The Project Gutenberg eBook, South America To-day, by Georges Clemenceau

SOUTH AMERICA
TO-DAY

A STUDY OF CONDITIONS, SOCIAL
POLITICAL, AND COMMERCIAL
IN ARGENTINA, URUGUAY
AND BRAZIL

BY
GEORGES CLEMENCEAU
FORMERLY PRIME MINISTER OF FRANCE

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press
1911

Copyright, 1911
by
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

[INTRODUCTION]

I have been asked for my impressions as a traveller in South America. I had no sooner promised them than a difficulty presented itself. I have no notes of my journey, and I should be sorry to have them, for it is annoying to record impressions in black and white at the precise moment when one feels them most vividly. And I pass over in silence the hour when it is wisdom to remain quiet.

The task of Christopher Columbus was lightened by one fact. America was there, stationary, in the middle of the sea, only waiting for some one to knock against it. I even found in Brazil an eminent Senator for the State of Saint Paul, Señor Almeida Nogueira, who declared that the principal event of that Friday, October 12th, was the discovery—by the original Americans—of Europe in the person of the great Genoese. They had this advantage over him—they had not left their homes.

What was I going to discover in my turn, at the risk of being myself discovered?—unknown countries?—unheard-of peoples?—virgin civilisations?—or simply points of comparisons for new judgments on myself and on my country?

Our self-satisfaction will not allow us readily to admit that we have anything to learn from young communities, though we are too ready to talk in generalities about them. We cannot deny, however, that their effort is fine, and tends continually toward success.

In such a result the least quick-sighted of us must be interested. Facility of communication has multiplied the points of contact between the men of every country. One of our first needs is to correct the vague or false conceptions of the different human societies borne by this globe in a tumult of joy and misery towards destinies unknown.

Because there was no one to contradict them, travellers of ancient times were able to give full play to their wildest imaginings. A proverb even sanctions their lack of veracity. When our good Herodotus related that the army of Xerxes dried up the rivers on its passage, the Athenians, perhaps, were not astonished. Christopher Columbus himself died in ignorance of the continent on which he had landed, convinced that he had reached the east coast of Asia. To-day it is another matter. From the Poles to the torrid zone are at work innumerable explorers who only succeed painfully in discovering the new at the price of being verified by their rivals. The incidents which accompanied the probable discovery of the North Pole by Commander Peary showed the danger of rash assertions, even when denial seemed only possible from seals and white bears.

I enjoy, happily, the great advantage of having discovered nothing. And, as I am less ambitious of astonishing my contemporaries than of suggesting reflections by the way, I shall perhaps escape offending the susceptibilities of those formidable savants who, having theorised upon everything, can only see everything from the standpoint of their studies. Statisticians had better avoid me; I have nothing to tell them. Having no preconceived notions, I shall not attempt to make facts square with them. Having in mind Voltaire's expression that the most mischievous ignorance is that of the critic, I confess that my own criticism of old civilisations makes me indulgent towards new experiments outside Europe.

I am of my time and my country, and at the end of a long career I submit with equanimity to the public the opinions and judgments I have gained. I do not share the prejudices current in Paris against the suburban dwellers of Villers-sur-Marne or St. Cloud. Our comic journals and our plays have inflicted the same kind of torture upon the South Americans. Having ridiculed them for so long, has not the moment come when we should study them, not merely to flatter ourselves at their expense, but as a people who, more than any other, are our intellectual children, and to ask ourselves whether we cannot sometimes learn something from them?

It is not in three months that one gets definite ideas as to the future of these vast territories, where a work of civilisation is going on which will inevitably change the political and social equilibrium of the planet that to-day is still, in effect, European. It is always difficult to report faithfully what one has seen, for there is an art in seeing as in telling. Without claiming to have achieved it, I venture to hope that my observations, impartially recorded, will bear the seal of good faith and be of some use to the reader.

It is obvious that the towns of South America, though some of them are very fine and well laid out, cannot, by reason of their recent history, offer monuments comparable with those of Europe. One not infrequently hears a remark of this sort: "Have you seen that old church over there? It is at least forty or fifty years old!" The towns derive their chief interest from their situation and surroundings; their internal features are only those which Europe has been pleased to send them in superabundance. There remain the land and the people, two worthy subjects of study. The land, rich in undeveloped forces, calls for new energies. As it only becomes valuable through human labour, everything depends upon man's activity. In the depth of his soul, at once ingenuous and complex, are inscribed all the mysteries of the past, all the secrets of the future.

Admitting that American civilisation is of recent origin, it must be said that the American peoples, far from suffering from growing pains, as we are fond of imagining, are really old races transplanted. Like us, they bend under the weight of a heavy history of glory and human suffering; they are imbued with all our traditions, good or bad; and they are subject to the same difficulties, whilst manifesting their vital energies in an environment better adapted to their display.

Then, again, let us not fail to distinguish between Latin America of the South and Anglo-Saxon America of the North. Let us refrain as well from generalities, sometimes unjustifiable, regarding the parallel development of two orders of civilisation, and the future destinies which, in hours of crisis, may appear uncertain, of old historic races.

I shall deal only with Latin America, without, however, losing sight of the great Republic of the North, where I lived nearly four years. Since neither Jefferson nor Washington foresaw the economic evolution which, in a little more than a hundred years, was to be realised by their infant Republic, it behoves me to be modest in my prophecies. But, if I firmly believe that, in spite of the "historic materialism" of Karl Marx, commercial interests are not the only factors in civilisation; if I take from an eminent writer in Brazil, Señor Arinos de Mello, the curious information that in 1780, at 1400 kilometres from the coast, at the house of his great-grandfather, who had never seen the ocean, a company of amateurs played the tragedies of Voltaire—I must conclude that the influence of Ideas, inherited from our forefathers, is not less certain or durable than that of international trade relations. This I say with no intention of depreciating the importance of such commerce as, even at that time, served as the vehicle of Ideas—just as the good sailing ship transported a copy of Voltaire's Mérope or Mahomet from Rotterdam to Pernambuco, and a train of mules took a month to complete the journey. It should remind us that moral influences are not inferior in results to monetary affairs.

We French have allowed ourselves to be outstripped in economic matters at too many points of the globe. Yet, notwithstanding our mistakes, our eighteenth century—with the Revolution which was its inevitable outcome—has constituted for us a patrimony of moral authority which we should seek not only to preserve, but also, if possible, to enlarge.

G. C.

[CONTENTS]

SOUTH AMERICA TO-DAY

South America To-Day

[CHAPTER I]
THE OUTWARD VOYAGE

The Regina Elena is in harbour. A great white boat vomits volumes of black smoke from its two funnels, whilst the siren sounds the familiar farewell. Two gangways, on which luggage and passengers are jostling desperately, present the peculiar spectacle of departing crowds. On a dais of multi-coloured sunshades, the wide hats of beautiful Genoese women offer their good wishes to the little veiled toques of the travellers. People stop in the narrowest part of the gangway to laugh and cry together. Vainly the human flood tries to break through the obstacle. The current, according to its strength, carries the living mass of feathers and ribbons back to the landing-place or pushes it on to the deck, where, in a perfect maze of movement and exclamations, it continues to stop the traffic.

Not far away, heavily laden with nondescript burdens, the silent emigrant forces his way to the lower deck, dragging old parents and young children after him. Do not imagine the emigrant leaving Italy for the Argentine to be the miserable human specimen one generally sees. He is neither more nor less than a workman moving from one hemisphere to another. We shall meet him again on board. Strongly attached to family life, his peculiarity is to move about with his wife and progeny. The difference in seasons allows him, after cutting corn on the Pampas, to return to Italy for the harvest. Often he settles down in the Argentine under the conditions which I shall explain later, and takes strong root there. Often, again, the love of his native land speaks louder than his love of adventure, and the steamship companies are glad to profit by the circumstance.

The siren has blown its last authoritative blast; the last visitors have returned to land; the huge monster glides gently out to sea. One sees nothing but waving handkerchiefs and hears nothing but parting words. We are off. "Good-bye." The grand amphitheatre of white marble and sunburnt stones glides slowly past us, dazzling in the warm light. Already our eyes were looking with curiosity and hopefulness towards the liquid plain. Are we flying from Europe, or is Europe flying from us? From this moment we shall look to see America surge up from the horizon on the day ordained.

The first impressions of the boat are excellent: it is admirably fitted up; clean as a new pin, with good attendance. We are welcomed in a most charming manner by the Captain, de Benedetti, a galant 'uomo, who advertises his French sympathies by flying a French flag. A fortnight in a handsome moving prison, with floods of salt air to fill one's lungs, and the marvellous panorama of sky and sea, shot with luminous arrows. Our daily promenades are those of prisoners condemned to walk in an eternal circle. As long as land is in sight, our eyes linger on the blue line of mountains, which speaks to us of the country which, in spite of the revolving screw, our hearts refuse to leave.

The Ligurian coast, crowned by Alpine heights; Provence, rich in memories, blue mountains darkened by the dying day; grey spots, which represent Toulon and Marseilles. A choppy, rather rough sea, complicated by a ground swell, as we cross the Bay of Lyons, tries the ladies, who had hitherto been very lively. They retire to their cabins, whence issue sinister sounds.

But let us pass on. To-morrow's sun will illumine the joyous hospitality of Barcelona.

Never did land look so fascinating to me. I have crossed the Atlantic eight times without ever feeling that kind of anticipated regret for the old Continent. Youth longs for the Unknown, but age learns to fear it.

The passengers lunched on shore. Then came a visit to the Rambla, sad and deserted under the grey sky. We linger over our first letters home, which can neither be called letters from abroad nor letters of farewell. A cab carries us about in a haphazard way, past modern houses which are a disgrace to Spain and our epoch, and past façades of convents burnt down in the last revolution. Finally, we are driven back to the quay, where, since morning, a crowd of fruit-sellers, picturesquely attired in red and yellow, have been selling their wares to the emigrants, forbidden by the regulations to land at the ports of call. Nets attached to long poles, filled with provisions of all sorts, are offered to the passengers on the lower decks and held at a safe distance until the sum, which has been volubly disputed, falls into the outstretched apron below.

But the signal is given. The teeming market disappears, and, without more ado, we put out to sea. In the dusk of the evening we discern the white summits of the Sierra Nevada, in whose shadow lie Granada and the Alhambra. We shall pass Gibraltar in the night, and at dawn to-morrow we shall have only the blue monotony of the infinite sea.

It is five days' steam to St. Vincent, in the Cape Verde Islands. The passengers shake down, grouping themselves according to national or professional affinities. Stretched on arm-chairs of excessive size—which turn the daily walk into a steeplechase—fair ladies, wrapped in shawls and gauzes, and profoundly indifferent to the comfort of others, try to read, but only succeed in yawning. They chatter aimlessly without real conversation. The cries of the children create a diversion, and a badly-trained dog is a fruitful topic for discussion. The men sit down to bridge, or smoke innumerable pipes in the Winter Garden. I catch scraps of business talk around me.

The boldest foot it on the deck, but their enterprise does not please the gentler passengers, who are in quiet possession of the only space available for exercise. Soon, under the guise of sops to the ravenous ocean appetite, piles of plates, glasses, and decanters, complicated with stools and travelling rugs, encumber the passageway. As the soft roll of the ship causes a certain disturbance of the crockery, the pedestrian, young or old, has always a chance of breaking his leg—a contingency to which the ladies appear to be perfectly indifferent. The piano suffers cruelly from sharp raps administered by knotty juvenile fingers. An Italian lady sings, and one of my own countrywomen sketches a group of emigrants.

In the primitive setting of the steerage everybody is already at home and appears happy. Attentive fathers walk and play with their offspring and occasionally smack them by way of showing them the right path. Mothers are nursing their babies or washing clothes. I am told that there are no fewer than twenty-six nursing mothers out of a total of six hundred third-class passengers on board. Amid the Italian swarm, brightly coloured groups of Syrians stand out. The women, tattooed, painted, and clad in light-coloured draperies, sometimes covered with silver ornaments, fall naturally into the dignified and statuesque pose of the Oriental. A few are really handsome, with a sort of passive sensuality of bearing. It is said that the Syrians are the licensed pedlars of the Pampas.

A visit between decks shows that the ventilation is good and that cleanliness is insured by incessant application of brush and hose. The sick bay is well kept. One or two patients are in the maternity ward awaiting an interesting event before the Equator can be reached. The food is wholesome and abundant. The Italian Government keeps a permanent official on board who is independent of the officers of the ship, and sees that the regulations concerning hygiene and safety for this class of passengers are rigorously carried out. Frightful abuses in former days necessitated these measures, which are now entirely efficacious.

We are looking forward to calling at St. Vincent as a welcome break in the monotony of our days. However, thanks to wireless telegraphy, we are no longer cut off from the world on this highly perfected raft which balances our fortunes between heaven and sea. One cannot help feeling surprised when presented with an envelope bearing the word "Telegram." Some one has sent me his good wishes for the voyage from France by way of Dakar. Then by the same mysterious medium the passengers of a ship we shall meet to-morrow wave their hats to us in advance. On several occasions I have had the pleasure of receiving messages of this sort; they are incidents in a day. From time to time we can read the despatches of the news agencies posted in the saloon. I leave you to imagine how, with our abundant leisure, we discuss the news. From St. Vincent to the island of Fernando de Noronha, the advanced post of Brazil, I do not think we were ever more than two days out of range of wireless telegraphy. When it is compulsory to have a wireless installation on board all ships, collisions at sea can never occur. I visit the telegraph office situated forward on the upper deck. It is a small cabin where an employee sits all day striking sparks from his machine as messages arrive from all parts of the horizon; the sound reminds me of the crackling of a distant mitrailleuse. Here one must not allow the mind to wander even with the smoke of one's cigarette. Through a technical blunder our unfortunate telegraphist, without knowing it, sent the information to Montevideo that we were in danger. In consequence, we learnt from the newspapers on our arrival that the Government was sending a State ship to our help. We thus experienced the sweet sensation of peril without danger, whilst the employee guilty of the error found himself discharged.

We shall not profit by the call at St. Vincent, since we arrive in the night. It is in vain that they tell us that the Cape Verde Islands are nothing but a series of arid, yellow rocks; that St. Vincent can only show commonplace houses and cabins with the inevitable cocoanut-trees; that the "town" is only inhabited by negroes who pick up a living from the ships that put in here to coal; whilst the English coal importers and real masters of this Portuguese possession live up in the hills. Nevertheless, we are disappointed of an opportunity to stroll on shore towards a clump of trees, apparently planted there with the object of justifying the name of the place, which is in reality the most barren spot.

