The republic is small but there is no waste land, and the railroads bring in quantities of wool and food-stuffs destined for the European market. More than three thousand steamers enter the port annually. Most of them belong to the eighteen British lines that touch here. No wonder the city is wealthy and has attractive shops and boulevards. To be sure, the harbor improvements, not completed yet, have been greatly retarded by the most flagrant kind of political graft. But what American city, from New York to San Francisco, has a clean record in this particular?
Splendidly equipped steamers, resembling our Fall River boats, ply nightly between Montevideo and Buenos Aires, in order to accommodate the increasing numbers who wish to do business in both cities.
A generation ago the traveller to Buenos Aires was obliged to disembark in the stream seven or eight miles from the city, proceed in small boats over the shallow waters, and then clamber into huge ox-carts and enjoy the last mile or two of his journey as best he could. Since then, extraordinary harbor improvements, costing millions of dollars, have been completed, and ocean steamers are now able
to approach the city through dredged channels. Yet such has been the phenomenal growth of the port that the magnificent modern docks are already overcrowded and the handling of cargo goes on very slowly, retarded by many exasperating delays. The regular passenger and mail steamers are given prompt attention, however, and the customs house examination is both speedy and courteous, in marked contrast to that at Rio. In years to come, the two other important ports of Argentina—Rosario, higher up the Rio de la Plata, and Bahia Blanca, farther down the Atlantic coast—are destined to grow at a rapid rate because of the better docking facilities they will be able to afford.
Bahia Blanca in particular is destined to have a great future, as it is the natural outlet for the rapidly developing agricultural and pastoral region of southern Argentina.
Buenos Aires, however, will always maintain her political and commercial supremacy. She is not only the capital of Argentina, but out of every five Argentinos, she claims at least one as a denizen of her narrow streets. Already ranking as the second Latin city in the world, her population equals that of Madrid and Barcelona combined.
Hardly has one left the docks on the way to the hotel before one is impressed with the commercial power of this great city. Your taxicab passes slowly through crowded streets where the heavy traffic retards your progress and gives you a chance to marvel at the great number of foreign banks, English, German, French, and Italian, that have taken possession of this quarter of the city. With their fine substantial buildings and their general appearance of solidity, they have a firm grip on the situation. One looks in vain for an American bank or agency of any well-known Wall Street house. American financial institutions are like the American merchant steamers, conspicuous by their absence. The Anglo-Saxons that you see briskly walking along the sidewalks are not Americans, but clean-shaven, red-cheeked, vigorous Britishers.
In England they talk familiarly of “B.A.” and the “River Plate”; disdaining to use the Spanish words Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Buenos Aires. To hear them you might suppose they were speaking of something they owned, and you would not be so very far from the truth. What Mexico owes to American capital and enterprise, the countries and cities of the Rio de la Plata owe to Great Britain. British capitalists have not been slow to realize the possibilities of this great agricultural region. They know its potentiality as a food-producer, and they have covered it with a network of railways much as we have covered the prairies of Illinois and the plains of Kansas. Of the billion and a quarter dollars of British capital invested in Argentina, over seven hundred millions are in railways. Thousands of active, energetic young Englishmen, backed by this enormous British capital, have aided in the extraordinary progress which Argentina has made during the past generation.