MENDOZA

Skilled in horsemanship, quick of hand and of eye; in his beginnings the Arab and nomad of the plains; indifferent of his neighbour’s life, for his own he carried in his hand to risk at the first hazard, yet “loyal to his own law” even in his most lawless exploits—the gaucho of the Pampa constitutes the genuine emblem of the Argentine genius. He is the materialized expression of the spirit of the vast and lonely plain. “Bearing allegiance to neither King nor thing,” as Azara writes, he followed the fate of the live stock of the colony; when the cattle escaped control he too declared himself free, running wild and beyond the pale of even nominal domestication. The Pampa was his home, and in his ears the breeze moving over the plains whispered to him of liberty. To colonial rule succeeded the new order of Independence, and the gaucho, inured by his style of living to the stress of weather and to the struggle with savage animals, became the right hand of the petty chiefs of party faction, ever joining the side in conflict with the ruling power. The words law and order signified for him oppression and servitude, and he became the declared enemy of all authority. But with all his faults the gaucho, in his own element, mounted on his beloved horse, with lazo secured to the back of his saddle and hisboleadorahanging from his waist, was the henchman beyond price for the work of the old estancia, knowing how to dominate and domesticate the savage herds and droves of wild mares. In all that he has seemingly been modified by the progress of the times, he has remained unmodified in his spirit which is the essential manifestation of his climate and of his habit. The nomad gaucho of the colonial period converted into the loyalgaucho of the estancia, the man with no other belongings than his horses and the silver clasp and buttons hanging at his belt to whom the breeder entrusted all his herds, and the grazier the money wherewith to buy the droves of bullocks, without for one moment thinking, either the one or the other, that he would neglect his charges or fail to render account to the uttermost farthing committed to his care. Alike loyal and venturesome in the fulfilment of his duties, and kindly and hospitable in his lowly home life, he is the hero of the rural romance of the Pampa. Not without regret and tender reminiscences must we take farewell of a period of pastoral life, from whose remembrance all the hardships and bitterness have disappeared, only leaving to us the recollection of that patriarchal and wholesome life which the late Hernandez has so skilfully depicted in the picturesque language of the gaucho who tells his story by the fitful light of the fire on the kitchen hearth while his fingers caress the melancholy strings of the guitar.And now approaches the new era of railways, of fenced-in paddocks, of ingenious drafting gates and all the mechanical entourage of the modern pastoral industry. The gaucho, like Othello, is without an occupation, but the spirit which in divers forms and epochs has characterized him shall not die. It is the native spirit of the Argentine genius which enters the immigrant ere for long he has settled in the land and which inspires the sons born to him in this country; it is the instinct of independence and individuality engendered by the free air of a rural life, and which is the antithesis of the dependent spirit symbolized in city life by socialism.

And now approaches the new era of railways, of fenced-in paddocks, of ingenious drafting gates and all the mechanical entourage of the modern pastoral industry. The gaucho, like Othello, is without an occupation, but the spirit which in divers forms and epochs has characterized him shall not die. It is the native spirit of the Argentine genius which enters the immigrant ere for long he has settled in the land and which inspires the sons born to him in this country; it is the instinct of independence and individuality engendered by the free air of a rural life, and which is the antithesis of the dependent spirit symbolized in city life by socialism.

Salta is a large, sparsely populated Province, the inhabitants of which outside the circle of its aristocratic families, are composed of our friend theGauchoand his families and theCoyaIndians. These last, cowboys and shepherds, are much more unpleasant people; morose, avaricious in their necessarily small way, and full of sullen duplicity. Their only obvious virtue is their devoted attachment to the small allotments of land they can call their own. This solitary virtue does not, however, make them any the pleasanter to strangers; all of whom indiscriminately they regard as possible enemies come torob them of their rights in some mysterious way or other.

Naturally, with such a population and on account of its distance from the great commercial centres of the Republic, Salta is not yet very far on the road to any great or settled prosperity.

It has some sugar plantations, cultivates some tobacco and makes some wine, but with its many generally well-watered and easily irrigable large areas of rich soil it could easily, and of course eventually will, progress.

It could grow a great deal more maize and alfalfa than it does, and could carry much more and better live stock than it yet troubles to do.

It produces some fruit and could produce all sorts of much choicer kinds in great variety; also potatoes, cotton and, as experts affirm, excellent coffee.

Of course there are here the old difficulties of irrigation, in some places, cost of transport and lack of intelligent labour. The first two are rapidly being overcome by the National Government, the last must be looked for overseas. The Gaucho and the Coya not only are not sufficiently numerous for Salta’s future needs, but (alas for the romance of the former!) they must be classed amongst the doomed unfit; to be merged in or overwhelmed by the march of modernity.

The aspect of Salta, like that of most of the northern Provinces and Territories, is varied. Mountain and low valley, broad plain and forest, deep river and rushing stream all alternate and give picturesqueness and diversity of climate. Goats, mules and sufficient horses for existing local needs are to be found here as in the neighbouring Provinces; all of which are justly famous for products, the mention of which must on no account be overlooked, the native cloths andPONCHOS, hand-woven of vicuna and guanaco wool. Soft, warm and durable, these cloths are highly and justly valued in the more civilized regions of the River Plate.

The manufacture of them dates from times which are prehistoric in America.

The forests of Salta contain a great quantity of Quebracho of excellent quality, and there are several indigenous creepers of caoutchouc-bearing kinds. This latter has as yet been little exploited, and then only in an extremely primitive manner.

Salta boasts a large hydropathic establishment in connection with the hot mineral springs of Rosario de la Frontera.

Salta, the Capital, is another of the old Colonial cities, amid the low houses of which fine new public buildings occur incongruously; iconoclastic. It has also a zoological garden which, wisely, contains many interesting specimens of local fauna, fine, luxuriantly planted public gardens and Plazas and an excellent Police Band.

In the oligarchic days of only a very few years ago the police forces of these outlying Provinces were extremely important political instruments. Under the Constitution the Provinces cannot raise or maintain independent soldiery; but who could say them nay if the exigencies of an uncultured population necessitated a large police force armed with Mausers?—to ensure due obedience to the orders of and agreement with the policy of the Provincial powers that were.

There are few commercial centres in Salta having populations sufficient to give them importance as towns. Metan is the largest, and after it come Cafayate, Campo Santo and Rosario de la Frontera, which, as has been said, is noted for its hot springs.

