GIFT OF JANE KoSATHER A VANISHING FIGURE A ' ' Gaucho " in full costume, wearing the " chiripa," or loose over-trousers, and carrying the " bolas " around his waist. Frontispiece. ,] THE REAL ARGENTINE Notes and Impressions of a Year in the Argentine and Uruguay By J. A. HAMMERTON ii With Numerous Illustrations NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1915 11 fit COPYRIGHT, 1915 BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY .' --t CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGE FROM LONDON TO LISBON i CHAPTER II OUR VOYAGE TO THE RIVER PLATE 7 CHAPTER III FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF BUENOS AYRES 28 CHAPTER IV PICTURES OF STREET LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 38 CHAPTER V MORE SCENES FROM THE STREETS OF BUENOS AYRES .... 56 CHAPTER VI WHAT WE THOUGHT OF THE WEATHER AND THE MOSQUITOS . . 73 CHAPTER VII A SPLENDID CITY OF SHAM 83 CHAPTER VIII SOME "PASEOS" IN BUENOS AYRES 102 CHAPTER IX MORE "PASEOS" IN BUENOS AYRES 116 CHAPTER X How THE MONEY GOES 129 CHAPTER XI SOME PHASES OF SOCIAL LIFE 154 CHAPTER XII BUSINESS LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 195 CHAPTER XIII THE ARGENTINE AT HOME 236 331101 CONTENTS CHAPTER XIV PAGE "THE BRITISH COLONY" AND ITS WAYS 260 CHAPTER XV THE EMIGRANT IN LIGHT AND SHADE 289 CHAPTER XVI LIFE IN THE " CAMP " AND THE PROVINCIAL TOWNS 315 CHAPTER XVII THE SPIRIT OF THE COUNTRY 340 CHAPTER XVIII A LAND OF PAIN 34 8 CHAPTER XIX TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW IN THE ARGENTINE 361 CHAPTER XX OUR SUMMER IN MONTEVIDEO 379 v CHAPTER XXI URUGUAY: NOTES AND IMPRESSIONS 41 x CHAPTER XXII FROM THE RIVER PLATE TO THE ANDES 438 ILLUSTRATIONS A Vanishing Figure " Gaucho " in full costume Frontispiece PAGE One of the Crowded Docks in the Port of Buenos Ayres . 4 Friends of Emigrants Awaiting Arrival of a Ship ... 4 Paseo Colon, with Government House on the Right . . 12 The Narrow Streets of Buenos Ayres Florida and San Martin 22 The Changing Heart of Buenos Ayres Plaza de Mayo 34 Exterior and Interior of the " Casa Rosada " . . . .44 Statue of San Martin in Buenos Ayres 52 The Colon Theatre, Buenos Ayres 60 Exterior of the Jockey Club, Buenos Ayres .... 68 The New Courts of Justice 76 The Palatial Home of La Prensa, Buenos Ayres ... 88 A Princely Sanctum Room of the Prensa s Chief Editor . 96 A Corner of the Medical Consulting Room of the Prensa 96 Bedroom of Distinguished Visitors' Suite in Prensa Office 106 The Gorgeously Decorated Salon in the Prensa Office . 106 A Contrast in Public Buildings Art Gallery and Water- works Office H2 English "Pro-Cathedral" in Buenos Ayres . . . .118 Roman Catholic Cathedral, Buenos Ayres 118 " La Merced," a Typical Buenos Ayres Church . . .124 " Teatro de la Opera," Exterior View 124 The Luxurious Domestic Architecture of Buenos Ayres . 136 Terminus of the Southern Railway at Plaza Constitu- cion, Buenos Ayres 148 Marble Fountain in the Gardens of the Paseo Colon, Buenos Ayres 158 ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Plaza Francia, in the Avenida Alvear, Buenos Ayres . .158 Prize Bulls at Buenos Ayres Agricultural Show . . . 1 66 Summer Scenes on the Tigre 174 Views of Mar del Plata 182 Suburban and Rural Roads in the Argentine . . . .190 An Argentine " Gaucho " in his Hours of Ease . . .198 Italian " Colonos " and their " Rancho " in the Argentine 206 A Village Wheelwright in the Argentine " Camp " . . 206 Preparing the Picnic Meal " Un Asada " in the Argen- tine 214 Fields of Maize 222 Bags of Wheat Awaiting Shipment 230 Three Huge Piles of " Jerked Beef " at a " Saladero " . 230 A Scene in the " Camp " Peones Outside a " Pulperia," or Country Grocery and Liquor Store .... 240 A " Ramada," or Shaded Resting-Place for Men and Horses 254 An " Estancia " Homestead of the Old Clay-Built Type . 266 A Modern " Estancia " Homestead Built of Concrete . 282 A " Rodeo," or Round-Up of Cattle in the Argentine Pampa 294 Familiar Scenes on an "Estancia" 310 Teams of Oxen Ploughing in the Argentine Pampa . .318 Montevideo from the South, Showing the Cerro with Its Fort 332 Shipping in the Roadstead at Montevideo 332 General View of Montevideo and the River Plate . . 344 Plaza Independencia, Montevideo . 350 Plaza Libertad, or Cagancha, Montevideo . . . .350 Cathedral and Plaza Matriz, Montevideo 356 Plaza Independencia and Avenida 18 de Julio, Monte- video 356 The " Rambla " at Pocitos, Montevideo 364 Bathing Place at Ramirez, Montevideo 364 Main Buildings of Montevideo University .... 372 ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE The Solis Theatre, Montevideo 372 Scene in the Parque Urbano of Montevideo .... 382 A Rural Glimpse in the Prado, Montevideo . . . .382 Cattle Assembled on " La Tablada," Near Montevideo . 390 Types of the Fantastic Domestic Architecture of Monte- video 408 Typical Country Road in Uruguay 418 Hides Drying at a Curing Factory Near Montevideo . .418 The Calle San Martin, Mendoza 432 A Glimpse of the River Mendoza 432 The Natural Bridge of Puente del Inca 440 The Inca's Lake in the Andes 446 The Christ of the Andes 446 '-'' INTRODUCTION So many books have been written on South Ameri- can countries within recent years that the addition of one more to the already formidable list calls for a word of explanation, if not apology. So far as American writers on the Latin-American Republics are concerned, many of their works are based upon the statistical returns of the respective Govern- ments, or on topographical and historical data, easily obtainable at the public libraries. Others, more pop- ular, but perhaps less valuable, are the hasty records of fleeting visits. These latter are so apt to be in- formed by a spirit of indiscriminate admiration that they present misleading and untrue notions of the coun- tries described. The present writer may be stating what is already known to the reader, when he mentions that among both of these classes of books a considerable percentage perhaps the greater number of those published in the United States and in England have been subsi- dised by the governments of the respective republics of which they treat. Many are but glorified advertising pamphlets, put forth in the guise of serious books the better to fulfil their office of propaganda. To look to them for any dispassionate and well-studied view of the countries illustrated in their pages, would be as natural as to expect the advertisement writer of Somebody's Soap to publish an entirely impartial opinion of the article he had been employed to advertise. INTRODUCTION Several French and German authors have written admirable works on the Argentine, entirely free from bias, depicting the country as it is, alive to its merits and its demerits alike; free both from the charge of " log-rolling " and from that of hasty observation. But American or English writers of similar works are not many. Nay, due to the difficulties of ensuring the conditions essential to the impartial and open-minded study of the country, even writers of such international distinction as Viscount Bryce and Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, with the best will in the world, are liable to give false impressions. Often have I seen the sys- tem at work, whereby " distinguished visitors " to South American capitals are so entirely taken in hand by Government, entertained royally, and shown only such things as Government particularly wish them to see, that it would be expecting too much of human na- ture to look to them for an unbiased opinion of the country. I have not read Lord Bryce's book on South America, nor anything that Mr. Roosevelt may have written concerning his tour there, but both these emi- nent men so suffer from the disability of their emi- nence, and from the official hospitality showered upon them during their brief sojourns in South America, that, try they never so valiantly to speak nothing but the truth, and I esteem them, different as they are in many ways, two of the frankest and most honourable of modern statesmen, their impressions will be col- oured by the peculiar conditions under which they were obtained; conditions of official tutelage; and tempered furthermore by reason of the warm hospitality ex- tended to them by the respective Governments. As INTRODUCTION for the things they see in their rounds of inspection, it is notorious that they are shown only what official dis- cretion would have them see. All this, mark you, in no depreciation of the brilliant work which these, and many less distinguished visitors to South America, are capable of doing, but merely to remind the reader that the conditions in which a work descriptive of any par- ticular country has been evolved ought to be borne in mind in the reading of it. The chief fault of most writers on the Argentine is the indiscriminate praise they shower around; their fulsome flattery of the country. Only two hours ago I received from Canada a newspaper with most of its front page devoted to an illustrated article entitled " Buenos Ayres the Paris of the New World." An estate agent, describing the attractions of some prop- erty for sale, would have been beggared for superla- tives compared with the writer of this article who lets loose a veritable flood of uncritical " gush " on Buenos Ayres. He may have spent a week in the town, or he may never have seen it, but a more untruthful or mis- leading account of the city could not have been penned, though it is typical of many that have come to my no- tice. I feel that the influence of such writings is to create in the minds of x the public who do not know the scenes nor the conditions described an impression en- tirely mischievous. So thinking, I have set myself in the present work to make " a try at truth." I have lived long enough on the River Plate to revise and correct my impressions. I mastered the language of the country, so that I came to converse in it as readily as in English. And during INTRODUCTION the whole of my stay I wrote not a single paragraph of this book, lest I should record impressions and ideas which in the end might be misleading. I deliberately refrained from note-taking, so that when, fully a year later, I came to the writing, I should be able to secure a truer perspective, only the things that mattered dis- engaging themselves from the multitude of impres- sions that crowd in on one during a year of active life in a strange land. I have eschewed statistics, which bulk so largely in most other works on the Argentine, and can be made to prove whatever a writer most wishes to establish. What I have sought for rather, has been the humanln- terest of these great cities of the River Plate; to pre- "sent an honest picture of the life that is being lived in them to-day, and to convey, in as interesting a manner as I know how, some general notion of the Republics of Argentine and Uruguay as they really are. I care- fully avoid the official point of view, having studiously refrained from putting myself at any time under any obligation that might tend to make me echo an official opinion instead of stating that which I had honestly formed from personal and independent study. J. A. H. THE REAL ARGENTINE CHAPTER I FROM LONDON TO LISBON WE set out from London on a raw and rainy day. It had been raining off and on for many weeks, and as enthusiasts of the car we had been grumbling, my wife and I, a good deal at the weather. But we were booked for the land of sunshine ! And when we bade good-bye to the chauffeur at Charing Cross Station, rather nervously watched the old grey car roll away among the traffic and the drizzling rain, we comforted each other with simple words about the sunshine that awaited us far off by the River Plate. Even Paris was dirty. I am an inveterate lover of Paris, and must have made some thirty different visits, but seldom out of season, so that I have rarely seen her draggle-tailed. But in that rainy March she looked as miserable -as London, and next day only the luxurious accommodation of the Sud Express made the journey through a sodden France agreeable. Floods everywhere. In the neighbourhood of Orleans, the geography of the country seemed to have changed, and this land of few lakes was studded with sheets of water that more than rivalled those of Bouchet, or Gerard- mer. Entering Spain we suffered a change in railway ac- commodation which was to be typical of many things when changed into Spanish a change for the worse. The carriages were no longer so princely in their ap- 2 THE REAL ARGENTINE pointments, they were smaller and not quite so clean; but we were still on the Sud Express, the train de luxe, and were .(but guessed it not) more comfortable than we were to be again for many moons. So in the darkness through Northern Spain, awakening in the morning as we were nearing the borders of Portugal. Thus far the journey had mostly covered ground long familiar to me, but Portugal was a new land, and romantically beautiful it appeared, with its stony up- lands, its green mountains and leafy valleys, seen in the clear rain-wasrhed air of that golden day that fol- lowed the passing of the floods. We were due in Lisbon at eleven o'clock at night; but, a bridge on the route having been washed away, the train had to make a long detour. We arrived at one o'clock in the morn- ing; yet the town was as wide awake as if it had been no later than ten. It evidently goes to bed about three, as we soon found to our cost when we sought to sleep in one of the luxurious chambers of the Avenida Palace Hotel. And here again we were unconsciously bid- ding good-bye to genuine comfort, as we were never to see in any hotel of South America a room worthy to be slept in by comparison, though we were to pay three times the price charged at the Avenida Palace, which, at the time, seemed sufficiently high! An interesting little incident on arrival at Lisbon threw a gleam of light on the manners of the degen- erate Portuguese nobility, about which we were to learn much from a friend who had resided there since the flight of King Manuel. At the Gare d'Orsay in Paris, we noticed that the next compartment to ours was occu- pied by a tall and handsome lady and her little daughter. FROM LONDON TO LISBON 3 Elegantly dressed, her natural but waning beauty aided artificially, her hair of false gold, this painted lady offered a strong contrast to the group of relatives who had come to see her off. At best, one might have judged these to be ugly people of the artisan class; at worst, gentry who traded less honourably in the ob- scurer byways of Saint Lazarre or Montmartre. The lady showed no physical resemblance to any of them; she might have been a changeling daugh- ter. Her own child was a charming little creature, despite her plain features, and it was clear the mother could command more cash than any of the shabby group of relatives who had wished them adieu and bon voyage. All the way to Lisbon, the lady kept closely to her compartment, but the trixy little daughter made free of the car. On arrival at the Portuguese capital, one began to piece together the scraps of a typical modern " romance," as the pair were met by an under- sized, flabby and slightly deformed young gentleman, on whom the child gazed with all the interest of a first encounter. A great motor car was in waiting and conveyed them to our hotel, a distance of about two hundred yards! We were fated to see much of the curious trio on the voyage to Rio de Janeiro. The gentleman, a Portuguese nobleman, was evidently mak- ing for the safety of Brazil, and had planned to keep bright his memories of Parisian Nights in company of one of the pleasure-givers. One meets queer ship-mates on the South American trip. It would be the height of indiscretion to in- quire too closely into the relationship of many of the 4 THE REAL ARGENTINE couples who sit with you at table. Somehow I always thought of " the distinguished member of the Jockey Club, with his niece, h'm, h'm ! " in Tartarin sur les Alpes, when the Portuguese nobleman, with his lady, h'm, h'm, sat down at table with the rest of our oddly assorted company. There is a brightness and a sense of gaiety about the picturesque and beautiful capital of Portugal that are most engaging to the fleeting visitor, but after a short time the foreign resident finds it one of the dullest of towns, and has a lurking sympathy with the old and fallen nobility who sought distraction in pursuits that drew only the poison from the pleasures of London and Paris, and eventually made of them the most corrupt aristocracy in Europe. From all one heard, the rev- olution did not come a day too soon, and seldom have there been a king and an aristocracy that more openly " asked for it " than Manuel and his effeminate nobles. The mingling of the negro blood with the European, which is so marked a feature of the Portuguese, is doubtless responsible for the low ebb of morality in Lisbon. The Jewish type is very noticeable among the people one passes in the streets, and especially in the women. Altogether, I felt that the breath of the place was somewhat unwholesome, and Republican- ism cannot possibly make matters worse, though national decay may have gone too far for any sort of government to re-vitalise the character of the people. Old Portugal's adventurings abroad, which made her powerful for a time, brought to her the canker of luxury and the lowering of her virility, in the admixture of the blood of alien and vicious peoples, so that to- ONE OF THE CROWDED DOCKS IN THE PORT OF BUENOS AYRKS. FRIENDS OF EMIGRANTS AWAITING T"E ARRIVAL OF A SHIP. FROM LONDON TO LISBON 5 day in her decadence she is really paying her final debts of empire. One sign there was of hope in what we saw the admirably conducted orphanage that occupies the splendid buildings of the old monastery of Belem, hard by the memorial of Vasco da Gama, with its memories of Portugal's golden age. Nowhere have I seen a finer institution of its kind, with better evidence of wise charity and tender care of the young. It was a good act that cleared out the droning monks and con- fiscated their building for its present humane and prof- itable use. The boys are taught all kinds of trades, including agriculture, and some of them to whom we spoke during their play-hour were much ahead of the scholars of any English orphanage in their knowledge of foreign languages. French was the favourite, although one of the lads, who had strong evidence of negro origin, spoke both French and English admirably, and told us he was studying German. On the way to the monastery we spent some time ex- amining the extraordinary collection of old royal car- riages and sedan chairs, housed in a plain modern building. These relics of the gorgeous past are even more remarkable in their prodigal ostentation than those of the famous collection at Versailles, and will probably be guarded by the Republic as evidence that the spendthrift kings who so long oppressed the country went to sinful extremes in their love of ostentation and luxury, though all the same I would not swap a six- teen horse power car for the whole collection, if it were comfort I was after! The driver of the motor car we had hired would 6 THE REAL ARGENTINE have been kept in solitary confinement in any peaceful country, for he was a public danger, yet when we had loaded up with our luggage at the hotel we came near to missing the ship, as " something went wrong with the works, " and the reckless driver proved so incom- petent a mechanic that we had eventually to transfer ourselves and our light luggage (the heavy having been shipped in England) to another taxi, and so reach the quay, where for a mere trifle of 2,000 reis ($2) two brawny rascals put our bags on board the tender, with more fuss than an English porter would have made over shifting a car-load. In a few minutes more we were aboard the liner that was to carry us across the sunlit seas to that other America which is so different from the Northern Con- tinent and of which Americans really know so little. CHAPTER II OUR VOYAGE TO THE RIVER PLATE WE had laughed at the story of some Englishmen in f Lisbon, told us by a friend there. He overheard a group of typical John Bull tourists, who had been " doing " a fortnight in Portugal, discussing their ex- periences on their way to the boat. The weather had been superb all the time; they had been steeped in sun- shine; yet the reflection which seemed to find most favour was the remark of a burly Yorkshireman : ' Thank 'eaven, boys, no more of this damned glare for a while! " But we were seekers of sunshine, prepared to ac- cept all that came our way, so it was with light hearts we heard the engines throb and felt the vessel resume her voyage. The Franco-Portuguese couple with the little girl and ourselves were all who came aboard at Lisbon, which looked a veritable city of dream as we steamed out through the wide waters of the Tagus. Seen from the river, there are few finer prospects than the long and diversified coast line of Lisbon, culminating in the castled height of Cintra. A soft haze of heat blurred the outlines of the hills and touched them much in the manner of those feathery old landscape engravings that used to adorn the art books of fifty years ago. There was a fairly large number of passengers aboard, but we soon discovered that the majority were 7 8 THE REAL ARGENTINE only bound for Las Palmas, excluding tfie second class and some three hundred Spanish and Portuguese emi- grants herded like cattle in the steerage. The dinner bell rang soon after we had settled in our new quar- ters, and for two weeks or so our days now slipped away, punctuated by the ship's bells. This orderly division of time speedily produces a mental condition that makes for calm and good health. With nothing to do but engage in an occasional game of deck golf, or lounge in your canvas chair reading a novel, and be prompt to answer the summons of the bells that ring you to your meals, the days fade into each other, like the old-fashioned dissolving views, and with never a suggestion of weariness. Indeed, I often wondered if it might not be that a term of imprisonment would be almost as efficacious in bringing calm to the troubled spirit and health to the wearied body. Certainly a spell of monastic life would be as good a " rest cure." But, on the. whole, I felt the steamer chair had its ad- vantages and although I had taken with me the notes for a book I had had in hand for years, intent on ad- vancing that in my days of idleness, it was with a great content that I found it impossible to fix my mind on any thought of work in those serene days of sailing over sunny seas. Nothing seemed to matter, even the frequent ticking of the " wireless " was somewhat of an intrusion on our ocean peace. In a voyage of so little incident, when the chief ex- citement is contrived by arranging sweepstakes on the day's mileage of the vessel, there is plenty of time to study one's fellow passengers, and for this a small com- pany, such as we were after leaving Las Palmas, is OUR VOYAGE TO THE RIVER PLATE 9 probably more interesting than a large one. There were only some thirty saloon passengers and naturally there was much interchange of gossip, the ship's officers proving especially companionable. A small company has the disadvantage, however, that the chronicler can- not well describe his companion voyagers with that easy frankness he may safely bestow upon a crowd. The possibilities of mutual identification are enor- mously increased. Yet in the little handful of voyagers with whom we sailed there was a remarkable mingling of character: potentialities of tragedy and comedy, a microcosm of the social world. One could find much to say of them. I must content myself, however, with a few vague touches. I found that one of the passengers who had made himself most eminent in the companionship of the saloon was an intimate of one of my oldest friends in a far-distant city so tiny is this great world of ours. He was a gentleman in whom there survived something of the spirit of Mr. Pleydell in his Saturday evening " high jinks," and maintained that character in the smoking room (where every night was Saturday) with a small but admiring audience whom he addressed as " my loyal subjects." " Tell me," he would say, " what thou would that we, of our royal will, might do this evening for our own and thy diversion." And with varying qualities of the lamely jocular they would give their suggestions. It was all very pathetic to an onlooker: the frank and insatiable egotism of " Uncle " (as we dubbed this worthy of the ruddy visage), his determination to hear the beloved sound of his own io THE REAL ARGENTINE voice in hoary anecdote and threadbare jest. I was very patient with him, as I shall ever be with one who has passed many years of his life in South America - he should be allowed a large charter of liberty for all that he has suffered of social hunger and intellectual thirst. At first I resented somewhat the obtrusive nature of this worthy Scot's companionship, but, some- how, before the journey's end we were good friends. I think a voyage of this kind teaches one tolerance, and it is surprising how the most apparently incompatible units may draw together by the practice of even a little toleration. As " Uncle " observed in his soft Scots voice: " Mun, I was even beginning to like Brixton," naming a young man who joined us at Pernambuco, and who, by reason of a most pronounced tendency to " swank," made a bad first impression. Mention of this passenger, by the way, reminds me that his unfortunate habit of capping every story, go- ing one better than everybody else, kept most of us at arm's length for a day or two. If one said he had yellow fever, Brixton had had it twice ; if another had made two voyages to Africa, Brixton had made five or six; if a third had shot a hare, Brixton had shot an ele- phant. Everywhere he had been he had met with hair- raising adventures. In Pernambuco, he had to use his revolver every night to scare away the burglars. How many had he killed? " I winged one of the devils any- how! " And in proof he passed round his revolver. Yellow Jack was raging in the town when he left, he assured us; but somehow he had been allowed to come on board quietly and make us shiver with recital of the horrors he had escaped. Of course, we doubted every OUR VOYAGE TO THE RIVER PLATE 11 word that Brixton said and yet on many points I have since had occasion to test his statements and never once have I found that he lied. He told the truth as he saw it, and he was an entertaining and good-hearted Englishman, who had forgot in growing up to cast off certain habits of thought and talk which are delightful in Tom Sawyers and Huck Finns, but are apt to con- vey wrong impressions of handsome, well-groomed Mr. Brixtons! Perhaps our quaintest voyager was an ugly French- man, who had been christened " Dr. Crippen," before the ship had reached Lisbon. He certainly bore some resemblance to that misguided gentleman who stood so eminently in the world's eye for a time, and the hu- mour of the situation was that he had never heard of Crippen, and rather thought it was some sort of dimly conceived English compliment to him. He spoke no word of our barbaric tongue, and when " Uncle " pre- sided at a mock trial of " Dr. Crippen " the prisoner was vastly amused, until he found himself condemned to an hour's solitary confinement in a bath-room. He was much given to patronising the bar and passed the most of his days in a state of happy fuddle; yet I after- wards learned that his was one of the clearest brains that control a great and world-famous organisation in France and when he left us, it was a new and extremely sober " Dr. Crippen " who stepped ashore to carry out a very delicate and difficult business mission. There was no American or English lady among the saloon passengers, but we had Scots, Irish, Danish, French, Spanish, and Peruvian. Of none that were ladies shall I speak, but two who were something else 12 THE REAL ARGENTINE deserve a note. 