South America Observations and Impressions

Such was the country and such those who dwelt in it: boundless plains, bare and featureless, but fertile wherever there was rain enough to water them, and not too hot for the outdoor labour of a south European race, a land fit for cattle and for crops, easy to traverse, easy to till, because there were neither stones to be removed nor trees to be felled. Yet in 1852 only an insignificant fraction of it was used for tillage, and such wealth as there was consisted of the vast herds of cattle. The population had scarcely reached a million and a half. What is it now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this immense fertile and temperate country with hardly six people to a square mile, what limit can we set to the growth of wealth and population? Already the nation is larger than the Dutch or Portuguese or Swedish. Within thirty years it may equal Italy. Within fifty years it may approach France or England, even if the present rate of its increase be reduced. It may one day be the most numerous among all the peoples that speak a tongue of Latin origin, as the United States is already the most numerous of all that speak a Teutonic one. Many things may happen to change its present character, yet the unformed character of the youth before whom such a future seems to lie is well worth studying.

First a few words about the race. No other Spanish-American state, except Uruguay, has a people of a stock so predominantly European. The aboriginal Indian element is too small to be worth regarding. It is now practically confined to the Gran Chaco in the extreme north, but elsewhere the influence of Indian blood is undiscernible among the people to-day.82 The aborigines of the central Pampas have disappeared, – nearly all were killed off, – and those of Patagonia have been dying out. We have, therefore, a nation practically of pure South European blood, whose differences from the parent stock are due, not to the infusion of native elements, but to local and historical causes.

Till thirty or forty years ago this population was almost entirely of Spanish stock. Then the rapid development of the Pampas for tillage began to create a demand for labour, which, while it increased immigration from Spain, brought in a new and larger flow from Italy. The Spaniards who came were largely from the northern provinces and among them there were many Basques, a race as honest and energetic as any in Europe. So far back as 1875 one used to see in the French Basque country between Biarritz and the pass of Roncesvalles plenty of neat and comfortable houses erected by men who had bought back their savings from the River Plate. The Italians have flocked in from all parts of their peninsula, but the natives of the north take to the land, and furnish a very large part of the agricultural labour, while the men from the southern provinces, usually called Napolitanos, stay in the towns and work as railway and wharf porters, or as boatmen, and at various odd jobs. In 1909, out of 1,750,000 persons of foreign birth in the republic,83 there were twice as many Italians as Spaniards, besides one hundred thousand from France, the latter including many French Basques, who are no more French than Spanish. Between 1904 and 1909 the influx of immigrants had risen from 125,000 annually to 255,000. The Spaniards, of course, blend naturally and quickly with the natives, who speak the same tongue. The Italians have not yet blent, for there has hardly yet been time for them to do so, but there is so much similarity, not indeed in character but in language and ways of life, that they will evidently become absorbed into the general population. Children born in the country grow up to be Argentines in sentiment, and are, perhaps, even more vehemently patriotic than the youth of native stock.

Here, as in the United States, the birth-rate is higher among immigrants than among natives. In the case of Italians it is twice, in that of Spaniards one and a half times, as great.

What effect upon the type and tendencies of the future nation this Italian infusion will have it is hard to predict, because no one knows how far national character is affected by blood admixture. We have no data for estimating the comparative importance of heredity and of environment upon a population which is the product of two elements, the foreign one injected into a larger native element whose prepotent influences modify the offspring of new-comers.84

In considering the probable result of the commingling, and as a fact explaining the readiness with which Italian immigrants allow themselves to be Argentinized, one must remember that these come from the humblest and least educated strata of Italian society. They are, like all Italians, naturally intelligent, but they have not reached that grade of knowledge which attaches men to the literature and the historical traditions of their own country. Thus, the scantiness of their education prevents them from making either to the intellectual life or to the art of their adopted country those contributions which one might expect from a people which has always held a place in the front rank of European letters, art, and science. It may be expected, however, that in the course of a generation or two inborn Italian capacity will assert itself in the descendants of the immigrants.

The other foreigners, French, English (business men and landowning farmers), and German (chiefly business men in the cities) are hardly numerous enough to affect the Argentine type, and the two latter have hitherto remained as distinct elements, being mostly Protestants and marrying persons of their own race. They occupy themselves entirely with business and have not entered Argentine public life; yet as many of them mean to remain in the country, and their children born in it become thereby Argentine citizens, it is likely that they, also, will presently be absorbed, and their Argentine descendants may figure in politics here, as families of Irish and British origin do in Chile.