RUINS OF JESUIT BUILDINGS: MENDOZA, ARGENTINA

This is one of the richer Provinces on account of its vines and the large wine-making industry. Similarly with Tucumán and Sugar, one may say that Mendoza and Wine are in Argentina practically synonymous; this observationalso applies to its neighbour, San Juan, the second great wine-producing Province. Indeed it is quite common—very common indeed, in fact—to say of a person who shows signs of being under alcoholic influence that he is “Entre San Juan y Mendoza” (between San Juan and Mendoza).

Besides those of its vines, the greatest agricultural products of Mendoza are alfalfa, grown over very considerable areas of salt-impregnated soil, and a much smaller proportion of maize.

The population of Mendoza is small and the number of its live stock very little larger: although in point of superficial area Mendoza ranks third (after Buenos Aires and Córdoba) among the Argentine Provinces. It is only fair, however, to add that much of the Western Area of Mendoza is very mountainous, since it includes a long stretch of the Eastern side of the Andes.

This Province is bounded on the North by that of San Juan, on the West by Chile, on the South by the National Territories of Neuquen and the Pampa Central, and on the East by the Province of San Luis.

Its department of San Rafael is a very large one, larger indeed than the whole of the rest of the Province put together; in it is found the greatest agricultural activity, including the great alfalfa fields. The Mendoza cattle are of all kinds and varieties, little attention having been yet, generally, given to the science of cross-breeding. It, however, exports numbers of cattle to Chile, either by way of mountain passes or the Transandine Railway; but a great many of these have been bred in neighbouring Provinces and sent to Mendoza for a fattening period before exportation.

Irrigation is a great feature of Mendoza, which was the first Province to receive any notable attention in this regard. Now, if we except, perhaps, the great irrigation works and schemes already well advanced in the National Territoriesof Neuquen and the Rio Negro, Mendoza has, with San Juan, the largest and most comprehensive systems (both existing and in advanced stages of consideration) in the whole Republic.

The fall of the mountain rivers and the eastward drop of the whole surface of the Province makes irrigation here a comparatively easy task, while the natural fertility of the soil quickly and richly repays the initial cost and upkeep of reservoirs and canals. One menace there is which hangs ever over Mendoza, that of volcanic eruptions. The whole of its Capital was completely destroyed as recently as 1861. The city has, however, been rebuilt on its former site, a sort of shelf of land situated on the spring of the great Andine range. Gradually the loosely built low adobe houses have been and are still being replaced in the New Town by several-storied buildings of solid masonry; courage growing as the date of the last great earthquake grows more remote. Still slight shocks are of frequent occurrence in the Capital and elsewhere in this Province.

The City of Mendoza is rich in public gardens and avenues filled with luxuriantly umbrageous vegetation and has, of course (what self-respecting Argentine town has them not?), electric light and trams; but its just pride is the great West Park, situate on another level shelf of land projecting from the foot of the Cordillera on a higher level than that on which the City is built.

This Park has a sheet of water of almost a mile in length by some seventy-five yards broad, in which are ornamental islets and on which regattas are held. For these festal occasions there is a huge stone grand stand at one end of the water. The Park has many magnificent electric-lighted avenues lined with trees of majestic proportions, and all over it are gardens of subtropical shrubs and plants. Within its great bronze gates are also a zoological and a, specifically, botanical garden.

A BIT OF THE TRANSANDINE RAILWAY, ARGENTINA

ENTRANCE TO THE SUMMIT TUNNEL THROUGH THE ANDES (CHILEAN SIDE)

With all this, if Mendoza has drawn somewhat on thefuture to foot the bill of its many embellishments, it has done no more than many other cities of the still new South American countries, and with more immediate prospect of justification for its expenditure than have several others. What Mendoza has got to do now is to create an export trade for its wines, on the condition precedent that it manufacture wines that will keep and will improve with keeping. Otherwise with increased irrigation it may run the risk of over-production, since the home consumption is as yet a limited one. The increase of the population of the River Plate countries is, as we have seen, still slow, and outside the towns very little wine is drunk by the majority of the people except on special and rare occasions; mate sufficing for their habits and needs.

Mendoza sends large quantities of table-grapes and other fruit to Buenos Aires, and hopes one day to send them overseas. This latter consideration depends greatly on the adoption of improved methods of picking and packing, matters to which the management of the Buenos Aires Pacific Railway has given much practical attention. Care in such details is, however, but little in the Argentine nature generally, and even in a less degree in that of the strong mixture of Indian blood which marks the working classes of Mendoza, as it does in all except the littoral Provinces. Very good canned peaches come from the Mendoza factories and are in large demand throughout the Republic.

Coal and petroleum have both been found in the Province, but further working tests are needed before their probable commercial value can be ascertained.

From the City of Mendoza the Buenos Aires Pacific Railway (familiarly B.A.P.) strikes upward to where it passes through the Transandine tunnel; on the Mendoza side of which is the famous Puente del Inca (the Inca’s bridge), a vast block of stone which, lying across a ravine, makes a natural bridge, recalling the giant-built palace of the old Norse Gods. Here are also some hot mineral springscelebrated for treatment of rheumatism; to which treatment the dry, rarefied mountain air perhaps contributes its less recognized quota.

This Province is bounded on the North and East by the Province of La Rioja, on the West by Chile, and on the South and South-East by the Provinces of Mendoza and San Luis respectively.

Of all the Argentine Provinces San Juan has shown itself, until very recent times indeed, probably the most recalcitrant towards financial orderliness. A repeatednon possumuswas the only answer its inertness returned to the many periodical fulminations and menaces of the National Government in respect of its treasury bonds or depreciated Provincial paper money. So depreciated, in fact, that it was worth nothing at all outside the Province itself, and was by no means welcome, although legal, tender within its boundaries.

San Juan pleaded that it could not call this paper in since it had nothing with which to replace it—all the little National money it got for its wines and other produce went immediately back to Buenos Aires again for necessary purchases.

The National Government insisted that San Juanmustremove the disgrace from its financial escutcheon or all sorts of things would happen. San Juan regretted deeply and asked for time. In the meanwhile it contrived to raise another of those loans, without much more than a shadow of adequate security or provision, which long have been the nightmare of the National Government, and it still kept on using its depreciated notes. So, and in many other ways for long, very long, did San Juan wrestle, successfully according to its lights, with the spirit of progress until irrigation, fostered by the National Government, came to the aid of the latter in a way there was no denying.

PUENTE DEL INCA; MENDOZA, ARGENTINA

San Juanhadto become more prosperous and to begin to pay its way in respectable fashion. It evidently did not in the least want to do so, but it could not any longer see any way by which it could avoid recognition of its just liabilities. Thus are the good old times of this Province vanishing; the good old times which made sufficient provision for an aristocratic oligarchy and in which vassals had no opportunity of acquiring luxurious tastes.