On our way we had passed the denuded rocks which somebody tells us are called the Canaries. St. Vincent, it seems, is a second edition of the Canaries—only more sterile. We have no difficulty in believing it when at nightfall the Regina Elena stops at the bottom of a deep black hole dotted with distant lights, of which some are fixed to the bows of small craft or tugboats drawing coal lighters, which dance up to us on the waves.

Suddenly, as in the third act of L'Africaine, under the orders of an invisible Nelusko, we are invaded on the starboard and port side by a dual horde of savages. They are fearful-looking blacks, with grinning masks, clothed in coal-dust, who swarm like monkeys up the shrouds and fall on deck with the laugh of cannibals. We are assured that our lives are not in danger, and, in fact, they are no sooner amongst us than, attacked with sudden shyness, they offer in a low voice and in a language in which French and English are strangely mixed, an assortment of cocoanuts, bananas, and bags made of melon seeds, to which they seem to attach great importance.

Once more we fall back on the small events of our daily life on board, of which the principal is to find the point in the southern horizon by which the speed of the ship can be calculated, under given conditions of wind and tide. On the New York crossing, the Americans make of this detail an excuse for a daily bet. I notice that the South Americans are less addicted to this form of sport. The first impression made upon me by these South American families with whom I am thrown in daily contact is eminently favourable. Simplicity, dignity, and graciousness are what I see: I find none of the extravagance ascribed to them by rumour. Only on one point am I led to make a criticism: their children seem to enjoy the utmost license of speech and action.

Henceforth our only subject of conversation is the probable date on which we shall cross the Equator. The Regina Elena, with a displacement of 10,000 tons, did 17 knots on her trials. If she makes 14 or 15 now, we are satisfied. The sea is calm: not a stomach protests. In these latitudes the storms of the North Atlantic are unknown. We shall make the crossing from Barcelona to Buenos Ayres in fifteen or sixteen days. A long rest for any one leaving or seeking a life of excitement.

We amuse ourselves by watching troops of dolphins, divine creatures, passing from the joys of the air to those of the sea with a facile grace. What legends have been created about these mammals! From the most ancient times they have been the friends of the seafarer! They save the shipwrecked, and surrender to the charms of music. According to Homeric song, it was from the dolphin that Apollo borrowed the disguise in which he led the Cretan fishermen to the shores of Delphi, where later his temple was built. How true to life is the undulating line of the bas-reliefs on the monument of Lysicrates, in which the Tyrrhenian pirates, transformed into dolphins, fling themselves into the ocean, as though in feverish haste to try a new life! Souvenirs of this old tale surge in my brain until I hear a voice saying harshly: "All these filthy beasts ought to be killed with dynamite, for they destroy the nets of the fishermen." Good-bye to poetic legend! Friendship between man and the dolphin ends in utilitarian holocausts!

Civilisation has not yet stamped out the flying-fish. It is still left to us to enjoy the spectacle of the great sea-locusts in flight, rising in flocks into the air to escape from their greedy comrades in the water, and dappling the wide blue plain with their winged whiteness. They remind me of the story of the traveller who was readily believed when he declared he had found at the bottom of the Red Sea a horseshoe belonging to the cavalry of Pharaoh swallowed up in their pursuit of the Hebrews. But when he talked of flying-fish, he found no credence anywhere! It is true men have told so many tales that it is not easy to know when it is safe to show surprise.

A daily increasing and heavy heat meets us as we draw near the Line. Light flannel suits are brought into requisition, and breathing becomes difficult to redundant flesh. We are in the Black Pot—skies low, heavy with iron-grey clouds; an intermittent, fine rain which cools nothing; a glassy sea; no breeze stirring. It feels like the interior of a baker's oven. We take refuge in the dangerous electric fan which is unequalled for adding a bad cold to the disagreeable sensation of suffocation.

Nothing remains of the famous ceremony of christening the passenger who crosses the Line for the first time. The innocent performance is now converted into a ball, with a subscription for the crew. Passengers on the lower deck waltz every evening with far less ceremony, to the strains of an accordion, varying the entertainment by playing at Morra, the national game. They stand up in couples and aim terrific blows at each other's faces, accompanying the movement with savage cries. If you watch carefully you will find that in this game of fisticuffs the closed hand is stopped just in time and, at the same moment, a certain number of fingers are shot out. Simultaneously a voice cries a number, always less than ten; and the game consists in trying to announce beforehand how many fingers have been pointed by the two partners. This sport, which has the advantage of requiring none but Nature's implements, is a great favourite with the Italians. Often, in the early morning, from my berth, I used to hear an alarming barking in the direction of the bows, which seemed to be the beginning of a deadly quarrel, but was in reality merely the fun of the Morra.

Brazilian territory is now in sight—Fernando de Noronha. It is a volcanic island three days off Rio de Janeiro. Successive streams of lava have given strangely jagged outlines to the peaks. A wide opening in the mountain lets in a view of the shining sea on the other side of the island. Three lofty poles of wireless telegraphy stand out among the foliage. They say that these posts were set there by Frenchmen. Goodluck to them!

Captain de Benedetti pays me the compliment of celebrating the Fourteenth of July. The Queen's portrait is framed in the flags of the two nations. In the evening we have champagne and drink healths. An Italian senator, Admiral de Brochetti, expresses, in well-chosen language, his appreciation of the friendship of France and I echo his good wishes for the sister nation.

Is there any better relief from the exhaustion of a sleepless night in the tropics than a solitary walk beneath the starry firmament of the Southern Hemisphere? Naturally, I sought the Southern Cross as soon as it had risen above the horizon. It was another disillusionment caused by an inflated reputation. Where are ye, O Great Bear and Pleiades, and where the Belt of Orion? On the other hand, words fail to describe the Alpha of Argo. Every morning, between three and four o'clock, I see on the port side a sort of huge blue diamond which appears to lean out of the celestial vault towards the black gulf of the restless sea as if to illumine its abysses. I receive the most powerful sensation of living light that the firmament has ever given to me. If there is in any part of infinite space a prodigious altar of celestial fire, that focus must be Canopus. It was assuredly there that Prometheus stole the heavenly spark with which he kindled in us the light of life. There, too, Vesta watches over the eternal hearth of sacred fire in which is concentrated a more divine splendour than even that of a tropical sun.

But now the earth calls us back to herself, or, rather, it is the stormy ocean that rouses us, for as we approach the immense estuary of La Plata a tempest of icy wind blows suddenly upon us from the south. This is the pampero, the south wind, the wind from the Pampas, which blows straight from the frozen tops of the Andes. A heavy swell makes the Regina Elena roll in the great yellow waves, for already the clay of the Rio de la Plata is perceptible in the sea and gives it the aspect of a vast ocean of mud. To-morrow morning we shall be in Montevideo.

[CHAPTER II]
MONTEVIDEO AND BUENOS AYRES

Through the vaporous atmosphere of the sky-line appear the serrated edges of Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, which was formerly a province of the Argentine, but is to-day an independent republic. In the current language of Buenos Ayres, Uruguay is known simply as "the Oriental Band," and when you hear it said of any one that "he is an Oriental," know that by this term is not meant a Turk or a Levantine, but the inhabitant of the smallest republic in South America, hemmed in between the left bank of the Uruguay, Brazil, and the sea.

Quite apart from the question of size, the Argentine and Uruguay have too much in common not to be jealous of each other. The Argentinos would appear to think that the prodigious development of their country must ultimately have the effect of bringing back Uruguay to the fold. This may be so; but it is also quite possible that the "Oriental Band" in her pride will continue to cherish her independence. Meantime, while leaving to the future the solution of the question, there is a little friction between them. Uruguay's revolutionary shocks usually originate in Argentine territory, across the river. The Argentine Government is certainly averse to any leniency towards those who incite to civil war, but it is not always able to exact obedience. South American ways! It is hardly necessary to add that the leaders of an unsuccessful party are wont to take refuge in Buenos Ayres—ten hours distant by the fine boats on the estuary—and that the natural magnet of commercial prosperity enlarges this political nucleus by the powerful factor of trade. There are no less than fifty thousand Orientals[1] in the Argentine capital, and the daily traffic between the two cities may be judged by the crowd assembled morning and evening on board the Piroscafi.

A brisk walk round the city to obtain a first impression of South America was the most I could do in a stop of a few hours. The landing was somewhat laborious owing to a heavy sea. The President of the Republic was obliging enough to send me a greeting by one of his aides-de-camp, and placed at my disposal the most comfortable of boats, which, after dancing gaily for a while on the waves, finally landed us without too much trouble. The docks, constructed by a French firm, are nearly approaching completion. The great European vessels could here, as at Rio, moor alongside the quays. Why should the Regina Elena lie off outside? A question of red-tape, such as I found later at Rio de Janeiro, exposes travellers to the annoyance of transhipping when every accommodation exists for mooring inside the harbour. Thus on these Latin shores I found a familiar feature of my own bureaucratic land.

Beside the French Minister, who is a friend, numerous journalists of pen and kodak came to offer a cordial welcome to their confrère. M. Sillard, an eminent engineer from the "Central" School at the head of the French colony here, is in charge of the harbour works. He has succeeded in winning for our country the esteem of every class of the population. The motor-cars start off. The first visit is to the Post-office where I am greeted by a cordial Montevidean whom I do not recognise but whose first word reveals an habitué of Paris. I have travelled by a long road to find out here the boulevard atmosphere!

There can be no two opinions about Montevideo. It is a big, cheerful town, with handsome avenues well laid out. Some fine monuments denote a capital city. Streets animated but not too noisy; sumptuous villas in the suburbs; subtropical vegetation in gardens and parks; a pleasant promenade amid the palm-trees by the sea. The dwelling-houses are for the most part of the colonial type. A very lofty ground-floor, with door and windows too often surcharged with ornament resembling the sugar-icing of the Italian pastry-cook, and calculated to convey to these sunny lands an idea of cheap art. The unexpected thing is that the first floor stops short at its balconies as if sudden ruin had overtaken the builder. I found this feature repeated ad infinitum wherever I went. The most modest of citizens, as soon as he can turn his back on his primitive cabin of corrugated iron, makes a point of arousing the admiration of the public with the decorative balcony of a first floor that will never be built. Roofs flat and without chimneys: the climate allows of this. Occasionally a balustrade that almost gives the illusion of a finished building, but that the balcony, cut off short at a height of from two to three feet, leaves you again in doubt as to its object. The drawing-room windows are naturally in the front of the house, and here ladies in their indoor dress have no objection to showing themselves for the delectation of passers-by.

But let us say at once that in these countries where the blood is hot misconduct is rare. Men marry young, and the demands of a civilisation as yet untouched by decadence leaves little energy for pleasure that must be sought elsewhere than on the strait path. I will not say but what the great attraction of Paris for many South Americans is precisely the pleasure of the novelty it offers in this respect. It is sufficient for me to set down what came under my notice: happy homes and regular habits; a tranquil enjoyment of a life of virtue. The living-rooms are always grouped around a patio with its colonnade bright with trees and flowers, and here their occupants enjoy the utmost privacy with an absence of street noises.

These are the impressions gathered in a hasty walk, since my first visit was necessarily for the President of the Republic and my time was strictly limited. The Presidential palace was a modest-looking house, distinguished only by its guard. Many of the soldiers show strong signs of mixed blood. Curiously enough the sentry is posted not on the pavement but out in the street, opposite the palace. As traffic increases, this rule will need to be changed. The President was not in his office. I was cordially received, however, by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who was like the most obliging of Parisians. A few steps from the palace I met the President of the Republic, with a small crowd round him, and easily recognisable by his high hat. I was careful not to interrupt him. He is going to do me the honour of receiving me when I return to the capital of Uruguay.

Señor Williman is a compatriot, the son of a Frenchman, of Alsatian origin. Before his election he was professor of physics, and he has not thought it necessary to allow his political duties to interfere with his educational work; twice a week he lectures in the college, where he becomes again the happy schoolmaster whose pupils have not yet developed their powers of contradiction. This charming democratic simplicity is in curious contrast with our own persistent efforts to save as much of the ancient autocratic machinery as possible from the revolutionary shipwreck. It is agreeable to be able to testify to the great personal influence that M. Williman wields in this land of Latin dissension.

We must get back to the ship, which is announcing its departure. With what pleasure shall I revisit Montevideo! There is perhaps more of a French atmosphere about the capital of Uruguay than any other South American city, and it has just enough exotic charm to quicken our pleasure at finding French sympathies in these foreign hearts. We get a view from the deck of the Regina Elena, as we pass, of the Cerro, which is something like the Mont-Valérien of Paris, and which in this land of flat alluvial soil assumes a very great importance. Like its prototype, it is crowned with a bristling line of fortifications, and Uruguay is so proud of this phenomenon that it has placed the Cerro in the national arms, where it figures in the form of a green sugar-loaf; no good Oriental omits to tell you that there is nothing like it in the Argentine.

Under the stinging breeze of the persistent pampero, our "screw" began to turn again in the heavy, clayey waters, with a slow, regular rhythm. To-morrow at daybreak we shall be looking through our glasses at the port of Buenos Ayres.

The estuary of the Rio de la Plata (Silver River [2]) that we have now entered is a veritable sea. Though this immense sheet of water is practically landlocked, there is no trace of land on the horizon. It is said to be as wide as the Lake of Geneva is long, not far short of thirty miles, spreading to nearly five times these dimensions at its mouth, after a course of 350 kilometres.

The area covered by the estuary is larger than Holland. Two big rivers, the Uruguay and the Parana, pour their waters into this enormous cul de sac, which is often ruffled by an unpleasant sea, as at this moment, and, after their junction at the small town of Nueva Palmira, in Uruguay, they project into the Atlantic a huge volume of water drawn from a vast watershed representing one quarter of South America. The tide is felt nearly a hundred miles above the confluence. Montevideo, 200 kilometres from Buenos Ayres, seems to guard the entrance of this inner sea, whilst the Argentine capital, situated on the opposite shore, is almost at the extremity of the bay. Clay deposits, silted down by a relatively weak current, clog the estuary and require constant dredging to keep the channel open to vessels of large tonnage. This is the problem which faces the port authorities of Buenos Ayres.

At last the town comes in sight. From out the grey clouds driven by the pampero there emerge the massive shapes of the tall elevators—those lofty cubes of masonry so dear to North America. Neither church steeples nor any other prominent monuments. Low, prosaic banks, barely distinguishable from the water, a few clumps of palms here and there, unbroken plains, an utter absence of background to the picture. We are preceded by two pilot boats, their flags flying in honour of the President of the Republic, who is lunching on board a training ship within the harbour.

