Here, as generally in South America, though less in Chile than elsewhere, politics is mainly in the hands of the lawyers. A great deal of the best intellect of the country, probably more in proportion than in any European country or in the United States, goes into this profession; and the contributions to the world's store of thought and learning made by Argentine writers have been perhaps more considerable in this branch of enquiry than in any other. In the sphere of historical or philosophical or imaginative literature, not much has yet been done, nor is the class prepared to read such books a large one. Fiction is supplied by France. The press is a factor in public affairs whose power is comparable to that exercised by the leading newspapers in Australia. It is conducted on large and bold lines, especially conspicuous in two journals of the capital[86] which have now a long record of vigour and success behind them. The concentration of political and commercial activities in Buenos Aires gives to them the same advantage that belongs to the leading organs of Sydney and Melbourne.
The world is to-day ruled by physical science and by business, which, in the vast proportions industry and commerce have now attained, is itself the child of physical science. Argentina is thoroughly modern in the predominance of business over all other interests. Only one other comes near it. The Bostonian man of letters who complained that London was no place to live in because people talked of nothing but sport and politics, would have been even less happy in Buenos Aires, because there, when men do not talk of sport, they talk of business. Politics is left to the politicians; it is the estancia, its cattle and its crops, and the race-course, with its betting, that are always in the mind and on the tongue, and are moulding the character, of the wealthier class. Business is no doubt still so largely in the hands of foreigners that one cannot say that the average Argentine has developed a talent for it comparable to that of those whom he calls the North Americans, seeing that much of his wealth has come to him by the rise in the values of his land and the immense demand for its products. He is seldom a hard worker, for it has been his ill fortune to be able to get by sitting still what others have had to work for, but he does not yield to New York in what is called a "go-ahead spirit." He is completely up to date. He has both that jubilant patriotism and that exuberant confidence in his country which marked the North American of 1830–1860. His pride in his city has had the excellent result of making him eager to put it, and keep it, in the forefront of progress, with buildings as fine, parks as large, a water supply as ample, provisions for public health as perfect, as money can buy or science can devise. The wealth and the expansion of Buenos Aires inspire him, as the wealth and expansion of Chicago have inspired her citizens, and give him, if not all of their forceful energy, yet a great deal of their civic idealism.
It is the only kind of idealism that one finds in the city or the country. Every visitor is struck by the dominance of material interests and a material view of things. Compared with the raking in of money and the spending it in betting or in ostentatious luxury, a passion for the development of the country's resources and the adornment of its capital stand out as aims that widen the vision and elevate the soul. A recent acute and friendly observer has said that patriotism among the Argentines amounts to a mania. Such excess of sentiment is not only natural in a young and growing nation, and innocent too (so long as it is not aggressive), but is helpful in giving men something beyond their own material enjoyments and vanities to think of and to work for. It makes them wish to stand well in the world's eyes, and do in the best way what they see others doing. If there is an excess, time will correct it.
Loitering in the great Avenida de Mayo and watching the hurrying crowd and the whirl of motor cars, and the gay shop-windows, and the open-air cafés on the sidewalks, and the Parisian glitter of the women's dresses, one feels much nearer to Europe than anywhere else in South America. Bolivia suggests the seventeenth century and Peru the eighteenth, and even in energetic Chile there is an air of the elder time, and a soothing sense of detachment. But here all is twentieth century, with suggestions of the twenty-first. Yet, modern as they are, and reminding one sometimes of the gaiety of Paris and sometimes of the stir and hurry of Kansas City, the Argentines are essentially unlike either Europeans or North Americans. To say in what the difference consists is all the harder because one doubts whether there yet exists a definite Argentine type. They have ceased to be Spaniards without becoming something new of their own. They seem to be a nation in the making, not yet made. Elements more than half of which are Spanish and Basque, and one-third of which are Italian, are all being shaken up together and beginning to mix and fuse under conditions not before seen in South American life. That which will emerge, if more Spanish than Italian in blood, will be entirely South American in sentiment and largely French in its ways of thinking, for from France come the intellectual influences that chiefly play upon it. It will spring from new conditions and new forces, acting on people who have left all their traditions and many of their habits behind them, and have retained but little of that religion which was the strongest of all powers in their former home. Men now living may see this nation, what with its growing numbers and its wealth, take rank beside France, Italy, and Spain. It may be, in the New World, the head and champion of what are called the Latin races. Will the artistic and literary genius of Italy, France, and Spain flower again in their transplanted descendants, now that they seem to have at last emerged from those long civil wars and revolutions which followed their separation from Spain? The very magnitude of the interests which any fresh civil wars would endanger furnishes a security against their recurrence, and the temper of the people seems entirely disposed to internal peace. No race or colour questions have arisen, and religious questions have ceased to vex them. They have an agricultural area still undeveloped which for fifty years to come will be large enough both to attract immigrants and to provide for the needs of their own citizens. Seldom has Nature lavished gifts upon a people with a more bountiful hand.
