The real Argentine: Notes and Impressions of a Year in the Argentine and Uruguay

by J. A. Hammerton

This movement has assumed proportions which in 1912 led the caricaturists to turn their attention to it, and cartoons of the different lecturers hurrying off with bags of gold, indicated the local cynicism on the subject; but apart from its amusing aspect it ought to be accepted as an earnest of the desire that does exist for instruction in subjects of public life. One popular lecture, for instance, was devoted to “The Management of Public Museums,” but literary subjects, studies of the lives of famous authors, and historical studies, as well as travel-talks, seem to be most acceptable. One lady arrived from Spain with a lecture in which she endeavoured to prove that Columbus was a Spaniard, based upon the most slender evidence put forth by a Spanish antiquary, with whom the wish was father to the thought; but she was listened to in a good-humoured, sceptical manner, which spoke well for the common-sense of the people, who wisely do not care a straw whether Columbus was a Gallego or Genoese. Among the celebrities engaged under Government auspices to lecture in recent years was a very famous French novelist, who is one of the favourite authors throughout Latin America. In common with most other authors, he not only lectured, but made use of his experience on returning home to describe the countries he had visited. His description of Uruguay is particularly remembered in Montevideo, as he is said to have mentioned the fine coffee plantations of that country, and this was the first that any Uruguayan had ever heard of them!

Although the final civilisation of the Argentine people will leave between it and any Anglo-Saxon civilisation a marked cleavage, yet it will approximate more closely to the British or North American than to the French or Spanish. To say that the Argentines are Latins with certain aspirations which are essentially characteristic of the Anglo-Saxons, would be too broad a generalisation, but, closely analysed, we can discover even more characteristics in the Argentine sympathetic to British social notions,—imitative of them, perhaps,—than in the French or Spanish, though at bottom, the Argentine remains Latin, and every nation, like every individual, is doomed to carry, wherever it goes along the road of progress or retrogression, “the baggage of its own psychology.” Socially, the British have passed through some of the phases from which the Argentine is only just emerging, and North Americans have passed through others which at no time affected British social life.

In concluding this chapter, I have to admit that I have been somewhat hampered in its construction by the fact that many illustrations which I have stored in my mind affecting the social side of things, fall more properly into other sections of my book, so that it is impossible to avoid in some degree the overlapping of interests, especially when I deal with subjects such as that in my succeeding chapter, which is really a further consideration of the social life of the country. In the present chapter, I have therefore sought to do no more than touch discursively upon certain incidents and matters coming within my knowledge during my stay on the River Plate, which may shed some light on an aspect of the Argentine which few American or English writers mention in their usually flattering and too often uncritical studies of the country and its people.

CHAPTER XII
BUSINESS LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES

Although I will not admit that Buenos Ayres is the most desirable place of residence, or that I should willingly pass any considerable portion of my life there, I can appreciate its fascination for the man of business. I was continually meeting Britishers who would, in the crudest fashion, contrast the Argentine capital with the cities of their Homeland, to the total eclipse of the latter, proclaiming that there was but one place on earth for them, and that was Buenos Ayres. But I never met an American there who preferred it to any of the great cities of his own country. These British exiles who so rejoice in their expatriation are undoubtedly maintaining in their adopted city an existence that in all points of comfort cannot be compared with that within the reach of a person of very moderate means at home. Yet they are by no means to be regarded as asserting loudly what they only half-believe. It is more than probable that they are honestly convinced of what they say, and that, so far as they are concerned, they do but utter the simple truth.

The secret of the matter lies in the fact that in the Argentine, as, indeed, in most alert young countries, there is a quick response to the efforts of the business man, which is but rarely experienced in the markets of the Old World. In this progressive Republic we have the phenomenon of some seven million people, of whom more than twenty per cent. are accessible in one city, crying out for commodities. It is a country almost destitute of industrial resources, lacking coal, minerals, wood, the essential elements of industrial life, for though minerals and wood do exist within the political delimitations of the Republic, they are geographically distant from the centres of population. Imported coal is extremely costly, while water power, owing to the extraordinary flatness of the land and the sluggishness of its rivers, is difficult, if not impossible to utilise. So that, for all practical purposes,—unless the discovery of oil deposits in the southwest may work a revolution in industrial possibilities,—we may regard the Argentine as a country at present limited to the pursuits of agriculture and cattle-rearing. These are the true bases of its wealth; for the development of these have English capitalists poured some £150,000,000 of money into the country, to cover it with a system of admirably constructed and well-managed railways. Mainly on the strength of these industries, have British, French, and other foreign investors taken up the millions of Government Stock for the national development of the Republic. In all some £300,000,000 of British money have been invested in the country.

Thus we may view the people as divided into two great camps: those who work the land and breed cattle, and those who make a living (and something to spare) by supplying the requirements of the former class, acting as middle-men between the European or North American exporter and the Argentine consumer. Roughly into one or other of these very disproportionate classes every worker in the Argentine must come, although, of course, there are endless variations of relativeness, if one cares to search for them. It is true that here and there some slight industrial progress falls to be noted. There is a good deal of tobacco making; there is more than one successful paper-making enterprise; in a timid way there is even the founding of iron; but broadly speaking, industries, apart from the land, do not exist. It is true you can get a table made, but it will be a very insecure table, it will also be very expensive, and you will be sorry you did not buy an imported one. The same applies to many other simple kinds of manufactured articles, which might, with a little patience and care, be successfully and profitably produced in the Argentine; but it is a safe assumption that for many years to come,—probably not within the lifetime of the present generation—there is no likelihood of national industry developing to such an extent that it would be able to replace in any great measure the imported article.

Meanwhile, the commission agent is enjoying a golden age of gain. It is a fairly easy matter to induce people to purchase who are in a chronic state of needing all sorts of commodities, living, as they do, in a country which is but poorly supplied even with the commonest necessities of modern domestic life. The commission agent has merely to announce the fact that he has made arrangements with Messrs. So & So, the well-known manufacturers of this or that, and will be pleased to supply it on certain terms, for his customers to find him out and make him busy,—granted that the article in question is one for which there is a real need. The crudest sort of advertising, the baldest form of announcement, will prove almost as effective as the most skilful propaganda would at home.

So it happens you will find many British residents of the meagrest intellectual endowments who have acquired considerable fortunes by doing nothing more brilliant than I have indicated, but who have been lucky enough—or shrewd enough, if you will—to secure the representation of some useful British or American-made device, such as a windmill water-pump, of which many thousands are in use throughout the country; a mechanical cash register, without which no Argentine business establishment is complete; a patent grass cutter; or almost any conceivable article of general utility. While the primal wealth of the country may come, as it does the world over, from the land, the most substantial profits made are those that go into the pockets of the agents, many of them unskilled, who handle the imported manufactured goods which the people of the country require in exchange for their grain, their cattle, their cow-hides, and their wool. Economically, of course, this is an unfortunate state of things, but I am concerned not with things as they ought to be, but as they are, and this is the present condition of the Argentine.