But what interested me most in my peregrinations around the city was the wonderful dock accommodation. The building of its splendid port began in 1902, and I should judge that it is now complete, or as near completion as will be necessary for some years to come, for the Rosarians, with a fine sense of future development, determined, in providing a port for the ever-growing traffic of the town, to base its accommodation upon the estimated needs of the year 1932! By reason of this generous anticipation of the future, the port, where at present a traffic valued at nearly $120,000,000 per annum is handled, looks almost idle. The quays stretch along the river front for some miles, dotted here and there with big grain elevators, and railway trucks unloading their freight for shipment into the steamers, which, though mustering a considerable fleet, seem “few and far between,” the accommodation for them being so enormous. The River Paraná is wide and easily navigable for sea-going vessels of considerable tonnage at Rosario, and this, combined with the privileged situation of the town in the centre of one of the richest agricultural regions of the Republic, marks Rosario out for a future of the greatest prosperity. Its history already is second to none as a modern romance of commercial expansion, and the brisk business air that pervades the community, exhaled by all its citizens, legitimately proud of its rapid progress, render it a most attractive centre for the commercial man.
Here we find a considerable British Colony, for which in 1912 a local English newspaper was started, and the town is also a favourite shipping centre with the English estancieros of the closely settled agricultural region to the north and west, to which five or six railway lines branch out from the city.
The railway run between Rosario and Buenos Ayres is perhaps the most comfortable of any in the Republic, and the Pullman service is excellently maintained, the journey occupying from about eight or nine o’clock in the morning until about half-past six in the evening. The departure of the Rosario express from Retiro every day is usually a scene of much male embracing and female kissing. Like most train journeys in the Argentine, there is never a tunnel, scarcely a perceptible change in the gradient, and only an occasional low bridge over some small stream to be crossed. You skim along through endless fields of alfalfa, of maize, of linseed, or through vast pasture lands dotted with innumerable herds of cattle, which always reminded me of Meredith’s sonnet where he says that Shakespeare’s laugh is
Broad as ten thousand beeves at pasture!
A trip to Córdoba, involving another day’s journey north and west from Rosario, offers a more appreciable change of scene. Here we find ourselves in a city that has caught but little of the new spirit of the Argentine and rather prides itself on being the shrine of the ancient spirit. For the first time, too, we can witness something resembling scenery, as the country in the neighbourhood of Córdoba, tired of being flat and uninteresting for so many hundred miles, begins to take on some picturesque inequalities, and at no great distance beyond the antique city, the Hills of Córdoba, wooded and picturesque, come gratefully to the eye. The city itself is essentially Spanish, with its narrow streets and old colonial houses, its numerous churches and black-gowned priests. Less than any of the Argentine towns do we find here that cosmopolitan mixture of humanity; here the old customs have fought a longer fight against modern innovations. M. Huret mentions an amusing example of this. He says: “No more than twelve years ago, it would not have been decent for any Córdoba woman walking through the public streets to have raised her skirt slightly; it was allowed to sweep the pavement with its tail. Two fashionable young ladies who had returned from Paris were the occasion of a scandal, by having ventured to show their ankles. But they continued doing so, and ended by conquering public opinion, so that to-day the ladies of the town are no longer afraid to raise their skirts in the street, but even have come to the point of wearing short dresses!” This is very characteristic of Córdoba, whose university (founded in 1605 by the Bishop of Tucumán, and sharing with that of Lima the distinction of being the oldest in South America) has done so much to maintain the spirit of times past, at the very threshold of the most insistent modernity. Little though I admire the Roman Catholic Church as I find it in South America, it seems to me that the Argentine is the better for its Córdoba. It is good that in a young republic, where commerce and the making of money have suddenly and inevitably become the great ambitions of the populace, the spirit of veneration for the past, even to the point of narrow-mindedness in social relationships, should somewhere survive as a leaven to the lump. Intensely provincial, parochial indeed, the life of Córdoba has still about it something of the aroma of a grey, old, historic place, and may not that be as fine a possession as great docks and grain elevators, and new-made banks stuffed with money?
Of Mendoza I shall have something to say in a later chapter, and of Bahía Blanca I need only state that it is no more than a town in the making—the raw materials of a great possibility, which in another decade may have grown into something not unlike Rosario to-day. Its life is naturally lacking in that rhythm I find in the great established emporium of the Paraná, but on every hand the evidences of activity are so patent that it requires no remarkable vision to see Bahía Blanca some day with a population running into six figures, with finished streets and settled conditions, where so much at present is in the travail of birth.
To sum up, the provincial life of the Republic reflects in high degree the conditions of the capital from which all the commercial centres take their cue. Buenos Ayres is the great exemplar, and it is only to be expected that the newer towns springing into greatness should aim at reproducing in themselves what they admire in the capital, avoiding always the creation of such unduly narrow thoroughfares as Buenos Ayres has inherited from the old colonial city. In the smaller towns, life is attended with many hardships and calls for stern self-denial, for plain living, if not for high thinking, and the impression of their inhabitants which survives in my memories of those I visited is that of their sullen determination to become rich, at no matter what inconvenience for the present. So, everywhere one finds the people looking to the future rather than endeavouring to “live along the way.” For hundreds of thousands, the Future may have a full hand. For hundreds of thousands more, perhaps, it is well the Future is veiled, that they may at least toil on in hope.
CHAPTER XVII
THE SPIRIT OF THE COUNTRY
There is a sense in which the spirit of a country must show itself in any honest description of its life and character. The preceding chapters of this book have dealt with so many and varied aspects of Argentine life that the reader should have been able to take in from these something at least of the spirit of the country: perhaps as much as can be made manifest in any specialised treatment of the subject. Yet I feel the attempt should be made to disengage from the tangle of ideas and impressions created in the mind by close observation of the ways of a people some orderly estimate of its “spirit.”