'Tis ever thus; virtue is, so lacking in the picturesque. As a connoisseur of dancing, I was in- terested to discover that we had aboard a famous danseuse, most charming of all the pupils of the great Loi'e Fuller, who was on her way to the Casino at Buenos Ayres a resort of dubious fame, according to current belief among our music-hall performers. But as I had many a time been charmed by the exqui- site art of the said pupil of Loi'e Fuller (whose name is as widely known as that of her teacher) I had no diffi- culty in deciding that the plain and vulgar Spanish con- tortionist who was going to stamp her heavy feet and twist her decidedly shapely body before the jovenes distinguidos of the Casino was merely trading in the name of a celebrity. Her luggage bore the famous name in huge letters, and I afterwards saw it " billed " widely in Buenos Ayres. On the whole, the conduct of this Spanish dancer during the. voyage was so openly without sense of shame that there was little one could object to! Sometimes she appeared in gorgeous raiment and an enormous "picture hat," ready for the Bois or the Alameda; even, on one occasion, sporting a huge muff in the trop- ics! Again she would pass the day in bedroom slip- pers, her corsets put aside, her lithe body draped only in a dressing gown, and her golden hair of yesterday, completely doffed, leaving only a shabby little nob of faded brown. She entangled at least one of the male passengers, a Chilian who later found another flame in an attractive demi-mondame of the second class, and it afforded us some amusement to watch the rivalry which now ensued, but there was little sympathy when ! r r * l '"" OUR VOYAGE TO THE RIVER PLATE 13 the gay Lothario came to the end of his cash and at- tempted to borrow. The other " interesting lady " of the saloon was of quite a different type. A French chanteuse of the smaller cafe concerts, she was extremely plain by na- ture's wish, but the art of make-up and some potent hair-dye effected a magical change the day she left us. She behaved herself modestly enough and passed most of her time with her crochet needle, sitting side by side with the honest women aboard, yet I was told that her songs would have brought a blush to the cheeks of a stevedore ! She sang to us several dainty and harm- less little French and Spanish verses in the familiar cafe chantant manner, and altogether left the impres- sion of a poor woman laying out her small gifts to the best advantage. There was little or no intercourse between the saloon passengers and those of the second class, although it seemed to me that among the latter were many worthy people and a good-hearted companionship. They cer- tainly showed to advantage in the diverting ceremony observed when Father Neptune held court on crossing the line. Included among them were a number of minor " artistes " bound for the music-halls of Buenos Ayres, not to mention several young women with a still less attractive journey's end in view. We heard much from the old South Atlantic voy- agers on board about the doings on other and more popular lines than that to which our vessel belonged. The " muck-raking " magazines might work up a spicy stew of scandal about life on the South American liners if they gave themselves to the task. Wealthy Argen- 14 THE REAL ARGENTINE tines and Brazilians travelling with their wives in the saloon and two or three concubines in the second class, offer quite attractive material for the journalist in search of the spicy, while the traffic in " white slaves " has long provided a certain percentage of the passen- gers for these very profitable lines, in which, perchance, /some dear old Christian ladies have their investments. f How difficult it is to keep one's hands clean in this ! soiled world ! From all that I have been told, and also from per- sonal- observation, the perils of the deep may have a curious resemblance to the perils of " the Great White Way." And even those who ought to be the protec- tors of innocence may prove to be its assailants. A young married lady, lately arrived from England, was under the pain of having to travel alone from Buenos Ayres to a Brazilian port where her husband was lying in hospital with typhoid, and her plain story of how the purser, under cloak of sympathy for her in her dis- tress, first ingratiated himself by talking sentimental slop about his wife and bairns at home, getting her to go into his cabin to look at the treasured photographs of his " dear ones," and there, without more ado, at- tempted to assail the honour of the young wife, whose miental sufferings at the time were, to my knowledge, almost beyond endurance, is one of the ugliest I have heard. This was an English officer, note you : none of your sensual Italians. ^ It is to be feared that much co-mingling with pimps and procurers may have tended somewhat to blunt the native honour of the Englishman in these southern latitudes, for, up to a day so recent that it seems but OUR VOYAGE TO THE RIVER PLATE 15 yesterday, nothing had been done to dam the foul stream that has flowed so long from the human sewers of Europe into the still more noisome mares slag- nantes of Buenos Ayres.^ Now, there is at least some pretence of stemming it, and from time to time one reads in the Buenos Ayres papers about the latest raid on the " apaches," who are deported, with much pomp and circumstance, or about the rejected of Paris, in the shape of womankind, who are refused admission to the city of good airs. But to return to a pleasanter, if less piquant subject, our voyage deserves at least a few words of descrip- tion. We seemed to be lying off Las Palmas before the beautiful picture of Lisbon in sunshine had quite faded from our vision, and at this distance of time I would not undertake to say whether it was two or three days that had passed between the two ports, so dreamy was our progress. The sight of Las Palmas, with its grateful greenness of hill and valley, and far south- ward, cloud-high in a gorgeous flood of sunshine, the mighty mass of Teneriffe, thrusting itself boldly into the sky from the heaving wilderness of water, gave to the beholder one of those rare moments of spiritual exaltation which a first sight of such natural grandeur must always awaken in the thinking mind. St. Vincent was a different story. Fully two days more steaming brought us thither to that vile haunt of malaria and all things unlovely. The Cape Verde Is- lands, of which St. Vincent is the principal, dishonour the name they bear, as there is scarce a speck of verd- ure to be seen upon them. Presumably there must be some natural reason for the naming of the Cape itself 16 THE REAL ARGENTINE on the African coast, off which, nearly five hundred miles north-westward, these scabby isles show their horrid heads above the blue Atlantic. They are of a dirty red colour, and at a distance resemble some humpy monsters of the deep wallowing in the sunshine. The port is useful as a coaling and cable station. A town of shanties, it swarms with negroes, and ships' pedlars. Here a small colony of young Britons are marooned in the cable service. At first the young cable operator is no doubt delighted to find how much more picturesque he has become than he was at home. To have to wear white duck suits and a pith helmet, and look like Stanley on his way to discover Living- stone, is extremely attractive to the eye of youth ! Even the gentleman who sells coals to the liners comes on board looking for all the world like a colonial gov- ernor, or the leader of a mission to Abyssinia. Then there is much card-playing and a good deal of hard- drinking among " the boys," who talk of " the service and all that sort of thing, dontcher know," to feed youth's fondness for swagger. But when the debili- tating effects of the climate and the life make them- selves felt, when the novelty has gone, what a husk remains ! Lucky are the young men who escape from these rusty isles before the rot of the place has eaten too deeply into their natures. The harbour swarms with sharks, but the negro boys who dive for the amusement of the passengers on the ships that put in there make light of the sharks for a sixpence, or even for a humble penny thrown into the water. St. Vincent gave us our last glimpse of the Old OUR VOYAGE TO THE RIVER PLATE 17 World. Its very ugliness sent our thoughts zestfully forward to the undiscovered beauties of the New, then so full of promise, now but that's a later story. It was pleasant to hear again the long soft swish of the water running past the vessel's sides as she resumed her tranquil voyage into the sunset. Now succeeded many days of idle lolling in the deck chair, watching through the binoculars the swarms of flying fish skim- ming over the surface of the ocean like tiniest aero- planes. Bird life in these ocean solitudes is rare, yet we not only saw several journeying on confident wing several hundred miles from land, but for two or three days we were forcibly reminded of " Nature red in tooth and claw," by witnessing a little drama in feathers. One day out from St. Vincent a bird, about the size of a pigeon, gorgeously coloured and sporting a plume of orange-red, alighted on the rigging of the ship, pursued by a larger hawk-like bird. Evidently the pursuit had lasted for a long time, as both were land birds and seemed very exhausted, for we were now some hun- dreds of miles from the African coast, whence hunter and hunted had no doubt flown. For two or three days a strange game of cross purposes ensued, the hunted, with the skill of desperation, cleverly selecting different positions in the rigging or on the smoke- stacks, which offered no opportunity to the hunter to swoop down on him from above. There were violent chasings at times around the ship, when the essential cruelty of the Spanish emigrants was displayed in their efforts to strike the pursued bird with all sorts of ob- i8 THE REAL ARGENTINE jects hurled at it as it swept past the bows. Eventually the hawk gave up and disappeared and soon afterward the bird of brilliant plumage took wing away. Seldom did we sight another vessel; now and again we signalled a tramp or a collier heading south with its cargo from Wales to be sold eventually in Buenos Ayres at some $20 or $25 per ton it was during the time of the coal strike. One only of the old " wind- jammers " did we pass. In full sail, she looked, in the blue immensity of the tranquil sea, no bigger than a toy boat, and an object of such appropriate grace and beauty that it was sad to think a day would come when no ship that goes by spread of glistening sail would cross those far waters again. Early on the sixth day out from St. Vincent, on going on deck before breakfast we were not a little surprised to find that we were steaming close to a long and narrow green island on which many signs of care- ful cultivation were evident. In a cove the white houses of a township showed clear and inviting in the morning air, the blue smoke curling from some of the chimneys giving one an intense pang of home hunger. With the binoculars it was easy to make out people go- ing about their tasks in the fields, others walking to- wards what seemed to be a signalling station. The surprise at this sudden coming upon a bit of the hab- itated globe in what, for all we had supposed the night before, was still mid-ocean, sent us questioning to the officers of the ship. The island turned out to be Fer- nando de Norona, notable chiefly as a Brazilian penal settlement. A Brazilian the only one among our company told me a story about Fernando de No- OUR VOYAGE TO THE RIVER PLATE 19 rofia which, speaking in Spanish, he considered muy graciosa. An Englishman in Pernambuco killed a na- tive in a quarrel and was sent to the penal isle, but in the course of a year or less he was granted his liberty, that being a matter of simple negotiation: a little influ- ence and a modicum of money can always save a crim- inal in that happy clime. But, the Englishman, having long suffered a shrewish wife, found so much peace in prison that he refused to quit the island and there re- mains. Fernando de Norona lies some two hundred miles off the north eastern shoulder of Brazil, and by that token we were soon to be touching at Pernambuco and hugging the Brazilian coast for the rest of our voyage. One felt almost sorry that the sunny days of serene steaming over shoreless seas were coming to an end and that presently we would be picking up the coast of the new world. By now we had grown so used to the companionship of the boat that we began to look for- ward to leaving it with something of regret. At Pernambuco we had our first sight of a South American town and I should be departing widely from the truth were I to say that the " Venice of Brazil " tugged at my heart-strings. It is a town of evil-smell- ing water-ways, half-finished streets, at their best no better than a London byway, with cut-throat quarters that harbour all uncleanness. The task of going ashore, first being lowered into a bobbing dingy by means of a rope and basket, is attended with a sensa- tion of nausea which the merry assurance of the old skipper by your side as to the water being a favourite haunt of sharks does little to counteract, especially 20 THE REAL ARGENTINE when his trained eye enables him, a moment or two later, to point out several of these hunting for garbage around the ship. It is fair to say of Pernambuco that it is undergoing transformation : the " avenida " craze has taken root and at the time of our visit innumerable shanties were being demolished to make way for wide avenues and new buildings. The first sensation of crossing a great sea and mak- ing land on its farther shore, once experienced and it is a "thrill" that never comes again we sank back into the half-indifferent contemplation of the long, indented coast line of this prodigious land of Brazil. For hundreds of miles it is unchanging in its character of paln>fringed shores, with great dim mountain masses inland, a soft blur of heat overhanging all. There is plenty to suggest mystery and romance, and yet somehow beauty is lacking. I mean the wild beauty of peak and crag which we find along the coasts of Scotland, where the conformation is continually changing. These mountains of Brazil have that vol- canic sameness which only becomes magnificent when you can ascend to some commanding pinnacle and look down upon a veritable wilderness of mighty earth mounds, such as it was my good fortune once to look upon from the tower of the ancient castle of Polignac in the volcanic heart of France. For many nights the tropical skies had been a reve- lation of stellar glory, and often though I have gazed at the friendly skies of home on u a beautiful clear night of stars " (to quote the haunting phrase of " R. L. S. "), little had I imagined the glories that awaited the beholder of the heavens in a clear tropical night. OUR VOYAGE TO THE RIVER PLATE 21 The stars appear much larger and incomparably more brilliant than I have ever seen them in our northern latitudes, nor do they " stud " the sky so much as hang dependent from the dense dark blue. I had many starlight talks with the old skipper who was travelling to a " shore job " (the dream of every sailor!) on the Pacific, and who spoke of the stars which had guided him so long on his voyages with that familiarity of the worthy old Scots minister " who, ye micht hae thought, had been born and brocht up among them." Yet I have failed on many occasions since to rediscover the interesting relationships of the constellations which he so clearly explained to me. I confess, however, to a keen sense of disappointment in the much vaunted Southern Cross. It is a lop-sided and unimpressive group of four stars. The sight of Bahia, about one day's steam from Pernambuco, was peculiarly pleasing. It might have been a bit of the French or Italian Riviera, with its rich verdure and bosky hills, while the residential sub- urbs looked quite European as seen from the ship. We made no closer acquaintance than a stay of some three hours in the beautiful bay, but I could well be- lieve that much that looked most alluring in the pic- turesque sea-front of the town did not bear too close inspection. Two more days brought us to Rio de Janeiro, full of expectation and curiosity for the pearl of South Amer- ica. The bay of Rio has been so often photographed, so fully described, that any one who has read much must have a good mental picture of the place, which fortunately squares very neatly with the actuality. 22 THE REAL ARGENTINE The fantastic islands of volcanic origin which peep up through the broad waters of the bay, or impu- dently flaunt their grassy cones high above sea level, in the most unexpected places, give to Rio, as seen from the bay, an aspect that is unique. The town spreads it- self out with picturesque irregularity among the gentle valleys that lie between the many hills, trending swiftly upward some little way inland from the shore, the no- ble height of Corcovado crowning the whole lively and diversified scene. These hills being mostly tropical in, the richness and character of their vegetation, the art of man had no great task to transform the situation into one of the world's most beautiful cities. On the whole, man has here done his work well, al- though it has to be confessed that much of the archi- tecture is paltry and all of the plaster variety. The marine drive will match almost anything of the kind in Europe, and the Avenida Central is admirably devised at once to .beautify the town and drain the pressing traf- fic of the narrower side streets. The suburbs are also spacious and well planned, so that one could imagine life being very pleasant here when the weather is a little cooler than the norm. Although the summer was supposed to be over at the time of our visit, the atmos- phere was enervating in the extreme, and even on the breezy heights of Corcovado, to which we ascended by the funicular, and whence one of the grandest pros- pects man may look upon rewarded us, we perspired at every step. Everywhere there was the moist, oppres- sive smell of the hot-house, so that one could guess what it meant to be afoot in Rio in the summer time, if this were autumn. OUR VOYAGE TO THE RIVER PLATE 23 As for living here: when we were charged twelve milreis ($6.50) for a dish of fruit that might have cost a dollar in New York, at a very ordinary hotel, where all other charges were proportionately appal- ling, we had our doubts, even granted a change of weather. One of our party paid the equivalent of four dollars for a tooth-brush, a cake of soap, a small tube of lanoline, and some shaving powder ! Paying an uniformed madman, who was plying for hire with a motor car, a few thousand reis (a milreis or one thousand reis go to 54 cents, so that you part with them in tens of thousands in a forenoon), we drove all around the city and the Marina at fully thirty miles an hour, turning busy corners at that speed. I myself can claim some dexterity at the wheel; but I confess that I sat in terror in that maniac's car as we sped wildly through the highways and byways of Rio. Yet he was perfectly sane as motorists are accounted sane in that town; his performance evoking no remark. The speed limit is, I believe, eight or ten miles an hour, but, like all the laws of Latin America, that is laid down merely to be ignored. The municipal authori- ties, however, use the bylaw as a supplementary ta6c, and regularly fine all the motorists of the town, in suc- cession, for exceeding the limit. A well-known Eng- lish resident who owns a speedy car told me he had been fined a month before for exceeding the limit on a certain date, when he had been on the high seas re- turning from Europe. He protested, lodged his plea, and was fined all the same, jbn the ground that if he did not exceed the limit that day, he had done so in all cer- tainty before or after. 24 THE REAL ARGENTINE Altogether our impressions of Rio were favourable. Every prospect pleased us; only man was vile, and none viler than the scum that haunt the sea-front to plunder visitors by getting them aboard their small boats for conveyance to the liners in the bay, then, with sundry sinister threats, endeavour (too often successfully) to make their victims disgorge a payment large enough to purchase the boat. The gentry who ply this trade at Naples are mild and benevolent by comparison. About noon of the day following our stop at Rio, we were steaming up the picturesque estuary of Santos. A Frenchman on board had promised me that here I should see something tout a fait original, and much though I had been charmed with the actual sight of Rio, so long familiar to me in picture, the approach to Santos proved even more interesting, due perhaps in some degree to the charm of the unknown and unex- pected. There is also a touch of romance in slowly approaching a town that lies up a river, instead of com- ing upon it suddenly from the sea. A negro pilot took command of the ship up to Santos, somewhat to the disgust of our captain, who had never before stood by a " nigger " on the bridge and seemed none too sure of his pilot, for he never let go the telegraph handle until his vessel was berthed. The country through which the river runs (it is more an arm of the sea than a river) is undoubtedly " original," abounding in low volcanic hills, with abun- dance of verdure, broken now and then by palm groves, and swampy flats. Here one is conscious of being in a strange land, and it is easy to imagine with what tense interest and straining eyes the first bold adventurers OUR VOYAGE TO THE RIVER PLATE 25 sailed up this narrow and beautiful water-way to found the city that has become the second port of Brazil. The city itself stretches by the river-side around the foot of a great green hill, disfigured by a monstrous advertisement announcing to adventurers of a different kind and a later day that somebody's biscuits are the best! A considerable part of the town lies on land that still looks suspiciously swampy and used to be an ideal haunt of Yellow Jack, though I was told that to- day it would be difficult to find a healthier spot. That may be so, but I think I could succeed if I tried very hard. As for the town itself, a short ramble revealed one of the deadest and most uninteresting cities it has been my lot to see, and I gladly returned to the friendly shelter of the ship and the livelier locality of the quay- side, where were congregated many vessels from Brit- ish, American, and Continental ports. Two days more and we found ourselves at anchor in the roads outside Montevideo, which presents a most engaging picture from the sea, the town covering a lumpy tongue of land that juts seaward with a rocky short, rambling inland in many directions and along the bay, which culminates in the conical mass known as the Cerro, crowned by an antique fortress and a modern light-house. At night, when the myriad electric lamps are lit, the light house on the Cerro throwing its broad and regular beams athwart the bay, innumerable red and green lights blinking on the buoys in the harbour, much flitting of motor launches and brightly illumin- ated liners lying at anchor, there is no scene I know that better suggests one's juvenile fancies of Fairyland. The town itself delighted us, seen in generous sun- 26 THE REAL ARGENTINE shine, with refreshing breezes blowing from the sea, which at first sight, as we pass along the streets, seems completely to enclose it. But as I shall have some- thing to say of my later stay in the Uruguayan capital, I shall not occupy myself with it further at the mo- ment. We bade good-bye to the ship that had been our most pleasant abode for so many days and made our first acquaintance with things Argentine by transferring ourselves to a musty, ill-managed river-steamer, on which the crudest elements of courtesy had still to be acquired by officials and stewards, who were all too conscious of being employed by a firm which then monopolised the river trade. Still, although we realised what a change for the worse we had made in transhipping, we comforted ourselves with the knowledge that to-morrow we should awaken in the port of Buenos Ayres; in that genial land of sunshine to which we had so long looked for- ward with eager anticipation. The passage up the river which, seaward of Montevideo, is some 150 miles in width, narrowing suddenly to sixty opposite the city, and to the eye has no farther shore, so that only the discolouration of the water distinguishes river from sea was made in the roughest weather we had experienced, the steamer tossing like a cork and its pad- dle wheels beating the waves with feeble irregularity. It was an early autumn morning when we walked off the gangway at the Darsena Sud to endure the pain of getting our belongings through the customs, an op- eration apparently regulated by the shipping authori- ties after studying all the worst methods in vogue, OUR VOYAGE TO THE RIVER PLATE 27 selecting the worst features of each, and combining these into a system that is the acme of inefficiency. Moreover, the wind bit as shrewdly this autumn morn- ing as on a midwinter's day in New York, and, believ- ing in this land of sunshine with a simple faith that had yet to suffer rudest shocks, we stood there an hour or more, clothed for summer, chattering with cold. But we were actually in Buenos Ayres, and soon all the marvels of that wonderful city, that " Paris of South America, " as Argentines who have never been to Europe are fond of describing it, were to reveal themselves to us starveling voyagers who knew nothing better than the Paris of France. Pantos a ver, as they say in Buenos Ayres. CHAPTER III FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF BUENOS AYRES OUR ship's doctor, with whom I had passed many agreeable hours, and whose efforts to practise the Span- ish speech added not a little to the gaiety of our voy- age, was a plain-spoken young man, who assured me, when he heard I was bound for Buenos Ayres, that I was going to " the rottenest place in South America." This was a blow that struck my puffed-up admiration of the place under the belt. I had read in the papers before leaving London that no fewer than fifteen stow- aways from Glasgow had reached the sunshine city of the River Plate on a merchant liner, and of these thir- teen were discovered on the same vessel when it was making its homeward trip. Now, Glasgow is noted for its rain, but it had rained in such an appalling man- ner all the time the vessel was discharging and loading at Buenos Ayres that these sodden thirteen were home- sick for the milder rains that wash their native haunts ! Doubtless, if the truth were known, the other two had stowed away too much of the vile liquid sold as " Es- kotsh weeskee " in Buenos Ayres to be able to stow themselves away a second time, and remained to swell the ranks of the Scotch and Irish rascals who pester their fellow-countrymen for alms in Florida and San Martin the streets where most of the Britishers may be encountered. But I had made light of both the doctor's dictum 28 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF BUENOS AYRES 29 and the experience of the Glasgow stowaways. No- body, nothing, was to rob me of my ideal city on the Silver River! The dirty porter who conveyed our hand-bags to a dirtier coche, with a driver in the full regalia of " hobo " and two horses that ought to have been taken straightway to the knacker's yard, did his best to rob me of five pesos (value $2.10) for a task which would have been well paid at a dime or a quarter and the money gratefully received. I had given him one peso only (42 cts.) and so loudly and volubly did he de- nounce me for a " mean, dirty German," that I gave him one more for peace, and the sorry nags were whipped up and we drove away on our great adven- ture. The coach, typical of many I was to see and not greatly inferior to scores it was to be my unhappy fate to ride in for many months, was of the " Victoria " style, so pleasantly familiar to the frequenter