Views of Mar Del Plata.In the second picture the large building of “El Club,” the gambling centre during the short bathing season, is seen, and the bottom illustration shows the new “Rambla” or promenade of cement structure which has supplanted a rickety wooden one.
Views of Mar Del Plata.
In the second picture the large building of “El Club,” the gambling centre during the short bathing season, is seen, and the bottom illustration shows the new “Rambla” or promenade of cement structure which has supplanted a rickety wooden one.
Next morning, or it may have been the next again, when walking along the Calle Florida, our Gringo was surprised to find himself stopped by a policeman, with whom was the cochero, and requested to accompanythem to the comisaría. He gave the agente to understand, as well as he could by gesture and some of his odd Spanish words, that he would go with him in a coach, but would not be taken on foot through the streets. Eventually this was agreed to, and thus they reached the police station, where some hours passed before the magistrate could or would inquire into the case.
In vain did the prisoner claim permission to communicate with the British Minister, and when at length he was brought before the judge, it was clear that gentleman had made up his mind on the story already told by the cabman, which was naturally a tissue of lies. A request for an interpreter was at first refused, the magistrate saying he believed the Gringo understood well enough what was being said to and about him, but on continued protest, an interpreter was called, and he made it his first business to interpret nothing said either by the magistrate or by the accused, but advised the latter to pay up and get out of the court at once. Mr. Gringo, being a particularly stiff-necked British type, insisted that having incurred the trouble of being arrested, he would not now pay one centavo more than he had offered the cochero at the hotel, and demanded that his side of the case should be fully interpreted to the magistrate. Even this seemed to make no impression on the enlightened administrator of the law, who stated that the simple fact remained that the coachman had been engaged and had not been discharged, and that evidently the accused had not taken sufficient pains to make sure that the coachman was not waiting forhim at the appointed time and place, the prosecutor producing a lying witness who swore to seeing him at the appointed place and at the time stated.
At this juncture the Englishman again in the most emphatic way instructed the interpreter to insist on having the case adjourned until he could have time to communicate with the British Minister, as he was willing even to run the risk of a night in jail rather than accede to any order of Court that seemed to him unjust. His request was again dismissed as irrelevant, the matter being one entirely for the consideration of the police judge. Then, suddenly recollecting that at the moment of his arrest he was on the way to visit a very influential Argentine with whom he had business relations, and who took a prominent part in local politics, he suggested that he be permitted to communicate with this gentleman. When the judge heard the name of this gentleman pronounced, and realised he might be a friend of the accused, the whole complexion of the case instantly changed, and instead of passing judgment for the payment of the coachman’s claim, as he had originally shown a readiness to do, he calmly asked the accused why he had not mentioned before that he was a friend of Señor Fulano de Tal, and the matter could have been arranged immediately. Moreover, he would not even allow that the coachman was entitled to more than one peso, his minimum fare for the ride from the hotel to the place at which the Englishman left the coach!
So dumbfoundered was the plaintiff at this sudden change of front that he burst into a volley of oaths against the Gringo and also insulted the judge, whoforthwith clapped him into jail to cool off for the next three days!
Our friend, not a little satisfied with the turn of events, was thereupon liberated, with no worse loss than that of some four or five hours’ time, and the expenditure of a certain amount of nervous anxiety. But that was not the end of the matter. The cochero, having spent a few pesos by way of bribes anticipatory, had ample time in the next three days to nurse his wrath to scalding point, and the Englishman was advised, in view of this, to be very careful of his movements after these three days had passed, as it was a matter that might be settled in the approved manner of the Italian—at the point of the stiletto.
It so happened that five days after the court scene, the Englishman was due to sail for England, and during the days following the prisoner’s release he practically never left the hotel, even taking the precaution of having his luggage conveyed to the boat by another traveller, to throw the coachman off the scent, if perchance he was lurking about, seeking vengeance. Then when ready to leave, a friend engaged a taxicab and drove up in it to the kitchen entrance of the hotel, the Englishman jumping in instantly. Thus he succeeded in eluding the ruffian, but he actually saw him arrive at the quayside just when the visitors were being turned off the vessel.
The simple narration of this episode can give but faint idea of the anxiety and inconvenience it must have caused to the English traveller, and it is to be doubted whether in the end he was the gainer. My own policy was invariably to submit to any sort of injustice whenI could not see an immediate likelihood of successfully protesting against it. The line of least resistance is certainly the only policy in the Argentine that makes for comfort and peace of mind.
