South America: Observations and Impressions / New edition corrected and revised

by Viscount James Bryce Bryce

With the comparative peace that followed the fall of Rosas there came the new factors which have enabled the country to advance so quickly: the entrance of European capital, chiefly expended in providing means of transportation, and the arrival of immigrants from Italy and Spain. No country offers greater facilities for the construction of railways. Quickly and cheaply built over a surface everywhere smooth and level, they radiate out from the capital, and have now penetrated every part of the country except the marshy wilderness of the Gran Chaco in the north and the arid wilderness of remote Patagonia in the south. The central part of the republic within three hundred miles of Buenos Aires is as thickly scored with lines of steel as is Westphalia or Ohio. Settlers, mostly following the railroads, have now put under crops or laid out in well-appointed stock farms all this central region and a good deal more of land to the north of it. The rest of the plain is occupied by cattle ranches or sheep-farms, except where the want of water makes stock raising impossible. Out of the 253,000,000 acres which are roughly estimated as being the area available for agricultural or pastural purposes in Argentina—the total area of the country being 728,000,000 acres—47,000,000 were under cultivation in 1910, this, of course, including the slopes of the Andes in the northwest round Tucuman and Jujuy, where sugar and other semi-tropical products are grown.

An enormous area still remains available for tillage, though nothing but experiment can determine to what extent lands hitherto deemed too arid may be made productive by the new methods of dry farming, now prosecuted so successfully in western North America, and beginning to be tried in South Africa and Australia also. Of this central tract already brought under cultivation, by far the largest part is fertile. There are sandy bits here and there, but the bulk of it is a rich, deep loam, giving large returns in its natural state. Thus the waving plains of grass over which the wandering Indian roamed and the Gaucho careered lassoing the wild cattle are now being rapidly turned into a settled farming country.

The history of these regions and the process of their settlement resembles in many points that of the western United States and western Canada, but differs in one point of great significance. In North America the settlement of the new lands has from first to last been conducted by agricultural settlers drawn from the middle or working-class of the older parts of the country or of Europe, and the land has been allotted to them in small properties, seldom exceeding one hundred and sixty acres. Thus over all the Mississippi Valley states and over the Canadian northwest there has grown up a population of small farmers, owning the land they till, and furnishing a solid basis for the establishment of democratic institutions among intelligent and educated men who have an interest in order and good administration. In Argentina, however,—and the same is generally true of Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Brazil,—the land, before or when it began to be regularly settled, passed in large blocks into comparatively few hands. There was no class like the men who settled New England in the seventeenth century and whose descendants settled the Great West in the nineteenth. The ideas of Spanish feudalism still lived among the Argentine colonists of a century ago. Leading men or rich men took as much land as they could get on the Pampas; and, seeing that there was little competition, each could get pretty much all he wanted. Thus the country became and is a country of great estates. They are measured by the square league, which contains about six thousand acres. Though a tendency to subdivision has set in and will doubtless continue, estancias of sixty thousand acres are not uncommon; and the average holding is said to be even now about six square miles.

This feature has, of course, had important effects on the character of the rural population. It consists, broadly speaking, of two classes, the rich estancieros or landholders, and the labourers. Though a good many Englishmen and other foreigners have bought farms and mean to stay on them, so that they or their children will doubtless end by becoming Argentines, still most of the large landholders are Argentine born. Many have become or are becoming opulent, not only by the sale of their crops and their live stock, but simply by the rapid rise in the value of land. They live in a liberal, easy, open-air way in straggling mansions of the bungalow type, low and large, which they are now, thanks to the railways, able to furnish with the modern appliances of comfort. The labouring class, who gather like feudal dependents round the estancia, are of two classes. Some are native, largely the offspring of the old Gauchos, who have now settled down to work as peons (labourers), unlearning their wild ways, and beginning to send their children to school. The rest are immigrants drawn from Italy and Spain by the immense demand for labour. Most numerous are the natives of northern Italy, hard-working men who do not fear the heat and can live on very little. Many of them come out for the harvesting weeks of December and January, and return home to reap their own harvest or gather their own vines in the Italian summer and autumn, thus making the best of both hemispheres, much as the sleepless herdsman in the Odyssey could earn wages by working day and night. As the native peons are the men qualified to handle live stock, so these Italians are the most valuable for all kinds of agriculture. Some receive wages: some who stay for a few years on the farm receive land to till and bring into condition, and pay a part, perhaps one-quarter, of the crop by way of rent. They seem to take to the country, and though many return to Europe when they have accumulated what is to them a fortune, a large and increasing number remain. Probably more and more of them will try to acquire small holdings, and as the price of land rises, many great landowners may, since the habit of extravagance is always growing, be tempted to sell off bits of their estates. Thus a middle class of peasant proprietors may grow up between the big estanciero and the lowly peon. But at the present moment small properties are rare. The country is not, like western Canada, a place suitable for British or Scandinavian immigrants of small means, not merely on account of the climate, but because they could not easily get small farms and the means of working them. At present it is only persons with some capital who can be advised to come hither from England to farm.