of Paris; but it was battered and tattered, the splash-boards broken, the mud-encrusted wheels repaired with odd spokes, the upholstering faded and torn, while the sight of the driver in his greasy rags and the poor worn horses with projecting ribs, broken kneed, and raw flesh showing in patches along their scraggy backs, mortified me that in such a manner I should enter the city of my dreams. Yet the description may stand as representative of a considerable percentage of the things then plying for hire in Buenos Ayres. The tat- tered ruffian on the box-seat lashed the moribund nags so unmercifully that I had to insist on his refraining, but then, and often afterwards, it was clear to me 30 THE REAL ARGENTINE that only by thrashing could the hapless creatures be made to go. And what a journey! The roadway reminded me of the Chinese saying, that in China the roads are good for ten years and bad for ten thousand. With a briefer history than China's it may be said of Buenos Ayres that its roads are good for ten days and bad for ten years. We had evidently arrived on the eleventh day! Made of cobble stones, the road was as choppy as the river on a windy day, the tram lines now project- ing half a foot above the level, now dipping into baked- mud hollows. Everywhere the cracking of whips, the clanging of bells, the shouting of drivers, the screeching of ungreased axles, and the slipping and straining of sweating horses, harnessed in threes and fours to un- couth and overladen wagons. A scene of brutal ugli- ness and sordid brute strife that filled one's mind with horror. We had plunged into the hell of the horse and the mule. It was heart-rending to see the wretched creatures cut and bruised, with open sores and swollen fetlocks, the cruel chain traces at which they were straining often running in grooves which they had cut in the creature's flesh and ever the relentless whips de- scending on the suffering backs with stings that would have touched the heart of any man of feeling. But in all that strange, noisy medley of man and brute there was no sign of feeling; nothing but a dull, blear-eyed urge forward. Forward to what? Ah, he were a bold man who answered that. But what I know and assert is that in a hundred thousand miles of world-travel, and observation, I have never witnessed such a scene of brute suffering as I did that autumn morning in our FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF BUENOS AYRES 31 drive from the Darsena Sud, past the Aduana, by the Paseo Colon and the Paseo de Julio to our hotel. As for my first impressions of the city, I comforted myself with the reflection that the neighbourhood of docks is in all great seaports the least favourable point of view. Everything that met one's eyes was mean, or makeshift. The shops along the Paseo were of the lowest class; most of the buildings were crumbling plaster shanties. The people trafficking in them were the dredgings of a lower life than one sees in the region of the Bowery incomparably more villainous in mien. It is true that the gardens, which adorn the Paseo Colon and the Paseo de Julio and make these appear (in a photograph) one of the pleasantest thor- oughfares in all the world (the one is a continuation of the other) , looked beautiful, yet none but foul Ital- ians and Semitic scum were to be seen walking there. It would be all right when we got into the city itself, for had we not feasted our eyes times out of number on alluring pictures of the imposing buildings of this wonder city sent broadcast to the ends of earth by offi- cial propagandists? A huge pink-painted plaster building, with the " sham " flaking off in places, showed its spacious back to the green palm-dotted gardens of the Paseo. Was it could it be? the famous Casa Rosada, the official home of the president? It was. A little cold shiver zig-zagged down my back, and I ticked off in my mind the Casa Rosada as one of my dream pictures of Buenos Ayres that had not come true. Presently, up a side-street, crowded with struggling wagons, coaches and clamorous tram-cars, where small 32 THE REAL ARGENTINE buildings were being torn down and large steel-frame ones were being stuck up, we came to our hotel. The roadway in front was so narrow, the traffic so insistent, and the tramways so continuous, that the mere act of stopping our coach for a minute blocked the whole ill-regulated, restless mass. Nor in the hotel did we find peace. It was in the hands of repairers, who, as we afterwards learned, had been repairing it for three years, and in all that time did no more than could have been achieved in New York inside of a month. As to the moderation of this statement, not only can I vouch from a careful and intimate study of the work of those blundering incompetents through eight long months of residence there, but I could call a cloud of witnesses, whose fate it was to live through a considerable part of the weary years of alteration, as the discomforts we had to suffer were a frequent topic of the " stayers " in what, with all its faults, was at that time the most comfortable and reasonable hotel in Buenos Ayres. (I hear that it has since been much improved in its appointments.) In the small and crowded lounge, where we humbly waited for the privilege of securing accommodation, there was a mingling of the coming and the parting guests. The former one could recognise at a glance by their creased clothing, the latter notably chiefly for their bucolic touches. The room was uninviting, the shabby wallpaper in pendulous bulges, mouldy with damp, every item worthy only of a small country hotel. The gentleman in the temporary office, who carried out his duties amidst plasterers' ladders and plumbers' FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF BUENOS AYRES 33 tools, was willing to concede us a small room with a bath for twenty-six pesos ($n) per day, including " board " but excluding certain " extras." The terms would be the same for a stay of one night or for a stay of one year. I accepted with a feeling of disappoint- ment, after discovering that a bedroom and a sitting- room of the most ordinary description were to cost me seventeen dollars per day. And had I to stay again for eight whole months in Buenos Ayres I should most willingly return to the same conditions which at first I regarded with frank contempt. It is a sadder and a wiser man that writes these lines than he who stepped hopefully into the best-recommended hotel in Buenos Ayres that chill morning of autumn. The window of our room looked upon a street so narrow that, when all the high buildings in process of erection are completed, no faint ray of sun will ever enter it. At the corner immediately opposite stood one of the old single-story structures of the colonial type, which in the centre of the city are giving way to the multi-storied edifices of steel and concrete. This old shanty-like building was a centre of swarming life Turks, Greeks, Swedes, Syrians, Italians, in short, the off-scourings of all nations, were to be our neighbours, and their babel of tongues sounded from the little drink- ing den into which our window looked as though the brawlers were in the hotel itself. A nice quiet neigh- bourhood! Being so near the corner, we had the ad- vantage of two sets of tramways, and with the windows open it was almost necessary to use a megaphone to make one's voice heard in the bedroom. The narrow 34 THE REAL ARGENTINE streets intensified all noises to an extraordinary degree. Bedlam must be peaceful compared to that corner and that is but one of thousands similar. " We must clear out of here as soon as possible," said my wife. But a woman's " must " dwindles into the meekest acquiescence when pitted against the " must " of Buenos Ayres. " There must be quieter places in the centre of the town, away from these cramped and crowded back streets," she opined. Alas, there are no back streets in Buenos Ayres. Or rather, there are few other. As soon as possible I went forth to find the great open avenues where, perchance, I could move at my ease and enjoy the spectacle of the myriad life of the t great metropolis. I half hoped that we had entered \ the hotel by a back door and would find on turning the I corner that it had a noble frontage to some spacious I street. Vain hope of a " Gringo " as the native dubs the foreigner in South America. I found myself in a buzzing thoroughfare, where there were no tramways, but where coaches and motor cars were dashing along in the most reckless manner and with quite superfluous speed, as at nearly every corner they had to pull up suddenly in muddled mobs to allow the streaming traf- fic of the cross-streets to pass. The street was lined with splendid shops, many displaying the most luxur- ious articles of furniture, jewellery, or wearing apparel, and reminding one of London's Bond Street. It was about the width of Wall Street, New York City. It was the Calle Florida, the very core and pride of Buenos Ayres ! As I went along, stepping off the narrow side-walk .c o II *l -, c 8* M S.s 8- |3t .1 u ~1 LIB S'S i Ml o S S C 3 8 S o CJ ^ Si M U ^ 3 U p'g S -2 S ,~ H rt g^ "E > ^ oJ d *= FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF BUENOS AYRES 35 every few yards to pass any two people inconsiderate enough to walk side by side, I recalled the one spark of wit I had heard from a youth of the " Rube " va- riety who had been a shipmate of ours. We were hav- ing dinner on board the river steamer and had reached the fifth or sixth course of the weirdest mixtures, when he said, " I wonder when they are going to bring us something to eat." In all these thoroughfares, I wondered when I was going to find a street. I had heard much of the famous Avenida. That at least would not disappoint me. The sun was now strong and the temperature must have risen fifteen or twenty degrees since the bitterly cold morning. Horses were sweating and giving off an offensive odour the result, I fancy, of their " al- falfa " feeding and were covered with a thick white lather along the parts of their bodies where the harness rubbed. I, too, was perspiring, though I was con- scious of a brisk buoyancy in the air, as I continued southwards towards the Avenida. Near the end of Florida, I noticed among the throng an acquaintance of mine who lives a few streets from me and whom I had not seen at home for more than two years. He was only on a short visit to the country, but I was soon to find that New Yorkers and London- ers who have business anywhere in Argentina and may never see each other for years at home are certain to meet in Calle Florida, which is a sort of funnel through which the whole stream of Argentine traffic must pass. The Avenida at last! Except where the narrow cross-streets debouched into it, every inch of the splen- did roadway was boarded up and only the side-walks, 36 THE REAL ARGENTINE crowded with jostling humanity, remained. They were then making the underground railway from the Plaza Mayo to the Estacion Once. In this state for many months it continued, an eyesore and a source of illimit- able dust and dirt to all the centre of the city. No more than a scrap of the dome of Congress, away to the west, was visible above the earthworks and barri- cades, while the Plaza Mayo, with the historic In- dependence Monument, was a scene of shapeless confusion. I ventured along Maipu, where the ceaseless rattle of traffic is surely more disturbing than the battle whence it takes its name could have been. Longing for a quiet corner to rest, I regained my hotel, where my wife reminded me of a certain old Scotswoman who came to visit her daughter in London and was taken to Westminster Abbey. She had got as far as the choir and stood looking quietly at the massy col- umns and noble spring of the arches, the iridescent beauty of the windows, before she spoke, and then she said: " Weel, do ye ken, Jeenie, I'm awfu' disap- pointed! " The afternoon Vas unpleasantly hot and enervating, but the evening was cool with a fresh and pleasant breeze. We were in a Latin city the Paris of South America, we had heard it called we were both lovers of Paris, my wife and I; so we sauntered out after dinner to take our ease at " some cafe, somewhere, in one of the squares." But all seemed dead. A mere handful of stragglers in Florida; in the Avenida a few soft-hatted loungers, who stared at my wife with rude animal interest; no cafe anywhere in any square, where FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF BUENOS AYRES 37 we were tempted to linger for a moment. So a coche rattled us back as quickly as possible to the already friendly hotel, going by way of Esmeralda and Cor- rientes, where the bright exteriors of some cinemas and other places of amusement punctuated the dulness with points of brightness. It was no later than half-past nine, and we thought once more of that old Scotswoman in Westminster Abbey. CHAPTER IV PICTURES OF STREET LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES IT is a reasonable proposition that there are at least as many ways of studying a strange town as Mr. Kip- ling allows in the writing of tribal lays " and every single one of them is right." I claim no more than that for my own particular way. My first concern is to gain a general impression, by wandering the streets and letting the spirit of the place " soak " into me, almost unconsciously. Later, I as- sume an attitude of mind more critical and less subjec- tive, becoming an active observer, open-eyed for every- thing that is strange or unusual; finally I compare all that has especially appealed to my mind with impres- sions long-since etched thereon by visits to other cities. In this way I should probably describe the same town somewhat differently in the varying stages of my observation, and each would be a true description so far as I was able to convey any notion at all. But after passing from the impressionary stage to the crit- ical and eventually to that of the comparative observer, it is difficult to recover the first impressions once these have been overlaid, like some palimpsest of the mem- ory, with later records. In the preceding chapter I have made some slight attempt at this, simply because it seemed to me worth trying and the progress of my narrative suggested it. A book of first impressions, however, would be of small value, no matter how in- 38 STREET LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 39 teresting it might prove, and I deliberately refrained throughout my stay of twelve months in the cities of the River Plate from keeping a diary, even from making notes, except on two subjects, to wit: the price of commodities, and cruelty to animals, which I shall discuss in special chapters. In what I now pro- ceed to describe, I shall be guided by my last and abid- ing impressions of all that I saw or experienced, and for this purpose a continuous narrative is no longer feasible. My way, then, in studying a foreign city is first to observe the panorama of its street-life so closely that I can ever after recall it in minute detail; then to store away finished pictures of its characteristic buildings in i my memory; next to watch narrowly the ways of the people, as expressed in all forms of their social life and business activities, gleaning on every hand from others and exchanging opinions even with persons with whom I should hate to agree. In such wise, or as nearly as may be, I shall now continue. Buenos Ayres in its planning is essentially North American. That is simplicity itself, but out of sim- plicity has come confusion. The buildings are in "blocks," or cuadras (squares), as they call them in South America. These squares measure 150 yards each way. Thus a plan of the city looks like a mon- strous checker board, with here and there a larger square, where two or more cuadras have been thrown into one to admit a little more air into the congested mass. For the streets are narrow beyond belief. The average width allows three coaches to stand abreast, with a clearance of some twelve inches between them. 40 THE REAL ARGENTINE A walking stick and a half gives you the measure of the pavements. These are the standards for nearly all the thoroughfares in the older part of the town, and were the ample ideals of the Spanish colonisers, who required no more than single-story houses and a track between for their horses or their bullock wagons. Thus, in great measure, Buenos Ayres is an anachron- ism, and such it will long remain, as the abnormal development of the country and its capital city the world's most prodigious mushroom has made this central part a veritable Eldorado of the land-owner. What served a century ago is to-day a legacy of evil, and these narrow colonial streets have made of central Buenos Ayres an inferno of human strife such as I hope exists nowhere else on our globe. For within these myriad squares of 150 yards there is no entrance or exit for wheeled traffic, and it is a pathetic sight to witness the unloading of goods on the narrow side- walks in the early morning. Let the North Ameri- can reader conceive a great department store, situated in a street no wider than Wall Street, utterly devoid of any back way for the entrance of a cart, with a pave- ment in front that measures a walking-stick and a half; and let him picture what it means to stock that great building with all sorts of goods, from massive suites of furniture to tons of shoes and neckties ! If his im- agination will stand the strain, let him further imagine what would happen if a trolley line were laid within two feet of the sidewalk in front of the door, and an endless stream of cars were passing, the bodies of them flush with the curbstone ! Yet the Wanamakers and the Marshall Fields of Buenos Ayres have to stock STREET LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 41 their premises under these conditions. In this city of miracles, there is none more extraordinary than the task of moving goods from the street into the shop and it is small wonder that a large part of what one pays for any article in Buenos Ayres has been incurred in getting it into the place where it is bought. It is in- finitely easier and cheaper to carry a piano from Lon- don to the port of Buenos Ayres than to take it from the ship a mile away to the shop where it will be sold ! Often have I marvelled at the patience and energy of the Italian peones, struggling with enormous cases of merchandise in the middle of the street, dodging them across the trolley lines, while a dozen drivers were clanging their bells for them to clear the way. And it is a daily incident to see wardrobes, suites of furniture, desks, sofas, mingled in the gutters with the fretting traffic, in front of the warehouse doors. In almost every street there is a trolley line on one side, and all the traffic has perforce to move in one direction, down this street, up the next, for which purpose an arrow on the walls indicates the direction. To walk at ease along any one of these streets in the business hours is impossible, and progress afoot is only to the strong. In such streets motor traffic is a folly, yet motor cars abound. It is a safe assertion that nine out of ten of them are used for no purpose other than ostentation. And your Argentine nouveau riche will have none of your modest 15-20 horse-power affairs. His mark is 40 horse-power, and the biggest, bulkiest, most cumber- \ some body money can buy. Thus, at certain hours of the day when the ladies go a-shopping, many of the 42 THE REAL ARGENTINE streets are stuffed with monstrous cars, which have brought their owners a good mile or perhaps two, and while the ladies are about their diversion in the shops, the chauffeurs sit making filthy remarks about every woman who passes, and ogling the girls. These motor men, uniformed expensively, are one of the most offen- sive elements in the life of the city. Lazy, pampered loafers most of them; they deliberately place them- selves in the near front seat of the car while waiting for their owners, the better to " amuse " themselves. With a cautious municipal authority, the motor-car would be prohibited in the centre of Buenos Ayres. It is a century or so ahead of the town. In streets so narrow the horse carriage should suffice, and as a mat- ter of fact the horse-driven traffic can move as quickly as the motor-driven, owing to the innumerable stops that have to be made in even the shortest journey. In the whole vast country of the Argentine there are not more than a hundred miles of really good motoring roads and automobile owners in Buenos Ayres seldom venture farther afield than the Tigre, an excursion of some sixteen miles. The road thither is the best in the country. It would rank as " bad " in the guide- book of any American or European touring club and it is the ruin of many a car. Yet vulgar ostentation insists upon the automobile, and almost every notable firm of motor car makers in Europe or the United States is catering for the craze with branch establish- ments in or around the Calle Florida. The papers abound in accounts of motor accidents and one seldom passes a car that does not bear some trace of a collision, many of the drivers being as reck- STREET LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 43 less as they are unskilled. The motor car is indeed one of the city's problems and no effort is being made to solve it. If the streets were only narrow, matters might not be so bad. But they are also villainously paved and continually out of repair. The pavements chiefly con- sist of slabs of rough-hewn stone, so badly laid that one is constantly tripping over their inequalities. Moreover, holes are merely covered by a piece of sheet iron laid loose over them, and in Florida alone (it is the universal custom in South America merely to give the name of a street, without adding the word calle) I have noted about a dozen old gas pipes left protruding some six inches above the pavement, a menace to all who do not walk with their eyes to the ground. As a New York lady visitor said to me : " If you don't watch where you're putting your feet, you'll fall into a hole, or trip yourself, and if you do look out for your feet, you'll get run over! " The streets are laid variously with asphalt, wood, and cobbles. But no matter what material is used, the result is equally deplorable. Thanks to the excessively heavy traffic, borne in wagons with immense narrow wheels, an asphalted street is cut up into ruts in a few days after it is laid, wooden blocks are destroyed with amazing rapidity, and cobbles are daily dislodged in hundreds. Thus stones innumerable are lying in the cobbled streets, to the danger of all sorts of traffic; in the wood-paved thoroughfares there are ruts several inches deep alongside the tram lines, and the asphalt roads are cracked and broken as though some wander- ing earthquake had passed through them on its way 44 THE REAL ARGENTINE from Chili. A paseo in a motor-car is an agony - there is no " rule of the road," it is merely " devil take the hindmost " a drive in a coach is little better, as the motor-cars make the progress of the horse vehicle a hazard of terrors. In such narrow and congested thoroughfares, build- ing operations are carried on with great difficulty. To me it was a source of constant interest and admiration to watch those in progress. And as there is no street where the builders are not busy, I had ample oppor- tunity. In Florida, where a huge arcaded building was being constructed through to the next street, San Martin, the work of digging out the foundations went on all day, and all night long the dirt was removed when the street was quiet. The scaffolding fashioned for the purpose was the most ingenious and complicated I have ever seen. To the narrow street there was a barricade of corrugated iron (wood is too expensive to use for- that purpose) and above towered a weird framework of timber, with " tips " or " chutes " pro- jecting into the street. Seen from behind the corru- gated iron, it was a magnificent spectacle of industry. Hundreds of labourers were digging down into the loamy earth some thirty or forty feet, and the material taken out was hoisted up by a lift and dumped near the tips, so that through the night great-wheeled wagons came along in fashionable Florida and were loaded up, leaving the street strewn with spilled earth next morning. I recall the night when some of this scaffolding collapsed and precipitated over thirty la- bourers into the excavations fifty or sixty feet below. Such accidents are very common, there being no intel- EXTERIOR AND INTERIOR OF THE "CASA ROSADA." The upper illustration shows the fa?ade of the Government House towards the gardens of the Paseo Colon ; the lower, the vestibule entering from the main door in the Plaza de Mavo. STREET LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 45 ligent supervision of building operations, and many labourers are sacrificed every year to the carelessness of their employers and their own ignorance. But, on the whole, it would be impossible to find more inspiring examples of human energy and in- genuity in the face of extraordinary difficulties than in the erection of these great buildings. To watch the low colonial house fall to the pick and shovel in a few days, the crazy scaffolding quickly reared for mining out the earth, the mighty steel uprights and girders arriving on huge wagons, each drawn by three or four sweating horses, the labourers swinging them into posi- tion, the frame of the ten- or twelve-story building presently disengaging itself where so recently stood the shanty, the bricklayers clothing it with their handi- work, the plasterers finishing its exterior with grace- ful decorative touches, all this was to me a source of endless interest. There is no evidence of an elementary regard for human life in the streaming streets of riotous traffic. Often have I seen buildings in course of demolition with no better guard against falling bricks and blocks of cement than some rough pack-sheet stretched in front. Sometimes not even that dubious courtesy is shown to the passer-by, and the demolishers stand aloft knocking down the walls inwards without the slightest protection against the fragments that rebound and land in the middle of the street. On several oc- casions I have escaped by half a yard or so a falling brick that might well have closed my account. Even when blasting with dynamite old foundation walls of brick and mortar, a few yards from the pavement, 46 THE REAL ARGENTINE nothing will be done for the safety of the passer-by. The casualty columns of the daily papers are eloquent evidence of the risks the ignorant labourers run who are employed in this work of demolition. In effecting repairs to the exteriors, painting, and the like, the workers are confronted with many difficulties, for the simple expedient of erecting ladders as in our cities is denied to them. A ladder would block the whole pavement. So they have to reverse the old order, and instead of placing the ladder firmly on the ground and leaning it against the wall, they plant the foot of it in the angle of the pavement and the wall and lean it away from the building, securing the upper and projecting end by ropes to a window. The worker on the ladder is thus between the ladder and the wall. And from this coign of vantage he drops paint or wet plaster on the passers-by with a cheerfulness and im- partiality which must be seen to be duly appreciated. Naturally the beautiful detail and the imposing ap- pearance of many of the finest buildings in the city are completely lost for lack of space to see them. Hun- dreds of thousands of pounds may be said to be wasted in this way; for there is widespread effort to render the fagades of the buildings artistic, the cement or plaster with which they are covered lending itself to all sorts of decorative treatment. But anything over two stories in height is above the line of sight in the nar- row streets, and there are prodigalities of decoration in the third and fourth and higher reaches of the new