Very slowly the Regina Elena brings up at the quayside. The gangway is put out, and behold a delegation of the Argentine Senate, accompanied by an officer from the President's military household, sent to welcome me. A deputation from the French colony also arrives, having at its head the governor of the French Bank of Rio de la Plata, M. Py. Cordial handshakes: a thousand questions from either side. Friendly greetings are exchanged, some of them taking almost the form of brief harangues in which the mother-country is not forgotten. Journalists swarm round us. As might be expected, the Prensa, Nacion, and Diario have each a word to say. I offer my best thanks to the members of the Senate. Farewell to the excellent Captain with my best wishes. Then I get into the motor-car which ten minutes later drops me at the door of my hotel. I am in the Argentine Republic. Henceforth I must keep my eyes open.

Buenos Ayres first. It is a large European city, giving everywhere an impression of hasty growth, but foreshadowing, too, in its prodigious progress, the capital of a continent. The Avenida de Mayo, as wide as the finest of our boulevards, recalls Oxford Street in the arrangement of its shop-fronts and the ornamental features of its buildings. It starts from a large public square, rather clumsily decorated and closed on the sea side by a tall Italian edifice, known as the Palais Rose, in which Ministers and President hold their sittings; it is balanced at the other end of the avenue by another large square with the House of Parliament, a colossal building nearly approaching completion, with a cupola that resembles that of the Capitol of Washington. Every style of architecture is to be seen, from the showy, the more frequent, to the sober, comparatively rare. The finest building is without question that of the wealthy Prensa, which we shall visit later.

There is an epidemic of Italian architecture in Buenos Ayres. Everywhere the eye rests on astragals and florets, amid terrible complications of interlaced lines. I except the dainty villas and imposing mansions which call public attention to the dwellings of the aristocracy. I suppose that the business quarters of all cities present the same features. The commercial quarter of Buenos Ayres is the most crowded imaginable. Highways that seemed spacious twenty or thirty years ago for a population of two or three hundred thousand souls have become lamentably inadequate for a capital city with more than a million. The footway, so narrow that two can scarcely walk abreast, is closely shaved by a tramway, which constitutes a danger to life and limb. The traffic is severely regulated by a careful police. But so congested with foot passengers do certain streets become of an afternoon that they have had to be closed to vehicles.

In spite of the wisest of precautions, the problem of shopping in the chief business district is not easily solved. To stroll along, or, still worse, to pause to look in at a shop window, is out of the question. Politeness demands here that the honours of the road be paid to age as to sex; so if by chance, in the confusion, you come upon a friend, you must stand on the outer edge of the pavement so as to check as little as possible the flood of human beings driven inwards by the almost continuous passing of the tramway. It is only just to add that this means of locomotion, which is universally adopted here, is remarkably well organised. Still, there are occasions when one must go on foot, and the municipal government, which has laid out elsewhere broad highways in which cabs, carriages, and motors may take their revenge for the scanty accommodation afforded them in the overcrowded centre, is faced with the urgent necessity of laying out hundreds of millions of francs in a scheme for street improvement that cannot be much longer postponed.

One of the peculiarities of Buenos Ayres is that you can see no end to it. Since on the side of the Pampas there is no obstacle to building operations, small colonial houses, similar to those that attracted my notice at Montevideo, make a fringe on the edge of the city, that extends ever farther and farther into the plain in proportion as building plots in the city area—the object of perpetual speculation—rise in value. Some of brick, some of plaster or cement, these villas make comfortable quarters in a land where no chimney-stacks are needed. The quality of the building, however, goes down naturally as one draws nearer the Pampas. The lowest end of the scale offers the greatest simplification: walls of clay dried in the sun, with a roof of corrugated iron, or the more primitive rancho, supported on empty oil-cans, placed at convenient distances, with the spaces filled in with boughs or thatch. One hardly knows whether this outer edge of habitations can fairly be included in the city area or not. The motor-car has been travelling so long that a doubt is permissible. The track is only a more or less level, earth road, which just allows the car to run over its surface but cannot be said to add anything to the pleasure of the drive.

The drawback in this country is the absence of wood, of stone, and of coal. No doubt in the more distant provinces there are still fine forests, which are being ruthlessly devastated either for québracho (the tree that is richest in tannin), or for fuel for factory furnaces; but the cost of transport is so great that the more prosperous part of the Republic gets its timber from Norway. Uruguay, on the other hand, supplies a stone that is excellent both for building and for macadam and paving: a heavy expense. As for coal, it is the return cargo of English vessels which carry as inward freight frozen meat and live cattle.

Without comparing in density of shipping with the ports of London, or New York, or Liverpool, a noble line of sea-monsters may be seen here stretching seven miles in length, most of them being rapidly loaded or unloaded in the docks by powerful cranes. The scene has been a hundred times described, and offers here no specially characteristic features.

I should need a volume if I tried to describe the plan and equipment of the docks of Buenos Ayres. Those who take an interest in the subject can easily get all the information they need. The rest will be grateful to me for resisting the temptation to quote long lists of figures copied from technical reports. Here it will suffice for me to state that there are two ports—the Riachuelo and the "port of the capital." The former is a natural harbour formed by a stream of the same name. It is used as the auxiliary of the other, which is finely fitted with every appliance of modern science. More than 30,000 craft, sail and steam, come in and out annually, including at least 4000 from overseas.

The big grain elevators have been described over and over again. Those of Buenos Ayres are no whit inferior to the best of the gigantic structures of North America. Each can load 20,000 tons of grain in a day. To one there is attached a mill said to be the largest in the world. Covered by way of precaution with the long white shirt that stamped us at once as real millers, we wandered pleasantly enough amongst the millstones and bolters which transform the small grey wheat of the Pampas into fine white flour. Our Beauce farmers accustomed to heavy ears of golden wheat would not appreciate this species, which, moreover, requires careful washing. We were told that it is the richest in gluten of all known species. Diabetics know, therefore, for what to ask.

The slaughter-houses of the Negra, round which I was taken by M. Carlos Luro (son of a Frenchman) form a model establishment in which no less than 1200 oxen are killed daily, without counting sheep and pigs—a faithful copy of the famous slaughter-houses of North America. The beast, having reached the end of a cul de sac, is felled by a blow from a mallet and slips down a slope, at the foot of which the carotid artery is cut. After this operation, the body is hooked up by a small wagon moving along an aerial rail, and is then carried through a series of stages which end in its being handed over in two pieces to the freezing chambers to await speedy shipment for England—the great market for Argentine meat. The whole is performed with a rapidity so disconcerting that the innocent victim of our cannibal habits finds himself in the sack ready for freezing, with all his inside neatly packed into tins, before he has had time to think. "We use everything but his squeals," said a savage butcher of Chicago. Veterinaries are in attendance to inspect each beast, which in the event of its being condemned is immediately burnt.

The first colonists, arriving by sea, naturally built their town close to the port. The capital now, in its prosperity, seeks refinement of every kind, and laments that the approach to the seacoast is disfigured by shipping, elevators, and wharves. The same might be said of any great seaport. Buenos Ayres in reality needs a new harbour, but it looks as if the present one could scarcely be altered.

It is naturally in this part of the town that you find the wretched shanties which are the first refuge of the Italian immigrants whilst waiting for an opportunity to start off again. Here is to be seen all the sordid misery of European towns with the accompaniment of the usual degrading features. I hasten to add that help—both public and private—is not lacking. The ladies of Buenos Ayres have organised different charitable works, and visit needy families; as generosity is one of the leading traits in the Argentine character, much good is done in this way. There are no external signs of the feminine degradation that disfigures our own public streets.

Why is it that this swarm of Italians should stop in crowded Buenos Ayres instead of going straight out to the Pampas, where labour is so urgently needed? I was told that the harvest frequently rots on the fields for want of reapers, and this in spite of wages that rise as high as twenty francs per day. There are a good many reasons for this. In the first place, such wages as this are only for a season of a few months or weeks. Then again, these Italian labourers complain that if they venture far from the city, they have no protection against the overbearing of officials, who are inclined to take advantage of their privileged position. I do not want to dwell on the point. The same complaints—but more detailed—reached me in Brazil. Both the Argentine and Brazilian Governments, to whom I submitted the charges brought against their representatives, protested that whenever any abuse could be proved against an agent he was proceeded against with the utmost rigour of the law. There can be no doubt as to the good faith of the authorities, who have every interest in encouraging the rapid growth of the population in the Pampas. Besides, it must be borne in mind that the elements of immigration are never of the highest quality. Still, I should not be surprised to learn that there was occasion for a stricter control in the direction I have indicated.

So far, I have said nothing of the beauties of the city. It is a pity that amongst the attractions of Buenos Ayres the sea cannot be counted. A level shore does not lend itself to decorative effect. A mediocre vegetation; water of a dirty ochre, neither red nor yellow; nothing to be found to charm the eye. So I saw the sea only twice during my stay at Buenos Ayres—once on arrival, and again when I left. During the summer heat, that section of the population which is not compelled to stay flees to Mar del Plata, the Trouville of Buenos Ayres, a charming conglomeration of beflowered villas on an ocean beach.

A perfectly healthy city. No expense has been spared to satisfy the demands of a good system of municipal sanitation. Avenues planted with trees, gardens and parks laid out to ensure adequate reserves of fresh air, are available to all, and lawns exist for youthful sports. The zoölogical and botanical gardens are models of their kind. A fine racecourse, surrounded by the green belt of foliage of the Argentine Bois de Boulogne, is known as Palermo.

A Frenchman, the genial M. Thays, well known amongst his European colleagues, has entire control of the plantations and parks of Buenos Ayres. M. Thays, who excels in French landscape gardening, takes delight in devoting his whole mind and life to his trees, his plants and flowers. He is ready at any moment to defend his charge against attacks—an attitude that is wholly superfluous, since the public of Buenos Ayres never lets slip an opportunity of testifying its gratitude to him.

Wherever he discovers a propitious site, the master-gardener plants some shoot which will one day be a joy to look upon. He has laid out and planted fine parks. He has large greenhouses at his disposal, and any prominent citizen, or any association popular or aristocratic can, for the asking, have the floral decorations needed for a fête delivered at his door by the municipal carts.

In his search after rare plants for the enrichment of his town, M. Thays has visited equatorial regions—the Argentine, Bolivia, Brazil. As his ambition vaults beyond the boundaries of Buenos Ayres, he has conceived a project, already in process of execution, of founding a great national park, as in the United States, in which all the marvels of tropical vegetation may be collected. The Falls of Iguazzu—greater and loftier than those of Niagara—would be enclosed in this vast estate on the very frontiers of Brazil.

Apart from these plans of conquest, which make him a rival of Alexander, M. Thays is a modest, affable man, who takes a good deal of trouble to look as if he had done nothing out of the common. Were I but competent I would describe the organisation of his botanical garden, which is superior to any to be found in the old continent. More amusing is it, perhaps, to follow him through the various sections in which the characteristic flora of every part of the world is well represented. The Argentine, as may be supposed, has here the larger share. Here are displayed specimens of the principal species of flora to be found in the district lying between the frozen regions of Tierra del Fuego and the Equator: the Antarctic beech, the carob palm, the québracho (rendered extraordinarily durable by the quantity of tannin it contains, and in great request for railway sleepers), walnut, and the cedar of Tucuman or of Mendoza—which, by the way, is not a cedar. It is from its wood that cigar boxes are made. It is used in the woodwork of rich houses, for it is easy to handle and highly decorative by reason of its warm colouring. Its fault is that it warps; wherever you find it in house fittings, doors and windows refuse to open or shut as they should.

But you should see M. Thays doing the honours of the ombu and the palo borracho. The ombu is the marvel of the Pampas, the sole tree which the locust refuses to touch. For this reason alone, it has been allowed to grow freely, though not even man has found a way to utilise what the voracious insects of Providence decline. For the ombu prides itself on being good for nothing. It does not even lend itself to making good firewood. It is only to look at. But that is sufficient. Imagine an object resembling the backs of antediluvian monsters, mastodons or elephants, lying in the shade of a great mass of sheltering foliage. Heavy folds in the grey rind denote a growing limb, a rounded shoulder, a gigantic head half concealed. These are the tremendous roots of the ombu, whose delight it is to issue forth from the soil in the form of astonishing animated objects. When by foot and stick you have ascertained that these living shapes are in reality mummified within a thick bark, you turn your attention to the trunk itself and find it hollow, with a crumbling surface.

Another surprise! The finger sinks into the tree, meeting only the sort of resistance that would be offered by a thin sheet of paper. And now fine powdery scales of a substance which should be wood, but, in fact, is indescribable, fall into your hand. They crumble away into an impalpable dust, which is carried off by the breeze before you have had time to examine it. Now you have the secret of the ombu. Its wood evaporates in the open air; at the same time there spring from its strangely beast-like roots young and living shoots of the parent tree. Since it is impossible to burn the non-existent, you cannot, obviously, have recourse to the ombu to cook your lunch. Here is an example in the vegetable world of paradox, which has no mission in life but a glorious uselessness. If it were but beautiful I should recommend the ombu to poets who profess to prefer the Beautiful to the Useful. But as its appearance does not impress the beholder, the wisest course is to impute its existence to momentary abstraction on the part of the Creator.

The palo borracho, on the other hand, is extremely useful, though not without a touch of capriciousness. Its popular name, which signifies "the drunkard," has been given to it on the ground that it seems to stagger; but such a name is a libel. This peaceful denizen of the forest has nothing to do with the alcoholic world. Nor can it be said to attract human society, for its strange trunk, strangled in a collar of roots, and bulging in its middle parts, bristles with innumerable points, short and sharp, which prevent all undue familiarity. These thorns fall with age, at least from the lower part of the tree, but as they exist elsewhere, even on the smallest twig, no animal, from man to monkey, can venture upon its branches.

The trunk, if tapped with a cane, returns a hollow sound. The tree is, in fact, empty, needing only to be cut into lengths to give man all he needs for a trough. The Indian squaw uses it to wash her linen, and the wood, exposed to the double action of air and water, becomes as hard as cement. The unripe fruit, the size of a good apple, furnishes a white cream, which, if not quite the quality demanded for five o'clock tea at Rumpelmayer's, still supplies the natives with a savoury breakfast. Later, when the fruit comes to maturity, it bursts under the sun's rays into a large tuft of silky cotton, dotting the branches with white balls and furnishing admirable material for the birds with which to build their nests. It is for this reason that the species is known as the "false cotton-tree." The exceedingly fine thread produced by this tree is too short to be spun, but the Indians, and even Europeans, turn it to account in many different ways. Soft pillows and cushions are made with it, and I can speak personally of their comfort.

