Although competition between the big lines is as severe as anywhere in the world, except within the United States, this movement in Argentina for amalgamation and agreement in regard to spheres of interest shows a disposition to put an end to fierce rivalry. Indeed, it is more than likely that within the next few years there will be more amalgamation and working agreements between the big companies.
FOOTNOTES:
[B] Subsequent chapters describe Mendoza and the author's personal experience during a trip into the Andes.
[CHAPTER XII]
ROSARIO
It was not my fortune to see Rosario, one of the leading commercial cities in the Republic, under the most favourable circumstances. During the few days I was there the weather was all it ought not to have been—dull and rainy and cold—and the streets, except in a few central thoroughfares, morasses of mire.
It is a purely commercial town. It puts forward no claim to be artistic or cultured, and it has no pretensions to be a leader of fashion. All the men in Rosario are engaged in money-making. There are big offices, and the business men are at their desks early in the morning and remain late in the afternoon. Great railway lines converge upon Rosario, and along the front of the River Parana there are miles of goods sheds and wharves, with ships lying alongside into which the elevators pour their streams of wheat. There is the constant shunting of trains, the shrieking of cranes, and the swinging of derricks.
The workers are the best type of Latins, Italians from North Italy, or North Catalonian Spaniards or Basques. Other Latins do not get much of a chance in Rosario. There are a number of Englishmen, but they are swamped in the total. I made inquiries about the relative merits of English and Italian working men, and was told that the Englishmen are superior, two of them doing the work which it generally takes three Italians to accomplish. But it did not strike me, considering the high cost of living, that the workers in Rosario are highly paid from an English point of view. Commerce is frequently held up by strikes. Indeed, there is probably no place where strikes are so recurrent as in Rosario.