years ago the visitor was bundled ashore in a rowboat and deposited on a marshy beach. Now his vessel enters one of the numerous basins of the vast dock system and confronts row upon row of massive masonry and cement wharves, behind which spreads a network of railway lines. In the background are public gardens with flowering bushes and statuary to beautify the approach to the city. For mile after mile, flanked by a seemingly endless procession of great trans-Atlantic ships and up-river produce boats, these docks stretch their length, not in a series of slips, as along the congested waterfront in New York, but so arranged that the vessels can moor broadside to them and have their cargoes loaded or unloaded by enormous traveling cranes; and, without, lying at anchor in the river awaiting their turn for a berth, are many more—for this giant enterprise, with towering grain elevators and a veritable forest of powerful cranes, already fails entirely to satisfy present needs. They are not only to be extended but so enlarged that they will accommodate vessels of the heaviest draft.
Not even the New York wharves with their vast commerce give such a picture of vivid bustle. The big German “Cap” boats—Cap Ortegal, Cap Frio, and the rest; French, Spanish, and Italian liners with champagne, aperitives, opera companies, automobiles and immigrants—always immigrants; Newcastle freighters unloading bolted sections of steel bridges; up-river boats laden with yerba maté or fragrant oranges from Paraguay, and the aristocrats of these seas, the Royal Mails from England—all contribute to the pell-mell, reminding one of the blurred babel of tongues that whispers across the decks of the world’s ships in the drowsy passage through the Suez Canal.