M. Thays was not the man to let us leave without seeing his plantations of yerba-maté. Every one knows that maté, the Paraguay holly, is a native of Paraguay, whence it spread to Chili, Brazil, and the Argentine. Its leaves, dried and slightly roasted, yield a stimulating infusion that is as much enjoyed by the South American colonists as by the natives. Like kola, tea, and coffee, maté contains a large proportion of caffeine, which renders it a good nerve tonic and, at the same time, a digestive.

I have tasted "Paraguay tea," or "Jesuits' tea," on several occasions, but cannot honestly say I like it. The palate, however, ends by getting used to anything. I have a friend who drinks valerian with pleasure. All South America delights in the peculiar aroma of the strengthening but, on first acquaintance, certainly unpleasant maté. Existence in the Pampas is strenuous. The days are past when a cow was lassoed to provide a beefsteak for your lunch. The favourite stimulant of the rancho is the yerba-maté which puts new life into the exhausted horseman. Everywhere in town and country, the first rite in the morning is maté-drinking. Men and women carry the little gourd around, into which each in turn dips the tube of the bombilla, a perforated disc which travels from mouth to mouth, in the company of devotees.

In the old days, it was the tradition of maté-making to give the first infusion—poured off quickly, but invariably slightly bitter—to the servants. Growing familiarity with the herb has practically set aside this practice: in fact, while it is, and probably always will be, the favourite drink of the masses, the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, though still appreciating maté, drink in preference China tea or Santos coffee, like good Europeans. Yet the consumption of maté has increased enormously with the population. It has been calculated that an Argentino spends twice as much in a year on maté as a Frenchman on coffee. Until the last few years the Argentine Republic, independently of its home production, imported from Brazil and Paraguay 40 millions of kilogrammes, estimated at 22 millions of francs.

As might be expected, the Argentine Government has shown itself anxious to encourage the cultivation of maté. The difficulty lay in the germinating process. In certain provinces of the Argentine, maté grew wild, but when sown the crops were a failure. After many trials, M. Thays discovered that the seed only sprouted after long soaking in warm water, and that, strangely enough, the plants thus produced could be propagated without repeating this preliminary process. It appears that in the ordinary course of nature, the fertilising process takes place in the stomach of birds. The Jesuits had made the same discovery, but on their expulsion they carried the secret away with them. M. Thays rediscovered it. More than once an attempt has been made to introduce the habit of maté-drinking into Europe. I do not think it will easily come about. It would, nevertheless, be a great boon if yerba-maté could with us, as in South America, be substituted for the alcohol which is threatening us with irrevocable destruction.

I cannot leave the Botanical Garden without noting the pleasing effect of the light trellises which are a feature of all large gardens here. In this fine climate, where winter's cold is practically unknown, neither shrubs nor flowers need the protection of glass. An arbour of trellis-work with gay flower-borders forms a winter garden without glass, in which sun and shade, cunningly blended, throw into delicate relief the beauties of the plants. It is not quite the open air, and neither is it the greenhouse. Let us call it a vast cage of decorative vegetation.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The census of 1904 shows only twenty-nine thousand.

[2] The estuary, which is not a river, and which contains not a particle of silver, was thus named from a few native ornaments discovered in its bed by the first comers.

[CHAPTER III]
BUENOS AYRES (continued)

Botany and zoölogy are sister sciences. We leave the plants to inspect the beasts in the company of M. Thays, who is always glad to see his neighbour M. Onelli.

The governor of the Zoölogical Garden of Buenos Ayres is a phlegmatic little man, Franco-Italian in speech, and the more amusing in that his gay, caustic wit is clothed in a highly condensed, ironical form. What a pity that his animals, for whom he is father and mother, sister and brother, cannot appreciate his sallies! Not that it is by any means certain that they do not. It seems clear that they can enter into each other's feelings, if not thoughts, since an intimacy of the most touching kind exists between the man and inferior creation, to whose detriment the rights of biological priority have been reversed.

I should like to pause before the llamas, used as beasts of burden to carry a load of twenty-five kilogrammes apiece, or before the vicuñas, whose exquisite feathery fur is utilised for the motor-car, and whose private life would need to be told in Latin by reason of the officious interference of the Indian in matters that concern him not a whit.

M. Onelli has housed the more prominent groups in palaces in the style of architecture peculiar to their native land, and this gives to the gardens a very pleasing aspect.

But first let us enjoy the animals. It is amazing to see the two monstrous hippopotami leap from the water with movements of ridiculous joyfulness in response to the whistle of their governor-friend, and, on a sign from him, open their fearful caverns of pink jaws bristling with formidable teeth to receive with the utmost gratitude three blades of grass which they could easily cull for themselves beneath their feet if these manifestations of joy were called forth by the delicacy and not by friendship. The great beasts became human at sight of their master, if one may thus describe ferocity.

The puma, a sort of yellow panther whose colour has apparently won for him the name of the American lion, came running up to offer his back to the caressing hand of his friend with a hoarse roar that seemed to express rather helpless rage than voluptuousness.

The puma is perhaps the commonest of the wild beasts of the northern provinces of the Argentine, for it retreats from before the approach of man, and is more successful than the jaguar or the panther in escaping the traps or the guns of the hunter.

M. Edmond Hilleret, who has killed several, told me that at Santa Ana, near Tucuman, it was impossible to keep a flock of sheep, as they were always devoured by the pumas in spite of all the efforts he made to protect them. "Yet," he added, "notwithstanding my dogs and my peons the puma can never be seen. He is quite a rarity."

After a short palaver with some delicious penguins newly arrived from the southern ice, with their young, which would die of spleen if they were not fed with a forcing pipe, like an English suffragette, we pause before the grey ostrich of the Pampas, which has been nearly exterminated by the cruel lasso of the gaucho.

The grey American ostrich, which should be safe from our barbarous ways since his tail feathers offer no attraction for ladies' hats, is interesting by certain peculiarities in his domestic habits. To the male is left the duty of hatching the eggs, the female preferring to stray. By way of compensation, the paternal instinct is the more keenly developed in the father in proportion as the mother—reprehensible bird!—neglects her duties. Thus before beginning to sit on the eggs, he sets carefully aside two or three of them, according to the number of young to be hatched, and when the little ones leave their shells, he opens them with a sharp blow from the paternal beak, and spreads in the sunshine the contents of the eggs his foresight had reserved; the appetising dish attracts thousands of flies who promptly drown themselves therein to make the first meal of the fledglings. Admirable instance of the contradictory processes of nature designed for the preservation of existing types.

But we have come to the palace of the elephants. There are half a dozen of them beneath a vast dome, and the sight of M. Onelli rouses them all. The heavy grey masses sway from side to side, large ears beat up and down, while the small eyes wink; the trunks are flung inquiringly round, eager for any windfall. One amiable and tame elephant, the youthful Fahda, born on the place, hustles her colossal friends, to clear a way to M. Onelli, who talks to her affectionately, but is unable to respond as he should to her pressing request for cakes. The governor gives us the reason of their friendliness.

"We have no secrets from each other," he remarks gently.

And it was truer than he thought, for the young trunk was softly introduced into his tempting pocket, and brought out a packet of letters which were forthwith swallowed. Thereupon exclamations as late as fruitless from the victim, who thus witnessed the disappearance of his correspondence down the dark passages of an unexpected post-office from which there is no hope of return. [3]

M. Onelli kindly offered us a few minutes' rest in his own salon. But what did we find there? The housemaid who opened the door to us carried a young puma in her arms, and I know not what sort of hairy beast on her back. The gnashing of white teeth proceeded from under the chairs and coiled serpents lay in the easy-chairs. Indeed, we were not the least tired! Palermo must be visited.

The celebrated promenade starts nobly at the Recoleta, where the lawns and groves are seen in a setting of harmonious architecture. Carriages of the most correct British style, drawn by superb horses, and noisy motor-cars dash swiftly by. But for the groups of exotic trees one might be in the Bois. Palermo begins well. Unfortunately, we suddenly find before us an avenue of sickly coco-palms, whose bare trunks are covered with dead leaves, giving an unpleasing perspective of broom-handles. This tree, which is so fine in Brazil, is not in its element here. When planted in rows, even in the streets of Rio, it is more surprising than beautiful. It is in groves that it best displays its full decorative qualities. I take the liberty of suggesting that M. Thays should pull up the horticultural invalids and plant eucalyptus or some other species in their place.

But we are not yet at the end of our troubles. Less than two hundred yards down, the railway traverses the avenue on a level crossing. A gate, generally closed, a turnstile for pedestrians, a station, and all the rest of it. After a wait of ten minutes, the train duly passes, and then the motor-car plunges into a roadway, full of ruts, leading to a dark archway which carries another railway across the promenade, making an ugly blot on the landscape. And now we reach a further marshy road, bordered with young plantations, which leads across a leafless wood dividing the railway track from the estuary of La Plata.

A succession of trains on one hand, and a muddy yellow sea on the other: as a view it is not romantic. Gangs of labourers are at work on the roads, which are badly in need of their attentions. No doubt some day this will be a superb promenade. It is only a question of making it, and the first step must be to clear away the railway-lines with their embankments and bridges. This is probably the intention, since I was assured that the level crossing would shortly be swept away. That will be a beginning. M. Bouvard is not likely to overlook the importance of the matter. My only fear is lest the situation should make it impossible for Palermo ever to attain to imposing proportions. But one thing is certain, if M. Thays can get a free hand, the city will not lack a park worthy the capital of the Republic.

Need I say that squares and parks alike are superabundantly decorated with sculpture and monuments both open to criticism? There is nothing more natural to a young people than a desire to acquire great men in every department as early as possible. Yet idealism that is to be materialised must, one would think, have its base set solidly on established facts. In a country whose population offers a mixture of all the Latin races, art could not fail to flourish. It will free itself from its crust as fast as public taste is purified. Works such as those of M. Paul Groussac, or the fine novel by M. Enrique Rodrigues Larreta, [4] the distinguished Minister of the Argentine Republic in Paris, are evidences of the development of literary taste on the banks of the Rio de la Plata. [5]

The sculptor does not appear to have reached quite the same point, but I hasten to add, for the sake of justice, that our own hewers of marble, with a very few prominent exceptions, expose nothing in Buenos Ayres which is calculated to throw into too dark a shade their confrères of across the ocean.

France, Italy, and Spain supply some fairly fine statuary for the Latin confraternity. But, as might be readily imagined, a legitimate desire to write history on every square and market-place has given a profusion of monuments to soldiers and politicians. The same mania has been pushed to such extremes in our own land that it would ill become me to make it a subject of reproach to others; nevertheless it behoves us to acknowledge that the Argentine Republic has, both in times of war and of peace, produced some great men. It suffices to mention the names of San Martin (whose statue is being raised at Boulogne-sur-Mer and at Buenos Ayres) and of Sarmiento.

If genius were always at the disposal of Governments, the wish to perpetuate to all eternity the renown a single day had won for them might readily be pardoned. But men of genius are rare, and they are apt to make mistakes like other men. And for the rest, the statues that are put up to their memory serve merely to inspire in our breasts a few philosophic reflections on the danger of a permanent propaganda of mediocrity! Besides, the sculptor has this defect—that he forces himself on the attention of the passer-by. We are not compelled to purchase a poor book or to go into ecstasies over all the Chauchard collection, whereas we are unable to avoid the sight of the statue of Two-shoes by Thingummy. My only consolation is that such monuments will not prevent the advent of other supermen in the future, who, like those of the past, will raise their own monuments in a surer and better manner by their own glorious achievements.

But it is time to leave these men of marble and come to the living, of whom I have so far said not a word. My remark as to the European aspect of Buenos Ayres at first sight must be taken as referring merely to its outdoor life. I do not speak of the business quarter, which is the same in all countries. The man who is glued to the telegraph wire or to the telephone, waiting for the latest quotations in the different parts of the globe in order to build on them his own careful combinations, is, notwithstanding his patriotism, an international type whose world-wide business connection must in time modify his own characteristics and make of him the universal species of merchant.

At the same time, the population of any large European city, while preserving in its general outline the special characteristic evolved by its own history, does yet show a certain trend in the direction of some well-defined types of modern activity whose attributes are the outcome of natural conditions of civilisation the world over. But when transplanted outside Europe, the original characteristics are inevitably modified by the new environment, and the result will be a striking differentiation—North America is an example of this.

In the eyes of our ancient Europe, with its venerable traditions and its base of primeval prejudice, the man who ventures to strike a new root in a colony beyond the sea will have to expiate his new prosperity by some extravagances which will expose him to the fire of the satirical pressman or playwright. This is the reason why South America, having undoubtedly borne in common with every country of Europe some few fantastic types of high and of low ideals, suddenly finds herself represented to the public, for the greater entertainment of the boulevard, as being exclusively peopled with those strange creatures we have christened rastaquouères, whose privilege it is to lead a life that is ever at variance with all the laws of common-sense.

If all we ask is a joke at the expense of our neighbours, the Gauls of Paris may give rein to their wit. Still, it may be useful for us all to know that these so-called rastaquouères, leaving to petty tyrants the whole field of ancient history, have not only secured to their country by their steady labour its present prosperity, but have also founded in their new domain a European civilisation which is no whit inferior in inspiration to that which we are for ever vaunting. They learn our languages, invade our colleges, absorb our ideas and our methods, and passing from France to Germany and England, draw useful comparisons as to the results obtained.

We are pleased to judge them more or less lightly. Let us not forget that we in our turn are judged by them. And while we waste our time quarrelling about individuals and names, they are directing a steady effort toward taking from each country of Europe what it has of the best, in order to build up over yonder on a solid base a new community which will some day be so much the more formidable that its own economic force will perhaps have as a counterbalance the complications of a European situation that is not tending toward solution.

In spite of everything, France has managed to maintain so far friendly and sympathetic relations with the Republic. Latin idealism keeps these South American nations ever facing toward those great modern peoples that have sprung from the Roman conquest. I cannot say I think we have drawn from this favourable condition of things all the advantage we might have derived from it, both for the youthful Republics and for our Latinity, which is being steadily drained by the huge task of civilisation and by the vigorous onslaught that it is called on to sustain from the systematic activity of the Northern races.

The great Anglo-Saxon Republic of North America, tempered by the same Latin idealism imported in the eighteenth century from France by Jefferson, is making of a continent a modern nation whose influence will count more and more in the affairs of the globe. May it not be that South America, whose evolution is the result of lessons taught to some extent by the Northern races, will give us a new development of Latin civilisation corresponding to that which has so powerfully contributed to the making of Europe as we know it? It is here no question obviously of an organised rivalry of hostile forces between two great American peoples, who must surely be destined both by reason of their geographical situation, as also by mental affinities, to unite their strength to attain to loftier heights. The problem, which ought not to be shirked by France, will be henceforth to maintain in the pacific evolution of these communities the necessary proportion of idealism which she had a large share in planting there.

