Buenos Aires has preserved in its central district, and reproduces in all its outer districts, the primitive draught-board plan of a Spanish colonial city. This plan is not suited to its needs to-day. The rapid growth of the city and its expansion—the mean density is not more than fifty-four inhabitants to the hectare, as against 360 at Paris—complicate the problem of transport. At the present time the city is considering plans for reconstructing its thoroughfares and making diagonal streets, starting from the centre and following the direction of the main streams of traffic. In this way the city would reproduce the fan-wise distribution of railways over the Pampean plain.
Buenos Aires is the intermediary between the provinces and oversea countries. It has three titles to this profitable part. In the first place, it is the chief centre of the import trade. The merchants of the cities in the interior are customers of the Buenos Aires importers, and are closely bound to them by a system of long-term credit. Buenos Aires is, secondly, the centre for the distribution of the European capital which has been used in the development of the country. Lastly, it divides immigrant workers amongst the provinces, just as it divides capital. As an immigration port its position is unrivalled. The efforts that were made to divert part of the immigrants to Bahía Blanca failed, and direct immigration to the Santa Fé province ceased at the close of the first period of colonization, about 1880. It is also at Buenos Aires that immigrants who are not going to settle in Argentina embark; re-emigration, which is regarded as a national plague by Argentine economists, is another source of profit to the capital. Hence the fortune of Buenos Aires is due in the first place to the close contact between the economic life of Argentina and that of Europe and North America.
But its very growth has led to a gradual change in the part it plays in the interior of the country. In proportion as its population and wealth grew, it became a great national market. The products of the provinces go to it, not merely to meet its own needs as consumer, but in order to be distributed over the entire country. The figures of the cattle trade on the Buenos Aires market are instructive in this respect. From January to July 1919 there were 1,130,000 head of cattle sold, 240,000 being for the supply of the capital and 700,000 for the refrigerators.[147] Of the remainder, 120,000 were bought for fattening and 40,000 by the butchers of other towns. The capital of its own which has accumulated at Buenos Aires is invested either in real estate or in industry, which has found great profit both in the development of local consumption and in the great stock of labour provided by immigration. Buenos Aires is not now content to be merely an intermediary between the country and foreign lands. It contributes by its own resources and work to the task of colonization and the supply of manufactured articles to the agricultural and pastoral districts. It is, finally, a luxurious city, with every opportunity for the men who have grown rich by the rise in the price of lands to spend their income, and providing pleasure for the country folk who come up occasionally, tired of their laborious, rough and solitary existence.
[BIBLIOGRAPHY]
I give here only the most important and most recent works. A list of the articles I have consulted would be long and uninteresting, while a complete list of those which might have been consulted, and from which information might have been gleaned, is impossible. For a work of this character there is no account of travel, no study of the soil, the climate, or the vegetation, no statistical document or journal or purely historical text, that has not a perfect right to be regarded as a source.
1. Periodicals.
Of the periodicals published in Argentina, and partly or wholly devoted to the study of the land and its development, the principal are:—
Boletin del Instituto Geografico Argentino (Buenos Aires, since 1879; vol. i, 1879, vol. ii, 1881; one vol. yearly from 1881 to 1901; has appeared irregularly since).