Montevideo the capital has the same air of freshness and cheerfulness which belong to Uruguayan landscape and the Uruguayan climate. It has grown to be a great and prosperous city in respect of its port, which makes it the chief seat of the republic's commerce. The estuary of the River Plate is much deeper on this northern side than on the southern, so large ships have always been able to approach nearer to this shore than they could do to the Argentine. By deepening the entrance and running out breakwaters, a good harbour has now been created, accessible to vessels of exceptionally deep draught which could not (in 1910) come up to the docks in Buenos Aires. The city is also more fortunate in its site, for the ground, a dead flat on the Argentine side, here rises from the shore in a slope steep enough to afford fine views over the sea and to enable the church towers and other tall buildings to present an effective sky-line.
Montevideo, with its 300,000 inhabitants against the 1,300,000 of Buenos Aires, has streets by no means so thronged as are those of the Argentine capital. Neither are the houses quite so high, nor is there the same sense of a vast country behind, pouring its products out by this water-gate that leads to Europe. But here, just as in Buenos Aires, everything is modern. Only one public building, the old Town Hall in the chief plaza, dates from colonial times and has, or seems by its quaintness to have, a sort of artistic quality which is absent from the work, all French rather than Spanish in character, of the last sixty years. The plazas are handsome, well laid out and planted, and the street architecture creditable, with fewer contrasts of meanness and magnificence than one usually sees in the growing cities of North America. There is an absence not only of external squalor, but of any marks of poverty, for the people seem brisk and thriving, with plenty of money coming in. For many miles round the environs are studded with tasteful villas, and the well-kept roads that traverse them are lined by splendid rows of Australian blue gums. Three points of interest deserve to be specially mentioned. One is the Cerro, an isolated conical hill on the southwestern side of the bay, opposite the main city, and an object so conspicuous and picturesque on this generally tame coast that it has found a place in the arms of the republic. The castle that surmounts it has no merit as a building, but the view is superb along the coast and out to sea where the pale grey waters of the Paraná and Uruguay meet the ocean blue. The second ornament of the suburbs is the Botanical Garden. Its display of spring flowers, both native and European, and the wonderful variety of trees from semitropical and temperate regions, give a vivid sense of the powers of this admirable climate, not oppressive in the blaze of its sunlight, yet warm enough for roses twice as luxuriant as the best that Europe can show. Lastly, there is a fine collection of wild animals in a garden belonging to a private gentleman of large means, who is unique in the personal relations which his kindly disposition has enabled him to establish with the creatures, even with the beasts of prey. There were splendid jaguars and pumas, and there were South American ant-eaters with tongues longer than themselves. But what most delighted the holiday crowd, who are permitted to ramble through the gardens, was to see a brace of lion cubs strolling about in a friendly way among men, women, and children, while the owner led us close up to the bars of the cage in which his pet lion, a superb giant, sat peacefully blinking and made us stroke it and rub its back. The lion took the attention benignly and beamed on his master, but the attitude of the lioness in the further corner of the cage did not encourage any such familiarities.
Like Argentina, Uruguay is destined to be a pastoral and agricultural, not a mining or manufacturing country. There are some minerals, including gold, manganese, iron, and coal, but none of these is worked on a large scale, and it has not yet been proved that either coal or iron is present in quantities sufficient to form the basis of any important industry. Cattle are at present the chief source of wealth, the export of meat having been greatly increased by the recently invented methods of freezing and chilling. Meat, hides, wool, wheat, and maize are likely to continue to be the mainstay of the country's prosperity; and as only about one-eighth of the surface is at present under tillage, there is room for great expansion. No better evidence of progress can be furnished than the extension of railways. The first was begun in 1866. There were, in 1910, 1472 miles in operation, and construction continues to go briskly forward. The chief centres of population are either on the coast or on the banks of the great navigable river Uruguay, whence cattle, meat, and wool are shipped.
So far, therefore, Uruguay has all the material conditions required for prosperity and happiness, an abundance of good land, a temperate and genial climate, water highways for traffic provided by Nature in her rivers, artificial iron highways on land, supplied by enterprising British capitalists. What is to be said of her inhabitants?
They were, till recent years, almost entirely of Spanish stock. The warlike native Indians, one of whose tribes, the Charruas, were fierce fighters, having been killed off, and the weaker tribes having quietly melted away, very little aboriginal blood has mingled itself with the Iberian stock. Some negroes are to be found along the Brazilian frontier, but they do not seem to have perceptibly affected the European element. Of late years a stream of immigrants has flowed in from Italy, yet in no such volume as toward Argentina. There is also a steady, though smaller, inflow from Spain; among whom there are, fortunately, many industrious Basques. Rather more than a fifth of the population are of foreign birth, a proportion small compared to that of the foreign-born population of Rhode Island or Massachusetts. These new-comers will soon be assimilated and are not likely to modify the national type.
