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

by J. A. Hammerton

Here is a state of things that might well spell disaster. It is primarily the result of the imitative habit in following a new craze, and the lack of an established policy.

If alongside of this declining activity in stock-raising there were an enormous countervailing increase in agriculture, there would be no occasion for criticism. But owing to the uncertainty of the seasons, agriculture must remain in the Argentine—at least until “dry farming” has been perfected—a more speculative industry than cattle. Government has recently taken measures to establish the North American dry farming, and this may go some way to insure the agriculturist against seasonal conditions which at present make him a highly nervous observer of the barometer. Even so, and admitting that the agricultural possibilities of the country to be enormous, its essential industry, that which nature seems to have marked out for it, is cattle-raising. So, after some four or five years of crop failures, and faced with a scarcity of animals, estancieros are again feverishly turning their attention to live-stock. The imminent danger is that in making haste to recover their pre-eminence in cattle-raising, they may undo something of the progress they have made in agriculture. And so they see-saw from policy to policy. This is bad, and so long as it continues we shall see these periodic panics. A more settled system is bound to emerge, more individualised, and based upon a nicer appreciation of local conditions, for the climate differs throughout the Argentine as widely as it does between the South of Spain and Siberia.

The future prosperity of the country is not a matter of doubt to any person who has travelled across its fertile plains, but all Argentine prosperity, whether of to-day or to-morrow must rest upon agriculture and cattle-raising, the latter, perhaps, bearing the greater proportion. Here lies its limitation. He is no true friend of the Republic who paints highly coloured pictures of a coming day when workshops in the great cities will hum with myriad crafts, and industries flourish as we see them now in the great industrial centres of the Old World and the United States. The mechanical arts and sciences will be relegated to a very humble position in the Argentine activities of the future, as they are in its industrial life to-day. You cannot make bricks without straw, nor can you work machinery without power. If the Andes were made of solid coal, still would the progress of the Argentine be slow in the textile and mechanical industries. It would cost more to carry the coal to the Atlantic seaboard, where the industries must needs have their centres, than it now does to bring coal thither from England to-day. But there is no reason for supposing that the Andes contain coal in any considerable quantities, while we do know that the only coal beds at present being worked on the Chilian side with some degree of success produce coal of so inferior a kind that it is only useful for mixing with imported coal.

Already I have had occasion to point out these limitations, and here I do no more than reassert that in my opinion the future of the Argentine is indissolubly bound up with the proper adjustment of its two great national industries. Nature has intended it to rear cattle almost without limit, and to produce grain for the teeming populations of Europe, and it never pays to fight against nature. It may be that some day rich gold deposits shall be discovered in still unexplored corners of the Andes, where we know that copper, tin, and silver are to be found in abundance. But in these things there is no permanence. For a generation or two, gold discoveries might modify a country’s progress, and might eventually do a great deal more harm than good, as it is to be feared the rich nitrate fields, of Chili will yet do to the sister republic. The real gold is the fruitful soil, and this is the Argentine’s ample dowry.

Main Buildings of Montevideo University.

The Solis Theatre, Montevideo.

The future of a country, however, is not merely a question of commercial possibilities. In treating of all new and essentially commercial countries, the tendency is to forget that there are other factors to be taken into consideration. The immediate past of the Argentine had very little to do with commerce. Its history is little but a story of more or less sanguinary squabbles between political parties, or the struggles of individuals to secure a temporary ascendency over the mass. It is really not an inspiring story, the political development of the Argentine, or of any South American Republic. It has its great moments, but they are few compared with the long unedifying periods of petty bickerings. All that, the Argentine put behind it when it suddenly awakened to the fact that if it behaved itself it could secure substantial loans of European money wherewith to develop its resources and so enrich its citizens. The revolutionary era is past, not entirely because the spirit that informed it has disappeared, but because other considerations of personal prosperity are now involved in any movement that would tend to discourage the faith of foreign financiers in the country’s future. The energy which found expression in the days of revolution has not ceased to exist, but has suffered a change and, transformed, it is at work in the political world of to-day, either for good or for evil. On the whole, I think for good, if I have read the signs of the times correctly in my endeavour to define “the spirit of the country.”

Only the youthful jingos foresee for the Argentine an imperial era, with the country lording it over heaven knows what other countries of old Earth. The sane and stable mind of the nation is set upon the development of sound nationalism, the welding of the whole cosmopolitan population into a composite people. Such dangers as beset it are very similar in kind and degree to those that vex European politics—international jealousies. Brazil and Argentina do not understand each other any better than Britain and Germany; and probably less. When in April 1912, ex-President Roca went as Argentine Ambassador to Brazil, and ex-President Campos Salles as Brazilian Ambassador to the Argentine, there seemed to be a wiping out of old jealousies, but these will only completely disappear with increase of intercourse between the two republics, and conditions are not markedly favourable to that, as a curious feature of the political life of these Latin-American peoples is that all maintain a more direct intercourse with the Old World than with one another.