In following such a train of thought, how can we help pausing for an instant to consider the Pan-American Congress which so fitly closed the splendid exhibition of the Argentine centenary? With the sole exception of Bolivia, every republic of South America sent a representative to the palace of the Congress to discuss their common interests—an imposing assembly, which in the dignity of its debates can bear comparison with any Upper Chamber of the Continent of Europe. For my part, I sought in vain for one of those excitable natures, ever ripe for explosion—the fruit, according to tradition, of equatorial soil. I found only jurisconsults, historians, men of letters or of science, giving their opinions in courteous language, whose example might with advantage be followed by many an orator in the Old Continent. Not, of course, that passions were wholly absent from these debates. In these new countries, where the strength of youth finds a free field for its display, and where revolution and war are the chief traditions of the race, warmth of feeling has too frequently transformed the political arena into a field of battle. But by degrees, as the community takes form and acquires greater weight in every domain of public life, there grows up an imperious need of organised action, and the youthful democrats themselves end by realising that a people can only govern itself when its citizens have proved themselves capable of self-discipline.

Of all the problems which might naturally present themselves in a Pan-American Congress, those that might be expected to call forth implacable opposition were rigorously eliminated. An exchange of views took place, and each delegate was able to report to his principals a number of conclusions calculated to pave the way to future understandings.

When the Congress threw out the proposal to generalise the Monroe Doctrine and apply its principle to the whole of the South American continent, the representative of a large State said to me:

"We shall separate without accomplishing anything."

"It is already much to have avoided all conflict," I replied, "and if you had really accomplished nothing you would still have been useful in that you had met, talked together, understood one another, and parted on good terms."

Perhaps the man whose position was the most delicate of all was Mr. Henry White, the delegate of the great northern Republic, and the distinguished diplomat so popular in Parisian society, who contributed to the utmost of his power towards finding an equitable solution of the Franco-German conflict at the Algeciras Conference. At the Congress of Buenos Ayres, the delegate of Washington had, like the representative of Uruguay, one vote only, and his efforts were directed to making his collaborators forget that he was a "big brother," a very big brother, faintly suspected of tendencies towards an hegemony. It took all the gracious affability of Mr. White to disarm the distrust aroused more especially by the proposal to place Southern America under the banner of the Monroe Doctrine, and thus the Congress could be dissolved without a word of any but good-will and American brotherhood.

The Pan-American Congress was the natural outcome of the great international exhibition by which the Argentine Republic celebrated the centenary of its independence. The great fairs of older times existed with very good reason. There was every advantage to be gained by bringing together at stated times the produce of different districts at a period of the world's history when the deficiency of means of communication placed insurmountable obstacles in the way of producer, merchant, and consumer. To-day, thanks to steampower, every city in the world offers a permanent exhibition adapted to the needs of its public, and the traveller wastes his time when he endeavours to bring back from his journeys some article unknown to his countrymen. For this reason the finest of international exhibitions can reserve no surprises to its visitors. And as for experts, or specialists in any branch of commerce or industry, he is to be pitied who awaits the opening of one of these universal bazaars in order to obtain information on some detail of his business.

There remain evidently the amusements and entertainments which in such gatherings are naturally intended to arouse the pleasure-loving instincts of crowds. But civilisation has pretty well surfeited us with such amusements, which are now better calculated to tempt than to satisfy us. And when the friendly city that summons us to such a show is situated 11,000 kilometres from our shores, it requires a more powerful attraction than this of the "already seen" to induce us to undertake the expedition.

For all these reasons and without seeking any others the Buenos Ayres Exhibition could not be a success either in the way of money or of the concourse of peoples. An unfortunate and ultra-modern strike retarded the arrangements to such a point that on the anniversary day, May 25th, only the section of ganaderia (cattle-breeding) was ready. Notwithstanding a multitude of difficulties, pavilions were put up, in which were amassed and docketed in the usual fashion some of those products which the greed for gold brings to all the depots of the world. A few special side-shows were remarkably successful. Of these may be mentioned the English exhibit of the railway industry and the German section of electricity. Some of the buildings were never completed, as that of the Spanish section. France, I regret to say, did not distinguish herself. The omission is inconceivable when one considers what a market might in this way have been found for our manufactures. Apart from some interesting displays by dressmakers, jewellers, and goldsmiths, exhibited in a tasteful pavilion slightly resembling Bagatelle, and called the Palace of Applied Art, we found nothing to send. I admit that for France this was not sufficient. England, however, exhibited a magnificent State railway-carriage—said to be worth two millions—which she presented to the President of the Republic. It is a luxury that the English might very well permit themselves, since almost all the railways of the Argentine are in their hands. And why, if you please? Because the engineer who one day invited tenders for the construction of the first Argentine railway-line found in Paris no support, and from our capital (I have it from his own lips) he turned to London, where the enterprise was carried to colossal proportions.

We could hardly help being represented in the art and sculpture pavilions. I can honestly say that our exhibit, well-organised, was highly creditable to the nation. But, without any tremendous effort, we might have done much better! We reckoned, perhaps, on the Argentine millionaires coming to Paris to look for the works we failed to exhibit in their capital. If only millionaires were concerned, I should say nothing. But it is precisely because the art education of the Argentine people is as yet rudimentary, as might also be said of more than one nation in ancient Europe, that we ought to have attempted to arouse a wider public interest instead of appealing merely to connoisseurs, who are in the habit of getting what they want in the picture-galleries of the Old World. Some excellent examples were shown, no doubt; that was the least we could do. Our home artists would not risk the experiment of creating a kind of exhibition-museum, which might have been a revelation of French art and have had the effect of arousing the need of the Beautiful which is latent in every nation, and at the same time inviting that intelligent criticism which is a powerful factor in the development of taste in connoisseurs.

There is no art museum worthy the name in the Argentine Republic. You must exist before you can add adornment. If, however, I may judge by what I saw in a few private galleries, the time is at hand when the need for large art collections will be fully acknowledged in the south as it is now in the north; there, forty years ago, I know by personal observation that the ground was less fully prepared than it is to-day in the Argentine, while now we see the treasures of Europe being eagerly bought up in order that the New World may soon vie with the Old on this point.

I must not omit to say a word on the retrospective exhibit of "colonial days." A centenary celebration implies a history and a past, and this history is remarkably well illustrated by the instruments of civilisation now in the hands of the founders. What a contrast there is between the more than sumptuous railway-carriage of which I spoke just now and the archaic coaches, fat-bellied barouches, and Merovingian chariots which used to pick a painful way across the pathless Pampas, transporting from plantation to plantation families that had but little prospect of ever amassing more than they needed for a bare daily life. Utensils of the simplest, bespeaking a time when wood was scarce. Weapons of the clumsiest, undressed skins as a protection from the occasional blasts of the pampero. In a period when the horse was the universal means of locomotion—he still is as a matter of fact, to a very great extent, since in the country the little children must mount their ponies to go to school—the equipment of the horseman was a pompous bedizenment in Spanish guise, from his heavy brass ornaments to the rowels of monstrous spurs. All this belongs to the ancient times of scarcely fifty years ago, and when you meet a gaucho on his thick-set horse, his feet in weighty wooden stirrups hanging vertically like wheels, you realise that the modern miracle of iron roads has not been able to entirely wipe out the primitive machinery of a world of colonists.

The section of Argentine produce—cattle, timber, plants, fruits, cereals, etc.—is specially interesting to foreigners. To describe it would be to write the economic history of the land. I heard on all sides that the cattle exhibits were exceptionally fine. I am not astonished, now that I have seen in the shows and on the estancias (farms) the finest of stock for breeding purposes. We know that out on the Pampas the rearing of horses and horned cattle as well as of sheep has developed enormously. I shall have occasion presently to return to the subject when I speak of the famous freezing-machines which supply the English markets with meat slaughtered in Buenos Ayres—to say nothing of the live cattle exported. The only detail that I shall give here is that the event of the day has been the purchase by a meat-freezing company of five oxen for beef at the price of 25,000 francs apiece (£1000). This looks like madness, and perhaps it is. We are beginning to learn in Europe to what point the craze for advertisement is carried by Americans. I only quote this fact because it throws more light on certain traits of character than any number of traveller's tales could do.

Grain-growing—wheat and maize—like that of flax (of which they burn the stalks for want of knowing how to utilise them) has recently grown enormously. I shall return to this subject also later on, when I speak of the Pampas, with their immense stretch of arable land between the Andes and the sea, yielding every kind of harvest without manure and almost without labour. Wherever the locomotive makes its appearance there blossoms forth a fertile strip of country on either side of the line, which on the plan of the administrators symbolises an instant rise in value of the property whose produce has henceforth a quick means of transport to its market. Had I not firmly resolved to abstain from quoting figures and facts cut out of books of statistics, I could easily dazzle the reader by showing him the fantastic increase in the crops of maize alone, standing in gigantic ricks round the estancias, pending the moment when they will be handed over to the gigantic elevators to be flung on board the English and German cargo-boats.

Strolling through the galleries in which are accumulated the exhibits of Argentine agricultural produce, you are forced to admire the variety of species yielded by a soil that produces clover two and a half yards in height! I say nothing of the fruits and vegetables, because at that season of the year I could not try them. Neither seemed to me to compete with European varieties. As for the tropical fruits, with the exception of the oranges and pines, they are astonishing, I confess, but I cannot give them any other praise.

In the section of Argentine timber is to be seen in the front rank the "false cedar" and the marvellous québracho, of which I have already spoken. No other wood can be compared with this in respect of the quantity of tannin it contains. For this reason the immense forests of the northern provinces are being devastated to supply the manufacturers. Railway-sleepers and stakes for the wire-fencing that marks out the immense stretches of Pampas are the principal employment for québracho, irrespective of the extraction of tannin. As the demand increases, and the idea of replanting does not seem to have occurred to the Argentinos, it is reasonable to foresee the moment when the Government of the Republic, having neglected to husband its resources, will have only vain lamentations to offer to its customers. The day may be far distant; I do not dispute it. Such an improvident policy is, none the less, reprehensible. How many years, moreover, must elapse between the planting of the young québracho and its maturity? Indeed, the same remarks might be made of all the other species of timber.

When you have seen tree-trunks that were many centuries in growth falling bit by bit into the maw of a factory furnace, without any attempt being made to replace them, when you have been saddened by the spectacle of the marvellous Brazilian forests blazing in every direction to make room for coffee plantations that will presently spring up amongst the charred trunks, you realise keenly that there is no more urgent need in these great countries than a complete organisation of forestry. If in some parts of Brazil the soil will no longer yield freely without the help of manure, the water system, at all events, remains unchanged. In the Argentine Pampas the case is very different, for the reason that the watercourses disappear into the ground before reaching the sea. When the immense forests of the highlands have disappeared to make way for plateaux open to wind and sun, can we doubt but that the already terrible scourge of drought will be still further aggravated, and its disastrous effects on cattle and harvests be even more redoubtable than they are at present?

I must resist the temptation of dwelling on the interesting exhibits of the South American Republics. I should never finish. Neither must I wander any farther from the Argentine capital to set down reflections that will more fitly suggest themselves later. Nevertheless I cannot leave the exhibition without mentioning the extraordinary establishment in which the Rural Society holds its annual cattle-shows—vast stables and stalls, constructed according to the latest pattern on English model farms. There is accommodation perhaps for more than 500 horned cattle, or horses, and for 700 or 800 probably in the paddocks, while 4000 sheep can be penned under a single roof, the whole completed by an enclosure for trials with seating accommodation for 2000 persons.

These shows take place every year in October. They are closed by a sale at which the beasts are put up at auction. No better system of gauging the progress of the breeding industry could be devised. As many as 4000 animals have been brought together for these shows, collected from all parts of the country, including stallions of the best breeds, Durham and Herefordshire cows, to say nothing of pigs, llamas, and poultry. Agricultural machinery and dairy implements also find a place here, of course.

It is in this colossal cattle-rearing city that the greatest effort of production ever made has been concentrated. I saw at Rosario a magnificent cattle show. But the great Fair of Buenos Ayres outdoes anything to be offered elsewhere of the kind. I shall have to return to the subject when I come to the estancias and the vast herds that belong to them. Here it suffices to note that the Argentine breeders do not shrink from any expense in order to obtain the most perfect stallions. England is, of course, the chief market for the frozen meat, which is carried as return cargo by the coaling-boats. Naturally the farmers of the Pampas endeavour to suit the tastes of their customers. This is why the finest specimens of British cattle-farms find their way every year to Buenos Ayres. It is not surprising that the horse-breeders have adopted the same course, though full justice is done to the qualities of French breeds. Still, the English breeder best understands how to make an outlet for his wares, whilst the French prefers to sit in the sun on the plains of Caen to wait until the foreigner comes to ask him as a favour for his animals.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] One word about M. Onelli's interesting work, À Travers les Andes, an accurate account of his journey in Patagonia. When describing to me the customs of the natives, he was good enough to promise me a few arrowheads collected in the course of his expedition. They reached me the following day with this letter:

"My dear Sir,—After rummaging amongst my drawers, I finally found the arrowheads you wanted. The book which accompanies them, a humble homage to yourself, describes the places in which I found them. If you are good enough to glance at it you will find several photographs of the descendants of the makers of these arrows. The Tchuleches Indians, who to the number of rather more than 2000 live in the southern half of Patagonia, say, when shown one of these arrowheads, which are to be found all over the arid plateau they inhabit, that they were the usual weapon of the Indians of olden times who travelled on foot. We know that they did not know the horse until a hundred and fifty years ago, at most, and, in fact, one may say that the Stone Age represented by these arrowheads only ended in Patagonia a half-century ago. The arrows to be found in Patagonia demonstrate in a contrary manner the influence of civilised industries, since the heads the most clumsily made are the most modern. The Indians lost little by little the art of making them when they learnt to make the shafts of fragments of knife-blades, or of iron obtained from the Christians, and since then they have completely abandoned the work to adopt firearms. In the preparation of guanaco skins, the Indian women, naturally more conservative than the men, still use the old system of scraping the under side of the leather with scrapers made of stone, in every way similar to the tool used by prehistoric man in European lands. Nowadays, having no means of making them, they search in their leisure moments in the ancient dwellings of their forefathers in order to find a flint scraper, which they carefully use and preserve.

