It is with genuine regret that the traveler leaves the hospitable capital for a trip through the country; but he will soon discover that the delightful climate (like that of Tennessee, but without the snows of winter) is characteristic of Uruguay as a whole. From the capital radiate some fifteen hundred miles of good railways penetrating Brazil at several points, and also tapping the commerce along the Uruguay River.
The country he will see is one great rolling pasture as large as all New England, and with occasional ridges of mountains. None of these, however, exceeds two thousand feet in height. Until recently Uruguay was given over almost entirely to the raising of cattle and sheep; now it promises great strides in products of the soil. Indeed, it is the boast of the Uruguayan that not an acre of his country’s 72,000 square miles of territory is unproductive. Here can be seen growing corn, wheat, and potatoes, and a great impetus has of late been given to viticulture—and there is no fear of either drought or frost. So far, however, only about three per cent. of the territory is under cultivation in foodstuffs. In 1909 Montevideo handled imports to the value of $35,000,000 and exports amounting to $32,000,000, while the ports of Rocha, Maldonado, and Colonia, on the south coast, and Salto, Paysandú, Fray Bentos, Mercédes, and others on the Uruguay, handled three millions more of imports and exports. Her production in cattle in that year amounted to 6,827,428, in sheep 16,608,717, and in pigs, horses, mules, and goats 700,000.
At Fray Bentos, on the Uruguay River, the Liebig Company has located a great plant, slaughters over three hundred thousand head of cattle a year, and does an enormous business in extract of beef, canned meats, hides, tallow, hair, horn, and other by-products. A day’s sojourn in the prosperous, if soup-laden, atmosphere will give one a proper appreciation of the rest of the country, for nowhere has Nature been more lavish with her favors, nowhere has she distributed more favorable conditions for life and national prosperity—everything man needs for food or clothing is here capable of being raised. Every section is reached by navigable rivers, which also furnish abundant water for irrigation and mechanical purposes. The country being on a gold basis, its credit in the European money markets is excellent.
Uruguay, as one historian expresses it, has always been the cockpit of the southern half of the continent. From the time of the appearance of the first whites in the Plata region—Diaz de Solis in 1515, and ten years later Sebastien Cabot—down to the period of Hernando Arias and Garay, who, in about 1580, permanently established the power of Spain on the river Plata, the Spanish and Portuguese settlements on the Plata and Uruguay had to contend with the incessant hostilities of a race of Indians—the Charrúas, who, next to the Araucanians of Chile, had the distinction of offering the most vigorous and successful opposition to the dominion of the Europeans in South America.
Throughout the colonial régime, Uruguay constituted the eastern border province (Banda Oriental) of Spain’s La Plata colony, and was the storm center of the Spanish and Portuguese strife for territorial control. Following this period came the abortive invasion of the English in 1806, and, a few years later, the wars of independence. When Spanish rule came to an end in the Plata country, the Banda Oriental became the bone of contention between Brazil and the newly born state that is now Argentina—a veritable new-world Flanders and the theater of many fierce battles. Brazil held the province from 1817 to 1829, and called it her Cis-platine Province. Finally, on May 1, 1829, Uruguay achieved her independence and set up a government of her own under the style of the Oriental Republic of Uruguay.
There is good reason, then, why the Uruguayans should have emerged from these three hundred years of turbulent character building into independence with a bellicose personality exactly suited to the Montague-and-Capulet existence that prevails in her politics between the Blancos, or reactionists, and the Colorados, who now hold the political power and stand for progress. The forcefulness of the nation is now finding its expression in industrial and commercial enterprises and has made of her chief port a powerful commercial rival of the busy mart across the Plata.
V
PARAGUAY
Paraguay is in the longitudinal center of South America, and, with the exception of Bolivia, is the only country on the continent that does not border on the sea. Next to Uruguay it is the smallest of the South American republics, possessing a territory of 196,000 square miles. Until the break with Spain, in 1813, it was, like Uruguay, part and parcel of La Plata colony, under the jurisdiction of the Viceroy of Buenos Aires, and was known as the Province of Paraguay. As will be observed from a glance at the map, it is hedged in by Bolivia, Brazil, and Argentina, and is separated from its twin sister, Uruguay, by an arm of the mother country (Misiones Territory) that reaches up into Brazil between the Paraná and Uruguay rivers.
For a proper acquaintance with the country it must be conceived as a dual personality, for it is divided longitudinally by the river Paraguay into western Paraguay, or the Chaco, and eastern Paraguay, or Paraguay proper. It is in the latter region that the republic has its being and in which the visitor’s interest is naturally centered. El Chaco is a vast, thickly wooded, and, for the most part, savage and unexplored section that was awarded to Paraguay by our President Hayes as arbitrator of its boundary dispute with Argentina; in gratitude the government named the chief settlement in the territory Villa Hayes. The region is now given over almost wholly to the immigrant Swiss, German, Italian and other communities that have been started on the west bank of the river, and to nomadic bands of still uncivilized Indians.