First the railway, slow in this case, however, in its usually tonic effects and then irrigation, which poured water on to a naturally very fertile soil, brought it about that one day San Juan woke up to find itself faced with financial responsibility.

People from the littoral and even from overseas came and bought land and paid good prices in hard cash for it and then planted vines of new, productive kinds; trimmed them in new, productive ways; and made better wine out of them than San Juan had ever deemed at all necessary. Other people planted wheat and alfalfa, and even troubled to grow more maize than there had been before. In fact, if ever a Province had greatness thrust upon it in a bewilderingly short space of time it was San Juan. People are even prospecting and actually exploiting its long-latent mineral wealth, looking for and finding deposits of gold, silver, copper, iron, zinc, lead, sulphur, alum, mica, rock salt, lignite and marble.

The exploitation of many of these has not yet attained any very great commercial importance,[29]but that of others has already done so, and all the companies concerned have brought money into the Province and pay wages to many native workers. All this troublesomeness tends to curtail the daily siesta, but a consequent bundle of full-value national dollars operates as a consolation to even the most conscientious observer of traditional custom. The nextgeneration of San Juan inhabitants will doubtless be as wide awake as their neighbours, and strikes may take the place of old-time rebellion to the orders of patriarchal overlords; while the latter will be put to it to work their ancestral lands intelligently in order to maintain the due measure of their proper dignity.

Not only has the National Government fostered large systems of irrigation in and given irrigation to this Province, but it has also run a railway connecting the City of San Juan with the Federal Capital; thus providing another outlet for its grapes, wines and other produce.

An instance of the former commercial apathy of San Juan, and of its neighbour Mendoza for that matter, was, not long ago, to be found in the manner in which the growers of table-grapes allowed themselves to be continually and methodically jockeyed by the fruit ring of Buenos Aires.

The worthies composing this ring were low-class, ignorant men, who could only grasp the possibilities of monopoly and market rigging on a very small scale. Their simple method was to put only a certain limited quantity of fruit each week on the retail markets of the Federal Capital and to charge exorbitant prices therefor. To the poor, three-quarter Indian, ignorant people of the islands of the Paraná they said that Buenos Aires did not care much for peaches, and so they only went there once a week or so to fetch a few, at miserable prices, for market. The rest of huge crops were left to rot on the trees. San Juan (and Mendoza) were evidently given to understand that a similar situation existed in regard to grapes.

How this could have been so is hard to understand, except on the ground of extreme apathy on the part of the Provinces concerned, for lots of vineyard owners live at least half the year in Buenos Aires, and could have told of the scarcity and high price of fruit in that city.

However this may have been, the fact remained that so many kilos of table-grapes, and no more, went down toBuenos Aires in specially constructed trucks placed on the B.A.P. trains three days per week. Until the General Manager, Mr. J. A. Goudge, decided to act in the better interests of the Provinces concerned and, incidentally, also in those of his company, by running grape trains six days a week.

He thought, perhaps, that the Buenos Aires fruit merchants would call at his offices with illuminated testimonials. If he did so he was entirely mistaken. They did call, but it was to curse not bless. He would ruin them all, they said; they had comfortably arranged for such and such supplies of grapes, but more would upset their plans and businesses completely! They left Mr. Goudge unconvinced. So much so, indeed, that considering the menace of the ring to boycott his new trains, he hit on the simple but adequate expedient of running three grape trains per week from San Juan, non-stopping at Mendoza, and three starting from the latter place. San Juan needed its three trains, so did Mendoza, and therefore no one could boycott either service. Result, the arrival at Buenos Aires of six grape trains per week. The ring soon accommodated itself to the extra supply and went on robbing the busy, light-hearted Porteños (as people born in Buenos Aires are called) till the continued efforts of a paternally wise Municipality at last, after a long and bitter struggle, crushed the power of all the food rings in that formerly ring-ridden city.

This little piece of economic history is here intended to show the depths of somnolence and blindness to their own interests in which the grape growers of San Juan and Mendoza reposed till, so to speak, only the other day.

San Juan is capable of producing good quality cotton and tobacco. Its general climate is warm, hot in summer, and in parts very dry; though the humidity of the soil and atmosphere of the chief vine areas are greater than in those of Mendoza. Hence the relative general superiority and freedom from insect pests of the Mendoza vineyards.

The city of San Juan is Colonial in almost all its aspects, and its public and private gardens, filled with mingled tropical and temperate zone trees, shrubs and flowers, exhale the lazy atmosphere of days the memory of which is so constantly recurrent in all distant Argentine towns. Sleepy hollow; maybe, but its charm! A charm which will not nor can ever be “reconstructed,” try all those of us who are afflicted with unhappy artistic temperaments, never so hard. But that charm is still in San Juan, in Misiones (the one-time “Jesuit Empire”), Salta and Jujuy; in spite of new Government and Municipal Buildings, electric light and trams.

Later, we will go to the Falls of Iguazú, greater and more magnificent than Niagara or the Victoria Falls. These wonderful Falls are in the great up-to-date, go-ahead Argentine Republic. What proportion of our “Man-in-the-street” has ever heard of them? And how many good intelligent inhabitants of Buenos Aires have any clear idea of what they are really like?

The name of the Pampa is also redolent of romance; of memories of vast herds of wild cattle and horses, picturesque gauchos and raiding Indians; but thePampa Centralof to-day is a great and ever-growing cereal area, soon, no doubt, to become in its own right the fifteenth Province of the Republic. A Province probably destined to outstrip rapidly many of its older compeers in the race for wealth and very modern in its utilitarian progressiveness.

Its superficial area is approximately equal to that of Mendoza, and though as yet it lacks population, that will come to it sooner than to many other parts of the Republic,since it already grows much more than double as much wheat as all the rest of the Republic put together, after exception made of the Provinces of Buenos Aires, Santa Fé and Córdoba, and more than double as much linseed after exception made of the Provinces of Buenos Aires, Santa Fé, Córdoba and Entre Rios. It also produces more maize than any Province or other Territory with the exception of the last-mentioned four.

Its development has been the most rapid of any part of quick-moving Argentina. No just comparison of progress can be made with Uruguay; the conditions under which the latter country has until so recently struggled having been adverse to rapidity of material development, whereas the Pampa Central was freed from its only, though great, disturbing element, nomadic hordes of native Indians, as long ago as 1884.

This Territory is bounded on the North by the Provinces of Mendoza, San Luis and Córdoba, on the West by Mendoza and the National Territory of Neuquen, on the South by the National Territory of Rio Negro, and on the East by the Province of Buenos Aires.