"The arrow age still subsists in the north of the Republic among the Indians of the Chaco forests. Their arrows are made of hard wood. On alluvial soils no flint can be found, just as none can be had in the province of Santa Fé, and nearly throughout the whole of the province of Buenos Ayres (a region larger than all France), without a single pebble!—a fact which renders it extremely difficult to keep up good roads across a flat country of crumbling soil without lime. The highway is turned into soft mud by traffic and rain; yet observe the enormous increase of railway lines.

"As for the art of making arrowheads, the Stone Age still reigns among the Onas and Lakaluf, natives of Terra del Fuego; but alas! the art has degenerated. The natives of the seacoast, always on the lookout for a whale, dead or wounded, and for fragments of wrecks of sailing vessels rounding Cape Horn, have discovered that bottle glass is the easiest material to work upon for their arrows, and their poor language is thus enriched with a new word; to express 'glass' they say 'botel,' by the natural quid pro quo of a tongue which in adopting a new word confuses the name of the object with that of the material of which it is made.

"The opaque black arrowhead is of basalt, the most abundant kind of rock in Patagonia, but also the most difficult to use in the manufacture of such small objects. Obsidian—the little black point of flint—is more generally used.

"The twisted forms are moulds of flint of the inside of a tertiary fossil mollusc, the 'turritella,' very common in the strata of the Rio Santa Cruz cliffs, and which Indian women often wear as ornaments. In the hope you will excuse my bad French, since I have had the presumption to write direct to you instead of being translated into good French,

"I am, my dear sir, yours, etc.,

"Clement Onelli."

[4] La Gloire de Don Ramire.

[5] I quote these two names because they are best known among us in France. But Argentine literature cannot be dismissed in a word. The struggle for independence could not fail to inspire songs to be caught up from ear to ear and sung everywhere, and in the same way the spread of education has naturally turned many minds to literary composition. The struggle with the metropolis and the flame of civil war irresistibly impelled the individual into the arena to take public action, and from the vortex there issued a new nationality. It is from such a period of strife that the first history of a people takes its origin, and the record of deeds wrought under the influence of such excitement is the material from which a nation's archives are derived, fixing for ever the memory of actions that will be revered by the generations to come. In this way, the noble harangues of Moriano Moreno to the Provisional Government, the eloquent proclamations made by General Belgrano after the battles of Salta and Tucuman, the noble letters of San Martin are impressive lessons for all humanity; time can have no effect on the exalted nobility of thought and artistic mode of expression that are here held up before us. Under the savage dictatorship of Rosas, all voices were silenced. Still, Sarmiento from his exile in Chili launched from the heights of the Andes his virulent pamphlets against the odious tyrant. When liberty was regained, Press and rostrum sent forth a legion of writers and orators, at whose head we must place Bartolome Mitré and Nicolas Avellaneda. To come down to our own time, the list of distinguished writers meriting each a special notice would be long indeed.

[CHAPTER IV]
FOREIGN COLONISTS IN ARGENTINA

It is now time to return to the city to get a little better acquainted with its inhabitants. As a matter of fact, the features upon which I have touched—the town, port, promenades, palaces, settlers' houses, agricultural products, manufactures, or commerce—do more or less reveal the native, and although I have said nothing of his person beyond that he looks very like a European, my reader has certainly gathered some light as to his way of living.

To the Argentine extra muros, the citizen of Buenos Ayres is the porteño—that is, the man of the port, the townsman kept, by the sea, in constant contact with Europe, and more readily undertaking a trip to London or Paris than to Tucuman or Mendoza. On his side, while professing great esteem for the provincials (for in the Argentine patriotism amounts to mania), the porteño is inclined to pity those who pass their lives far from the capital; while the countryman mocks good-humouredly at his strange compatriot who knows naught of the Campo, whence are brought to his door the corn and cattle which are the outcome of the highest and mightiest efforts of their common national energy, and which by his means are to be exchanged for European produce in an ever-widening and developing trade.

This is, however, but a superficial judgment that we may permit ourselves to make; but if we look more closely into the national character, we shall perceive that if the porteño is the nearer to Europe and hastens thither on the smallest pretext; if he is more thoroughly steeped in European culture; if he takes more interest in the doings of the Old World, attaching the greatest importance to its opinion of his own country; if it is his dearest ambition that the youthful Argentine Republic shall comport herself nobly among the old peoples of a weary civilisation; if it is his constant care to obtain from beyond sea the advantages gained by experience, to be turned to account by his own nation—we should be greatly mistaken in assuming that European contact or descent could lead either citizen or farmer, porteño or estanciero, to prefer to his own land that Old Continent which his forefathers deserted, in the hope, already realised, of finding on this virgin soil, fertilised by his own labour, a better chance of success than the Old World could offer him.

While the physiognomy of the streets of Buenos Ayres is wholly European in symmetry, style, and even in the expression of the faces to be seen thereon, yet this people is Argentine to the very marrow of the bones—exclusively and entirely Argentine. New York is nearer to Europe, and New York is North American in essence as completely as Buenos Ayres is Argentine. The difference is that in New York, and even in Boston or Chicago, North Americanism is patent to all eyes in type, in carriage, and in voice, as much as in feeling and manner of thinking; whereas the piquancy of Buenos Ayres lies in the fact that it offers the spectacle of rabid Argentinism under a European veil. And, strangely enough, this inherent jingoism, which in some nations that shall be nameless assumes so easily an offensive guise, is here displayed with an amiable candour that is most disarming, and instinctively you seek to justify it to yourself. Not satisfied with being Argentine from top to toe, these people will, if you let them, Argentinise you in a trice.

To tell the truth, there are some (I have met a few) who speak ill of the country—and these critics are people who have not even had the excuse of having been unsuccessful in their business affairs here. There are systematic grumblers everywhere, who endeavour to give themselves importance by finding fault with their surroundings. Those who are not pleased with their stay in a foreign country should remind themselves that nobody prevents them from returning to their own.

I have already mentioned that many Italians cross the sea for the harvesting in the Argentine, and then, taking advantage of the difference in the seasons, return home to cut their home corn. This backward and forward movement has grown enormously. But in the long run the attraction of a land that overflows with energy defeats atavistic proclivities and weakens roots that are centuries old. And as soon as the settler has become the owner of a few roods of the new soil, he is irrevocably lost to Europe.

I have not sought to conceal the fact that the largest number of immigrants make the mistake of stopping at Buenos Ayres, whose population is thus increased out of all proportion with the development of Argentine territory. This mass of working people, who necessarily remain easily accessible to European influences, offers apparently an excellent field for revolutionary propaganda. Anarchists and socialists spare no pains to make proselytes here, in order to strengthen their hands. A violence of speech and action has in this way given to certain strikes a truly European aspect. Still, in a country in which there is a constant supply of work, it is hardly possible that disturbances arising rather from doctrine than from existing social evils can take any hold on or materially affect any considerable extent of territory.

If I am to believe what I heard in all parts, the Russian anarchists have a specially redoubtable organisation. To mention only the most recent of events, it is known that the Chief of Police, who had directed in person some ruthless repressive measures, was killed in the street by a bomb thrown by a Russian, who was protected from the full severity of the law by his tender age. [6]

Last June, a few days before I left Europe, a bomb was thrown by some unknown person in the Colon Theatre, falling in the middle of the orchestra and wounding more or less seriously a large number of persons. The Colon Theatre, in which opera is given, is the largest and perhaps the handsomest theatre in the world. [7] The open boxes of the pit tier, like those of the first two tiers and orchestra, present, when filled with young women in evening dress, the most brilliant spectacle that I have ever seen in any theatre. In such a setting, imagine the catastrophe that could be caused by a bomb! [8] The injured were carried out somehow or other, the house was emptied amid loud and furious outcries, and, the damage having been repaired in the course of the following day, not a woman in society was absent from her place at the performance of the evening. This is a very fine trait of character which does the highest honour to the women of Argentine society. I am not sure that in Paris, under similar circumstances, there would have been a full house on the night following such a disaster.

It is easy to understand, however, that the fury of the public found expression in an Act of Parliament of terrible severity, directed immediately against any suspicious groups. The criminal in the present case has not yet been discovered, though during my stay in Buenos Ayres there occurred a sensational arrest which led the authorities to believe they had laid hands on the guilty man. A state of siege was in some sense declared, lasting all the time I was in Buenos Ayres; and the Government obtained extraordinary powers, to be used only against organisations believed to be anarchical. The penalty generally imposed was transportation to Terra del Fuego, under conditions that no one would or, perhaps, could describe to me. I am without the necessary returns for establishing the results obtained. Some complaints reached me from the more populous quarters affirming that the innocent had been punished; all I could do was to hand them over to the authorities. I can testify that in my presence, in any of the circles of Buenos Ayres society that I was able to observe, no anarchist outrages were on any single occasion the subject of conversation. More than once I led up to it. The reply invariably was that the question was one for public authority, that the Government was armed and would take action, and if further powers should prove necessary they would be granted. Then the topic was changed.

There is no doubt that the Argentine Government, like that of Great Britain, is resolved to finish, once for all, with crimes which arouse only horror in all the civilised world. In the course of a hasty visit I had occasion to pay to the Police Department, in the company of the City Superintendent, Señor Guiraldès (at the very moment of the arrest of the man who was believed to have thrown the bomb in the Colon Theatre), I could see that not only is the force a very powerful one, but that it has at its head men of energy and decision who are determined to repress deeds of violence, of which all or nearly all are committed by persons not of Argentine nationality. [9]

While on the subject, one may note that the Argentine police have adopted and perfected the system of identification of criminals by the marks of the thumb. First the imprint of all ten fingers is taken, so as to make mistake impossible and arrive at absolute certainty; then, acting on the principle that it may be as useful to identify an honest man as a bandit, identification certificates are issued to the public, for a small fee, containing an enlargement of the thumb imprint.

A crowd of people waiting at the door of the office that makes and furnishes these documents showed that the public fully appreciated their usefulness. Young men and old were submitting in silence to have their ten fingers smeared with a sort of wax not easily removed by soap and water. Each in turn departed well pleased that the stigma of "Unknown" would never be attached to his grave. It appears that it has become the fashion to register one's thumb at the police-station before starting on any journey. Señor Guiraldès told us that his own son, now in Europe, had taken this precaution before exposing his person to the risks of the elements and the unceremonious manners of Parisian apaches.

In the days of the stage-coach Parisians used to be laughed at for making their wills and taking out passports before starting on a journey to Étampes. Now behold! By other routes we have returned to the good old days. And funny as it may appear to those of us who like to believe that civilisation in South America is more or less rudimentary, it is precisely this country which thus, in scientific fashion, guards against the barbarous ways of the capitals and even the country districts of Europe.

There was recently a story of an Argentine who was drowned on our coast and whose body was subsequently washed up on shore, with the head frightfully mutilated. As, however, the telltale thumb had been preserved he was quickly identified. If this story had been told me in time I should certainly have allowed as much of my person as was necessary to be dipped in wax instead of venturing to start on my homeward journey without the simple proofs of identity which would suffice to place beyond doubt the status of any Jonah in the depths of a whale. As it is, in spite of my imprudence, I reached home with my head still on my shoulders. Pure luck! Never again will I trust myself at sea without this elementary precaution, which would so radically have changed the fortunes of Ulysses in rocky Ithaca.

After this digression, which is only excused by the importance of the subject, I want to finish what I began to say about the rabid Argentinism of our friends. I had a great surprise one day when speaking respectfully of the fine qualities of the Spaniards. Some highly cultured men present interrupted me, and criticised severely the race from which they had sprung in terms one might have expected from an Anglo-Saxon, but not from a Latin. Therefore I must ask my readers not to imagine that the Argentinos are merely Spaniards transplanted to American soil. No! The real Argentino, though he would never confess it, seems to me convinced that there is a magic elixir of youth that springs from his soil and makes of him a new man, descendant of none but ancestor of endless generations to come.

That there is indeed a regenerating influence in this youthful land is proved by the power it wields over newcomers of whatever origin. The Italian in particular is Argentinised before he is argenté. In the provinces, as in Buenos Ayres, I had a hundred thousand examples of this before my eyes. You ask a child, the son of an immigrant, whether he speaks Italian or Spanish. He answers haughtily, "At home we all talk Argentine." Another, unable to deny that he was born in Genoa, although he claimed Argentine nationality, murmured by way of excuse, "I was so little." I may add that in the primary schools where these replies were made to me the teaching was the epitome of Argentine patriotic spirit, as might be guessed from the pictures and inscriptions on the walls. [10] But Alsace-Lorraine and Poland are witness to the fact that unless the heart be wholly won authority may labour in vain.

As I want to be wholly sincere here, I must admit that the French take this Argentine contagion with remarkable facility. I should grievously wrong our own excellent colony, however, if I did less than justice to its ardent patriotism. It is only when tried that love grows and grows purer. In absence the fatherland seems the dearer in proportion as it is connected with the recollection of sufferings that left us stripped of all but honour.

The public work of the French colony speaks loudly for it. Its most important achievement is the French Hospital, founded long ago, but, thanks to its Governor, M. Basset, and its chief physician, Dr. G. Lauré, it is invaluable. As I was leaving the building after a visit I shall not soon forget, the Chairman of the Board of Directors showed me a bust of Pasteur standing among the trees, and asked what I thought of a suggestion to place near it a figure of Lorraine. Although the symbolism in the two statues would be entirely different, I warmly concurred in the plan. There is, after all, a delicate connection between these two manifestations of the soul of France—the desire for knowledge and the courage to hold.

These men, who have presented to the city of Buenos Ayres a monument worthy of France in commemoration of the friendship of the sister republics, and who, on the occasion of the floods in Paris of last year, sent a cheque for 400,000 francs to assuage the worst of the distress, never miss an opportunity of showing their loyalty to the mother-country. Yet how many sons of France one meets at every step who have gone over to the Argentine, head and heart, beyond all possibility of return!

One large manufacturer of the port of Buenos Ayres is a nephew of a member of our National Assembly of 1871. I noticed, when inspecting his very remarkable establishment, that he speaks French less fluently than Spanish, while his two brothers, who pay frequent visits to Paris, have become thorough Argentinos.

Again, I might take the case of one of our most eminent compatriots who left France in his twentieth year, but who has remained French to the very marrow of his bones. His son is an official of high position in the Argentine. Doubtless his marriage with a woman of the country laid the foundation for this South American family. The atmosphere of the home is naturally altered, and his material interests, indissolubly riveted to the soil that feeds him and his family, attune the settler insensibly to new ways, and gradually transform his whole habit of mind to the new pattern.