Agricultural prosperity, more general here than almost anywhere else in the world, is tempered by two risks, either of which may destroy the profits of the year. One is drought. As the average rainfall is, in most parts of the country, only just sufficient to give moisture to the arable land, together with drink and grass to the animals, a deficient rainfall means scanty crops and the loss of cattle. It is only along the skirts of the Andes that much can be done by irrigation, for the permanent rivers are few and the lagoons, which at one time were frequent, have been drying up. Besides, they are often brackish. The other danger is a plague of locusts. These horrible creatures come in swarms so vast as to be practically irresistible. Expedients may be used to destroy them while they are walking along the ground by digging trenches in their path, tumbling them in and burning them, but many survive these efforts, and when they get on the wing, nothing can be done to check their devastating flight. Did the swarms come every year, the land would not be worth tilling, but at present the yield of good years more than covers the losses both of droughts and of locust invasions. Men talk of erecting a gigantic fence of zinc to stop the march of the creatures southward from the Gran Chaco, for here, as in South Africa, they seem to come out of a wilderness. When the Gran Chaco itself begins to be reclaimed, the plague may perhaps be stayed.

As aridity is the weak point of the Pampas in their agricultural aspect, so monotony is the defect of their scenery. There is a certain beauty in a vast plain, but this one is so absolutely dead a level that you cannot see its vastness. There would be a charming variety of colour in it, the vivid green of the alfalfa and the light blue profusion of the flax blossoms contrasting with the yellowing wheat and the more sober greyish tints of the maize and the bleached pasture, but all these, as well as the shadows of the passing clouds, are not visible when one is standing on the ground and can see no further than a mile or two. The Pampa country has now been turned from a prairie of grass and flowers into huge fields divided by wire fences and intersected by straight roads, or rather cart tracks, marked by the line of brown dust that a drove of cattle or a vehicle raises. The landscape was in Gaucho days the same for hundreds of miles. It is so still, but now it wants the wildness and the flowers, nor has it the deep river channels and their overhanging bluffs which here and there relieve the uniformity of the North American prairie states. However, in many places orchards and clumps of other trees are being grown round the mansion house. Such a clump, being the only sort of eminence that breaks the skyline, is called a Monte. The swift-growing Australian gum, which has now domesticated itself in most of the warmer parts of the world, waves its pliant tops in the breeze, more picturesque in the distance than it is close at hand. If man's hand takes something away from the wild charm of nature, he also by degrees creates that other charm which belongs to rural life, so this land will come in time to be less dull and more homelike. Pleasure grounds round the estancias will mitigate the roughness of a first settlement, and there will be groves with dim recesses in their thickets to stir the imagination of children. There is always in the Pampas an amplitude of air and a solemn splendour of the sunset glow to carry the mind away beyond its near surroundings.

Nevertheless one is glad not to have been born in the Pampas.

Perhaps those whose early years have been passed in flat countries do not feel the need for hills in the landscape in the same way as do the natives of Scotland or New England. Could any one of the latter class dwell for twelve months in Argentina without longing to rush off for refreshment to the mountains and lakes of the South Chilean Andes.

One word more on the economic aspects of Argentina before I come to the people. The wealth of the land is in tillage and live stock. Its three great agricultural products are wheat, maize, and linseed, in each of which it is now in the front rank of exporting countries. Sugar and cotton are grown in the north, and may increase largely there as that region gets settled, and wine is made at Mendoza for home consumption. Cereals will, however, remain the most important crops. Vast as has been the increase of live stock, the limits of the ranching area have not yet been reached.[80] The export of meat received a great stimulus from the introduction of systems of cold storage and transport, and now an enormous amount of European and North American as well as Argentine capital is embarked in this trade. There is, so far as known, hardly any coal in the country, and the sources of water-power are only along the Southern Andes, so that manufacturing industries have not been established on any large scale. The slopes of the Cordilleras furnish mines of gold, silver, copper, and lead, but the production of these minerals is small compared to that of Peru and Bolivia. The people have not taken to the sea either as mercantile mariners or as fishermen, and the demand for agricultural labour has been so large that there was no occasion for any one to seek his living in those employments. Thus we may say that among those great countries of the world which Europeans have peopled, Argentina is that which is now, and is likely to continue, the most purely agricultural in its industrial character.

The best evidence or illustration of the swift progress of the republic and of the confidence which European investors feel in its resources is to be found in the development of its railway system. The first railway line was opened in 1857 and was twelve miles long. In 1911 there were nearly 20,000 miles in operation, and the receipts in 1910 amounted to £20,000,000. Most of these railways, many of which are of a gauge broader than those of the United States or Great Britain, have been built and are worked by British companies, a few by the government.[81]