Some parts of the Pampa Central are hilly and wooded and, as in some parts of the Province of Buenos Aires, ever-moving sand-hills vary the monotony of other portions of its surface, but the greater part of it is the continuation of a vast plain, begun in the Province of Buenos Aires, thePampaof the Indians, from which it takes its name. It is, in fact, the Central Pampa; the Eastern being in the Province of Buenos Aires and the Southern extending into Patagonia.

Though the Pampa Central boasts only two great rivers, the Rio Colorado and the Rio Negro, the latter of which forms its southern boundary, it has many both fresh-water and saline lakes, and water is seldom to seek far from its surface.

The chief products of the Pampa Central are wheat,linseed, maize and oats, but with the growth of its alfalfa fields and the planting of good grasses in lieu of the native hard pasturage, it has also become a great centre of the Live Stock fattening industry, especially during the winter months.

The sandy, salty soil of much of this territory, with water near the surface, provides, as has been said of similar tracts elsewhere, just the conditions most favourable to lucerne; while in other parts the soil is extremely rich in humus.

Three of the great railway systems serve the Pampa Central; viz. the Buenos Aires Western, the Buenos Aires Pacific, and the Buenos Aires Great Southern, carrying its produce to the ports of both Buenos Aires and Bahia Blanca.

Santa Rosa de Toay is the Capital of this Territory; a purely commercial town which by its rapidly grown importance supplanted the old Capital, General Acha.

The Pampa Central has also numerous other active centres of the cereal trade and general commerce.

On the question of its becoming a Province of the Republic there is considerable local difference of opinion; a good many of its business men holding that honour dear at the price of having to maintain a Provincial Congress and various Ministries and the rest of the appanages of autonomy. In this they are right. Direct National Government is certainly the cheapest and it is also very far from being the worst.

The Pampa Central now exports large quantities of high-class wool and hides. It also has some copper mines, the present output of which, however, is not of great importance.

This territory would already, no doubt, have been much more populous than it is had it not been the scene of one of the most glaring of the labour-exploiting scandals referred to elsewhere in these pages.

Here the cases were sufficiently numerous and contemporaneous to render a menace of serious disturbance possible to and partially effective by people who had been cajoled into developing virgin land only to be threatened withexpulsion (as soon as that work had been done and before they had been able to derive any profit from it) by owners who only revealed their existence at what seemed to them the propitious moment for their appearance on the scene of other people’s labours. Compromises were arrived at by which the farmers consented to pay rent for their holdings, but the scandal undoubtedly kept many others away from the Territory, and even now an evil result of it continues in the shape of almost every tenant being obviously only anxious to get the most he can out of the land while it is his to work. Few tenant farmers in the Pampa spend much money in buildings or other improvements.

The Pampa Central is a crying case for the adoption and insistence by the National Government on the real practical working out of a true colonization policy. A policy by which the small farmer could obtain the indisputable freehold of land which he develops and on which he lives, be he Argentine or foreigner.

In all else the foreigner actually enjoys under the Constitution the same privileges (except eligibility for high Government office, etc.) as a born Argentine. But land! It must go hard with an Argentine ere he part with his ultimate rights in that. Yet, I repeat, he must make up his mind to do so on a large scale or he will find his whole progress arrested as surely as if the Antarctic zone had suddenly extended its icy influence over half of his Republic. If he will not give them land the class of colonist he most needs—the realsettler—will continue to give the country a wide berth and its output must remain stationary at the point at which it fully occupies all available labour.

This is one of the least generally known parts of Argentina. Misiones figures in the history of the Spanish Conquest and that of the Jesuit Missionaries,[30]from which ittakes its present name; the Territory of the Rio Negro has of late years become prominent by reason of great schemes of irrigation (these, however, also affect the Eastern portions of Neuquen); Chubut came into notice in connection with the not over-successful establishment of a Welsh colony; the Chaco is vaguely associated in the general mind with Indian Reservations and occasional real or reported disturbances caused by the aborigines confined therein; but the Territories of Santa Cruz, Formosa, Los Andes and Neuquen are still little more than geographical expressions to even the vast majority of the inhabitants of the rest of the Republic.

A principal cause of this is that most of the inhabitants of Neuquen are to be found on the Western and most distant side of it (in which the most fertile, and almost the only really fertile parts of it, until irrigation is an accomplished fact, are situated) and because they not only do all their trading with Chile, but, to all intents and purposes, are Chileans.

It is quicker and easier to get backward and forward through well-known Andine passes between Neuquen and Chile than to accomplish the journey between the rail-head at Senillosa, a little to the West of the township of Neuquen, and the productive and well-watered Andine valleys. The Buenos Aires Great Southern Railway, which serves this Territory, now, however, has under construction an extension of the Neuquen line to far up the Andes; from whence it is intended to connect with the Chilean Railway system.

Therefore the richest parts of Neuquen are as yet practically Chilean colonies; from which cattle and agricultural produce find their way, some paying and much contriving to escape payment of duty to the neighbouring Republic, which in return sends such manufactured articles as the colonist’s somewhat humble needs demand.

VIEWS ON LAKE NAHUEL HUAPÍ, ARGENTINE NATIONAL TERRITORY OF NEUQUEN

This Territory is bounded on the North by the Provinceof Mendoza, on the West by Chile, on the South by the Territory of the Rio Negro, and on the East by the Territory of the Pampa Central.

Neuquen, though Argentina at large knows little of it, grows more wheat than any other National Territory, except the Pampa Central, and more alfalfa than any except the last named and the Territory of the Rio Negro. It also sends small quantities of potatoes and other table vegetables to Chile. Its chief exports to that country consist of cattle and sheep on the hoof.

The whole of the Andine side of Neuquen is extremely picturesque, and abounds in fertile valleys well watered by mountain streams. These streams, after their arrival at the foot of the Andine range, form a network of ultimate tributaries of the great rivers Colorado and Negro; after having formed a whole system of lakes of which Nahuel Huapí is the largest. The scenery of this lake, with the great snow-covered volcanic mountainTronador(the Thunderer) on its Southern end, is Scandinavian in its tree-clad magnificence. The superficial area of this lake is some 1000 square miles and its depth in some parts is over 700 feet.

On one of its islands, Victoria, the enormously wealthy Argentine family of Anchorena have founded a colony to work its wealth of virgin timber, on a 99 years’ lease from the National Government.

A number of small steam and sailing boats ply on this lake, gathering the wood, hides and other produce of the farms on its borders and bringing to the farmers their necessary supplies.