Can anybody explain why this is not the case with the French who try their fortune in North America, and why in Canada the two races live side by side in all harmony but never mix? It must be that "blood is thicker than water," as says the English proverb, and that the Latin element blends more readily with a Latin agglomeration than with an Anglo-Saxon community. Here I have seen, over and over again, that after two or three generations nothing remains of the original stock but the name.

I know of but one instance where the Latin organism has been completely assimilated by a northern race, and that is the French emigration to Germany in consequence of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. But in that case a community of religious fervour, strengthened by an odious persecution, was the active agent in the blending of the Latin mind and character with that of Germany. We all remember that the first German Governor of Alsace-Lorraine was the descendant of a French emigrant. Some of us may recall the furious address of the learned Dubois-Reymond to the youth of Prussia in 1870, urging them over the frontier of the land from which their ancestors were driven by the sabres of the dragoons of Louis XIV.

To return once more to our Franco-Argentinos, I ought to say that the severe application of French military law but too often embitters them against the mother-country. In its haste to increase its population, the Argentine awards nationalisation to the children of foreigners born on Argentine soil, and nationalisation carries in its train military service. It is the same system adopted by ourselves in Algiers toward Spanish colonists. The consequence is that the son of French parents duly registered at the French Consulate, in order to preserve for him his father's nationality, finds himself later called simultaneously to serve under two flags on opposite sides of the ocean.

What is he to do? In the Argentine, where military service is very short, are all his future prospects, while in France no place has been kept open for him. If France were in danger and called to him for help he would not hesitate, but, failing that, his actual surroundings make it hard for him to decide. The majority respond to the call to the Argentine flag, and by so doing fall into the class of insoumis on French soil, except in cases where the father, with a forethought that cannot be approved, has omitted to register the birth at the Consulate.

If I remember rightly, ten only out of forty youths called up leave Buenos Ayres annually to answer to their names at the French roll-call. One wonders whether the result be sufficient to justify steps that might easily trouble our relations with the French colony in this country. For the young insoumis can never set foot on French soil without finding the gendarmerie after him. Yet his business will call him inevitably to Europe. Where will he take his orders when France has shut her doors to him? England, Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany are open to him. I heard recently a story about a Frenchman of Buenos Ayres who ventured to Lille, and had only just time, at a warning from a friend, to escape over the border.

I need not dwell on the matter, but it is easy to see how detrimental the present state of the law is to French families living in the Argentine, Brazil, and other American countries, as well as to France herself. We manage in this way to drive from the national fold a number of young men who would in time of danger respond heartily to a call from the motherland.

Wherever I went I heard the same cry. The Consuls and the French Minister could only reply, "It is the law." But the Frenchman who follows the Flag in some foreign land demands an alteration in a law which ought not to be applied with the same rigour to youths living in Basle, Brussels, Geneva, and to those who have found a field for their activities across the sea.

To me it seems only justice to establish a distinction in our legislation between these two categories of French subjects. For example, I heard of the case of an eminent politician—M. Pellegrini, the son of an inhabitant of Nice, and therefore French—who, in his youth, got into difficulties in the way described with the French recruiting service, and who later, having risen to the position of President of the Argentine Republic, received the Grand Cordon of the Legion of Honour. The red ribbon or the Council of War—which seems the more appropriate reward to citizens of this kind? Of course, we must all regret that valuable citizens should thus be taken from France at the moment when she needs every one of her children. At the same time we must consider that a Frenchman who has become Argentine is by no means lost to France, as might be the case in the United States, for instance, where the Latin is rapidly submerged by the irresistible flood of Anglo-Saxonism.

In the Argentine, on the contrary, the Northern races prove merely a useful element of methodical intelligence and tenacity, which is in time engulfed by the great Latin wave. There are important German colonies in Brazil, and even in the Argentine. Both English and North Americans have prosperous manufactories there. Yet in a race that has preserved integrally its Latinity, all this is of but secondary interest, and the tendency remains to travel steadily in the track of peoples of Latin stock, among whom it may without presumption be said that the French exert the most powerful influence.

For this reason any Frenchman of average intellectual and moral value who becomes incorporated in the Argentine nation must almost infallibly at the same time—for I doubt if any Frenchman is ever really un-Frenched—materially aid in permanently strengthening French prestige.

What are we to think of men like M. Paul Groussac, who holds an eminent place in Buenos Ayres, but who would equally in his own land have reached the very front rank? M. Groussac, having gone through our naval training school, set out to see the world. One day, his pockets empty, he arrived at Buenos Ayres, where courageously he hired himself as gaucho—that is, keeper of the immense flocks of the Pampas, whose members run into their thousands—and he undertook to drive a train of mules to Peru. He accomplished the journey successfully, covering the same route four times in all, each journey taking four months. Later we find him acting as schoolmaster. In Tucuman he carried on the work of the French outlaw, Jacques, who, having escaped to the Argentine after the coup d'état of December 2d, devoted himself entirely to public education on lines taken up later and developed by President Sarmiento. We had the pleasure of seeing in the place of honour at the Training College of Tucuman the portraits of the two French founders, Jacques and Paul Groussac. From time to time the latter brother has published various literary works, notably some short stories in which Argentine life and character are brilliantly set forth, and the name of their author has achieved a wide celebrity. Then M. Hilleret, the great French sugar manufacturer of Santa Ana, placed a large capital at the disposal of Paul Groussac with which to start a daily paper destined to reveal, in the person of its editor-in-chief, a writer of remarkable force.

To-day you may hear that Paul Groussac is the leading Spanish writer of our times, which by no means prevents him from contributing some brilliant articles to our own Journal des Débats, amply proving his mastery of his mother-tongue, not to mention a curious study by him of that literary enigma the Don Quichotte of Avellaneda.

In 1810 a Public Library was founded by decree of the first Revolutionary Junto, on the initiative of Secretary Moreno. It was opened March 16, 1812, its nucleus being drawn from the convent libraries. In 1880, after the proclamation of Buenos Ayres as capital of the Federation, the Public Library became the National Library, and in 1885 Paul Groussac was appointed Governor. In an interview with President Roca, who cannot be accused of any partiality for him, Groussac obtained a grant of the building intended, alas! for public lotteries, in which the library might be installed. He set to work immediately. The National Library of the Argentine, under the control of M. Groussac, is now without a rival in South America, and can bear comparison with many similar institutions on the Old Continent. [11]

One of the pet hobbies of M. Groussac is now to open a French lycée in Buenos Ayres, with the support of both Governments. His eldest son, an Argentino, has just been appointed to the post of Under-Secretary of State in the Office of Public Instruction by M. Saënz Peña.

Strangely enough all the fine qualities of this illustrious compatriot of ours have been lost sight of for the reason that through some defect—I had almost said vice—in his character he has won the reputation of being the surliest of bears. Having myself also, to some extent, a reputation for being less than amiable I wondered whether the two of us might not come to blows if we met. Considering in some sort my bald head a protection, I ventured into the bear's den, and found only the most affable and genial of men, whose claws were of velvet and his tusks of sugar. Thus we made friends at once, and I found that the much-dreaded beast had nothing terrible about him, unless it was a strong accent of the Gers.

Since that day I have done my best to dispel so injurious a prejudice against the man. I can only explain its prevalence by the words of Tacitus, who remarked of his father-in-law, Agricola, "He chose rather to offend than to hate." It is a rare enough trait among men this, which leads them, like Alceste, to declare their real opinion rather than stoop to the indignity of falsehood. It may very easily happen that in this way such men may offend the talker who asks only cheap flattery, though actuated themselves by the kindliest feelings towards their fellow-men.

If we consider for a moment the sentiment aroused in us by the general practice of using words to conceal our thoughts, we must recognise that we are the first to suffer by this universal weakness—not to say cowardice—in that we only expect from others what we ourselves give, namely, hypocritical phrases, leading to crooked actions, and causing that silent but lasting dislike which forms the principal obsession in the life of many among us. If it is a less offence to inspire than to harbour dislike, let us absolve the men who fail to win universal regard, but who are nevertheless wholly incapable of harming a creature.

Unless I am misinformed, we shall soon have the pleasure of seeing Paul Groussac in Paris. A Chair of History of the Argentine Republic has been founded at the Sorbonne, and there is talk of offering it to him. Certainly no one could better perform its duties. Yet it would surprise me if he could in this way break off his multitudinous engagements in the Argentine. They say he will in person open the course of lectures. I can promise an intellectual treat to his hearers.

I did not hear of any Germans or Englishmen who had, to the same extent as the Italians and the French, undergone transformation into Argentinos. The German, whose fundamental roughness—to call it by no stronger name—is frequently masked by good humour, works his way into all classes of society, but without losing any of his original traits. M. Mihanowitch, who is at the head of a colossal business of river and sea transportation, must, notwithstanding his Austrian origin, be considered as an Argentino, though he is surely of Slav blood.

The English invariably retain their individuality. I am told that in Patagonia, where they are carrying on sheep breeding on a scale that leaves Australia in the rear, they have built up cosy dwellings, where every night they change into their smoking-jackets for the family repast, and never miss taking a holiday of two or three months in their native land. They never become Argentinos. This, however, does not prevent their being at the head of the business world of La Plata, where they exert a powerful influence on the industrial and commercial life of the people.

It would have greatly interested me to study the foreign colonies more closely, but time was lacking. Of the Spanish, the only man I was able to see anything of was M. Coelho, the distinguished Governor of the Spanish Bank of La Plata, whose untiring energy reaches out daily in new directions; he gave me many proofs of kindness, for which I am sincerely grateful.

It is certain that the recent visit of Field-Marshal von der Goltz to the Argentine must prove useful to German influence. As we know, it is the Germans who are responsible for the present organisation of the Argentine Army. Their Government, wiser than some others, did not hesitate to send to La Plata some of their most skilled officers, who were naturally received by Argentine society with the deference that was their due.

The eminent legal scholar, Professor Enrico Ferri, lately re-elected Deputy of the group that we should call "Independent Socialists," is and has long been the official mouthpiece of the Italian colony. Gifted with a perfect urbanity, an impartial mind, lofty ideals, and generous eloquence, he quickly attracted the notice of the public, and soon vanquished the suspicions of the Extreme Right, who feared his Socialist views, and the opposition of the Extreme Left, who bore him malice for having broken away from them. M. Saënz Peña's Cabinet has been well advised in calling on M. Enrico Ferri to take over the management of the penitentiary system.

I have mentioned the principal features of the French colony, and shall hope to be forgiven if lack of space has prevented me from doing full justice to its members. I have spoken of M. Py, the distinguished Governor of the Banque Française de la Plata, who is admirably assisted in his work by the manager, M. Puisoye. It would be unpardonable to omit the name of Mme. Moreno (of the Comédie Française), who has so thoroughly mastered the Spanish tongue that she has opened and carried to success a conservatoire, in which she trains pupils for the stage. It would be the less excusable to forget this lady in that she is frequently to be met at receptions, where her elocution, both in prose and in poetry, delights her Parisian-Argentine public. Whilst waiting for the Académies to confer on women the right to be learned, let us venture to proclaim their cleverness even when it is but an adjunct to feminine charm.

FOOTNOTES:

[ [6] The death penalty, abolished in Uruguay, does still exist in the Argentine Republic, but executions are rare. The last dates several years back. The condemned man is shot by the troops.

[7] The Colon Theatre seats no less than 3570 persons. The third tier is reserved for ladies only; the acoustics are excellent; the most renowned artists appear on its stage. There is also another opera-house.

[8] Impossible to exaggerate the horror of the scene. A high official personage told me that he had never beheld such pools of blood.

[9] The Fire Brigade, admirably organised as I had an opportunity of observing, is armed like the Paris Corps, and can thus be employed to reinforce the city police if necessary.

[10] It appears that on the day of the National Fête the pupils of the primary schools have to take an oath of fidelity to the Flag, which is called the juro de la Bandera, and is accompanied by speeches and patriotic songs that cannot help making an impression on the children.

[11] In 1893 the Library numbered 69,000 volumes; in 1903, 130,000; and in 1910, 190,000.

[CHAPTER V]
ARGENTINE EDUCATION, HOSPITALS, AND ASYLUMS

If the different foreign elements contributed by the Latin peoples fuse so readily into an Argentine race, it is none the less true that Spanish metal bulks the heaviest in the ore. Language, literature, history, give a bias from which none can escape. The ancient branch transplanted to this youthful soil sends up its shoots towards another heaven, but the original sap circulates unendingly in the living tree. The Argentine is not, and firmly refuses to be, a Spanish colony. It has successfully freed itself from the historic shackles—those of theocracy, first of all—which have so disastrously tied and bound the noble and lofty impulses of a people eminently fitted to perform exalted tasks. And hence, notwithstanding a large alluvion from Italy, symbolised by the monument to Garibaldi, notwithstanding the growing influence of French culture, the atavism of blood preserves an indelible imprint which will characterise the Argentine nation down to its most distant posterity.

The visit of the Infanta Isabella on the occasion of the Centenary Fêtes in honour of the independence was a happy thought on the part of the Spanish Government. The Princess, escorted by M. Perez Caballero, the present Spanish Ambassador in Paris, was everywhere received with rapturous enthusiasm. It was easy to see that the struggles of the past, now relegated to the annals of the dead, had left no bitterness in the people's heart. There was universal pleasure at the graceful action of the now reconciled parent in thus stretching a hand to the son who, with impetuous ardour, had thrown off the yoke of dependence, and the public found a subtle pleasure in showing that the chivalrous courtesy which is part of the tradition of the race had lost none of its flower in this American land. After the severe measures taken to repress anarchical violence, a rumour spread that the life of the President of the Republic was in danger. Perhaps there was nothing in it. Unfortunately, it was one of those things that can only be verified by experience. At all events, the Infanta Isabella chose to ignore the danger. With the utmost simplicity, but also with the utmost courage, she showed herself everywhere by the side of the Chief of the State, and to the lasting credit of the Argentine reputation, everywhere she was greeted with hearty applause.

Here, then, is a base, immutably Spanish through all the changes that one can foresee, together with a fusion and perfect assimilation of the Latin elements in the immense influx of European civilisation: such is the first condition of Argentine evolution to be seen and studied in the city of Buenos Ayres. To make the picture complete, we must notice an important contribution of Indian blood that is very marked everywhere. I shall return to this later. As for the national character, since I am only jotting down a traveller's impressions, and not attempting to present to my readers a didactic study, it is, I think, better to allow its features to spring naturally from the subject under consideration as we go along, rather than first to make statements that I must next attempt to prove.