The practice of indiscriminately thrusting people into jail and leaving them there for several days, in the vilest conditions and often in a common room with the most desperate characters, before inquiring into their cases, had one solitary merit, and, as the Irishman said, even that was a bad one. In every motor accident that takes place—and there are many daily—the first thing the policeman does is to march the chauffeur off to jail, and have the car removed afterwards. It is a matter of complete indifference to the police whether the accident is the fault of the chauffeur or not—off he goes to jail and there he may lie for several days before he is discharged. As it would be difficult to discover more reckless drivers than those who make pandemonium of the streets of Buenos Ayres, this struck me as not entirely a bad method. To assume the guilt of the motor-driver until he had proved his innocence was, in nine cases out of ten, to take the proper course. Some English acquaintances of mine, however, who kept an automobile and employed a very considerate and cool-headed Englishman as driver, were unable to agree with me, as their man had just spent three days in jail for a slight accident, in which a careless passenger had injured his foot by stepping off the pavement against the wheel of the car, and owing to the verminous condition of the jail, the poor chauffeur had to destroy all his clothes after he was liberated! My friends also had to suffer inconvenienceowing to their car being abandoned in the street by the arrest of the driver, and being held by the police for a day or two before it was delivered to them, sustaining in the meantime some damage. The only moral of this story is that Buenos Ayres is no place for an English chauffeur!
But of course it is easy to be critical of the social conditions of a country which, after all, has no more than emerged from somewhat primitive conditions into the larger life of a great modern nation. The Spanish civilisation in America was not in every way superior to the native civilisations it destroyed and supplanted, and for generations it made but little progress of itself, if anything deteriorating as the inevitable consequence of its low and brutalising aim—the securing of treasure for the Spanish Crown. The Spanish communities established throughout the continent were notoriously lacking in ideals. Until they threw off the yoke of Spain and began to feel within themselves the stirring of national aspirations, to cherish ambitions of elevating themselves into individual nations, their history went some way to justify the famous cynicism that the true dividing line between Africa and Europe are not the Straits of Gibraltar, but the Pyrenees.
No longer, however, can it be said that any of these virile young peoples are without their ideals. If the Argentine citizen had no other figure than the splendid one of Sarmiento to point to, he would still be justified in claiming for his country a place among the intellectual nations of our time. And Sarmiento is but one of many great men whom the Argentine has produced.
There is everywhere in South America to-day an unmistakable reaching out for better things. Alongside the sheer brutality, unhappily still existing, the tender plant of intellectual culture has been growing, and with it true humanitarianism must make progress. It is, however, the defect of virtue ever to be less interesting than vice; not only in the Argentine, but also among ourselves, the baser elements of society have a knack of thrusting themselves in front of the worthier, so that the observer is liable to get his perspective askew. That is why it is easy to overestimate the importance of these baser elements of Argentine social life, though not to overdraw the picture of actual conditions. It may fairly be said that the baser elements of social life touch a higher percentage of the whole in the Latin-American civilisation of to-day than in that of Europe or North America, but that the more elevating factors are present and, if less in degree, are similar in kind to those of the older nations, and will eventually produce a worthy social system, in which intellectualism and humanitarianism will triumph over the brute forces of self-seeking and indifferentism. But the time is not yet.
The Argentine is credited with expending more on the education of its people than any other country in the world, with the exception of Australia, and if the truth must be told, it is not getting the best value for its expenditure. Since the days when Sarmiento,—who took part in the insurrection against the notorious Rosas in 1829, and some twenty years later had a hand in overthrowing thatgauchotyrant,—established in 1856, the first department of public education, the publicschools of the Argentine have been regarded as one of the first considerations of every statesman. Sarmiento spent his life in the cause of education, which he had studied in the United States and in Europe before rising to power in his native land, and during his presidency he achieved great things in the founding of schools and colleges throughout the country.
A visitor to Buenos Ayres, and especially if he be one of official distinction in his own country, will be shown some most admirable educational institutions in the federal capital, and among these the splendid Colegio Sarmiento, which perpetuates the memory of the wisest and most humane of Argentine presidents. So far good, but he will not be told, especially if he be under official guidance, that probably the school teachers throughout the country are four, five, or six months in arrears with their salaries, the appropriation for public education having somehow fallen short of the requirements. Just as an immense amount of the corruption and criminality among the police is due directly to the infamously low rate of remuneration, which in 1912 was practically the same as it had been some fifteen or twenty years before, though the cost of living had meanwhile doubled, if not trebled, so is school-teaching rendered one of the most despicable of callings by reason of the shamefully low wages paid to those engaged in it. In a country where the commonest forms of manual labour are highly rewarded, the rank and file of teachers are not so well paid as they are in the United States or in England, and thus, in financial standing, fall into the meanest class of workers. Nay, it is by no meansunusual for their wretched salaries to be as much as six months in arrears, and in any case the average teacher seldom has the satisfaction of handling his or her income, owing to a check system worked under the immediate auspices of the Educational Department itself.
The school teacher, being quite without resources and living from hand to mouth, wishes to buy, let us say, a sewing machine for his wife, or some household necessity. He obtains this on the instalment system, and the Educational Department becomes hisfiador, or guarantor, for the transaction. It does more; it actually pays the instalments and marks them off against his salary! In such wise many teachers do all their shopping, even to the purchase of their eatables, and rarely have the satisfaction of handling their actual salaries. No wonder that the poor pedagogue, who ought to be the hope of his country, is more often despised and contemned for his inability to acquire money in a country where the possession of it is the sole measure of a man’s ability.
Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that there is a genuine desire for knowledge among the Argentine people to-day, a willingness to be instructed, only second to that of the North American, whose advanced ideals of education first fired Sarmiento to emulation. The works of an informative character sold in the bookshops would, I am confident, greatly outnumber those of light reading, were statistics available. There is throughout the Press the same evidence of a serious interest in subjects which in England would be considered “heavy” or “dull.” In a word, the good Argentineis a man very much in earnest, given to pondering the problems of life in the light of the best criticism he can find, and if he is still overshadowed by his worser compatriots, he is by no means a negligible quantity, nor is he rarely to be met with.
Suburban and Rural Roads in the Argentine.The photograph on the left was taken in the suburb of Quilmes, and shows a typical suburban road in dry weather; that on the right, the main road through the town of Azul in the south of the Province of Buenos Ayres.
Suburban and Rural Roads in the Argentine.
The photograph on the left was taken in the suburb of Quilmes, and shows a typical suburban road in dry weather; that on the right, the main road through the town of Azul in the south of the Province of Buenos Ayres.
In many ways the country seems to be passing through much the same social development as the history of the United States presents, always remembering, however, that it is based on a civilisation that differs radically from the Anglo-Saxon. A further evidence of this is the extraordinary popularity of the lecture as an instrument of education. In the course of a single year, the procession of lecturers who invade Buenos Ayres assumes proportions that are almost comic. Not a week passes but the newspapers herald the coming of some European celebrity, whose portrait is published broadcast, whose life is written up in every journal, and whose lectures (for which a high fee is usually charged) are pretty sure to be well attended. The subjects on which these lecturers discourse are often of the most forbidding seriousness, and only people famishing for knowledge, or utterly at a loss otherwise to dispose of their time, could provide audiences for them. Theseconferencistascome indiscriminately from France, Spain, and Italy, the languages of these countries being so widely represented in the Argentine that a gathering capable of understanding any or all of them is not difficult to get together. Some of the lecturers are officially invited by the Government, who pay their fees and expenses, others—the majority—are quite as much interested in filling their pockets as in furthering the intellectualdevelopment of the Argentine, and very willingly invite themselves, any lecturer of the Latin race being a gifted self-advertiser. A good many ladies, chiefly Spanish novelists of reputation or political agitators, also grace the lecture platform in Buenos Ayres and the large provincial centres. A reception committee is usually formed to meet the distinguished visitor at the boat, and there is the usualbanquete, with the equally inevitablecopa de champaña, and the ubiquitous photographers fromCaras y Caretasand the other pictorial papers.
This movement has assumed proportions which in 1912 led the caricaturists to turn their attention to it, and cartoons of the different lecturers hurrying off with bags of gold, indicated the local cynicism on the subject; but apart from its amusing aspect it ought to be accepted as an earnest of the desire that does exist for instruction in subjects of public life. One popular lecture, for instance, was devoted to “The Management of Public Museums,” but literary subjects, studies of the lives of famous authors, and historical studies, as well as travel-talks, seem to be most acceptable. One lady arrived from Spain with a lecture in which she endeavoured to prove that Columbus was a Spaniard, based upon the most slender evidence put forth by a Spanish antiquary, with whom the wish was father to the thought; but she was listened to in a good-humoured, sceptical manner, which spoke well for the common-sense of the people, who wisely do not care a straw whether Columbus was a Gallego or Genoese. Among the celebrities engaged under Government auspices to lecture in recent years was a veryfamous French novelist, who is one of the favourite authors throughout Latin America. In common with most other authors, he not only lectured, but made use of his experience on returning home to describe the countries he had visited. His description of Uruguay is particularly remembered in Montevideo, as he is said to have mentioned the fine coffee plantations of that country, and this was the first that any Uruguayan had ever heard of them!
Although the final civilisation of the Argentine people will leave between it and any Anglo-Saxon civilisation a marked cleavage, yet it will approximate more closely to the British or North American than to the French or Spanish. To say that the Argentines are Latins with certain aspirations which are essentially characteristic of the Anglo-Saxons, would be too broad a generalisation, but, closely analysed, we can discover even more characteristics in the Argentine sympathetic to British social notions,—imitative of them, perhaps,—than in the French or Spanish, though at bottom, the Argentine remains Latin, and every nation, like every individual, is doomed to carry, wherever it goes along the road of progress or retrogression, “the baggage of its own psychology.” Socially, the British have passed through some of the phases from which the Argentine is only just emerging, and North Americans have passed through others which at no time affected British social life.
In concluding this chapter, I have to admit that I have been somewhat hampered in its construction by the fact that many illustrations which I have stored in my mind affecting the social side of things, fall moreproperly into other sections of my book, so that it is impossible to avoid in some degree the overlapping of interests, especially when I deal with subjects such as that in my succeeding chapter, which is really a further consideration of the social life of the country. In the present chapter, I have therefore sought to do no more than touch discursively upon certain incidents and matters coming within my knowledge during my stay on the River Plate, which may shed some light on an aspect of the Argentine which few American or English writers mention in their usually flattering and too often uncritical studies of the country and its people.