[CHAPTER X]
URUGUAY
Whoever wishes to have something by which to distinguish Uruguay from its many sister republics, the size and character of each of which are unfamiliar to many of us in Europe, may learn to remember that it is the smallest of the South American states, and that it has neither mountains, nor deserts, nor antiquities, nor aboriginal Indians. Nevertheless, it is by no means a country to be described by negatives, but has, as we shall presently see, a marked character of its own.
Having belonged to the viceroyalty of Buenos Aires, and being peopled by men of the same pure Spanish stock as those who dwelt in Argentina, it would probably have continued to be a part of that country but for the fact that, as it lay close to Brazil, it was from time to time occupied and held by the Portuguese of that county, sometimes by conquest, sometimes by formal cession from the crown of Spain. Thus its people, who had, when part of the Spanish dominions, a governor of their own under the Viceroy, began to acquire a sort of national consciousness as a community distinct from their fellow-countrymen on the opposite shore of the Rio de la Plata and the Uruguay river. They got the name of the Banda Oriental (East Side), as opposed to the rest of Argentina on the west side of the Uruguay. When the colonists began, from 1810 onwards, to assert their independence of the crown of Spain, the Orientales, as the Uruguayans were then usually called, had to fight their own battle and fought it valiantly. The Portuguese of Brazil, now allying themselves with Spain in defence of monarchy, invaded the country, and it was their expulsion in 1814, as the outcome of a long struggle under the famous patriot leader Artigas, that finally set Uruguay free. After the Argentines had tried more than once to force her into their federation, and the Portuguese had again invaded and occupied the devastated land, Uruguay was ultimately recognized as a sovereign State in 1828 by both Argentina and Brazil, the latter now independent of Portugal. By this time incessant wars and sufferings had formed a distinctive type of character and lit up a flame of national feeling which has burnt strongly ever since.
With an area of only 72,000 square miles, as against 1,135,000 in Argentina and 3,208,000 in Brazil, Uruguay seems like a garden plot between two vast estates. But she is a veritable garden. There is hardly an acre of useless ground within her borders. Except a few bare hilltops and a few sandy stretches on the coast, all is available, either for cattle and sheep, or for tillage, or for forest growth. No country is more favoured by nature. The surface is gently undulating along the sea and rises inland into swelling downs intersected here and there by ranges of hills. The abundant grass is deemed the best for cattle in all South America, so for many years ranching was practically the only industry. Latterly, however, a great deal of land has been brought under cultivation. Wheat and maize are the principal crops, and there are now many vineyards. As the climate, while generally resembling that of central Argentina, is tempered by the neighbourhood of the Atlantic, the winters are less cold and the summers cooler in Montevideo than they are on the other side of the Plate estuary. Further north, where Uruguay adjoins Brazil, the midsummer heats are severe and the vegetation becomes subtropical. It is a cheerful country, with scenery constructed, so to speak, on a small scale, as befits a small republic. Broad uplands of waving grass, with here and there tree clumps, and in the centre and north of the country bosky glens winding through rocky hills, make the landscape always pleasing and sometimes romantic. There are no great forests, no deserts, no volcanoes, nothing half so grand as the peaks of the Argentine Andes, but nothing half so monotonous as the flats of the Argentine Pampa.