buildings which have never been noticed by anybody since the day they were uncovered. A barn-like struc- ture would have served the purpose equally and given STREET LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 47 as good an effect except in a photograph, taken from one of the upper stones on the opposite side of the street. Thus one has a curious feeling of disap- pointment on beholding many of the more notable buildings which he has first seen in photographs. The famous Jockey Club, for example. You are conscious that if you could get a hundred yards away from the front of it, you might find it a very handsome edifice. But the actual effect is that of a full-length photograph out of focus, in which the boots and the lower part of the legs dwarf all the rest. I recall very vividly the impression of my first walks in those strange streets. The scarcity of women was very noticeable in the earlier part of the day. Such streets as Bartolome Mitre, Cangallo, Sarmiento, Maipu, and San Martin, where the tide of business flows strongest, were crowded with men; the odd women who passed seemed out of place. But later in the day, women and children may be seen in consider- able numbers in Florida and the vicinity, though at no time are they ever relatively so numerous as in the streets of New York. And what never ceased to irri- tate me was the rudeness with which the passers-by stared at me and at each other. I was prepared for them feasting their eyes on the odd women, but man scrutinising man was new to me. They inspect your neck-tie, study the style of your hat, stare at your boots ! They gape at you, so that you wonder if you have forgotten your collar or if your suspenders are hanging down ! You are reassured, however, by their gaping at each other for no obvious reason. It is merely a vulgar habit, probably acquired by the 48 THE REAL ARGENTINE gapers when first they arrived from the hill villages of Italy or the desert towns of Spain, when any person decently clothed was a novelty to them. Some of the half-breed policemen at the street cor- ners, trying to " control " the traffic, are a source of infinite joy. Armed with white batons, they wave these about in a way so bewildering that it is a puzzle to know whether they mean to hold up one of the streams of cross traffic or invite the two opposing pro- cessions to mutual destruction. On the whole, al- though some of these policemen, shamefully underpaid, indulge in a little robbery to keep the pot boiling one, whom I had rather grown to like, mounted guard one Sunday while a gang of thieves, with carts and motor cars, plundered the newly-opened branch of Harrods' London Stores in Florida ! I came to form a very favourable opinion of them, and many showed real courtesy and good sense in controlling the traffic, under the -most trying circumstances, as every cocker o and chauffeur looks upon them with contempt and pays a minimum of respect to their authority. I have been told by old English residents of Buenos Ayres, who are prepared to perjure their souls on be- half of the city that has given them the opportunity to grow richer than they were ever likely to become at home, that " there are no poor and there are no beg- gars in Buenos Ayres. " Both statements are untrue. There are lots of poor, and there are some beggars. (Time was when the beggars went about on horse- back, to the confusion of the old proverb.) It could not be otherwise in a vast metropolis, abnormally larger than the country behind it will warrant for many STREET LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 49 years to come, to which the poor of the poorest coun- tries in Europe, Spain and Italy, are flocking in daily ship-loads. No poor in Buenos Ayres, forsooth! Thousands of poor are dumped down at the docks every month, and poor many of them remain forever poor and criminal though many more, with en- ergy and application, escape from the ranks of pov- erty, and not a few grow rich. Poor there are in abundance, and very much in evi- dence. Take a walk along the Paseo de Julio and you will see as many of the tattered army of Poverty as you will encounter in London, and in London you should see exactly five times as many, to maintain a proportion relative to the size of the cities. Beggars are less no- ticeable, chiefly, I fancy, because there is no room for them in the streets; yet I have often been asked for alms in Florida, while looking at a shop window the only chance the beggar has of practising his (more often her) profession, as to stand in the gutter for more than a minute would be to invite a violent death. To Britishers, a saddening sight is presented by the gin-sodden Irishmen and abandoned Englishmen who pester their fellow-countrymen in Florida and San Martin, with the old familiar yarn about losing their job as ship's carpenter and the certainty of getting a new start if they can only raise the money for a suit of clothes. Scores of times have I had to turn these British rascals away, and some of them became as fa- miliar in my daily walks as old friends. If ever one saw a face that had been made repulsive by drink, a nose that was reddening with malt, it was invariably the guilty possession of a Britisher. 50 THE REAL ARGENTINE Mention of familiar faces reminds me of one of the most disagreeable features of the Buenos Ayres streets. In this matter I am a thoroughly prejudiced witness, so I must explain my attitude. To me, one of the abiding charms of London is that I can walk its dear familiar streets with their ever changing throngs, without having momently to raise my hat, or to stop every few yards to endure the idle chatter of some acquaintance. I love London for itself and I know where to find my friends when I want them. To have them bumping up against me at every corner would come between me and my London. It would destroy completely that feeling of immensity, that sobering sense of the greatness of humanity, which London im- poses on the reflective mind. But in Buenos Ayres, if you have noticed a man in a railway train, if you have spoken to a passenger on the river boat, if you have been introduced to somebody at a Belgrano dinner- party, you will surely see them all in Florida next day. This parochial condition is the result of the central part of the town being confined to a few narrow streets. In all Latin countries there is also a sheep-like flocking to certain beaten tracks, as in Paris every boulevardier and almost any visitor is sure to be " spotted " if you but sit long enough at the Cafe de la Paix. Although the admirably planned and imposing Avenida de Mayo was opened some twenty years ago to give Buenos Ayres a new heart, it is still comparatively unpopular, while the congested Calle Florida is more congested than ever. Other faces that grow familiar to one in the streets are those of the porters or chang adores. Brawny STREET LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 51 Italians or Gallegos usually, these lazy and exigent vendors of unskilled labour stand in braces at the cor- ners of many of the central streets, a nuisance to pass- ers-by. They are armed with a rope or with a large piece of packing cloth folded and laid across their left shoulder. This is at once their instrument and their insignia. If you want anything removed, you send out for one of these gentry, and if he is feeling strong enough he may condescend to oblige you for a fee which would command a visit from a skilled medical man in New York. They will fuss and blow over a little job which should be no more than a mere incident in the day's work. Once I was so fortunate as to get one to carry a box of books for me up three flights of stairs, for a trifle five pesos, or two dollars which he pocketed without a word of thanks. They must be prosperous villains these street porters and the malorganisation of labour gives them their oppor- tunity, as nobody sending you any moderately heavy article will undertake to do more than leave it at the foot of the stairs. If you happen to require it three stairs up that is entirely your affair. Turning from the people in the streets to the shops, one is struck by the extraordinary preponderance of chemists and druggists. Almost every other corner- shop is a / 'armada. And it is pretty certain to be a f armada inglesa or francesa, or alemana, or ilaliana rarely espanola! But all the same the " English chemist " may be an enterprising Argentine who knows no more than " zank you ver' mooch," which he will utter with a self-satisfied smile after you have con- ducted all your business in his own language. And he 52 THE REAL ARGENTINE ought to " zank you " in half a dozen languages at once for what you have to give him in exchange for what you get. The farmacia is to Buenos Ayres, and indeed to the whole of the Argentine and Uruguay, what the public-house is to England the " corner shop." In the country towns it actually takes the place of the village inn and is the rendezvous of the local gossips. Magnificent establishments are these farma- cias. New York has nothing to show in the line of artistic shops that will excel the best of them. In- deed, in no other great city have I seen drug-stores to be compared with certain of these in respect to the grandeur of their carved wood adornments and the completeness of their equipment. Their numerous assistants usually wear long white linen coats, after the style of hospital doctors, which give them a pleasant air of cleanliness they might otherwise lack. With a drugshop at every corner, buzzing with cus- tomers, the unconscious liar who can speak no ill of Buenos Ayres will blandly tell you it is " the healthiest city in the world." As a matter of undiluted fact, it is a paradise of the doctor and the patent-pill-man, largely due to its curiously trying climate. One often comments on the abundant evidence of the patent medicine seller in the United States in the adver- tising columns of the newspapers, on the hoardings in the streets but nothing we have amongst us in that respect equals the insistence with which you are re- minded of your aching stomach at every turn in Buenos Ayres if, by lucky chance, your stomach itself has forgotten for a moment to remind you of its troubles. STREET LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 53 Next in proportion to those offering the Argentina a myriad cures for his estomago, come the shops that are dedicated to cleaning his boots. Indeed, one might reasonably suppose this to be the national industry. The abundant energy devoted to this lowly calling if turned to other channels might go far to fortify the republic. Even in the Calle Florida, where land val- ues and shop-rents rival the highest known on Fifth Avenue, one finds certain enviable positions occupied by nothing better than salones de lustrar, and in all the central streets such establishments often employing upwards of a dozen men abound. Nay, go where you will, even to the outer suburbs, you will never fail to find a druggist's or a bootblack's shop. A real Argentine citizen must have his boots polished several times a day, else these multitudinous slaves of the blacking brush could not be kept so busy. The saloons are sometimes fitted up in quite a luxurious manner, with long platforms on which are raised padded chairs with high foot rests in front, and while you sit in this elevated position the polisher per- forms the most elaborate operation on your shoes, using a bewildering variety of pastes, brushes, and cloths. When you think he has done, he begins all over again and not until he has completed what must be the tenth or eleventh stage of the operation, which consists in taking a piece of silk from his trouser pocket, where it has been lodged to absorb the warmth of his body, and working it with furious friction over your shoes, are you free to step down. Meanwhile you have been listening to Caruso and Tetrazzini on the gramophone, I have even heard a customer insist 54 THE REAL ARGENTINE on a tune being stopped and his favourite substituted ! so that when you step out with shining feet you feel the threepence or fourpence you have paid has been well-earned. But you won't have gone twenty paces along the street until a bawling door-man, shouting " Se lustra! se lustra! " will point to your feet and in- vite you into his shop, with " Shine, sir? " Many of these boot-blacks run their prosperous busi- ness in conjunction with an agency for lottery tickets and most of them sell cigars and cigarettes as " side- lines." The shops dedicated to the sale of lottery tickets present at first a very unusual sight to the vis- itor. Their name is legion. All the numerous money- changers deal in these tickets, which are spread out in their windows so that the passer-by may scrutinise the numbers and see if his lucky combination is among them. Many tobacconists also sell them, and there are nu- merous street-hawkers to offer you the chance of scores of thousands of dollars for fifty cents or so a thirty- thousand-to-one chance. It is a study in Hope to watch a poor workman outside the window of one of these lottery-ticket vendor's pointing out the particular ticket which he trusts may bring him a sudden fortune and take him home to Italy or Spain by the next steamer the ultimate hope that flickers in all their breasts. There is much parade of luxury in the barbers' shops, which form a good third, in point of number, to the druggists and boot-blacks. Mirrors gleam along the walls and the basins and pipes for performing the mysteries of an Argentine's " shave and haircut " are many and glittering. The assistants seem almost as STREET LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 55 numerous as the customers at any hour of the day and all wear the white jackets that cover a multitude of sins. A simple haircut in an establishment of just mid- dling style regular, no mas costs you eighty centavos, leaving twenty out of the peso for the artist who has treated you. Forty-two cents for a mere haircut is moderately "stiff"; but have a shampoo, a singe and a shave at the same time, and you will find that, like Sampson, your strength has oozed away with your hair, when the barber names his price ! CHAPTER V MORE SCENES FROM THE STREETS OF BUENOS AYRES WHAT fascinated me most in the streets of this motley town were the bookshops. Who says there is no cul- ture in Buenos Ayres has to reckon with the evidence of these, for London itself has no more than you might count on the fingers of one hand that excel the librerias of the Argentine capital. Many pleasant hours have I passed inspecting their wonderfully varied stocks of books from all the countries of Europe where the art of printing flourishes, as well as from North and South America. In proportion to their populations, Buenos Ayres excels New York in the number and character of its bookshops. m It was very encouraging to a literary worker to note how every country has sent of its best (though Spain also of its worst) to keep alive the taste for letters in those whom the eternal quest for the elusive dollar has taken to far-away Argentina. There are many German bookshops, stocked with wonderful collections of the classic literature of the Fatherland and the latest works of its indefatigable authors of to-day in every branch of thought and activity. Several admirable French shops there are of which the same may be said; a few Italians extremely few in proportion to the vast Italian population and several well-known British shops, where cheap English and American fic- 56 THE STREETS OF BUENOS AYRES 57 tion unfortunately outnumbers the books of serious value, though practically no new book of real note that saw the light in England or North America did not have at least a brief showing on the shelves of the British bookshops during my stay. There is even a bookshop where the strange literary products of the Turk and the Syrian are sold to the oriental community. But the native bookshops have nothing to learn from the foreigners, unless it be a better taste in displaying their wares, which are usually thrown into the window with all the abandon of a country store. In point of variety, they are as richly stocked as any of their col- leagues overseas, and it is clear from the most casual examination of their shelves that all the principal French and German publishers are vicing with each other in catering for this rich and ready market of golden South America. I could fill pages with lists of " libraries " which are being produced specially for Latin America (but chiefly for Buenos Ayres) by fa- mous Continental houses, who publish Spanish transla- tions of all their important new books, as well as of a bewildering number of old books that first found popularity in French or German. Spanish publishers lack enterprise, hence Buenos Ayres, where printing is excessively costly and is used almost exclusively for business propaganda, has to get its most worthy Span- ish books by way of France or Germany. I have said Spain also sends of its worst. Most of the trash comes from Barcelona and Madrid houses. It consists chiefly of atrocious translations of English and American detective tales of the crudest " penny blood " variety, badly printed, and stitched within a 58 THE REAL ARGENTINE gaudy and often well-done coloured wrapper, with some preposterously sensational picture thereon. These are sold, not at a penny, but at fourpence (twenty centavos) and are read by young and old alike. There are many shops that show nothing in their windows but this gutter literature, while the kiosks on the Avenida pale and shabby ghosts of the delightful Paris kiosks these ! are stocked with them, and also with translations of the pornographic French books which the shameless shopmen of the Palais Royal dis- play for the concupiscent foreigner. Of old bookshops, alas, there are none. To the literary man, a city without its dusty haunts of the bookworm lacks something that all the loads of " latest books " cannot quite replace. Old books there are to be found in the general bookshops, and they are usually offered at prices so excessive that when I set about the formation of a library of South American works, I was eventually forced to discontinue buying any but the most essential, as they are to be picked up in Paris at a fifth the price and with much less searching. I also found that I could secure in London more and better photographs of Buenos Ayres than in the city itself, and at less cost ! One day, requiring urgently a photo of a certain aspect of the statue of San Martin, I had all the likely shops and photographers searched in vain, yet in London I could have got it immediately. The English booksellers (who, of course, also cater for the small North American "colony") have the habit of hanging out a notice when the English or North American mail has come to hand with its load of new books and the latest periodicals. And once a THE STREETS OF BUENOS AYRES 59 week the exiles from Old England or from the United States must feel a quickening of the pulse when they see the announcement in good bold letters " MAIL DAY " or " MAIL ARRIVED " at the doors of these thriving bookshops in the Calle Cangallo. But perhaps a time may come to the exile when his pulse is so scant of home-fed blood that he notes these signs with a dim unseeing eye and feels no flush of the old love for his native land arise in him. If horseshoes brought luck, every exile might be a millionaire, for nowhere have I seen so many cast shoes in the streets. You could wager on filling a cart with them in one day! The workmanship of the smiths is evidently so crude or so little care is taken of the horses that their shoes are allowed to loosen and fall off without any serious attempt to preserve them. Whatever the reason, they are in all the streets like " common objects of the seashore." But the electric bulb is to Buenos Ayres as the seaweed or the limpet to a rocky shore. Except along Broadway, no New Yorker ever looks on such prodigality of electric lamps. All the public buildings are permanently out- lined with them, so often have they to use them on anniversaries or centenaries; for the Argentine dearly loves to celebrate the centenary of any old forgotten " battle " in his glorious history and the anniversaries of all the " epoch-making " events and great men's birthdays, by illuminating his public buildings and get- ting some great living Argentine to declaim a type- written speech to an assembly of distinguidos. Even the Cathedral is garlanded with rows of electric bulbs, so that it may take its part with the public buildings 60 THE REAL ARGENTINE and the retail shops in these extremely frequent elec- trical celebrations. No wonder the electricians love Buenos Ayres ! And very beautiful is the city with its millions of little coloured lamps aglow. I saw it many times thus in eight months ; but could have wished for some novelty after the fifth or sixth time. While electricity is comparatively cheap, and the supply of glass lamps evidently inexhaustible, the plate- glass used for lighting underground warehouses from the sidewalk is evidently at a premium, as I noticed that whenever one of these pavement lights was broken it was not replaced by a piece of thick glass, but by wood covered with a layer of cement! Having thus far dealt with the streets of Buenos Ayres in general terms, let me now glance at certain of the more famous thoroughfares in particular. Florida must naturally come first, for Florida is a microcosm of Buenos Ayres. It is a tramless street, in so far as the electrlcos only cross it at every 150 yards. It is, moreover, a " two ways " street, traffic being allowed to pass along it in both directions. It is, as I have already indicated, an extremely narrow street. But it is the great highway of the city; its peculiar pride and joy. There throbs the great heart of el gran pueblo Argentina. On a dry day the motors churn up the dust and line the broken asphalt roadway with long tracks of oil, on which the horses " slither " and fall. On a moist day the dust is converted into a pasty coating, which makes progress on sidewalk or roadway a peril to quadrupeds and bipeds alike. On a really wet day and often it rains in torrents for days on end the windows of all the shops become t/D B '-5 M V H S THE STREETS OF BUENOS AYRES 61 obscured with mud and pedestrians are bespattered from head to heels. The habit of wearing waterproofs with hoods, which they flap over their hats, gives a curious aspect to the men on wet days. I had been told in London that the Anglo-Saxon was spotted in Buenos Ayres by his umbrella. My experience was that the first things a newcomer bought in the month of May or June were a waterproof and an umbrella, and it was comic to see the poor Italian and Spanish immigrants disembarking, each clutching a real old " gamp," for which he was to find abundant use. The caches, being built for fair weather, offer little protec- tion when it rains, a crude apron of leather being stretched in front of the " fare," but leaving his head and shoulders exposed to the deluge. Yet one is lucky indeed to secure so much protection on a rainy night, and often have I had to walk to my quarters in the drenching rain after shivering for half an hour in a doorway in the vain hope of getting some condescend- ing cochero to accept my patronage. At other times, when I have secured a coach, I have regretted I have not boldly footed it in the rain, as there would be a painful interlude on the journey while the driver strug- gled to raise up his fallen steeds. They tumble about on the slippery streets like beginners in a skating rink. But let us look at Florida when the sun is shining. Its shops are full of interest to the curious. The jewellers' are especially numerous, and vie with the best in London or Paris. And their contents are of the most beautiful, for the Argentines have taste in jewellery, even though they are inclined to display it with almost barbaric opulence. The furniture shops 62 THE REAL ARGENTINE are equally prodigal in beautiful and unique wares, with perhaps too marked a tendency to the art nouveau, which has not yet grown old in Buenos Ayres. Com- fortable chairs, luxurious lounges, no their prefer- ence is for " style " rather than comfort. The milliners and modistas display the most tempting hats I have seen one ticketed at 500 pesos and dresses which are the last word in Parisian ingenuity. They have also a childish delight in grouping life-sized and very lifelike female figures arranged in these vani- ties in their windows. A waxen lady displaying her startling corsets and snowy underwear has a peculiar fascination not only for the women, but even for the men. One evening I overheard a little ragged urchin, who was standing before such a revelation, pressing his hands across his heart, like Caruso in a love scene, exclaiming to the wax idol of his adoration, " Ah, mi querida senorita! " They begin young in Buenos Ayres ! Florida is so much a Vanity Fair that the shops de- voted to the more sober necessities of life seem out of place. Some of these still present a " Wild West " aspect in the motley assortment of their wares, cooking ranges, oil stoves, baths, cork-screws, infants' foods, boots, bedsteads, and travelling trunks being mingled together in pleasing disorder. But such establishments are gradually being elbowed out by the pompous jewel- ler, the pianoforte-seller, whose chief business is in pianolas and musical boxes crowds will stand around a shop door to listen to a musical box at work or an automatic organ, in the evening when the street has been closed to wheeled traffic the furrier, the high- THE STREETS OF BUENOS AYRES 63 class stationer, the modista, the chemist, and the op- tician. Nowhere will you find such opticians. It may be that the syphilitic condition of the South American blood is responsible for the myopia of the Argentines, or it may be no more than a fashion, like the monocle with a certain type of Englishman; but the use of glasses is widespread. There is one establishment in Florida which is a veritable palace of optical appliances, employing many scores of assistants. A considerable part of this business is also associated with land-sur- veying and the most expensive instruments of that sci- ence may be seen for sale in many shop windows in Florida. A peculiarity of Buenos Ayres (and Mon- tevideo also) is the public display of surgical ap- pliances. Brilliantly lighted windows present you with the latest things in operating tables, glass service stands for the instruments, and all sorts of uncanny inventions for cutting you up. The craftsmen of Florence send much of their mar- ble handiwork to Florida, and some of the art shops are stocked with beautiful statues and bronzes, while every variety of gorgeous inkstands may be seen in them. The inkstand is an important item of the chic Argentine home. But the taste for graphic art is still undeveloped, and the pictures offered for sale compare very unfavourably with the sculptures. I recall in particular a hideous daub, which was alleged to rep- resent two or three members of a certain familia dis~ tmguida (any family that can pay its way and afford a seat at the Opera is so described), being the centre of admiration in a Florida shop window for some days, while the newspapers gave reproductions of it. In 64 THE REAL ARGENTINE London or Paris no art-dealer would have allowed it to be seen on his premises. As I have already indicated, Florida has every day a brief surcease from the battle of motors and coaches. From four o'clock until seven no vehicles are allowed to pass along it, and only at the crossings is there any traffic. These are the hours of the evening paseo. Ladies and children are now at liberty to saunter along the pavements or in the roadway, while the gilded youth of the town struts by and gazes at them, or more often stands in stolid rows and admires. The ladies are perhaps a trifle too well dressed and the children mostly over-dressed. But this is their " life." This