Neuquen is credited with alluvial goldfields and has some copper. Its mineral wealth is as yet, however, really unascertained; the prospecting and tentative exploitation of it having been up to the present only done by syndicates or small companies whose resources have been too limited for the tasks they have set themselves in, from the point of view of transport, such inaccessible regions.

The Western and South-Western parts of this Territory are rich in timber, and its Eastern plains should, with irrigation, repeat the prosperous history of the Pampa Central.

It has many hot and other mineral springs, the medicinal and other virtues of which are already known in Chile; from which country they attract many sufferers from rheumatism and stomachic and other ailments.

In dealing with all the yet little known outlying parts of the vast Argentine Republic one is apt to become wearisomely tautological in one’s endeavours to give some true idea of their enormous latent natural wealth. Yet if one set out, ever so modestly, to bring some conception of them home to the Northern Hemisphere, one must tell the truth even at the risk of reiteration. And the truth is that for the future wealth of all these regions there is only one word,Incalculable.

The Territories of Neuquen and the Rio Negro will soon have irrigation on a vast scale and of most modern design. This work is being carried out for the National Government by the Buenos Aires Great Southern Railway Company and is already far advanced.

The virgin soil of the plains of these Territories is almost incredibly rich in humus and alluvial deposit; and they have a wealthy Railway Company ready to afford all necessary means of transport to deep-water ports which nature has already provided on the Atlantic Ocean at, comparatively, no great distance from any of, and in many instances close to, what will be their chief centres of agricultural production (in the widest sense of that term).

HEAD PORTION OF THE RIO NEGRO (ARGENTINA) GREAT IRRIGATION AND CURRENT CONTROL WORKS

The most important of the general observations applicable to this Territory have already been made immediately above; remains in their connection only to be said that theNorthern side of the valley of the Rio Negro itself contains some of the naturally richest soil to be found anywhere in the Republic. Anyone armed with a watering-pot can grow any temperate-zone crop, fruit or plant and be astounded by the brobdingnagian proportions of its yield, accomplished in a space of time suggestive of Jack’s Beanstalk.

And this anywhere in the midst of what now is an arid desert, on which the only vegetation is sparse, stunted, scrubby, useless bush.

The reasons for this are that these eastern regions of the South have practically no rainfall at all and that all the water running from the Andes to the Sea has already found its way, farther west, into one or other of the great Rivers Colorado and Negro.

The huge irrigation scheme now being carried out will utilize an enormous natural hollow formerly known as theCuenca Vidal, now rechristened Lago Pellegrini (after a once prominent Argentine statesman) as a natural storage reservoir. The surplus water from the lake and river system, which makes a network over the whole of the western part of the territories of Neuquen and the Rio Negro, at the base of the Andes, will be utilized for the irrigation of their eastern plains. This system is also destined to serve another necessary purpose: namely, to regulate the flow of the Rio Negro.

This is very necessary indeed; for this river, swollen by the melting of Andine snow and ice, which has in some years taken place in an exceptional degree, comes down suddenly with overpowering violence, headed by what is like a huge tidal wave, and sweeps everything within miles of its normal, deep-cut, banks before it.

Several times during the past fifty years have settlers been tempted by the rich alluvial soil, brought down by centuries of just such floodings, to establish themselves near enough to the actual river to irrigate by some one or other rough lift system, and remained there year in yearout, in the false security enjoyed by peasants on the slopes of a volcano, till one day a thunderous roar has been the only warning of the immediate approach of a torrential flood. Lucky the man who could catch and mount his horse in time to gallop away and thus save his life. All the rest, cattle, house and crops, were swept away in a second by the great head wave and following floods of the river suddenly swollen by the simultaneous overflowing of its innumerable tributary lakes.

Now all this will be guarded against, and, incidentally, the Rio Negro may be rendered really navigable for a very considerable distance by other engineering works for the removal and control of its bar.

However, and when, this last may be, there can be no doubt about the magic change that the first partial irrigation of these present desert plains will quickly create. Trees will soon grow on the irrigated portions, and these trees and other vegetation will arrest the clouds which now fly on unheedingly to the superior attractions of the Andes or the southern hills of the Province of Buenos Aires. The very southernmost portion of that Province is now in the same sad case as the rest of the valley of the Rio Negro, of which it forms a part.

As the result, smiling verdure will replace arid desert; in a short space of time, because of the natural fertility of the soil on which the transformation will take place.

Already two dotted lines on the railway map, one between Bahia Blanca and Carmen de Patagones, near the mouth of the Rio Negro, and the other branching from it to San Blas, show where the Buenos Aires Pacific Railway intends to run its first two lines through the southernmost strip of the Province of Buenos Aires which lies between the Rios Colorado and Negro, and other two dotted lines, one running southwards from the township of Rio Colorado to the bay of San Antonio, in the San Matias Gulf, and the other from the centre of the first to a junction, near Choele Choel, withthe main line to Neuquen, show the first intentions of the Buenos Aires Great Southern line towards that portion of the valley of the Rio Negro which falls within its agreed sphere of influence.

In agreeing to a division between them of the productive and prospectively productive areas of the southern parts of the Republic, these two great Railway Companies not only removed from their own paths the disastrous temptation to cut each other’s throats by tariff war, but also to a considerable extent precluded profitable competition by outside enterprise.

The National Government has now a line running from the port of San Antonio running East and West right across the Territory. The construction of this line will soon reach Lake Nahuel Huapí.

San Blas deserves special mention as the probable future chief port of the Rio Negro valley. On a long inlet of the Atlantic Ocean at the mouth of which is a large projecting island and having deep water right up to its shores, San Blas has been described by high British authority to be the finest natural port, after Rio de Janeiro, on the Atlantic coast, both for commercial and strategic purposes.

It formed part of a concession made many years ago by the National Government to the late Mr. E. T. Mulhall, the Editor and, with his brother, Mr. Michael Mulhall, the eminent statistician of his time, joint founder ofThe Buenos Aires Standard, in recognition of services done for the development of the Republic; which in those days of its obscurity and distress was much aided towards a better and truer knowledge of its possibilities in Europe by the efforts of what now is the oldest established newspaper in America.The Standardis printed, as it always has been, in the English language.

The Rio Negro Territory already grows a good deal of wheat and oats and has the largest area under alfalfa of any National Territory except the Pampa Central; it also hassome vineyards and many European fruit trees grow in the fertile valleys at the foot of the Andes.

The minerals of this Territory are as yet an almost unknown quantity, except some copper and salt. Petroleum has also been found at Bariloche, but its commercial value is not fully ascertained.