I have already mentioned the extreme kindness of Señor Guiraldès, the City Lieutenant, who is for the Argentine capital what M. de Selves is for Paris. Like our own Prefect, he is appointed by the President of the Republic, and I may say that although there are inevitably from time to time differences with the Municipal Council, the system has given good results as applied to a place in which there are so many conflicting elements. Señor and Señora Guiraldès, like all the upper class of Argentine society, possess the most perfect European culture, and they do the honours of their city with a charming grace that delights the foreign visitor. Now that I am at a distance from them, I consider that I may with propriety pay sincere homage to their courtesy. Whenever I found I had a little time to spare I used to telephone to Señor Guiraldès, who had once for all placed himself at my disposal. He invariably replied by hastening to my door, and together we consulted as to tours of inspection; it was agreed that I should choose the institutions to be visited so that there might be no suspicion of collusion. In this way I was enabled to visit all the State or municipal establishments that interested me. When by chance we found some evidence of official oversight, Señor Guiraldès's satisfaction was boundless.

"At least," he cried, "you will not tell me that your call had been announced beforehand."

Then, to check any inordinate vanity, I told him the tale of an adventure that happened once to a certain Minister of the Interior who visited the prison of Saint Lazare.

A ring at the bell.

"I want to see the Governor."

"He has gone up to town."

"Then I will see the chief clerk."

"He is away on leave."

"The chief warder?"

"He is laid up."

"Can I speak to the Sister Superior?"

"She has just gone out."

"Well, are any of the prisoners at home?"

The gaoler, smiling amiably: "I believe so."

Argentine officials, like their French brethren, are both fallible and zealous, and while it was impossible that in so many visits there should be no ground for criticism, yet I am anxious to declare publicly how admirably kept were the schools, of whatever degree, the hospitals, asylums, refuges, and prisons; they were not only adapted to all the requirements of therapeutics, hygiene, and the canons of modern European science, but they showed a genuine effort to do better than the best. I should have been glad to have there some of those who make a practice of disdaining these countries that started very long after us, but that can already give us some salutary lessons through institutions such as those I have named, which are here brought to a pitch of perfection that is in many cases unknown with us.

My readers will not expect me to take them with me round all the establishments that I visited with Señor Guiraldès. They would fill a book, and I should need to dip into the innumerable volumes of reports and notices which Argentine benevolence added to my personal luggage. This, however, does not come within my subject.

None will be surprised that the schools attracted my attention first. The School Question is too vast to be handled here in detail. But I saw professional schools (Écoles industrielles de la Nation), and primary schools that would be models in any land. All the arrangements irreproachable, and the children scrupulously clean. Demonstration lessons in abundance. Lessons on the land and its mineral, vegetable, and animal productions, specimens of each being passed from hand to hand, accompanied by explanations summarised in synoptic tables. A lesson on the anatomy and physiology of the lungs was illustrated by the breathing organs of an ox and a sheep (higher primary class for young girls), which appeared to awaken great interest among the scholars. Specimens in pasteboard coloured like life, showing the different parts of the organism, allow these rudimentary demonstrations to be carried fairly far.

The primary schools, under the management of the National Educational Council, are free, and include the school material obligatory in theory for children of from six to twelve years of age. But the population of Buenos Ayres grows more rapidly than its schools. Hence the inconvenient expedient has been adopted of dividing the pupils into two categories, one attending school of a morning and the other of an afternoon, with the result that one half the children are always wandering about the streets while the others are drinking at the fountain of knowledge. This is a system that has nothing to recommend it. It is difficult to understand why the Argentine capital postpones making a pecuniary sacrifice which is certainly not beyond its means, and which is imperatively necessary. The criticism is the more justifiable in that untold sums have been spent on certain buildings which are veritable palaces, as, for example, the President Roca School. About a hundred private, lay, or denominational schools, kept for the most part by foreigners, take in the children who are crowded out of the public schools. At Buenos Ayres, as in other parts of the country, the number of pupils in this category is far too large. There are provinces where the deficit of schools is such as to constitute a real scandal in a civilised nation. [12]

I shall never forget the heart-broken tones of a child of ten whom I met in the Pampas of the Buenos Ayres province and whom I questioned as to his occupations.

"I want to go to school. Papa does not want me to."

The father was a Mexican. The eyes of the child thus condemned by paternal stupidity to mental darkness were full of intelligence. How much trouble we take to make the best of our land! How apathetic we are when it is a question of developing the greatest force in the world, that which sets in motion all the rest—human intelligence! Is it not inconceivable that in France, after nearly half a century of labour, we still find every year a large number of wholly illiterate men among the conscripts called up to serve with the Flag? This state of affairs, which is sad enough at home, would be reckoned a great success in the Campo, where distances are such that the children have to go to the primary schools on horseback, as I have elsewhere mentioned. But when a school is within reach, the folly of parents must not be permitted to debar their children from its advantages.

The municipal and State schools are entirely undenominational. This rule obtains throughout the Argentine, where it is accepted without a murmur. The numerous religious Orders have their own private schools in virtue of the recognised principle of liberty of teaching. It might surprise a European to see that the Catholic clergy of the Argentine do not attempt to fight the undenominational character of the public schools which elsewhere has aroused such violent hostility. To my mind this cannot be explained by a want of religious fervour amongst priests and monks in the Argentine. But circumstances which it would take too long to explain have taught the Argentine clergy to make an outward practice of toleration. If questioned on the subject, the Argentino will reply: "Our clergy hold themselves aloof from politics."

And this seems to be the case. The religious world appears to be no party to political differences. The social influence of the Roman hierarchy is none the less powerful on what remains of the old colonial aristocracy and (with few exceptions) on the women of the class known as superior. Practically, the official relations of Church and State in the Argentine approach very close to separation.

I shall say nothing of the secondary schools and colleges, of which I saw but little. They are placed under the immediate control of the Minister of Public Instruction. There are no resident students. This, in the opinion of all, is the weakest spot in their educational scheme. Amédée Jacques, one of the exiles of our December coup d'état, introduced our classical curriculum into the Argentine, but it met with no success. Since that time, here, as at home, there has been strife between the partisans of the classic and those of modern, or even technical, education. Great battles have been fought, and the only result is that the cause of education has suffered from both parties. The opening of a French lycée, which I have reason to believe will shortly take place, may help to restore the classics to the position which in my opinion they ought to hold in every civilised country.

In certain branches higher education has made great strides. Law and Medicine in particular have a staff of eminent men in their colleges. Any man who has made his mark in Europe is sure of a choice audience there, drawn from both professors and students. I had the pleasure of being present at the first of Enrico Ferri's lectures at the Law schools. His subject was Social Justice. The powerful and glowing eloquence of the orator was never displayed before a public better prepared to profit by his lofty teaching on humanitarian equity.

It is not in vain that so many young Argentines have made their way to the universities of France, Italy, and Germany. As soon as I set foot in the hospitals here I had an impression that I was in the full stream of European science, and that the Argentinos were determined to be second to none in the perfection of their organisation.

I noticed an excellent bacteriological institute managed by a compatriot of ours, M. Lignères, and some agricultural schools that are turning out a competent body of men for the development of the Pampas.

The hospitals impressed us very favourably. The New Hospital for Contagious Diseases, situated some kilometres from the centre of the town, comprises a series of model buildings, all strictly isolated, of which each is devoted to a special disease. At the Rivadavia Hospital, for women only, the Cobo wards (for pulmonary tuberculosis and surgical operations) are particularly admirable. Everywhere the latest improvements as regards the appliances for the patients, the sterilising halls, and operating theatres, and also as regards surgical appliances. Nothing has been overlooked that can increase the efficaciousness of the hospital schools: amphitheatres for classes, diagrams, specimens, etc. The laboratories are so luxurious that they would make our own hospital students envious. It was here that Dr. Pozzi, our eminent compatriot, performed in May, 1910, a series of operations, every one of which proved successful; while his German fellow-practitioner, whose scientific acquirements are unquestionable, met with very different results. The same may be said of Dr. Doléris, who held a course of demonstration lessons in Buenos Ayres, and whose operations were also crowned with entire success. The Rivadavia Hospital has a fine annexe of supplementary work: consultations for outpatients, electro- and radio-therapy, dispensary, etc. I must also mention the sumptuous recreation-rooms for the use of convalescents, and the gardens, exquisitely kept.

In the maternity wards (at Alvear as at Rivadavia) we find the same care for ultra-modern comfort, combined with the strictest cleanliness. I must not forget a very curious obstetrical museum with diagrams, anatomical specimens, and a series of admirable preparations exemplifying the different stages of gestation. A small cradle should be noticed (a German invention, I believe), ingeniously attached to the mother's bed and taken down with a single movement of the hand. Very happy instance of simplification. Everywhere—in the design of the buildings, in the fittings, laboratories, sterilising- and operating-rooms—the influence and products of Germany were patent. On the other hand, the French culture of doctors and surgeons, masters and pupils, was easily discernible, and all were greatly indebted to the classics of our Paris and Lyons Faculties. I could not see the evidences of this in the hospital libraries without remembering regretfully the churlish reception that is given in some of our hospital schools to modest foreign savants.

At the same time, I will not conceal the fact that Protection of the most extreme sort flourishes among the Argentine physicians, who are very anxious to defend themselves against European competition. I was told that there are no less than thirty-two examinations imposed on a doctor from the Paris Faculty before he is permitted to write out the simplest prescription for a gaucho of the Pampas. We may be allowed to find these measures highly exaggerated.

There is a splendid Asylum for Aged Men kept by French Sisters of Charity in a condition of the daintiest cleanliness, and managed by ladies of the city. The Argentinos claim that their women are very zealous in all charitable works. Doubt was thrown recently in the Chamber on this statement. I am not competent to judge.

One original institution—the Widows' Asylum—is a sort of settlement composed of small apartments of one or two rooms, on a single floor. In the courtyard opposite the gate is a small shed, in which is placed a stove for open-air cooking, possible in this fortunate climate all the year round. The rents are very low for widows having more than four children.

The lunatic colony of Lujan, to which its founder and manager, Dr. Cabred, has given the significant name of The Open Door, deserves a more detailed description. It consists of an estate of six hundred hectares on the Pacific Line seventy kilometres from Buenos Ayres, and here twelve hundred patients are accommodated in twenty villas—graceful chalets, surrounded by gardens and containing each sixty patients. These villas are fitted up with everything necessary for clinotherapy and balneotherapy, with fine recreation-rooms. The colony is enclosed by a line of wire; not a wall, not a wooden fence—everywhere unrestricted freedom and a wide, open horizon.

We have erected a monument in Paris to the memory of Pinel, in which he is represented as breaking the chains which mediæval ignorance heaped on the mad inmates of Bicêtre as late as 1793. But if you visit our asylum of Sainte-Anne, you are tempted to ask in what this "modern" establishment differs from an ordinary prison. I hasten to add that in the other asylums of the Department of the Seine we are beginning to develop the open-air treatment. Long ago the system of placing certain patients out in the country amongst peasant families was planned and adopted. The Open Door treats all mental patients, of whatever degree of madness, on the plan known out here as "work performed in liberty." In the confusion of cerebral phenomena the widest freedom is given to the reflex action of unconscious or quasi-unconscious life. If a patient has learnt a trade, he finds at once in The Open Door an outlet for his energies, for it is with the labour of the lunatics that the carpentering, masonry, scaffolding, etc., of these villas was executed. Those who have no trade are given a technical education, and often acquire great skill. The difficulty is to persuade the newcomer to begin to work. If he refuses, he is left alone. "He is left to feel dull." Then he is invited to take a walk, and once on the spot where work is proceeding, he is offered a tool that he may do as the others are doing.

"I have met with only one refusal," said Dr. Cabred. "One patient tried calmly to prove to me that life was not worth the labour necessary to preserve it. I must confess that he nearly convinced me, and I often try to find the flaw in his reasoning, though never, as yet, with success. It is a little hard when the apostle of lunatic labour is brought to ask himself if the lunatic who refuses to work is not acting on a better reasoned conviction than his more submissive companions. At any rate, he is the only man in the colony who does nothing. He spends his time reading the paper or dreaming, without saying a word. When I go to see him he mocks at me, declaring that it is I who am the fool, and, indeed, to support his laziness is not, perhaps, the action of a sane man."

There is not a strait-waistcoat or a single appliance for restraint in the whole colony. Excitement or attacks of violence all yield to the bath, which is sometimes prolonged to twenty-four or thirty hours if necessary.

Separate chalets for the manager and his staff, for the water reservoir, the machinery, laundry, dairy, kitchens, workshops, theatre, chapel. Outside, agricultural labour in every form, from ploughing to cattle rearing. Only the superintendents who direct the work are sane, or supposed to be. In spite of this assurance it is not without alarm that one watches madmen handling red-hot irons or tools as dangerous for others as themselves. As may be supposed, they are not put to this kind of work until they have been subjected to long trials.

Our visit to The Open Door lasted a whole day, and still we had not seen everything. From first to last we were followed by a mad photographer, who took his pictures at his own convenience and reprimanded us severely for rising from lunch without first posing for him. Four days later a series of photographs, representing the various incidents of our day at The Open Door, was sent to me, bound in an album—by a madman, of course, and sent by another madman to a person mad enough to believe himself endowed with reason.

Need I add that we had been received to the strains of the Marseillaise and the National Argentine Hymn, performed by a mad band, which, all through lunch, played the music of its repertoire! Ever since, I have wondered why a certificate of madness is not demanded from every candidate for admission to the Opera orchestra.

As for journalism, do you suppose that no room was found for it in The Open Door? The excellent Dr. Cabred is not a man to make such omissions. We were duly presented with a copy of the Ecos de las Mercedes, a monthly paper, written and published by the madmen of The Open Door, with the intention, perhaps, of making us believe that other journals are the work of individuals in full possession of their common-sense—prose and poetry; articles in Spanish, Italian, and French; occasionally a slight carelessness in grammar and in sequence of thought, but, on the whole, not wandering farther from their subject than others.

Finally, to wind up the day's proceedings, we were treated to a horserace ridden by lunatics. Sane beasts mounted by mad horsemen, galloping wildly, by mutual consent, in a useless effort to reach a perfectly vain end. Is not this the common spectacle offered by humanity?

Meantime, one honest madman of mystic tendencies, decorated with about a hundred medals, pursued us with religious works, from which he read us extracts, accompanied by his blessing. I wondered whether this form of exercise was included in Dr. Cabred's programme, since he claims to make his lunatics perform all the acts of a sane community. A similar scruple occurred to me at noon, when I was invited to take a seat at a well-spread table.

"Is your cooking done by madmen?" I inquired, not without anxiety.

"We have made an exception in your favour," was the contrite reply.