paseo is what they live for, so they strive to appear at their best and to display their possessions of silks and satins, while the jovenes distinguidos have all had their boots polished to the nth degree just before they came into the street. And the scene is undeniably enchant- ing, when the electric lights blaze out. There are hun- dreds of projecting shops-signs, in which changing elec- tric lights are now revealed and now occluded, and the great warehouses are all illuminated as though it were another centenario, news vendors are calling La Razon, El Diario, Caras y Caretas, or Fray Mocho, and the whole has the atmosphere of some brilliant bazaar, rather than of the highway of a great city. It is a feast of light, but not of gaiety, for the Argentines are not given to joyousness and are strangely lacking in humour; everybody is frightfully formal and all are obviously conscious of being well dressed. It is Vanity Fair with the fun left out! Towards the river, the street of San Martin (in- THE STREETS OF BUENOS AYRES 65 escapable national hero who pursues you everywhere in statue, in street and place-name, in " cocktails," in every conceivable connection) runs parallel to Florida but bears no resemblance to it except in being equally narrow. It is essentially an earnest business thorough- fare, lined with many fine office buildings, and choking perpetually with traffic. But, by the way, many of these business buildings that look so " up-to-date " from the outside are antiquated within. It is a fact that up to so recently as a year ago builders were in the habit of erecting large tenements which they well knew would be utilised for nothing but offices, yet they built them deliberately for " flats/' or departamentos, as these are called, fitting each with its kitchen and bathroom and disposing the apartments as for bed- rooms and salons. Thus you will find to-day hundreds of business firms using such modern flats as offices, in some cases the bathrooms remaining, in others con- verted into " enquiry office," or the like, all ex- tremely uncomfortable in conditions entirely foreign to their requirements. But San Martin contains sev- eral imposing blocks of real office buildings and will presently contain more, for the builders are busy here, as everywhere else, with their work of transformation. A friend of mine, when I called on him at the beginning of May, 1913, had just received notice to quit, by the demolishers arriving and starting to unroof his office ! That was his first intimation that the landlord pur- posed clearing away his old property and putting up a great new business building. Argentine methods are not ours. One " square " nearer the river runs Reconquista, 66 THE REAL ARGENTINE dignified by the presence of the principal bank build- ings, many of which are real ornaments of the town and all suggest a sense of opulence and financial solidity it would be hard to match even in New York or London. Yet the best of them, the richest and the- most sub- stantial, are no more than the branches of the Tree of English Gold which has its roots deep-struck in Lon- don City. It is a street of all nations this Reconquista. England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and the rest have their banking houses here, and there is no more encouraging sight in this remorseless city than to wit- ness the many ill-clad Spanish and Italian labourers going through the long and intricate operation of send- ing drafts home to those they have left in the old coun- try. Many hundreds have I seen with eager, straining faces, scanning the pink or green slips of paper that would mean so much to some one far away in Lom- bardy or in Catalonia, and represented so much of the sweat of his brow to the poor sender. The practice of keeping a bank account is very gen- eral, even among the labouring classes, as the poor peon has nowhere to hide his little hoard, living as he does in the most shameful conditions, where a square yard of living-room is more costly than a cottage would be in his native village, and among people who do not hesitate at murder to gain a few pitiful pesos. Thus you will often see a lean and hungry labourer, dressed no better than an English tramp, scrutinising his bank book in the corridor of one of the great banking houses, and the sight is a strange one to English eyes. Turks, Polish Jews, Norwegians, Russians, Cingalese, Swedes, Armenians, all the nations of the world are represented THE STREETS OF BUENOS AYRES 67 daily in the teeming throngs that flock to the banks in Reconquista, where the innumerable clerks are puffing steadily at cigarettes and attending to their clients with a charming ease that has in it a pleasant suggestion of eternity. For the simplest banking operation will eat away twenty minutes of your time, as your account is balanced whenever you withdraw or lodge any sum, and to secure a draft on London at ninety days, calls for the patience of Job and three-quarters of an hour. Much of this formality is the result of the system of issuing open checks, which makes swindling delight- fully simple, and the bank always stands to lose, as there is extreme difficulty in bringing a swindler to book. The last of the narrow streets riverward is Calle 25 de Mayo, so called from the day in the year 1810 when the movement for Independence began, although the actual date of the Declaration of Independence is 9th July, 1816. They have a curious habit of think- ing in dates in Latin countries. Both Paris and Rome give us examples of famous dates as street names, but in South America dates are honoured to a degree that is comic. One of my friends in Montevideo has an office in 25 de Mayo, a showroom in 18 de Julio, and warehouses in 2 1 de Agosto and in 1 5 de Octubre ! By some odd chance he always found what he needed most in one of the streets named after Uruguay's historic dates. There was another such, I de Mayo, but it offered him no accommodation else he should have taken premises there also, just to complete the series. Calle 25 de Mayo in Buenos Ayres has long been one of the degenerate parts of the town, entirely unworthy 68 THE REAL ARGENTINE of the historic event it commemorates. But it is be- ing gradually reformed and may yet take on an aspect of decency. Near the Plaza de Mayo it contains some fine new buildings, but westward [tjs^still the haunt of undesirables, although the English pro-cathedral stands there, a plain and not undignified structure with which I made no close acquaintance. From 25 de Mayo the ground falls quickly to the Paseo de Julio, the former street occupying the level of what, no doubt, was long ago the bank of the river. This is the only semblance of a hill in all the district. Inland for leagues, the city lies flat as the proverbial pancake, while below towards the river, the Paseo and the gardens beyond, with the buildings of the port in the further distance, occupy a lower level of land re- claimed from the river. If anybody wants an enemy " put out of the way " for a matter of twenty dollars or so, he will have no difficulty in finding a villain ready for the job somewhere along the arcaded haunts of the Paseo. In one respect the Paseo de Julio resembles Princess Street, Edinburgh, which, as the Irishman said, " is no more than half a strate, as it has only one side to it." The Paseo has only one side to it, and it is a bad one. The second stories of the buildings that stand between the Paseo and 25 de Mayo are on the road level of the higher street. Thus it might be possible, for aught I know, to enter one of the low dens on the Paseo and mounting two or three floors within its evil and mysterious interior, emerge on the level of 25 de Mayo. The lower stories of these buildings on the Paseo side are arcaded, and these ar- cades are the haunt of " all things perverse, abomina- EXTERIOR OF THE JOCKEY CLUB, BUENOS AYRES. A good photograph of this famous building cannot be made, the street being too narrow to admit of focus, even from the upper storeys opposite. In the right bottom corner part of a window-sill, or ledge of roof, on the opposite side of the street, appears in this photograph. THE STREETS OF BUENOS AYRES 69 ble." According to the local press, after nightfall no man dare appear there wearing a collar, and any one who requires the aid of eye-glasses must not venture thither. Often have I wandered among the stinking peones and cosmopolitan criminals who throng the arcades by day, but I know not the Paseo by night. The shops are kept by all sorts of cheap clpthiers, gen- eral dealers, and many cutlers, whose windows are ex- clusively given over to the display of long knives or daggers. Probably sixty per cent, of the frequenters of the arcades carry one of these dirks, like the old Scottish Highlander, and the other forty per cent, are armed with revolvers, of which hundreds are exposed for sale in the arcades. There is no lack of " cheap Jacks " with " special lines " to clear at a sacrifice. There are many filthy looking restaurants and pro- vision shops ; and more librerias, which expose nothing but the filth of the Continental press translated into Spanish and Italian. If you look at one of their win- dows for a minute, out pops the greasy owner, spider- like, to enquire if by any chance you would like to in- spect his more secret stock of fotografias muy curiosas, while youths will thrust under your nose an envelope of obscene photographs, with a particularly offensive one exposed. The whole atmosphere is vile. The cinematographs and raree shows that also abound in these arcades may be no more pernicious than many in the Bowery, but that is a matter on which no decent visitor can speak, as none such could risk the contamina- tion of entering therein. It is a male crowd that is always circulating in the Paseo. Never have I seen a decent woman there, and indeed no more than a half-a- 70 THE REAL ARGENTINE dozen hatless sluts are ever to be noticed under its arcades. This abomination must pass. It exists merely be- cause landowners have preferred to hold their old rotten properties, and allow them to be used by the scum of the population, until such time as it would pay them to sell out. The transformation has already be- gun; the pestiferous old buildings are giving way to modern ones, devoted to cleaner purposes. Some day the haunts of the criminals may be utterly wiped out and the^aseo de Julio become, what it might well be, one of the pleasantestlhoroughfares of a great city. Up the little hill from the Paseo, one gains the Plaza de Mayo, whence stretches for a mile and a half in the most approved Haussmannesque straightness the Avenida de Mayo, ending in the massive palace of Congreso. Lined with many handsome buildings, of six, eight, or even a dozen stories, whose shadows are falling athwart the broad and teeming roadway, while the westering sun is making iridescent the white marbles of the great domed Congreso in the far distance, here in the new land of South America is at least one fine city highway that may hold up its head among the world's best. There is a suggestion of a Paris boule- vard in the Avenida; a suggestion of form, but as- suredly not of life nor of " atmosphere." And there the rivalry between the two great Latin cities begins and ends ! The great Avenida Callao runs at right angles with the Avenida de Mayo from the Plaza Congreso. It is badly paved, but contains many attractive buildings of cement. Some day perhaps it may become the cen- THE. STREETS OF BUENOS AYRES 71 tral thoroughfare of the city. There are those who believe it will, but in my judgment it will call for a greater revolution than they have ever known in Ar- gentina to shift the centre of gravity from the Calles Maipu, Florida, and San Martin to Callao. Between Florida and Callao there are eleven parallel streets. All are incessantly busy from early morning till night- fall, while Maipu, Esmeralda, and Suipacha, in the or- der given parallel to Florida, are busy even through the night. All sorts of shops abound in these thoroughfares and business offices innumerable, as well as many places of entertainment, restaurants, and cafes. But, apart from Florida, all these streets that lie to the north of the Avenida de Mayo are so characterless that after many years of residence it would puzzle even those with an abnormal " bump of locality " to say in which street they found themselves if they stepped from a cab in any one of them without having noted some landmark on the way. In the suburbs it is even more difficult to realise at a glance where you may happen to be, and the policeman often cannot tell you the name of the street he is patrolling. I remember asking a policeman in a street near the Plaza Libertad for Frank Brown's Circus (Brown is an American or an Englishman who has made and lost fortunes in circuses throughout South America). " Oh," said he, " you are going the wrong way. It is at the corner of Florida and Cordoba." Now, I knew that some eighteen months or two years before it had stood there, but was deliberately burned to the ground by the jingo youths of the city, who were offended by some quite innocent action of the unfortunate Brown. This 72 THE REAL ARGENTINE policeman, some eight or ten squares away from the scene, had not yet heard the news, and meanwhile a magnificent pile of ferro-concrete architecture, the Centro Naval, had been reared on the spot! I found the new circus by describing to another policeman, who at first denied all knowledge of it, a big building to which thousands of people had been flocking for two or three nights past. Then a light dawned on his Indo-Spanish soul. " Entonces, senor" said he, " se encuentra sin duda y a la esquina de esta misma calle > porque se ha concurrida mucha gente, por alia, estas ultimas noches" It was even so, three squares away at the corner of the street in which I had speech with the policeman, I found the circus. There is no end to what I might write about the streets of Buenos Ayres, but there must be speedily, if not already, to the interest of the reader. I who have tramped them, in fair weather and in foul, on busy week days and on the deadest of dull dead Sundays, mile upon mile, seeking for interest and finding but little, now discover many forgotten impressions com- ing up on the films of the mind, which, so to say, I have been putting into the developer, and though these amuse me, I doubt if they would equally entertain others. CHAPTER VI WHAT WE THOUGHT OF THE WEATHER AND THE MOSQUITOES I CANNOT go further in the story of my stay in Buenos Ayres without saying something very definite about the weather. Passing references have already been made to that all-important topic; but it requires a chapter to itself, and it insists on having it here and now. As I have said, we were seekers of sunshine. Well, we found it and also some fine samples of most sorts of weather known between the Equator and the Poles. We arrived early in April, which is the beginning of autumn in the Argentine. As the reader has heard, the morning of our arrival was a " perisher." Next day I found my hands, for the first time since boyhood, sore and " chapped." The cold wind was so keen that it had instantly roughened all exposed parts of the skin, and I had recourse to lanoline to soften my hands and to heal my cracked lips. But on the third day the sun came forth again and for nearly a fortnight the heat was almost as trying as in a New York summer. Everybody was mopping his forehead; men who, a day or two before, had been going about in great-coats, were walking the streets with handkerchiefs tucked in- side their collars to absorb the sweat. And suddenly it would change to a bitter night; or perhaps one went forth in the sunny morning in summer clothes, and by noon the temperature had precipitately dropped fifteen; 73 74 THE REAL ARGENTINE or twenty degrees, so that one went shivering hotel- ward for lunch and a change of clothes. Yet a Scotsman, long resident in Chile, told me that I would find Buenos Ayres had the finest climate in the world ! I wonder where he will go to when he dies. For eight months I had occasion to comment on the weather and seldom in terms of congratulation. The expatriated English and the few portenos of British parentage with whom I came into frequent contact were strangely prone to ask me what I thought of the weather, whenever it happened to be a really fine day. " Compare this," they would say, " with the weeks of fog in London when the gas has to be lighted all day long and one can't breathe." " My dear sir," (or " lady," as the case more often was), I might timorously make answer, " you speak of what is as much a tradition as the red wig and beard for the part of Shylock, and moreover you speak to one who lias seen as great variety of weather in Buenos Ayres as in London. Yqur memory is so short that you forget it rained monstrously for three days last week, and for the other four days there was a white chilling vapour over all the town, so that you could not see the length of two squares in the forenoon, and when the vapour had cleared it was as though you were walking on vaselined sidewalks." " Oh, but that was exceptional." " And so, it may be, are the fogs of London. But I'd much prefer a real old London * particler ' to this marrow-searching, flesh-chilling, white plague that comes up from the River Plate in your winter-time and gets one by the throat." THE WEATHER AND THE MOSQUITOES 75 That fine line of Tennyson's, All in a death-dumb, autumn-dripping gloom, comes to mind in Buenos Ayres on one of these days, but, alas, the autumn dripping is not from branchy trees to fragrant, leaf-laden loam, nor is it " death-dumb." It drips from gaunt iron frames, from broken plas- tered walls, from tramcars, from horses' harness. A billiard cue taken from the rack will feel as though it had been lying in the bath, and the boots which you have not been wearing for a few days will show patches of white and green mould. But it is true that between April and November there may be many days of sunshine; nay, even weeks of it at a stretch. And these days are delicious. There is a tang of freshness in the air such as comes to one on a fine frosty autumn morning on the heights of up- town New York. Then towards the end of November the sun begins his yearly revel and till the end of March Buenos Ayres swelters in the most oppressive heat imaginable. Not that the barometer ever attains a greater height than it frequently registers in New York City, but New York rarely experiences such long-sustained periods of heat, and the humidity due to the mighty volume of the River Plate makes the life of man and beast a burden. The nights bring no surcease. Horses die in the streets by the score every day, and you will see their carcasses in all parts of the town, awaiting re- moval. Lucky are the inhabitants who can escape to Mar del Plata, to Montevideo or to the Hills of Cor- doba, but they are few compared with the myriads who 7 6 THE REAL ARGENTINE must remain in the monstrous stew-pot. " Long drinks " and two or three cold shower baths are now the order of the day. But even the cold douche has its snares. I was once severely scalded by taking one, as the cistern was exposed to the sun and the water had been brought near to boiling point without the aid of a u geyser " ! There is nobody in Buenos Ayres during the summer who attaches much importance to the scien- tific wiseacres who tell us the heat of the sun is diminish- ing. There was no doubt about it we had found the sunshine at last. And like so many of the quests on which mankind sets out, our find was no better than Dead Sea apples. What could we do with it? Why, we shut it out of our rooms by every means in our power; we wore smoked glasses so that we should not see it. We thought of the Kentucky nigger who was knocked down by an autumnal blast and got up and shook his fist at the invisible force, saying: 'Wind, wheah wuz you dis time las' July? " It will be gathered from what I have said that the Argentine has no lack of " weather," wherein it re- sembles England, which Mark Twain alleged had only " samples " of climate. It has all the essentials of the finest climate in the world, but no wise Providence has blended these with any discretion. In the course of one short day you will pass through all the seasons of the year, and though it never snows, I have experienced cold in Buenos Ayres equal to a sharp frost in New York. Nay, I will roundly assert that no wind that sweeps across New York has a tooth so keen as the pampero. One has to be out in Buenos Ayres when THE WEATHER AND THE MOSQUITOES 77 the wind from the boundless pampas strikes the town to know how cold can rake through to the marrow. Over the thousands of leagues of plains it blows, direct from the snowy Andes, and stirring up the clammy effluvia of the River Plate it breathes rheumatism, bronchitis, consumption over the city the hateful pampero ! Nor have the people learned how to combat their changeful weather. All their houses are built for sum- mer. They are excellent for four months of the year, and uncomfortable for the best part of eight. The ceilings of the rooms are usually five feet or more higher than the American standard, which gives one a sporting chance of a breath of fresh air in the torrid season, but when the wind blows and the rain pours, such lofty rooms, tenanted by a myriad draughts, are veritable haunts of misery. For they have neither fireplaces like English houses, nor stoves like American, while steam heating is in its infancy. There are ac- tually modern houses in which " dummy " fireplaces have been built for show, but a real genuine fireplace is a thing which most Argentines have only seen on a visit to Europe. A well-known steam-heating expert from New York, who was sent on a special mission of study to Buenos Ayres, told me that in many of the new departamento buildings which offer the attraction of calef action central the steam heating installation is no more than make-believe for selling or letting pur- poses, but never calculated to supply the tenants with warmth. No, the Argentine either goes to bed earlier or puts on extra clothing in the cold weather, lounges about his house with an overcoat or a shawl above his 78 THE REAL ARGENTINE winter suit, and tries to warm his toes at an oil stove. The ironmongers make great display of these stinking abominations at the first cold-snap, and the papers carry many advertisements of their merits, their " odour- less " quality being insisted upon in every case. Elec- tric stoves are largely and successfully used, and as electric current is cheap they form the best substitute for a coal fire although the English believe there is no substitute in all the world for a fine glowing fire of coal. " Weather " is indeed a staple of talk in the Argen- tine, just as at home. Indeed, to a greater degree does one hear people discussing the weather in Buenos Ayres even than in London, and with very good reason. The fortunes of all hinge on the state of the climate. Too much rain and the harvests are spoiled; too much heat and horses, cattle and sheep perish in their tens of thousands.^ And year after year the Argentine suffers either way. Tell an estandero that you have seen two or three locusts flying about in the street and his face will blanch, his lip quiver, for already in imagination he sees the dreaded plague of these insects devastating his crops. He is ever in a state of nervous fear as to whether there is going to be too little rain or too much, and, poor man, he will tell you with glee when he meets you on the beastliest of rainy days that " it's raining dollars." If you meet him a fortnight later and it is still raining, there will be no smile on his face, for he fears it is to be the old, old story. " Last year and the year before the crops were nearly in the bags for put- ting on the rail and yet we lost them through the rain." Raining dollars, forsooth ! For a day or two that may THE WEATHER AND THE MOSQUITOES 79 be so, for a week, perhaps; but later on it rains bank- ruptcy. Que Undo pais, as a dear old self-deluded lady used to say when telling me the most atrocious un- truths about her adopted country. What a lovely country ! The uncertainty of the Argentine weather is really incredible to any one who has been fed on the pap of interested hack-writers. In the year 1911 the great national horse race at Palermo was three times post- poned on account of the course being dangerously heavy from excessive rain, and in 1912 it was post- poned once for the same reason, being run on the suc- ceeding Sunday on a course that was still sloppy. Was the Derby ever postponed because of rain? I have no Derby lore, but I should be surprised to learn that such a thing had ever happened in rainy England. It had been represented to me before I went to Buenos Ayres that, so reliable was the climate, one could make engagements for outdoor sports months ahead, with the certainty of weather conditions being favourable. During my stay there, numerous lawn tennis, golfing, boating and picnic engagements were postponed from time to time because of the rain. In short, Argentine weather is either too much of a good thing or too much of a bad thing. The dear old lady already mentioned told me that she had to live in Buenos Ayres during the winter because the roads to her estancia were quite impassable whenever it rained, but it was lovely there for a few weeks in the spring, though she had to clear out as soon as summer came, as the place was so infested by flies and mos- quitoes that the family had to live in darkness, never 8o THE REAL ARGENTINE daring to raise the blinds ! Buenos Ayres being equally obnoxious in summer, she went to the Hills of Cordoba, and came back to town with the autumn. Thus she was able to spend a few short weeks of each year at her home in the "Camp," and the rest of the year, from a chair in the hotel drawing-room she sang the praises of the glorious Argentine weather and of the country that blossoms as the rose. The final touch of unloveliness is the loss of the ruddy glory of the fall. In the province of Buenos Ayres especially, there is no gorgeous funeral for King Summer; no shimmering gold of hedge and bough. The leaves rot on the trees suddenly, wither into pale colourless things that to-morrow's wind sweeps away and, behold, so many gaunt and shivering skeletons of trees. When man dies in Buenos Ayres, they coffin him and consign him to his corner of Chacarita within twenty-four hours. Summer dies and is buried with similar despatch, but Nature relatively provides less pomp at the funeral of Summer than the experts in pampas funebres supply for the average Argentine who yesterday was and to-day is not. Insect life is, of course, conditioned by the weather. Yet the Argentine mosquito has a wonderful power of surviving into the winter. It is a worker. Its in- dustry is unquestionable. I shall not readily forget how I was plagued by this small product of a great country. On various occasions I had to limp about my affairs with absurdly swollen feet, thanks to the atten- tions of these tiny pests. An afternoon siesta could only safely be indulged in under a mosquito net. Even as I write I still bear traces on my right foot of a par- THE WEATHER AND THE MOSQUITOES 81 ticularly venomous bite that dates back more than six months I " Haw, yes, the mosquitoes always get the Gringos," said a pimply faced young Englishman to me, when I was mentioning my first experiences nearly a year later in Montevideo. " How long have you been out here? " I inquired. u Oh, nearly three years now," said he. " So that you are a three years' Gringo, I suppose." The English youth makes haste to range himself with the " old timers " and will lie to you abominably to convey the impression that he is no longer a tenderfoot (though a Gringo he must ever be), and tell you that the mosquitoes never touch him, while you can see him scratching his latest bite ! The fact is that some people are more subject