The climate of the Rio Negro is temperate and, as has been indicated, for the most part very dry. One disadvantage to agriculture in the flat parts of these southern Territories is the furious winds which frequently sweep over them. The force of these will, it is reasonably hoped, be broken by trees in the days to come.

This reminds one of the tragi-comic history of the contemplated exploitation of certain great salt marshes situate not very distant from San Blas.

The brine from these was to be, and indeed on a great inaugural occasion was, run through pipes into immense shallow basins, where it was to lie until its moisture had been evaporated by the sun and wind. Afterwards the salt was to be shipped at the port of San Blas to Buenos Aires or elsewhere.

All seemed very well with this plan. The brine was duly accumulated in the drying basins, the sun shone fiercely on it—and, then, the wind blew and blew. So hard that it emptied the basins and distributed the brine they had contained over the rest of the Universe. Thus was a good scheme brought to naught by the miscalculations of its initiators. These, however, were wealthy enough to take the matter in good part. Indeed, it was from one of them that the present writer had the story. Still there is plenty of good salt in the Territory.

The Rio Negro has as yet only townships of rough-and-ready architecture, the centres of its nascent commerce. Viedma, its capital, is in a fertile tract of land at the mouth of the Rio Negro; it was, however, almost completely destroyed by a great flood in 1899. Its communicationwith the Federal Capital is maintained by the steamers which call at Carmen de Patagones, on the opposite bank of the river, and by ferry thereto and coach to the head of the above-mentioned new line of the Buenos Aires Pacific Railway which already reaches half-way between it and Bahia Blanca. The completion of this line will greatly affect Viedma for the better, while the regulation of the current of the Rio Negro will protect it from repeated destruction by flood. This Territory has a fair stock of sheep, but few cattle.

Chubut has struck oil, literally. Petroleum was discovered there only a few years ago (1907), and since the first discovery many more wells have been sunk in greater or less proximity to the first find in the district of Comodoro Rivadavia, situate almost on the southern boundary of this Territory and on the Gulf of San Jorge. On this gulf of the Atlantic Ocean, the new oil-fields enjoy an admirable commercial situation. Remains only to prove fully their commercial value; of which the great Argentine Railway Companies are evidently not yet fully persuaded as far as fuel for their purposes is concerned, since they still use imported coal.

A long continuance of this present European war might, however, give stimulus to experiment with Chubut petroleum, which evidently has some value, even if it need more preparation for use than the North American and European kinds.

These oil-fields were, as has often been the case in such matters, discovered by accident, but the discovery was made by the National Hydrological Department in the course of a search for an available water supply for the then new Comodoro Rivadavia port.

On these fields claims have been allotted to Companies and private individuals and a certain area has been reservedto itself by the National Government. Most brilliant results of tests of all kinds are announced, the Government line of railroad from the Rio Negro port of San Antonio to Lake Nahuel Huapí “uses no other” (fuel); and yet, and yet, Comodoro Rivadavia petroleum is slow to make history in the markets of the world.[31]

Still, time must be given for proof, especially in Chubut, the general appearance of which Territory suggests that it was the last word of creation, in one sense, after, of course, utterly desolate Tierra del Fuego. It is only about two decades since the Argentine authorities themselves seem to have grasped the idea that such a place did exist in their dominions. It is only so long ago, anyhow, that the National Government thought fit to send the first resident Government officials to Chubut to look after whatever might need to be looked after there. Before that, a small part of it was under the absolute control of a Colony of Welsh people who first settled there in 1856-66. The rest of it was, and to a great degree still is, almost exclusively inhabited by native Patagonians.

The capital of the Territory, Rawson, was founded by the Welsh colonists at the place of their first landing on the South Atlantic coast. It has twice been destroyed by the flooding of the Chubut River, at the mouth of which it stood; but it has now been rebuilt more solidly than before and on a site rather more out of harm’s way.

The original Welsh colonists seem to have been a strangely puritanical and narrow-minded set of persons to find themselves in such an out-of-the-way corner of the earth as Chubut then was. So, however, it may be observed, were certain other persons who landed in North America a much longer while ago from a ship called theMayflower. Anyhow, the Welsh built and their descendants still maintain Protestantchurches and a stern religious spirit in their town of Rawson, a somewhat bigoted spirit, be it added, since it forbade the inter-marriage of its flock with anyone not of their own, or at any rate British, nationality; nor would it, until very recently, permit their acceptance of the most tempting offer to sell any part of the land within the colonised areas to a “foreigner,” Argentine or otherwise. And this last restriction does not seem to have been so much due to foresight of a future increase in land value as to a simple objection to the admission of any stranger within the fold.

Time will change this no doubt, and change it as soon as Chubut begins really to advance, but all that time has as yet done for the Welsh colony appears to have been to sap the energy of its forefathers; the men who in the face of discouragement and deaf official ears turned to their just grievances, struggled on, themselves constructing irrigation canals, and changed disaster into comparative prosperity. The Chubut “Welshman” of to-day seems as lazy as his forebears were energetic. A fresh strain of blood is possibly needed for his case.

The superficial area of Chubut is very large. After the Territory of Santa Cruz (to which would seem to have been allotted all that was left over of the Republic except the Argentine half of Tierra del Fuego, after the Government of the more populated parts had been arranged for) it is the largest National Territory of Argentina, and much larger than any Province except that of Buenos Aires.

Its estimated population averages scarcely more than one per ten square miles, so that there is plenty of elbow room in Chubut. With a superficial area approximately equal to that of Italy, the total estimated number of its inhabitants is but 31,000.

However, no doubt there are good times coming for Chubut as elsewhere in Argentina, though, petroleum and its general effects apart, there is relatively little in Chubut to hasten their coming, except its fertile Andine valleys. Sheep certainly thrive on its rough, scanty vegetation, andseem to find just sufficient shelter on its wind-swept plains; but Chubut has little rainfall and its available fresh waters are few and far between at any practicable distance beneath the surface. It has only one great river, the Chubut, from which it takes its name, and this runs very shallow in the summer, while many of the lakes dry up altogether. In the West, the Andine region, however, there is ample rainfall, and this is as yet the only really productive part.

Chubut grows and exports some alfalfa and sends some cattle to Chile, but its chief product is wool. Its wheat, however, though still small in quantity, fetches very good prices. A railway is projected to run East and West across this Territory. It already reaches from Puerto Madryn to Gainam, on the River Chubut, a little west of Rawson.

This Territory is bounded on the North by Chubut, on the West and South by Chile, and on the East by the Atlantic Ocean.