The social structure of the nation is the result of the economic conditions already described. In the rural districts there are two classes only, – landowners, often with vast domains, and labourers, the native labourers settled, the Italians to some extent migratory. In the cities there exists, between the wealthy and the workingmen, a considerable body of professional men, shopkeepers, and clerks, who are rather less of a defined middle class than they would be in European countries. Society is something like that of North American cities, for the lines between classes are not sharply drawn, and the spirit of social equality has gone further than in France, and, of course, far further than in Germany or Spain. One cannot speak of an aristocracy, even in the qualified sense in which the word could be used in Peru or Chile, for though a few old colonial families have the Spanish pride of lineage, it is, as a rule, wealth and wealth only that gives station and social eminence. Manners, which everywhere in South America have lost something of the courtliness of Castile, are here rather more "modern" than in Mexico or Lima, because the growth of wealth has brought up new men and has made money the criterion of eminence, or at least of prominence. Here, as in England and the United States, one sees that though the constitution is democratic, society has some of the characteristics of a plutocracy.

The little that I have to say about the political life of the country must be reserved for another and more general chapter, so I will here note only two facts peculiar to Argentina. It is, of all the Spanish-American republics, that in which the church has least to do with politics. Though Roman Catholicism is declared by the constitution to be supported by the state, and the president and vice-president must profess it, that freedom of religious worship which is guaranteed by law is fully carried out in practice, and all denominations may, without let or hindrance, erect churches and preach and teach. The legislature has shewn itself so broad-minded as to grant subventions to a system of Protestant schools founded originally as a missionary enterprise by a Protestant Episcopal clergyman, and many of the Roman Catholic families of Buenos Aires send their children to schools provided by the American Methodist Episcopal Church. In liberality of spirit, Argentina is rather more advanced than either Peru or Chile, not to speak of bigoted Ecuador. Still more noteworthy is it that there seems to be little or no effort on the part of the church to influence public affairs. No political party is allied with the clergy, no clerical influence is felt in elections. The happy detachment of the two spheres which travellers observe and admire in North America deserves even more credit when found in a country where intolerance long reigned supreme.

The other phenomenon which no one will connect with religious freedom, inasmuch as it has appeared in nearly every country of Europe and of North America, whatever be the religious conditions that prevail, is the emergence here and nowhere else in South America of a vehement anarchist propaganda. Among the immigrants from Italy and from eastern Spain there have been enough persons engaged in this movement to cause great alarm to the government. Not long ago the chief of the police was killed by an explosive thrown by a Russian anarchist, and in the summer of 1910 a bomb was exploded in the great Opera-house during a performance, wounding a number of persons. These occurrences led to the proclamation of a state of siege which was maintained for many weeks. The police is said to be efficient,85 and the Executive did not hesitate to use powers which it would be less easy to obtain or use in the United States or in England. Our age has seen too many strange incidents to be surprised that these acts of violence should be perpetrated in a country where, though no doubt there is an ostentatious display of wealth, work is more abundant and wages are higher than in any other part of the world. Such acts are aimed not at oppression, nor at bad industrial conditions, but at government itself.

Here, as generally in South America, though less in Chile than elsewhere, politics is mainly in the hands of the lawyers. A great deal of the best intellect of the country, probably more in proportion than in any European country or in the United States, goes into this profession; and the contributions to the world's store of thought and learning made by Argentine writers have been perhaps more considerable in this branch of enquiry than in any other. In the sphere of historical or philosophical or imaginative literature, not much has yet been done, nor is the class prepared to read such books a large one. Fiction is supplied by France. The press is a factor in public affairs whose power is comparable to that exercised by the leading newspapers in Australia. It is conducted on large and bold lines, especially conspicuous in two journals of the capital86 which have now a long record of vigour and success behind them. The concentration of political and commercial activities in Buenos Aires gives to them the same advantage that belongs to the leading organs of Sydney and Melbourne.

The world is to-day ruled by physical science and by business, which, in the vast proportions industry and commerce have now attained, is itself the child of physical science. Argentina is thoroughly modern in the predominance of business over all other interests. Only one other comes near it. The Bostonian man of letters who complained that London was no place to live in because people talked of nothing but sport and politics, would have been even less happy in Buenos Aires, because there, when men do not talk of sport, they talk of business. Politics is left to the politicians; it is the estancia, its cattle and its crops, and the race-course, with its betting, that are always in the mind and on the tongue, and are moulding the character, of the wealthier class. Business is no doubt still so largely in the hands of foreigners that one cannot say that the average Argentine has developed a talent for it comparable to that of those whom he calls the North Americans, seeing that much of his wealth has come to him by the rise in the values of his land and the immense demand for its products. He is seldom a hard worker, for it has been his ill fortune to be able to get by sitting still what others have had to work for, but he does not yield to New York in what is called a "go-ahead spirit." He is completely up to date. He has both that jubilant patriotism and that exuberant confidence in his country which marked the North American of 1830–1860. His pride in his city has had the excellent result of making him eager to put it, and keep it, in the forefront of progress, with buildings as fine, parks as large, a water supply as ample, provisions for public health as perfect, as money can buy or science can devise. The wealth and the expansion of Buenos Aires inspire him, as the wealth and expansion of Chicago have inspired her citizens, and give him, if not all of their forceful energy, yet a great deal of their civic idealism.