than others to mosquito bite and there are many thousands of native-born who never outgrow the susceptibility. I sincerely sympathise with .all such, as the mosquito has the power to make their lives a misery for at least six months of the year. Fleas and bugs (the loathsome bed-hunter) also abound in the City of Good Airs. A gentleman of my ac- quaintance who took lodgings in a native doctor's house was told by the housekeeper, when he complained about the bugs in his bed, that she couldn't help them "they were natural." That was his complaint; he would rather they had been artificial. The bicho Colorado is another busy little fellow, the size of a pin- head. He haunts the grass and as you walk over that he removes his habitat to your foot, bores a hole in your skin, burrows merrily into your flesh'and pro- duces a sore which you will have cause to remember 82 THE REAL ARGENTINE for many a day. The chemists do brisk business in selling innumerable " preventatives " and " cures " for the bites of mosquitoes and bichos colorados, but all that I tried were failures, until I discovered in that familiar product, liquid ammonia, a really effective banisher of the pain. On the whole, I do not seem to have formed an extremely favourable opinion of the weather in Buenos Ayres. Like that famous little girl, " when it is good it is very, very good; but when it is bad it is horrid." And I have a notion that the little girl in question was none too often "good." As for the insects; well, Stalky's pet aversions, the " bug-hunters," can always be sure of a busy time in and around Buenos Ayres. CHAPTER VII A SPLENDID CITY OF SHAM " OF course we all work in sham," remarked a prom- inent Argentine architect to me, one clear, still night, as we leant together over the rail of a river steamer, discussing the pros and cons of Buenos Ayres a subject as infinitely interesting to River Platers as the weather to the Englishman. The " of course " was a kindly concession to some criticism of mine and showed an open and liberal mind. The architect was no self-deluding porteno to whom Buenos Ayres was everything good, true and beautiful. He was prepared to admit the warts. He were, indeed, the blindest and most incompetent of observers who failed to notice at the end of his first hour in Buenos Ayres that it is a city of " sham." Its buildings are of no distinctive value architectur- ally nay, not even the most notable. Without ex- ception they follow European models in exterior treat- ment, no matter how widely they may differ from them interiorly. That many of the public buildings are im- posing, and at first glance look like " the real thing," no one will deny. Besides, he who were foolish enough to deny this could be confronted with the evi- dence of the official photographs which have conveyed to an envious Europe the idea that Buenos Ayres eclipses her worn-out old cities in its architectural glories. A photograph makes lath and plaster to 83 84 THE REAL ARGENTINE look like granite and porphyry. Through the camera the graceful buildings of the St. Louis " World's Fair " appeared as permanent as the pyramids, though a few score labourers with picks and shovels wiped them out in less time than it took to put them up. Buenos Ayres is truly a city of sham. Nor is this to its shame. For it costs more to erect its steel-frame and cement structures than it does in Washington or London to rear solid piles of masonry. The country is destitute of workable stone, and the bricks made in the Argentine are so unsightly and spongy that they can only serve as a base for plaster. Wood also is scarce and the gorgeous doors, without which no fine building in Buenos Ayres would be considered com- plete, have to be imported at great cost from Europe. Many of these are beautiful and in this one respect the city may be said to outvie Paris, whence comes this taste for the grandeur in gates. It may be a mere old-world prejudice on my part, but I have never been able to look with real interest on a building that has not been made of brick or stone. In Europe, in the United States, also, we are accus- tomed to historic buildings that have been reared by competent workmen with the idea that they were to last forever, which, as Ruskin reminds us, is the only true way to build. To come to a new land and find that the most pretentious efforts of the builder's craft are chiefly stucco copies of European stone-work, leaves the beholder cold. The Congreso has been trying for some years to be- come the pride of the town. It is the great marble- veneer palace where the legislators sit in a literal A SPLENDID CITY OF SHAM 85 sense, for they deliver their speeches seated - and it is effectively situated at the western end of the spacious Avenida de Mayo. It has been many years in course of construction and I am afraid to say how many millions of money have been spent upon it. At least, it has cost more than three times the amount originally voted for it, and there are few senators or deputies who have not had some pickings out of the " job." No man knows when it will be finished, for it is said that as much material as would have built two such palaces has gone in at the front door of the works and been mysteriously absorbed. The explanation is that many a fine residence for a legislator with a " pull " has been built of the said material, after it had gone out a back- door! Meanwhile the gorgeous Palacio del Congreso presents a noble marble front to the great Plaza Con- greso and stares eastward along the Avenida without a blush for its ulterior nakedness. It is like the noble savage, " whose untutored mind clothes him in front and leaves him bare behind "; for when you have turned the corners from the plaza you discover that only the front part has been covered with marble slabs ; behind there is naught but dirty naked bricks. So it has been for three or four years and so it is like to re- main for some years to come; but. meanwhile a photo- graph of the front does good service for sending abroad as an evidence of the architectural grandeur of the capital city. But all this notwithstanding, the Congreso, as seen from almost any point of the Avenida, is an imposing building. Dignity and elegance are combined in its graceful proportions, and its elongated dome soars 86 THE REAL ARGENTINE above the surrounding buildings with a fine sense of confidence. The Corinthian column is used very ef- fectively in the facade and there are many rather too many statuary groups, in which winged figures and ramping horses are prominent. Grand stairways sweep up to the central door and inclined planes make possible the near approach of carriages. But immedi- ately one steps inside there is disappointment. The central hall is of mean proportions, and in a few min- utes all is confusion, as there is no real dignity of treat- ment, and certain inner courtyards are actually built with painted iron pillars hopelessly out of harmony with the prevailing style of the building. The Cham- ber of Deputies, in the form of an ellipse, is business- like and handsome, but no more imposing than some of the council chambers of the great provincial cities at home. The Senate is a smaller and more elegant chamber, richly furnished with ample seats of ease and commodious desks for each of its distinguished members. There is another luxurious room, dedicated to special ceremonies, and the deputies' lounge is im- mense and well-appointed, much after the style of some of the big New York clubs. It is, indeed, at once a club and an exchange, for here many of the " deals " by which some men make money in the Argentine, and others lose it, are consummated. On the first floor are ranged all the different minis- terial offices and committee rooms, and I think there were only two of these to which I did not gain admis- sion. But there was little of interest to note in them. The fact that the rooms devoted to the affairs of the Army and Navy were about one-tenth the size of those A SPLENDID CITY OF SHAM 87 required for the department of Public Works was elo- quent and reassuring. But although I explored the whole building, high and low, I find I have retained only a very blurred impression of the interior with its bewildering passages, through which liveried servants bearing trays of tea dishes were constantly passing, as the Argentine deputy is a firm believer in getting all he can out of his country in addition to his annual sal- ary of 12,000 pesos ($5,040), feeding at public ex- pense, not only himself, but as many relatives and friends as have the good sense to find important busi- ness to transact in the lobbies of Congress at meal times. A very handsomely furnished library is a notable feature of the palace. It is small, but admirably de- signed for the enshrinement of many books. One of the proudest possessions of the library, pointed out to me with much satisfaction, is a complete set of the Hansard Debates of the British Parliament. There are standard works on all sorts of social subjects and books of statistics enough to give a mere literary man a headache. I noted most of the books had a suspi- cious air of newness. There was a deputy busy con- sulting a volume of Hansard, but no other thirster after knowledge in the library at the time of my visit. * You may come here often," said the official who was showing me over the building, " and you will sel- dom see more than two people using the library, per- haps three." , The restaurant is much more popular with the dep- uties, but there is no doubt that if any of them ever by chance should wish to " verify his references " he 88 THE REAL ARGENTINE would find no difficulty in performing that most laud- able and improbable task with the aid of this well- stocked and well-managed library. On the whole, the impression of the Palacio de Con- greso upon the visitor is of a piece with the capital city. It is all so new, and all so unfinished, and promises to be rather shoddy when eventually it is finished. As a tall strapping doorkeeper, who showed me over the great rooms in the basement of the building, where are stored in iron chambers many official records, said, " when they've finished the building they will have to start all over again repairing it." I went outside on a balcony at the back to examine the still uncovered brick-work. It is of a quality which would not be used for workmen's cottages in England, but once it has been hidden under plaster, with thin slabs of marble imposed thereon, it will doubtless pre- sent a brave appearance for some years. But not for all time 1 At the eastern end of the Avenida stands the more historic "Pink House" (Casa rosada), or govern- ment building. It occupies the whole width of the Plaza de Mayo and extends backwards to the Paseo Colon beyond a mighty pile of plastered brick. Lacking in distinction and of no established style, it is chiefly notable for its abundance of windows. I re- member counting about one hundred and twenty in the east front alone, so that the whole building probably contains upwards of six hundred, and, with so many piercings in its walls, it will be understood that little opportunity was left for architectural ingenuity. An immense group of statuary surmounts the central part THE PALATIAL HOME OF "LA PRENSA." Fa9ade of the great newspaper office on the north side of the Avenida de Mayo. Different interior views of this building are given at pages 80 and 81. A SPLENDID CITY OF SHAM 89 of the building, and this too is most likely a stucco mas- terpiece, for if it were solid stone it would surely bring down the roof. The whole exterior is painted pink and on a bright day its appearance is undeniably pleas- ing, if you are content to take it as a whole and some little distance off, for a too close inspection will reveal many shabby patches and innumerable corners that are calling aloud for plaster and paint. Indeed, so large is the Pink House, it would only be possible to give it a coat of paint that would be fresh all over by employ- ing an army of workers, for, ordinarily treated, the paint on one side has become old ere the painters have reached the other. The interior of the Government House, Casa de gobierno which is the official designation of the Casa rosada contains many fine apartments, richly fur- nished. The great ballroom where the President gives his grave and stately entertainments from time to time is of elegant proportion and beautifully decorated. At the northwest corner of the Plaza de Mayo stands the Cathedral. Although I passed it daily for some eight months, I never mustered up sufficient inter- est to go inside I who have spent so many months of my life among the musty old cathedrals and churches of France. I felt there was little historic about this common and defective imitation of a Grecian facade, vulgarised by wreaths of electric bulbs around its Co- rinthian columns. At first glance it suggests a stock exchange rather than a place of Christian worship. There is a dome of glazed tiles, so far away from the low and squat entrance colonnade which faces due south that it seems to have no relation to it. I do 90 THE REAL ARGENTINE not remember noting the material of the building so little did it attract me but I fancy it consists of the usual plastered brick. O*ie day I did seek to en- ter, but could find no door that was open and never do I remember to have seen the main door open on a week day. This is characteristic of the churches of South America, where one misses that generous invitation of the fine old fanes of France. Mainly, the Cathedral of Buenos Ayres will stay in my memory as a great stock exchange building gone wrong, or illumin- ated on any of the numerous national feast days as a municipal theatre on a noche de gala. A stone-throw from the Cathedral stands the Mu- nicipal Building, or Intendencia, at the corner of the Avenida and the Plaza de Mayo. It is of no account, and does not compare in interest with the splendid palace of La Prensa adjoining it. I confess that as a journalist. I had more desire to inspect the famous building of the great Buenos Ayres daily than any other sight in the city. During my stay I had frequent busi- ness with the management of La Prensa and was priv- ileged to examine every corner of its wonderful home, on one occasion spending some hours in the building after midnight, when the sight of Buenos Ayres from the globe on which stands the Prensrfs Goddess of Light, who holds aloft her flaring torch over the rest- less city, is surely one that can be rarely equalled in the world. No doubt if one were to look at Paris by night from the apex of the dome over the Sacre Coeur, or London, say from the Clock Tower at Westminster, the sight would be more beautiful, but it could scarcely A SPLENDID CITY OF SHAM 91 be more impressive, as the extraordinary flatness of Buenos Ayres permits the observer on the Prensa tower to survey the whole vast city to its utmost limits and even to distinguish the twinkling lights of La Plata, the provincial capital, twenty-four miles away. I shall not readily forget that starry night when, at two o'clock, I stood up there in the lookout beneath the Goddess of Light and saw the great noisy, cruel city as a prodigious map of stars. The prodigality of Buenos Ayres in electric light was evident even at that hour, for mile upon mile the eye could follow the main streets with their double lines of radiant dots, thinning gradually as they flickered into the boundless plain be- yond, while on the fringes of the mighty metropolis appeared numerous constellations betokening the sub- urbs which the Federal Capital threatens to engulf. The interior of the Prensa building would require a chapter to itself to describe it with any attempt at de- tail. That is not possible here and a mere glimpse of it must suffice. It is almost everything that our Eng- lish ideas would expect a newspaper office not to be. If you enter from the front, there is nothing in the busi- ness department to strike your attention. There are many newspaper offices in the United States quite as im- posing. Nor is there anything particularly worthy of note in the reportorial rooms, the library, or any of the workaday departments, though the note of luxury is probably more pronounced in the apartments of the editor and the editorial writers than in most American offices. The machine room is splendidly equipped. The overseer, I was told, was an Argentine, but I sus- 92 THE REAL ARGENTINE pect he was of British or German parentage, for the native has little aptitude for mechanics. His assistant was a Britisher. There is a series of " show " rooms which made it hard for one, like myself, whose life has been spent in newspaper offices at home amid the well-loved odour of printer's ink, to imagine himself within a building devoted to the production of a daily newspaper. At two o'clock in the morning what a scene of hustle is a daily newspaper office in New York! Here every- thing was as quiet and orderly as in a museum when the visitors have gone ! And in truth it reminded me not a little of a museum. There was a magnificent concert hall, superbly decorated, with painted panels for the doing of which artists had come especially from France. Here many of the most famous operatic stars who have visited Buenos Ayres have appeared before select audiences invited by the Prensa; celebrated actors have tried new plays and illustrious visitors from foreign lands have addressed privileged audi- ences in many different tongues. The value of such a hall to a newspaper is so obvious that it is surprising none of the New York journals has yet attempted any- thing of the kind. I think the Prensa salon accommo- dates an audience of some five hundred, and it is smaller than the very charming little theatre of Femina, the Paris ladies' journal, in the Champs Elysees. Then there is a suite of living-rooms, fronting to the Avenida, worthy of a prince. These have been placed at the disposition of distinguished visitors to the Argentine with a liberality that has not always A SPLENDID CITY OF SHAM 93 been duly appreciated, for I was told that this very pleasant custom of honouring the country's guests has more than once been abused by a visitor staying so long that he threatened to become a permanent boarder of the Prensa. Hence, it may be, that the custom is no longer to be maintained, and I can imagine the business side of the newspaper can make even better use of the space. A sports-room for the staff includes appliances for every variety of indoor sport and exercise, from billiards to fencing, nor need one ever be at a loss for a cooling bath in the hot summer days, as the bathrooms and lavatories are worthy of a first-class New York hotel. But, most curious of all, perhaps, are the medi- cal and dental departments. The rooms for the physicians and surgeons on the staff of the Prensa are supplied with all the latest medical and surgical ap- pliances, and readers of the paper can come here free of charge for advice and treatment. There is also a legal department, where skilled lawyers look into the troubles of the newspaper's subscribers ! In short, the Prensa building is one of the most in- teresting sights of Buenos Ayres and a notable orna- ment of the Avenida. It is an epitome of Argentine progress, for less than fifty years ago the journal was a humble little four-page sheet, issued from some scrubby little shanty, while to-day it is one of the wealthiest, as it is one of the largest, newspapers in the world, housed in a palace that cost $1,500,000 to build. Its enterprising founder, the late Dr. Jose Paz, died at Nice a week or two before I left England and I was later present at the ceremony of receiving his remains in Buenos Ayres for interment at Recoleta, the 94 THE REAL ARGENTINE last resting place of the Argentine's aristocrats. He had built another palace for the whole Paz family in the Plaza San Martin, one of the most magnificent buildings in the city and one of the most princely pri- vate residences I have ever seen in any land, but he was not spared to see it occupied. If we cross the Avenida and go some four squares down the Calle Defensa we shall come to one of the few historic buildings in the city the church of Our Lady of the Rosary Nuestra Senora del Rosario. There is nothing worthy of note in its architecture, but in the tower which surmounts the front entrance to the north a number of cannon balls are embedded in the mortar of which the church is built. These are said to be relics of the British bombardment of 1806 and within are the flags which the Spanish viceroy, Liniers (a Frenchman, by the way), took from the British troops under General Carr Beresford when they were~ compelled to surrender to superior forces after their brief and ill-advised occupation of the citadel from June to August of that year. Liniers promised the flags of the conquered British to Nuestra Senora del Rosario before he went forth to engage Beresford on the I2th of August, and there they hang, objects of no small pride to the patriotic Argentine. (This on the authority of the native historian, Senor Jose Manuel Eizaguirre, though Mr. Cunninghame Graham states that the flags were taken from the in- competent General Whitelock in his disastrous attempt to retake the town in 1807, and that they hang in the Cathedral.) There are indeed few churches in Buenos Ayres that A SPLENDID CITY OF SHAM 95 will repay a visit. All are edifices of little note and, almost without exception, stuck rather shamefacedly among other buildings where you may pass a dozen times and never notice them once. Buenos Ayres has other business in hand than matters of the soul. No one_coujd describe it as an aggressively religious city. The Jockey Club is more to its taste. It stands rather more than half-way along the Calle Florida, going from the Avenida towards the Plaza San Martin. That admirable English word of recent invention, u swank," was surely coined by some one familiar with the Jockey Club of Buenos Ayres. But for the mo- ment I shall not seek to illustrate this by attempting to describe the spirit that animates this bizarre and curi- ous institution. In this chapter I am concerned only with its outward appearance. That is by no means unpleasing, though the facade of the building is con- stricted and the narrowness of the street prevents one from obtaining a satisfactory view of it. It is covered with an infinity of electric bulbs and no occasion to light these is ever allowed to pass unregarded. Often have I seen the building aglow like Aladdin's Palace in a Drury Lane pantomime and scarce a soul within sight to feast his eyes on the outward magnificence of this great national institution which exists for the main- tenance of the best breeds of man's devoted servant, the horse (no me parece, as they say in Buenos Ayres, or " I don't think," as they say elsewhere). Westward some six or seven squares from Florida one encounters in the Plaza Lavalle several noteworthy buildings. On the west side of that fine plaza the new Tribunales, or Law Courts, have just been completed, 96 THE REAL ARGENTINE and Buenos Ayres has nothing finer in the way of archi- tecture to show. Conceived on a massive scale and carried out with unusual thoroughness of detail, this is a magnificent palace for the housing of Justice, and as Justice is by no means blind in the Argentine she will find much in her palace to occupy her attention, even to distract it from those duties which in other lands she is supposed best to perform with shut eyes. Why a style that is reminiscent of Assyria and Byzantium should have been chosen, I know not, unless Argentine Justice is of Oriental origin; but the effect is undoubt- edly imposing. The six massy columns of the cen- tral fagade spring upwards to the height of five tall stories, with a large sense of strength and permanence, though it is true they begin in noble stone only to con- tinue upward in concrete. The five entrances are gen- erously inviting, but every Argentine knows that when he enters there to lodge a suit Heaven alone can guess how old he will be, how grey his hairs, when he comes out again with a verdict. Three more stories tower above the great plinth of the pillars, and over the en- trance runs a fine, spacious colonnade of Ionic columns. The building of the Tribunales is, in truth, one of the finest palaces of justice in any great city of the world, exceeded in sheer bulk, so far as I can remember, only by the Palais de Justice of Brussels, which is colossal beyond all reason. Even though a vast deal more cement than enduring stone has gone to its making, it will long remain the most noteworthy architectural effort in Buenos Ayres, and one cannot look upon it without feeling a certain reverence for the intentions of its builders. If Argentine Justice will only endeavour A PRINCELY SANCTUM ROOM OF THE "PRENSA'S" CHIEF EDITOR. A CORNER OF THE MEDICAL CONSULTING ROOM OF THE "PRENSA.' A SPLENDID CITY OF SHAM 97 to " live up to" the dignity of her new home, the citizens of the great young republic will have reason to congratulate themselves. On the opposite side of the same ample plaza stands the Teatro Colon (Columbus Theatre), the home of the state-aided opera. The citizens are immensely proud of this fine building and with good reason. Al- ways allowing for the difference between stone and cement, neither Paris nor London has anything finer than this palatial theatre. Admirably situated, it is no less admirably designed. It seems large enough to contain half a dozen opera houses, and indeed the theatre proper occupies less than half of the great build- ing. Near the Colon rears its more modest head the Colegio Sarmiento. Sarmiento was one of the greatest men the Argentine or any other country has produced in modern times. No one did more than he for the advancement of his native land, and while I would have preferred to see the Colon dedicated to the memory and the educational ideals of the famous presi- dent, it is perhaps only in accord with the lessening ideals of our day that amusement and social preten- tiousness should outvie the merely intellectual and useful. The old Teatro de la Opera still stands and thrives under private management. No doubt when it was first built it was thought to represent the last word in architectural grandeur, but a glance at its rococo fagade, wedged between two other bulidings in the Calle Cor- rientes, after having looked at the Colon, will show how rapidly Argentine ideas have expanded in recent years. 