That type strikes the foreign observer as already distinct and well marked. The Uruguayan is, of course, first and foremost a Colonial Spaniard, but a Spaniard moulded by the conditions of his life during the last ninety years. He has been a man of the country and the open air, strong, active, and lawless, always in the saddle riding after his cattle, handy with his lasso and his gun. Fifty years ago he was a Gaucho, much like his Argentine cousin beyond the river. Now he, too, like that cousin, is settling down, but he has retained something of the breezy recklessness and audacity, the frankness and free-handedness, of the older days. A touch of this Gaucho quality, in a milder form, is felt through all classes of Uruguayan society. Democratic equality in manners is combined with a high sense of personal dignity, an immense hopefulness, an impulsive readiness to try all experiments, a national consciousness none the less intense because it already rejoices over the triumphs it is going to achieve. Whether there is more of "ideality" than in Argentina I will not venture to say, but there is less wealth and less ostentation. Englishmen and North Americans settled in Montevideo like the Uruguayans, and say they are good fellows. There is evidently something attractive about them when the sons of such settlers grow up fond of the country, willing and proud to be its citizens. You will hear an English-speaking youth of either race say, if asked whether he is an Englishman or an American, "I am an Uruguayan."
While we were in Montevideo a revolution broke out in the country. There was sharp fighting about forty miles away from the city and the railways were bringing in the wounded. It caused no great excitement, having been expected for some weeks, and the newspapers told their readers very little of what was happening. They did not know much, for the military authorities had stopped every channel of communication. That, however, would of itself have been a very poor reason for not furnishing details. There were other and more imperative grounds for reticence. We were unfortunately unable to see anything and could learn little of the revolution, but its origin and especially the perfect sang-froid of the Montevideans, both natives and Englishmen, struck us as curious. A short explanation of the conditions attending such outbreaks may throw light on the phenomena of other republics as well as Uruguay.
Ever since the colonists declared their independence of Spain, fighting has been almost incessant in this smiling land. They fought first against the Spanish troops, and then against the Portuguese rulers of Brazil; they fought several times against Argentina and Paraguay, and almost incessantly against one another. As soon as independence had been secured and the Portuguese finally expelled, the two leading generals (Rivera and Oribe) who had led the patriots to victory quarrelled, and before long were striving in arms for the chief place in the republic. Their adherents grew into two factions, which soon divided the nation, or so much of it as took an active interest in politics. At the first battle General Oribe, who headed one of the parties, rode a white horse, and his lancers carried white pennons on their spearheads; so they were called the Blancos. The followers of the rival general, Rivera, had red pennons, and he rode a bay horse. They were, therefore, the Colorados. From that day on Uruguayans have been divided into Whites and Reds. Seventy-five years had passed and the grandsons of the men who had fought under Oribe and Rivera in 1835 were still fighting in 1910.
For what have they been fighting? At first there were no principles involved; it was a personal feud between two soldiers, who not long before had stood shoulder to shoulder against the Brazilian invader. But just as political parties sometimes drop the tenets with which they started and yet live on as organizations, so sometimes factions which started without tenets pick them up as they go along and make them watchwords. A party is apt to capture any current issue, or be captured by it, and to become, thereafter, committed to or entangled with it. Thus the Whites became in course of time the country party as opposed to the Reds of the towns, and especially of Montevideo, and thus, as the city is the home of new views and desires for change, the Reds have become the anticlerical and the Whites the church party. It would seem that the colours have nothing to do with the now almost forgotten term (common in France in 1848–1851) of the "Red Republic," but another sort of connection with Europe may be found in the story that the Garibaldian red shirt, which figured on so many battle-fields in Sicily and Italy, was due to Giuseppe Garibaldi's having fought on the Colorado side, in 1842–1846, against Rosas and the Argentine invaders, the emblem being retained when that last of the heroes raised his standard in the Italian revolution of 1848.[87]
When an insurrection is planned in Uruguay, word is sent round that its supporters are to rendezvous, armed and mounted, at certain spots on a certain day, and when the government gets to know of the plan, its first step is to seize all the horses in the disaffected districts and drive them to a place where they are kept under a strong guard. The horse is the life of a revolutionary movement, a tradition from the grand old Gaucho days; and without horses, the insurgents are powerless.