Santa Cruz is not by any means so desolate, on the whole, as Chubut. It is the land of the sheep, and its large, very large, estancias, either on the Andine side of it or on the banks of its rivers, mostly belong to British settlers, who have brought their own architecture, orchards and gardens with them to this really out-of-the-way spot. Anyone weary of the crowded world and its busy ways might live and die under the shadow of the ever-lessening, as one gets south, heights of the Andine range, in some snug, sheltered valley through which a rippling stream runs close to where he would sit on a green sward in the shade of his own orchard.

This is no fancy picture. As has been indicated elsewhere in these pages, nothing is so English, temperature, vegetation, the very breeds of sheep (Romeny March largely predominating), in America than some favoured spots in Santa Cruz. Only the climate is different in being drier, the rain mostly falling in blustering showers.

There is, of course, a contrast when one emerges from among the Andine valleys, rivers and lakes out on to the dry, wind-swept, desert-looking plains. Still, even there one comes at times to oases, on the banks of one or other of the several considerable rivers. Shelter from the furious winds which seem to blow eternally over Patagonia is the one necessity for man, beast and crops in Santa Cruz. Transport also is lacking. Even the railway which the National Government has partly constructed to run from Puerto Deseado, and for the rest has under advanced consideration, is apparently to strike almost immediately Northwards up into Chubut; leaving Santa Cruz, as it is now; almost a world of itself apart, as far at least as communication with the rest of Argentina is concerned. Its most fertile parts, like those of all these western and southern territories, are much more get-at-able from Chile than from their Atlantic sides.

However, a cold-storage establishment has been built at Gallegos, the chief port and the capital of this Territory; so that Santa Cruz may become a centre of the frozen and chilled mutton industry instead of, as formerly, exporting only wool and slaughtering sheep merely for their fat and skins. It is a good sheep country in the regions at all suitable for grazing, since disease is extremely rare in, if not entirely absent from, flocks reared in its cold dry climate. In respect of cattle and cereals the outlook is not so promising. Still, one cannot have everything even in Argentina. And one can grow wheat, oats and alfalfa, besides apples and pears in Santa Cruz.

First of all it may be said that there are no active volcanoes in Tierra del Fuego nor have been within the memory of man. Mr. Paul Walle, in his excellent work, already mentioned,L’Argentine telle qu’elle est, suggests that itsname may have been given it by early explorers who observed burning on it grass fires lit by the natives for the purpose of improving the growth of certain shrubs the leaves of which they use for food.

Be this as it may, the name “Fire Land,” as my friend the Government official translator naively has it in the English edition of the Monographs attached to the latest Argentine agricultural census, is anything but a warm spot; as certain demagogues who long troubled the industrial peace of Buenos Aires have shown that they are well aware.

These people were at one time periodically deported for inciting to commit or committing overt violence in connection with labour strikes. They were mostly anarchists of the type which tyrannical Governments all the world over persist in regarding as criminal. These men were put on board boats bound for their native countries, the police of which were telegraphically advised of their departure and intended destination. Needless to say, the anarchists took good care to contrive to leave the boat before she reached what was for them a danger zone. Usually they got out at Montevideo and soon were back again at their old work of stirring up strife in Buenos Aires.

At last the National Government had enough of this procedure and Congress passed a law whereby any person having been sentenced to deportation is, on being subsequently found in the Republic, liable to a term of penal servitude; and the fact that Tierra del Fuego would be the penal settlement to which recalcitrant anarchists would be sent was duly and insistently made public. This had a very beneficial effect for the Government and peaceable citizens at large. Dangerous anarchists thenceforth ceased to return to Argentina after deportation. They knew, or at least had read or heard, what the climate of Tierra del Fuego is; and that for people like them, used to fairly comfortable living, confinement there most likely meant burial there also.

Not quite half of this charming island, over which thewinds blow straight from the South Pole, belongs to Argentina and forms the National Territory under discussion. The other half of it belongs to Chile. Geologically most of this island is a prolongation of the Andes. On the Atlantic side of its forest-clad hills are sloping plains, the continuation of the Pampean formation. On these a peculiarly hardy breed of sheep graze, finding some shelter in valleys and hollows, and give a wool which fetches a good price in European markets. Grazing of a rough kind does also maintain cattle and horses on the Northern parts of the island. Fish and shell-fish of a multitude of kinds and good quality abound on the coast and afford material for a profitable industry, as also do the seal and whale fisheries, and penguins are hunted for their oil. All these fisheries are supposed to be under Government supervision, regulated by special laws; but, in fact, the practical difficulties of adequate supervision result in an enormous amount of highly destructive poaching.

The official estimate of the total cultivated area of Argentine Tierra del Fuego is 110 hectares, of which 90 are stated to be planted with potatoes and other table vegetables. The number of sheep is given by the same authority (Señor Emilio Lahitte, Director of the Department of Rural Economy and Statistics in the National Ministry of Agriculture) as over 2,500,000 and cattle at about 15,000.

The Roman Catholic Silesian Brothers have a mission, schools and an estancia on the island; and a Protestant clergyman, the late Mr. Bridges, during his lifetime did a great deal towards civilizing and bettering the condition of the native Indians and also kept a self-supporting refuge home for the victims of the shipwrecks of small craft which are still too numerous on this wild storm-beaten coast. This good work is now being carried on by his son, the first child of European parentage born in Tierra del Fuego.

Ushuaia, the Capital, is chiefly notable for the penal gaol above alluded to. Formerly convicts were kept, but notoften for long before death overtook them, on an island which forms the very southernmost point of South America. It is a terribly cold, damp region where rain falls on an average 280 days in the year. On consideration, perhaps it is the reputation of this place which has so effectually damped the ardour of deported anarchists; as the Ushuaia gaol is a modern structure, said to be furnished with all the latest requirements for the well-being of prisoners. Still, even it, in Tierra del Fuego, can provide but uncomfortably cold lodging.

Tierra del Fuego is not lonely for it has many fishing ports and all navigation must pass it on the way through the Magellan Straits. For all that, one cannot but wonder why any but prisoners and prison and other officials go there (except, of course, fishermen and the adventurous spirits who are ever hunting in every accessible nook and cranny of it for alluvial gold) when there are so many much pleasanter and more profitable places, with, between them, all varieties of climates to choose from in the wide latitudes of the River Plate Republics.De gustibus, etc., one must suppose—and yield obedience to the final words of the saying.

If one has sufficient Spanish, one should read Leopoldo Lugones’Imperio Jesuitico, and also the same author’sGuerras Gauchas, before going to Misiones. If not, one should go there all the same.