98 THE REAL ARGENTINE It is scarcely possible to continue an orderly corrv mentary on the public buildings of Buenos Ayres until one has passed them all in review. There are too many for that, and many are too similar. Others that I call to mind particularly at the moment, are the great offices of the Water Works (Aguas corrientes) and the Board of Education (Junta de education), both of which are fine examples of the stately manner in which the Argentine houses its public departments. The same cannot be said for the Art Gallery. I am willing to concede that in a young country the essential things, such as good drinking water and elementary education, should take precedence over the fine arts, but when so noble a building as the Colon could have been erected merely to provide society with a short season of social diversion each year (for we must frankly admit that it is more a society haunt than a temple of the muse), surely it might have been possible to do something worthier of the graphic arts 1 The art gallery occupies a commanding site on the northeast side of the Plaza San Martin, but the building is only a second-hand pavilion, bought from some exhibition (that of St. Louis, I was told) and re-erected here. It is a gimcrack affair of iron frame, wood and gaudy tiles. Although it looks quite attractive in a photo- graph, the shoddy workmanship, the great chunks of coloured glass, used as items of the decorative scheme, and the general air of temporariness inseparable from the purpose for which it was originally designed, leave one with the impression that the Argentines set a very low value on their art treasures. Yet there are several A SPLENDID CITY OF SHAM 99 canvases in the collection that may be worth more than the building that houses them. The sooner this trashy pavilion is thrown on the scrap-heap and a worthy gallery erected, the better for the reputation of the country in respect to the fine arts. One other public building there is that calls for note. It is known as the Casa de expositos, and occupies an airy position on the great thoroughfare that runs through the district of Barracas Montes de Oca. It is an immense building, larger than some of the great London workhouses, and seems to have an in- finity of rooms within. There is no fanciful treatment of the exterior; all is plain, massive, substantial. The purpose of this institution is to rear the undesired chil- dren of Buenos Ayres. An exposito is a foundling, and this is the Foundling Hospital of Buenos Ayres. Unwilling mothers bring their offspring here, leave them at the door, where they are willingly received " and no questions asked." The state does not despise this means of fostering the population, though it leaves many thousands of infants to die annually for lack of popular instruction on the rearing of the young and also by permitting the continuance of social condi- tions which make the survival of most children of the labouring class something of a miracle. When the station of the Central Argentine Railway at Retiro has been completed, Buenos Ayres will pos- sess one of the finest railway buildings in the world, but during my stay the termini of that railway and the B. A. P. were no better than some of the shabbier country stations in the United States, though the ioo THE REAL ARGENTINE Southern, at Plaza Constitucion, has a handsome edifice, and the Western, at Plaza Once, quite a presentable railway station. And talking of railway stations, I shall make this the end of my journey round the public buildings of Buenos Ayres at least for the present. I have not sought to do more than to give the reader as in the fleeting glimpses of a strange land from the window of a speeding train a rapid outline of the material Buenos Ayres. This splendid city of sham ! If I may not appear to have been deeply impressed with its beauties which have been so floridly pictured by more partial pens, that is probably because I have sought to bear in mind there are other great cities in the world. To the untravelled British provincial, who has shipped straight from some English port to the River Plate, I can well imagine the Argentine metropolis is the great- est wonder of the world. The most devoted admirer of Buenos Ayres that I met during my stay there was a gentleman from Kilmarnock, Scotland. He had never seen London; had never previously been out of his native Scotland; but his ten years in the Argentine capi- tal had convinced him that it stood unique in the world and in all time as the most glorious example of the power of man in the making of cities. That renegade Scot, I quite believe, looks forward with satisfaction to living out his life there and being hurried one day, some twenty hours after he dies, to the sweet rest of Chacarita ! But he is a type one may easily allow for (I always show a marked approval of their well- seasoned opinions) and pass on. The intelligent writer, however, who so often, from hasty observation A SPLENDID CITY OF: SHAM* 101 or from interested motives, conveys a too flattering L v'iliil factor m determining the social life of any community is, perhaps, the position of the womenfolk. In this respect, there is probably no city in the world on which so much has been written, yet SOME PHASES OF SOCIAL LIFE 157 concerning which the untravelled reader entertains more erroneous ideas. For this we have chiefly to thank the sensational journalism of Europe and North America, which, on the flimsiest of bases, has built up in the public mind the conception of Buenos Ayres as the metropolis of Vice, the world's mart of the White Slave Traffic. Bearing in mind much~ot what has been written on this unsavoury topic, and more that is circulated world-wide in irresponsible gossip, the visi- tor might expect to find the outward conditions of New York, London and Paris reproduced on a many- times magnified scale. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are no large cities that I have visited in Europe or North America, and I have visited most of them outwardly so free of social offence as Buenos Ayres and the other great cities of South America. By comparison, New York, Chicago, New Orleans, even Washington and Philadelphia, would seem sinks of iniquity. Go to the races at Palermo, visit any theatre in Buenos Ayres, with two or perhaps three exceptions, dine at any of the few restaurants where a good meal is obtainable, wander the streets at any hour of the day or night, and you will never have a moment's embarrassment from the social pest which obtrudes itself so flauntingly in New York or London. This is one of the few things they regulate better in Buenos Ayres. All places of public resort are barred to the demi-mondaine, and as she is officially known, this makes for a certain surface cleanli- ness of society, which is doubtless a delusion so far as the essential morals of the people are concerned, and may be written down an organised hypocrisy, but the 158 THE REAL ARGENTINE outward evidences are as stated and not otherwise. Furthermore, I know of no cleaner journalism than that of South America. Even the papers of the Anglo- Saxon world compare unfavourably in this respect; yes, those we deem highly " respectable " ! Ofce might expect to find among a Latin people something of the Continental levity in the treatment of this subject, but for propriety and sobriety, I do not believe it would be possible to better the journals, even of the lighter class, which are published in Buenos Ayres. They are almost absurdly respectable; the result, it may be, of a very obvious lack of humour in the people. A further consideration is the intense devotion of the Ar- gentine tojainilyjife, and to family TiTe of an alniost "Moorish elcclusiveness, so that, with very few excep- tions, almost any publication issuing in Buenos Ayres may safely pass from the hands of the parents into those of the youngest children. This will be something of a revelation to many of my readers, but when I come to deal with " The Ar- gentine at Home," the factors which make for this outward cleanliness of social life will become apparent. On the other hand, the position of the Argentine woman, which so vitally affects the social life of the country, corresponds in no way to Anglo-Saxon no- tions, and explains much of the dulness, artificiality, and insincerity it is my immediate business to describe. I remember very well reading in the pages of M. Huret's admirable work Del Plata a la Cordillera de I os Andes: An Argentine assured me that, on meeting in the street a lady whom he had known in his youth, and whom he is entitled MARBLE FOUNTAIN IN THE GARDENS OF THE PASEO COLON. PLAZA FRANCIA IN THE AVENIDA ALVEAR. The memorial is an offering of the French "Colony" to the Argentine on its Cen- tenary in IQIO. Various monuments, the gifts of other "Colonies," ornament different parts nf the onpit >! r'tv. SOME PHASES OF SOCIAL LIFE 159 to address familiarly (a la cual tutea), he is careful not to stop and speak to her, lest in doing so he might compromise the lady. Indeed, this Argentine informed the French writer that in such a case he preferred not to notice the lady at all, but to look away from her! Here, surely, is a suggestive fact. The statement seemed to me so remarkable that I raised the point with various Ar- gentines, and always had it confirmed, one gentleman assuring me that he would not even go so far as to pause for a moment to speak in the street with his sister-in-law if she were unaccompanied. He thought it was an extremely foolish social custom but considered it was one to which every gentleman was bound to conform. It will thus be seen at a glance that one form of social intercourse so familiar to us does not exist in the Argentine, which country is typical in this of almost all the South American Republics. How far this must condition the social life, any one can guess. The women are permitted somejrieasur^ o f freednrn until they become engaged, and may, under strict chaperon^ "age, attend formal receptions and balls, where the Ttmest of starchy manners are de rigueur. But after marriage, they_withdraw to the seclusion of their own hoTnes~ and~ devote themselves to the care of their families, scrdgm takmgjjart in any social gaieties, even l*oing veryTittleTtolhe theatre! One consequence of this is an extraordinary pre- ponderance of men at all pla^s of amusement. Him probably under-estimating the proportion when I say that in almost any audience, with the exception of that at the Teatro Colon, seventy-five per cent, would be 160 THE REAL ARGENTINE men. More, I have often deemed it a pathetic com- mentary on the arid life of the place to enter one of the many cinematograph theatres and note the rows upon rows of men, with no more than a handful of women sprinkled among them. Often in an audience num- bering probably five hundred, there would not be more than a dozen ladies and most of these foreigners. It is a condition of things that tends to perpetuate it- self, as my wife, even with me at her side, always felt a little ill at ease where so few of her sex seemed to be expected, although, without exception, the enter- tainments might have been arranged for a party of Sunday-school children, especially if it contained a num- ber*of " Budges " who revelled in " bluggy " subjects, as hairbreadth escapes and the adventures of Nick Winter, Sherlock (often rendered "Shylock") Holmes, and other preposterous " detectives " were the staple fare. This tremendous overplus of men in the places of amusement admits of two explanations. First, we have the unusual social custom which allows of the husband acting as vicarious pleasure-seeker for wife and family, so that no Argentine lady complains when her husband goes out alone to the theatre and winds up the night at his club, returning long after she has been asleep! Secondly, we have to remember that in all cities populated chiefly by emigrants, large num- bers of single men are to be encountered. It is the experience of business people in Buenos Ayres who em- ploy considerable staffs, that a large proportion of their workers are youngish men who 'seem to be ab- SOME PHASES OF SOCIAL LIFE 161 solutely without family ties or attachments of any kind, lonely wanderers from the. far lands of Europe. A further influence militating against the women- kind enjoying such entertainment as is to be found in Buenos Ayres is the widespread area of the city. With a population not very much larger than half that of Paris, Buenos Ayres occupies vastly more space, owing to the system of one-story houses, which is still universal beyond the congested business area of the town. The tram service, one of the best regulated in the world, as it is also one of the cheapest, affords only a very inadequate means of communication between the further suburbs and the theatre district, in Maipii and Esmeralda, while the primitive state of the Subur- ban roadways make travel by coach, or taxi-cab, a hazardous and painful experience. So it happens that we find nowhere those bright and attractive supper restaurants with merry groups of pleasure-seekers, men and women, discussing the play they have just come from; but, in their place, many cafes, exclusively oc- cupied by soft-hatted men smoking and drinking. The most pretentious restaurant in the city shuts its doors immediately after dinner, and even during dinner the ladies are always in an insignificant minority. Gaiety, forsooth! Who comes to look for that in Buenos Ayres has undertaken one of the most barren of pur- suits. As for the character of the resorts, little that is fa- vourable can be said. I remember with what delight I used to scan the theatre advertisements in the columns of La Prensa before I sailed for the River i6a THE REAL ARGENTINE Plate, and what pleasures we promised ourselves, my wife and I, when the day's work would be done ! Places of amusement there are in abundance, and their advertisements make a brave showing in the newspa- pers, but there are rarely more than two, or it may be three, entertainments that are worthy of a visit. South America is the happy hunting ground of all sorts of incompetent Spanish actors and draggle-tailed Span- ish dramatic companies. To see " The Merry Widow," "Casta Susana," or "The Count of Luxembourg " performed by a company destitute of vocal talent, with shabby, misfit scenery, and a ward- robe so poverty stricken that not a single actor wears a suit of his size (the whole company of them re- sembling, in evening dress, a scratch lot of waiters from a Soho chop-house), the orchestra clad in the mot- liest mixture of tweed suits, while the voice of the prompter, whose sweaty shirt sleeves obtrude from his ugly box in the fore-front of the stage, is heard above that of the actor to witness this is by no means a delectable experience; yet such is the manner of the fare most frequently offered in the theatres of the city. True, from time to time excellently organised Span- ish and Italian companies do occupy the principal theatres, and once a year there is a visit from some eminent French actor, with a picked company, but on the whole dramatic entertainment is pitifully poor, the pieces being staged in a slovenly and inadequate style. The State-aided Opera, which has its home in the great Columbus Theatre, is, of course, a national institution, and as such plays a very important part in the social life of the richer classes, though the bulk of the people SOME PHASES OF SOCIAL LIFE 163 have never seen more than the outside of the building. Opera is here staged as perfectly as in the finest opera- houses of Europe, and not a few " stars " first twinkled in Buenos Ayres before their magnitude was recognised in London or Paris. On the strength of the Opera, Buenos Ayres enjoys the reputation of being a very musical city. In the paraiso, or gallery, you might dis- cover a considerable number of Italians who had been attracted to the Colon out of a genuine delight in the performance, but in most other parts of the house, and most of all in the highly-priced boxes, the people are there to see each other : the ladies to study the dresses of the other ladies, the gentlemen to display in the persons of their wives and daughters the substantial condition of their banking accounts or of their credit. Nay, even during the most dramatic parts of " Aida," " Manon Lescaut," or " Otello," I have seen quite as many ladies in the audience with their backs to the stage, chattering to friends, as there were others following the play. And in the cazuela (a word which in domestic use signifies a stew, and theatrically a gallery reserved entirely for ladies also something of a stew) the chattering between the fan-flapping oc- cupants is so continuous that on a sudden lowering of the music one is sure to hear voices from the cazuela ringing out by contrast. For the rest, the Opera is a function conducted with the most tremendous gravity, and although the season is comparatively short (and usually unprofitable to the impresarios), it is not with- out its uses in enabling the native community to see a little more of each other than the restrictions of their social life would otherwise allow. To the stranger, 1 64 THE REAL ARGENTINE however, it is socially useless, and to the mere lover of music who could appreciate the excellence of its representations, it is almost prohibitively expensive, unless he or she is brave enough to incur the odium of being " spotted " in the five shilling gallery or paraiso, where no English resident of any position in the town would condescend to ascend. The consequence is, you will seldom meet an English resident who has ever been to a performance in the Colon. Of recent years, a movement in the direction of pro- viding healthier entertainment of a varied description for the family circle on certain afternoons of the week, much after the style of the American vaudeville, has been growing. Thus, on Saturday and Sunday after- noons during our stay, one used to see many ladies and young children at the Casino, but at night it was the rarest thing to discover in the whole crowded theatre a respectable woman. Occasionally, an American or English lady ventured with her husband to one of the boxes, where it was possible to sit behind a screen and see the performance without being seen, but every seat in the pit, the circle, and the galleries was occupied by a man, and invariably there would be at least one turn that was highly objectionable, and rendered the more so by the conduct of the audience, who, slow to re- spond to anything which the Anglo-Saxon mind recog- nises as humour, have an ever-ready nose for sugges- tiveness, and when that is forthcoming, do not merely laugh at it, but render it the more offensive by uttering all sorts of obscene noises. The Casino, the Theatre Royal, the Scala, and the Parisiana, during my stay, whatever may be the case SOME PHASES OF SOCIAL LIFE 165 now, were the evening haunts of the younger men. The first named was the only one that attempted any- thing like vaudeville entertainment, the majority of the artistes being usually American or English, and the difficulty of maintaining a programme was so great that the management had to content themselves with what they could get in the shape of second- and third-rate " turns " from overseas, so that often the variety was not remarkable, two or three groups of comic acrobats being included in one programme, and we all know that there is no variety in comic acrobats. The other three resorts were deplorable imitations of the Pari- sian houses that specialise in revues. W]thjtfie_excep- tion of the Casino, these theatres were all so small that they would not have been considered suitable in Amer- ica for more than lecture rooms or " picture " halls. The revues were usually so stupid, the scenery so con- temptible, the performers so inferior, that I always felt sorry the audience had nothing better to do than waste their time in such inanity. French was the lan- guage of the revues, with occasional Spanish songs and interludes, and there was only one joke which seemed to have a universal appeal some reference to " 606." Examples : A miserable youth comes on to visit a burlesque doctor. He begins explaining how he had met a young lady in a restaurant, using words of the most suggestive character, each sentence con- taining a pun on a number. " Ah," says the doctor, " your case must be treated arithmetically." As the patient proceeds with his tale, the doctor seizes on every punning phrase containing a number, jots these down on a slate, adds the lot up, result 909; but re- 166 THE REAL ARGENTINE versing the slate he exhibits to the audience " 606." Then there is feeble laughter of fools! Or a young lady has a song of the telephone, and the refrain is "Please give me number 606." Faugh! But the spectacle of an English acrobat on the Casino stage, dressed as a Highlandman, who at certain times pulled a string that raised the back part of his kilt and dis- played " 606 " painted on the seat of his " shorts " filled me with disgust. (Perhaps it should be ex- plained that " 606 " is a cure for syphilis.) The music in these revues usually consisted of a rechauffe of such up-to-date tunes as " Ta, ra, ra, boom de ay! " " A Bicycle Built for Two," " There are nice girls everywhere, " and many others that have run their little day in the " halls " of New York and London. In a word, anything more despicable in the matter of entertainment could not be conceived, yet in these poor, pitiful play-houses the young men and older bucks of Buenos Ayres were supposed to be " seeing life." At one of the theatres mentioned, a group of four- teen English girls were employed as dancers and sing- ers practically all the time I stayed in Buenos Ayres. They would certainly have found the greatest difficulty in earning a livelihood in the same way in their own land, and it made me sad to hear their poor thin voices uttering some drivel about " coons " and " moons " which to me was only partially intelligible in my na- tive language, and must have been so much meaning- less rubbish to the majority of the audience. The few painted ladies who frequented those places in the even- ings were a sorrowful group of regular attenders, ad- I SOME PHASES OF SOCIAL LIFE 167 mitted, I believe, at half price, and gave the final touch of squalid meanness to the scene. So much for the " gaiety " of Buenos Ayres! The reader will probably now begin to realise what an at- tractive place it is for the young American or Britisher. Poor young man, there is no one for whom I feel more pity. He is at his wits' end for wholesome amusement after business hours, and his case is even worse than that of the young Frenchman or the Spaniard, who can occasionally, at least, enjoy some reasonably good performance in his native tongue, for English dramatic companies cannot possibly find suf- ficient support to warrant the expense of the long voyage out and back. When I come to deal with the life of the British community, I shall describe the straits they are put to for social amusement and dis- traction, and the ingenuity with which they contrive to render their lives a little less unpleasant than cir- cumstances conspire to make them. _But_in the gen- eral social life of the town, the English take little or no part, keeping to themselves with their usual ex- clusiveness, rendered the greater here by the almost impenetrable barrier which the criollos, or older na- tive families present to all advances from without. In this regard, the British are not singular, as the French, German, Spanish, Italian, and other nationali- ties all maintain in a very marked degree their racial sympathies, although assimilating more quickly with the native element in the matter of language, which remains the great stumbling block of the Anglo-Saxons. Each community maintains its own clubs, with many sub-divisions among Italians and Spaniards, the Nea- 1 68 THE REAL ARGENTINE politans, for instance, having their meeting-places apart from other Italians indeed most decent Italians re- fuse to recognise the Neapolitans as fellow-country- men and, among Spaniards, the Asturians especially maintaining their local patriotism and racial interests in this way. These clubs, almost innumerable, afford the men a common meeting place to discuss their fortunes in the new land of promise and to recall their old days at home, and as the social side of them includes fre- quent concerts, banquets, and balls, the women of the company have also opportunities for appearing in their best clothes and seeing photographs of themselves in groups published in Caras y Caretas, the principal illus- trated weekly, whose every issue contains a large num- ber of such items. The social side of journalism is even more highly developed in Buenos Ayres and in South America gen- erally than in North America, so that one judging only by the newspapers and the illustrated periodicals might suppose there was nowhere in the world such sociability as in these Latin Republics. In Buenos Ayres and in Montevideo elaborate guias soclales are published annually, containing lists of " At-home Days " and other information of a personal character, while La Prensa, La Nacion, El Diario, and all the other newspapers devote whole columns daily to the movements of the local nobodies. No possible occa- sion for a banquete is allowed to pass, and to the Eng- glish reader Caras y Car etas is a weekly joy, with its dozens of photographs of these quaint little functions. Senor Don Alonso Moreno Martinez (let us say) is going to Rio de Janeiro on business for two or three SOME PHASES OF SOCIAL LIFE 169 weeks. The friends of Don Alonso thereupon ask him to dine with them at the Sportsman Restaurant, where, in two hours' time, they will demolish a quite eatable dinner of five or six courses. Meanwhile, one of the ten or fifteen hosts of Don Alonso has taken care to warn the photographer of Caras y Caretas, of Fray Mocho, and perhaps of P. B. T., and these three photographers turn up in the course of the two hours, make flashlight photographs of the little handful of diners, none of whom will be in evening dress, the group presenting the oddest assortment of clothes, and, behold, in the next issues of these widely circulated periodicals, excellent reproductions of the said photo- graphs, inscribed: "Banquet offered by his friends to Senor Don Alonso Moreno Martinez, in view of his departure for Rio de Janeiro, where he will ab- sent himself for a few weeks on affairs of importance." It is no exaggeration to say that thousands of these photographs are published yearly in the pictorial press, and when the honoured guest is a little more important than my imaginary Don Alonso, then the big daily newspapers are pleased to publish the photograph, while the provinces send up to Buenos Ayres scores of them every week. It is all very pathetic, but very elo- quent of the low level of social interest. Even the Races, so important an institution in Buenos Ayres, are conducted in a way that almost en- tirely eliminates the social element. Among the vast crowd that frequent the splendid course at Palermo on Thursday and Sunday afternoons, except in the enclo- sure belonging to the Jockey Club, very few women are to be seen. The men are there in mobs, not to enjoy 170 THE REAL ARGENTINE the races, in which they take no genuine sportive in- terest, but in the hope of making a bit of money. An American lady said to me she had never been at so quiet a demonstration before; she considered King Ed- ward's funeral was altogether a livelier ceremony ! The undemonstrative character of the people is, to us supposedly phlegmatic Anglo-Saxons, really extraor- dinary. I have an impression that it arises from an in- born laziness of character which is not altogether for- eign to their nature. They are chary of giving ap- plause in the theatre, and they sit dull and motionless before the most exciting films in the picture palaces. At the Races there is a feeling of sullen determination to get back twenty pesos or more for the two they have speculated. With all this lack of wholesome interest in life, out- side the brute struggle for the dollar, it is not surpris- ing that there should be a widespread devotion to gam- bling and the card table, most of the social centres already mentioned being also resorts of gamblers. And with all its veneer of socialness, there is no genuine public spirit throughout the heterogeneous community. In a minor way this was illustrated in February of 1913, when, owing to certain regulations which the Chancellor of the Exchequer imposed upon the shops selling drugs and perfumes, some 1,340 hairdressers and about 400 drugshops declared themselves " on strike " by temporarily closing their premises, to the serious inconvenience of the invalids and the dandies. The action drew forth the strongest denunciation of the Press for its anti-humanitarian character, but I noticed that quite as much sympathy was expressed SOME PHASES OF SOCIAL LIFE 171 with the male population who would thus be placed under the painful necessity of shaving themselves for a day or two, as with the suffering humanity whose need for medicine makes the druggist's one of the most suc- cessful businesses in the city. There is truly little humanitarian feeling evide"nT"in the soci aj : liie_of^BuenQ&. Ayr e^, although the organisa- tion of the Asistencia publica is in every respect ad- mirable and its first aid to the injured and the sick leaves nothing to be desired. The Hospital organisa- tion into whose care the patient passes