This territory is bounded on the North-East and South by Brazil, and on the West by Paraguay and the Province of Corrientes. It is sandwiched in between the rivers Paraná and Uruguay, but a very much smaller Paraná and Uruguay than we have seen further south.

Many parts of Argentina have been described as “The Garden of the Republic,” and many as its most picturesque region, but the latter description can surely only truthfullyapply to Misiones. If not sufficiently trim and cultivated to be called a garden, its superlative beauty and its crowning marvel the Iguazú Falls must leave even the most callous visitor pleasurably astounded; and not a little awestruck with its ruins and reminiscences of the dawn of South American civilization, which was heralded in these parts by the Jesuit Fathers. These Missionaries made most practical Christians of the surrounding tribes; teaching them the arts of architecture, carpentry, and such-like; not forgetting humility and obedience.

If one wants proof of all this one need but look on the ruins of monastery and church now half hidden amid an ever-encroaching luxuriant vegetation.

The descendants of those same Indians can hardly be got to do as much work in a lifetime now as they must have done in a week under the mild but very firm rule of the Jesuit Fathers. Eventually, the power these Missionaries had attained over the surrounding tribes became such as to label them dangerous to even Catholic Spain; and an order was given, and enforced, for their expulsion. They were scattered: and but the ruins of their solid, sculptured masonry, gardens and orange and olive groves now mark the places where once white-clad natives kept fast and feast days with as much solemn orderliness as ever so many timid monastic novices could do.

Nowadays, one can get from Buenos Aires to Misiones either by rail (North-East Argentine Railway) or by the Mihanovich company’s boats. Both ways furnish delightful travelling through interesting and picturesque country, though for pure scenery the river way is the best. The best of all, however, is to go up by rail and down again by boat and to see all there is, and there is a very great deal worth seeing, to be seen.

By either route one can stop at Posadas, the capital, evidently from its name an ancient resting-place for travellers (Posada being Spanish for an inn).

But people who are bent on reaching San Ignacio, a small river port, or rather clearance on the Upper Paraná, near which are the chief of the ruined Jesuit Missions, and the Iguazú Falls will probably leave Posadas for closer inspection if need be, on the return journey.

Once again we board a Mihanovich boat and go up a seeming river of fairyland.

An adequate description of the majestic splendour and beauty of the Iguazú Falls is far beyond the pen of the present writer. One is gradually prepared for the great sight by a series of smaller cascades and cataracts of other converging rivers which one passes on the way to where the Iguazú hurls its large volume of water in downward jumps or in one horseshoe-shaped, thundering, frothy mass. Where it falls one is face to face with the greatest waterfalls in the whole world,[32]as the following comparative figures will show:

The only point of advantage of the Victoria Falls is their height.

The present chief source of wealth in Misiones is the various kinds of timber and valuable cabinet-maker’s woods found in its virgin forests. One day Misiones will doubtless export its rosewood and other beautiful and valuable products of its forests, which also produce pine and other building timber of superior quality to that which Argentina now imports from Europe. Transport of timber is effected by means of tying it into huge rafts which go down river as far as Corrientes. The timber supply of Misiones will long continue rich, since the tendency of the forest is ever to encroach on the surrounding land.

A growing industry on which great expectations are based is the cultivation of the Ilex Paraguayensis, or mate shrub.The consumption of mate or Paraguayan tea, as it is sometimes called in Europe, is enormous throughout both of the River Plate Republics, which now import very large quantities annually from Paraguay and Brazil, while no sort of good reason seems to exist why the northern districts of Argentina should not grow sufficient to meet the home consumption.

The Jesuits evidently appreciated and cultivated this shrub, but they had the secret of growing it from seed, a secret the true re-discovery of which by modern horticulturists is not yet quite proved.[34]

Up till quite recently all Misiones mate yerba has been gathered from the abundant virgin growth of the shrub. Once Misiones produced larger quantities of sugar than it does now; and there is no reason why this industry should not revive from the almost total paralysis which it at present suffers; nor why one day the wine output of Misiones should not be improved in both quality and quantity.

Maize naturally grows well (it yields in six months) in Misiones; which Territory with the general warmth of its climate, sufficient rainfall and heavy dews, is most favourable to tropical and subtropical vegetation. Oranges, of course, bananas, pineapples, and guavas grow practically, if not quite, wild and ground nuts and the castor-oil plant are among its many valuable products. The whole of Misiones is well watered by a network of very numerous streams, and if its atmosphere by day is rather reminiscent of a hothouse, the nights are usually cool and refreshing.

The unevenness of its surface, while precluding much idea of extensive cultivation, is admirably suited for the shelter and care of the best natural produce of this exotically picturesque region.

Misiones has quarries of valuable granite at San Ignacio; close to the river as if they had been placed there for facilityof transport. These quarries furnished the Jesuits with the material for their famous buildings; though that they persuaded the natives, who before their coming had little ambition for anything save inter-tribal warfare, to quarry, transport and build up solid masonry is nothing short of marvellous. Truly Jesuit “influence” was a very real and concrete thing in the Misiones of those days.

One must not forget tobacco, or cotton, as other of Misiones’ hitherto greatly neglected industries.

One cannot insist too much upon the fact that no one who does not himself visit the River Plate Republics in all their length and breadth can really grasp even a faint idea of their diversified latent wealth. One is apt to suppose that because Misiones, for instance, does not produce much tobacco or sugar,[35]there is some pretty solid obstacle at the bottom of its relative non-productiveness. People naturally think, “Well, it’s all very well to chant dithyrambics of the marvellous might be’s of what evidently are your pet countries, but why does all this wonderful wealth of them continue latent, why does not one see, or at least hear, a great deal more about it, if all you say is true?”

The reply for this is, “Give me sufficient capital and sufficient suitable labour (especially the latter) and I will very speedily prove my every word.”

The River Plate Republics have not yet (again I say it) sufficient population to exploit even a part of their possible cereal industry, the one which naturally gets first attention because it combines the attractions of rich profit and comparatively little care or labour, under the almost primitive conditions under which most of it is still carried on.

When there is a surplus of labour after grain and cattle have been duly provided for, all sorts of other things will be attended to. But it is no good expecting ordinary people, without the many more or less occult advantages of early Jesuit Fathers, to get any constantly careful work, such ascotton, tobacco and many other valuable crops require, out of native South American Indians. They can’t or won’t do it, anyway, they don’t; and it is probably easier to rediscover how to grow mate yerba from seed than how to rediscipline for practical purposes the race which built and gardened in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The North Argentine Railway has in project a branch from its Santo Tomé-Posadas line to run through the centre of Misiones to the North-West corner where the frontiers of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay join.

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