after leaving the hands of the Asistencia is by no means so well con- ducted, so that while you may rely on being taken to a hospital in the best possible way, Heaven help you after you have been left there ! While it is true that the Argentine is far in advance of most of the other re- publics in its provisions for public vaccination, and also in its sane policy of making vaccination com- pulsory, the official treatment of disease always seemed to me to suggest a nervous dread of the pos- sibilities, a feverish readiness to test all the latest Euro- pean innovations for its suppression. The memory of past plagues is a potent factor in this; recollections and traditions of the devastations wrought in Buenos Ayres by Yellow Jack a generation ago do much to spread the nervousness when there is any whisper of epidemics in other South American ports. January 29, 1913, was the second anniversary of the first great epidemic of yellow fever that decimated the population of Buenos Ayres, and the anniversary coincided with an outbreak of bubonic plague in the northern city of Tucuman. The occasion was seized 172 THE REAL ARGENTINE by the very competent and vigorous writer of " Topics of the Day " in the Buenos Ayres Standard to deliver an excellent homily on " Disease as a Hygienist." From this I quote a few passages which I think worthy of attention, coming as they do from the pen of ar out- spoken local critic: Unfortunately government as an art is not understood to include or embrace hygiene. Politics concern themselves only with the passions of the people, and the detriment thereof. The oft-quoted tag: "the health (sic) of the people is the supreme law," is remembered only when an orator is anxious to display his erudition, or when he feels in a particularly cynical mood. The " supreme law," as every one knows, is to get what you can, when you can, how you can, but get it ! Not merely in the Provinces is hygiene neglected. The big cities are great culprits in this matter. Some years ago the city of Rosario was visited by bubonic plague. Instantly it was placed in a state of siege. Trains from outside were not allowed to enter, nor were passengers allowed to leave without " a thorough disinfection." They and their luggage were sub- mitted to the process, which gave them a disagreeable odour, but, unfortunately, gave immunity to no one. The outbreak was, as a matter of fact, too benevolent to cause wide alarm in Rosario, but it had a wonderful influence in stimulating the city authorities. As if by some enchantment, the old foetid system of cesspools in the centre of the city was done away with and modern sanitation installed. Legions of homeless dogs were summarily caught and mercifully asphyxiated. The vigorous broom of reform was wielded unceasingly for a few months, and Rosario smelled sweeter in consequence. But much still remains to be done in Rosario. In Buenos Ayres the old problem of sanitation is now in course of solution, a comprehensive and stupendous scheme being in course of exe- cution. Still there are places in the outskirts that would serve SOME PHASES OF SOCIAL LIFE 173 as nurseries for exotic disease-germs. Unfortunately, too, the conventillos are full of children and adults predisposed by heredity, by malnutrition and unwholesome surroundings, to fall victims to, and propagate, any passing epidemic. . . . The fact is, it is difficult, if not impossible, to find a city, town or village in Argentina that can boast of adequate sani- tary arrangements. The smaller the place the greater the problem. But to listen to Argentine orators, in Congress or out of Congress, it might be thought that this country had absolutely nothing to worry about but the unsatisfactory politi- cal conditions of the Provinces and the country. Whole ses- sions are devoted to a sterile debate upon the alleged covert intervention of the National authorities in the mean and petti- fogging " politics " of the Provinces But never a word about the squalor that is endemic in the cities and towns of these politician-ridden, quasi-autonomous States. Should Nemesis come along she will exact heavy retribution for culpable loss of time and opportunity, sacrificed in order that glib orators may air their ineffective gifts. Clearly social hygiene is not yet a strong point in the Argentine, where 62 per cent, of deaths among children born in the country are due to mal-nutrition and errors of diet. Think of the folly of it! A land clamouring for population, inviting immigrants of all races, yet allowing a high percentage of its new-born citizens to perish owing to the lack of humanitarianism in its social system. The life of the individual is valued lightly in the Argentine and in any sort of so- ciety where the welfare of the component atoms is deemed of no importance, the basis upon which to rear the fabric of social well-being is insecure. As an illustration of the poor stuff out of which the social life of Buenos Ayres has to be constructed, 174 THE REAL ARGENTINE note the following, which I reprint from the Buenos Ayres Standard: " Those who live in glass houses should pull the blinds down " is an old axiom worth keeping in mind. Although not exactly a glass house, there is a hotel in Calle Cangallo. A bedroom in the ground floor has two large windows fronting the street. Last night both these windows were surrounded by an admiring crowd. An Englishman who happened to pass naturally stopped to look at the attraction. This consisted of a young and exceedingly pretty woman who had " divested " herself and got into bed, quite oblivious of the fact that the persianas (lattice shutters) were wide open. The evening was warm, and as she slept the sleep of the just, she exhibited even more of the human form divine than would be considered dis- creet by a classical dancer. The admiring crowd freely criti- cised the sleeping beauty and made no attempt whatever to arouse her to a sense of her position. Our English friend promptly entered the hotel, explained matters, and a maid promptly entering the room switched off the light, to the ac- companiment of a chorus of groans from those who stood without. The lax organisation of the police is largely to blame for the lack of social sweetness throughout the Argentine. The officials of the force embrace every type of mankind from honest devoted servants of the public to the lowest of " grafters " and murderers. They are constantly swaying between excess of zeal and absolute indifference, or active participation in criminality. Here is a typical case as reported in the daily press: The Buenos Ayres iyth police have been accused of a serious abuse of authority. According to the accusers, a young couple SUMMER SCENES ON THE TIGRE, THE RIVER RESORT NEAR BUENOS AYRES SOME PHASES OF SOCIAL LIFE 175 engaged to be married were arrested in the Plaza Francia be- cause they were seated on a bench talking. Conveyed to the comisaria, the two prisoners were confined in separate rooms, and one of the two police officials, it is alleged, assaulted the young woman in a most cowardly and repulsive manner. The case has been referred to the Chief of Police. That is all I ever heard of the matter. Almost daily all sorts of police scandals come to light in the press, show their ugly heads for a moment, as it were, then slip out of sight, " no more being heard of the mat- ter." A similar case to that just quoted came to my knowl- edge, in which two Gringos figured unhappily. A young lady arrived from England to marry her sweetheart, who was employed in Buenos Ayres. On the second night of her arrival, they strolled to the Plaza San Martin, and, forgetful of the strange ameni- ties of local society, behaved in the " spoony " fashion of a loving cquple in a London park. They were promptly arrested and passed the rest of the night in prison. The creature who would arrest them might be a half-breed Indian, himself capable of any crime, but not understanding that Gringos are accustomed to do their love-making in the open! Quaintly enough, the police are often the ravishers of helpless women. Once during our stay a young woman was forcibly taken by two men in a taxicab to the woods at Palermo and there criminally assaulted by them, while a vigilante " kept the coast clear." The men then decamped, and the zealous agent of Argen- tine law himself committed a further criminal assault on the unfortunate woman. The police have even 176 THE REAL ARGENTINE been known though this predated our stay in the town to seize a woman in the street, conduct her to a house and assault her ! With the police as active agents in wrong-doing, the social life of the country could not be other than it is. Nay, when one has listened to many stories of official turpitude, the surprise is that so much approximating to modern civilised conditions should be able to survive in the Argentine. Although probably more in place in my chapter on the Emigrants, I am tempted to relate here, for the lurid light it throws on certain sections of Argentine society, one of several stories told to me by an Italian-doctor, who had practised for some twelve years, first in a provincial town and afterwards in the Federal capital. A countryman of his came to the Argentine, with his young wife and infant daughter. In Italy he had been a small market-gardener, and in the new Land of Prom- ise he started in a humble way as a cultivator of pota- toes and vegetables near a country town some thirty- five miles from Buenos Ayres. Modest prosperity at- tended his efforts, and in their rudely built and sparely furnished little rancho, the couple lived happily and contentedly with their little daughter. Some years of increasing prosperity passed in this way, and the Ital- ian was able to acquire a little more land. Meanwhile, a slight friendship had sprung up between him and the local comisario, who, in riding past, would occasionally dismount and enter the rancho, or take a seat in the shade of the rude verandah, to share a bottle of wine with the Italian and his wife. Indeed, the story as told to me by the doctor, with the warm, imaginative SOME PHASES OF SOCIAL LIFE 177 touch which the Italian imports from his native tongue into the Spanish, was quite idyllic up to this point, but here enters the element of tragedy. It so happened that the young wife, her husband's junior by some eight or ten years, was even more beau- tiful than the average woman of her class, admittedly the most beautiful of peasant women. At first the Italian was flattered by the friendship of the police of- ficer, whose good-will it was desirable to retain, if all sorts of oppressive restrictions hampering the develop- ment of the ranchero's work were to be avoided but later, he began to wonder whether this friendship sprang entirely from good feeling towards himself, or whether the comisario was casting an envious eye upon the young wife. Suddenly awakened to the possibili- ties of this, and being, in common with most of his race, a man of passionate nature, the Italian forthwith de- termined to remove from the district to some place where he hoped his wife might be free from any pos- sible persecution and he from being tempted to the usual extreme of the Italian husband whose honour has been assailed. Selling his plots and belongings for much less than he might have secured had he cared to wait a favour- able offer, he removed some forty miles away, leaving no clue as to his address. In this new locality he ac- quired a similar piece of land, set about the erection of a new rancho and the preparation of his soil. Here he opined his wife would at least be safe from the at- tentions of the official, and he determined he would exercise greater care in preventing the comisario of the new district from setting eyes on her, for he had now 178 THE REAL ARGENTINE realised, what all his countrymen in the Argentine come speedily to understand, that a good-looking wife is one of the most dangerous possessions an emigrant can take with him to the new land. Quietly the couple went about their business for a time, the wife actively assist- ing in the work of the little farm. The shadow of the evil comisario seemed to have passed. But it was not so. Annoyed at being baulked of his prey, that ruffian had carefully followed up the disappearance of the Italian couple and traced them to their new place of abode. This he managed by the simple process of sending out an official description to all the surrounding comisarias, describing the couple and asking for news of them to be forwarded to him, as though they were fugitives from justice ! And so it happened that, after a few more months of peaceful industry, the Italian was hor- rified one day to see his wife's persecutor riding down the main street of the town, in company with the local chief of police. Scenting evil afoot, he hastened home to warn his wife, and make preparations for eventuali- ties. That very evening the comisario, accompanied by a local vigilante, called at the house and demanded ad- mission, declaring they held an order for the arrest of the Italian. The latter's response was to discharge a revolver point blank at the police agent, whom he griev- ously wounded, the officer keeping out of range. The latter then withdrew, only to return with two more agents, and several roughs from a neighbouring cafe. Acting on his instructions, the gang attacked the house, the two vigilantes being killed by the Italian before he SOME PHASES OF SOCIAL LIFE 179 was overpowered and bound to the rough wooden posts of the inner wall. The comisario and the scoundrels who accompanied him now criminally assaulted the young wife and daughter before the eyes of the help- less man, and eventually left, carrying away with them the mother and child, only when the outraged husband seemed to have been rendered raving mad. Later, several agents were sent from the local comisaria to remove the now almost lifeless Italian, who had been seriously injured in the melee and crippled for life owing to the wanton brutality of those who broke into his rancho. He was lodged in jail, and after many months was tried and sentenced to some five years' imprisonment for the shooting of the two agents sent to arrest him. Surviving the prison ordeal, he was eventually released, though crippled, beggared, and hopeless. But the Italian spirit of revenge burned fiercely within his shattered frame, and obtaining one of the deadly stilettos with which his countrymen are all too familiar, within a few months of regaining his freedom, he succeeded, in the most dramatic manner, in killing not only the comisario who had worked such havoc with his life, but also the brother officer who had so callously aided and abetted him. The one he de- spatched in a cafe; the other in his private room at the police station, allowing himself to be arrested imme- diately thereafter. Of his ultimate fate the Italian doctor could not speak, but he assured me the facts were as stated, and that the man was personally known to him. Nor did he know what sinister fate befell the wife and daughter. Such is one of the little tragedies i8o THE REAL ARGENTINE of the Argentine, and one that I have been assured by those who know is typical of numberless unwritten chapters in its social life. It may be objected that the killing of the officer in a restaurant and being able to escape to a distant town and kill another, seems improbable; but this you will understand when you know what happens in the event of a public murder in the Argentine. I remember walking along Calle Maipu, in Buenos Ayres, soon after my arrival, when suddenly seven or eight people bolted out of a small cafe, the entrance to which was down some steps, and whence came the screams of a woman. Presently two policemen came hurrying along and disappeared within. Everybody near the scene took care to avoid the immediate vicinity of the cafe, lest he might be arrested as a witness ! What had happened was this. A man had been shot dead, and his body was lying in the cafe, where only an old woman who attended the bar remained, every one who had been in the place at the time of the murder inconti- nently bolted. And well for them that they did so, as it is the custom of the police to make indiscriminate arrests of witnesses in the neighbourhood of any crime that has been committed, and these helpless witnesses are lodged in gaol and treated with greater rigour than the perpetrator of the deed! So notorious is this ludicrous procedure, that there is a saying in Buenos Ayres, " It is better to be a murderer than a witness," and consequently an enormous number of crimes pass unpunished for the simple reason that no one who val- ues his personal safety cares to come forward as a wit- ness. SOME PHASES OF SOCIAL LIFE 181 The nature of the crimes perpetrated daily through- out Argentina is such that the Anglo-Saxon mind re- volts at the mere thought of human beings existing who could be guilty of such enormities. But it is only fair to say that in these crimes of passion and violence, the native Argentine is seldom involved, the lower class Italian, and especially the Neapolitan, being the worst offender. Indeed the Italian doctor who told me the story related above was careful to explain that neither of the comisarios who played such villainous parts were Argentines of pure descent, but were Spanish-Italians. One has only to note the names of the persons con- cerned in the cases reported in the Press to realise that Italy, and especially that hotbed of vice and_criminal- ity of which Naples is the centre, is responsible for the largest percentage of the inhuman outrages that stain the records of the Argentine. As I have hinted, the Gringo who gets himself in- volved in any sort of dispute with the police is likely to regret it. The only safe course is to avoid at all costs the intervention of the legal authorities. When one must go to law, then care must be taken to ensure the proper course of justice, either by judicious bribery or personal influence ! I have known of cases in the United States where it has been necessary " to purchase justice," particularly one important judgment which was only placed beyond doubt by liberally feeing the judges. Similarly, the honest man who meekly sits down, and out of his unworldiness allows " justice " to take its course in the Argentine, without doing some- thing to help it along, may live to regret his scrupulous- ness. 182 THE REAL ARGENTINE An English acquaintance whose sense of justice is so abnormally developed that he would go to law about the most trumpery matter rather than submit to what he felt to be an injustice, one morning had to make some calls in Buenos Ayres, and, hailing a coach from the rank in front of the hotel, he drove to his first ap- pointment, a matter of some ten minutes, asking the driver an Italian to wait for him at a certain point a few hundred yards distant, where coaches were permitted to stand. But after discharging his business and going to the place in question, he could not find the coach. The driver had evidently accepted another fare, hoping to get back in time for my friend. But, behold him at the hotel in the evening, demanding pay- ment of fifteen or sixteen pesos, on the ground that he had waited several hours for the return of the trav- eller, and only gave up hope of his coming back when it was nearing dinner time ! The Englishman declined to disgorge six or seven dollars for his ten minutes' coach drive, and offered two pesos, exactly double the amount he had legally incurred up to the time of leaving the coach, and thus allowing for the time he had ordered the coachman to wait. This the man indignantly re- fused, quitting the hotel with vows of vengeance on the Englishman who, by the way, had only a smattering of the language, or sufficient to indicate in a crude and gesticulative manner what he required. Next morning, or it may have been the next again, when walking along the Calle Florida, our Gringo was surprised to find himself stopped by a policeman, with whom was the cochero, and reauested to accompany VIEWS OF MAR DEL PLATA. In the second picture the large building of " El Club,' the gambling centre during the short bathing season, is seen, and the bottom illustration shows the new " Rambla " or promenade of cement structure which has supplanted a rickety wooden one. SOME PHASES OF SOCIAL LIFE 183 them to the comisaria. He gave the agente to under- stand, as well as he could by gesture and some of his odd Spanish words, that he would go with him in a coach, but would not be taken on foot through the streets. Eventually this was agreed to, and thus they reached the police station, where some hours passed before the magistrate could or would inquire into the case. In vain did the prisoner claim permission to com- municate with the British Minister, and when at length he was brought before the judge, it was clear that gen- tleman had made up his mind on the story already told by the cabman, which was naturally a tissue of lies. A request for an interpreter was at first refused, the magistrate saying he believed the Gringo understood well enough what was being said to and about him, but on continued protest, an interpreter was called, and he made it his first business to interpret nothing said either by the magistrate or by the accused, but advised the lat- ter to pay up and get out of the court at once. Mr. Gringo, being a particularly stiff-necked British type, insisted that having incurred the trouble of being ar- rested, he would not now pay one centavo more than he had offered the cochero at the hotel, and demanded that his side of the case should be fully interpreted to the magistrate. Even this seemed to make no impres- sion on the enlightened administrator of the law, who stated that the simple fact remained that the coachman had been engaged and had not been discharged, and that evidently the accused had not taken sufficient pains to make sure that the coachman was not waiting for 1 84 THE REAL ARGENTINE him at the appointed time and place, the prosecutor producing a lying witness who swore to seeing him at the appointed place and at the time stated. At this juncture the Englishman again in the most emphatic way instructed the interpreter to insist on hav- ing the case adjourned until he could have time to com- municate with the British Minister, as he was willing even to run the risk of a night in jail rather than ac- cede to any order of Court that seemed to him un- just. His request was again dismissed as irrelevant, the matter being one entirely for the consideration of the police judge. Then, suddenly recollecting that at the moment of his arrest he was on the way to visit a very influential Argentine with whom he had business relations, and who took a prominent part in local poli- tics, he suggested that he be permitted to communicate with this gentleman. When the judge heard the name of this gentleman pronounced, and realised he might be a friend of the accused, the whole com- plexion of the case instantly changed, and instead of passing judgment for the payment of the coachman's claim, as he had originally shown a readiness to do, he calmly asked the accused why he had not mentioned before that he was a friend of Senor Fulano de Tal, and the matter could have been arranged immediately. Moreover, he would not even allow that the coachman was entitled to more than one peso, his minimum fare for the ride from the hotel to the place at which the Englishman left the coach ! So dumbfoundered was the plaintiff at this sudden change of front that he burst into a volley of oaths against the Gringo and also insulted the judge, who SOME PHASES OF SOCIAL LIFE 185 forthwith clapped him into jail to cool off for the next three days ! Our friend, not a little satisfied with the turn of events, was thereupon liberated, with no worse loss than that of some four or five hours' time, and the ex- penditure of a certain amount of nervous anxiety. But that was not the end of the matter. The cochero, having spent a few pesos by way of bribes anticipatory, had ample time in the next three days to nurse his wrath to scalding point, and the Englishman was ad- vised, in view of this, to be very careful of his move- ments after these three days had passed, as it was a matter that might be settled in the approved manner of the Italian at the point of the stiletto. It so happened that five days after the court scene, the Englishman was due to sail for England, and dur- ing the days following the prisoner's release he prac- tically never left the hotel, even taking the precaution of having his luggage conveyed to the boat by another traveller, to throw the coachman off the scent, if per- chance he was lurking about, seeking vengeance. Then when ready to leave, a friend engaged a taxicab and drove up in it to the kitchen entrance of the hotel, the Englishman jumping in instantly. Thus he succeeded in eluding the ruffian, but he actually saw him arrive at the quayside just when the visitors were being turned off the vessel. The simple narration of this episode can give but faint idea of the anxiety and inconvenience it must have caused to the English traveller, and it is to be doubted whether in the end he was the gainer. My own policy was invariably to submit to any sort of injustice when 1 86 THE REAL ARGENTINE I could not see an immediate likelihood of successfully protesting against it. The line of least resistance is certainly the only policy in the Argentine that makes for comfort and peace of mind. The practice of indiscriminately thrusting people into jail and leaving them there for several days, in the vilest conditions and often in a common room with the most desperate characters, before inquiring into their cases, had one solitary merit, and, as the Irishman said, even that was a bad one. In every motor acci- dent that takes place and there are many daily the first thing the policeman does is to march the chauffeur off to jail, and have the car removed after- wards. It is a matter of complete indifference to the police whether the accident is the fault of the chauffeur or not off he goes to jail and there he may lie for several days before he is discharged. As it would be difficult to discover more reckless drivers than those who make pandemonium of the streets of Buenos Ayres, this struck me as not entirely a bad method. To assume the guilt of the motor-driver until he had proved his innocence was, in nine cases out of ten, to take the proper course. Some English acquaintances of mine, however, who kept an automobile and em- ployed a very considerate and cool-headed Englishman as driver, were unable to agree with me, as their man had just spent three days in jail for a slight accident, in which a careless passenger had injured his foot by stepping off the pavement against the wheel of the car, and owing to the verminous condition of the jail, the poor chauffeur had to destroy all his clothes after he was liberated! My friends also had to suffer in- SOME PHASES OF SOCIAL LIFE 187 convenience owing to their car being abandoned in the street by the arrest of the driver, and being held by the police for a day or two before it was delivered to them, sustaining in the meantime some damage. The only moral of this story is that Buenos Ayres is no place for an English chauffeur ! But of course it is easy to be critical of the social conditions of a country which, after all, has no more than emerged from somewhat primitive conditions into the larger life of a great modern nation. The Span- ish civilisation in America was not in every way su- perior to the native civilisations it destroyed and sup- planted, and for generations it made but little progress of itself, if anything deteriorating as the inevitable consequence of its low and brutalising aim the securing of treasure for the Spanish Crown,. The Spanish communities established throughout the con- tinent were notoriously lacking in ideals. Until they threw off the yoke of Spain and began to feel within themselves the stirring of national aspirations, to cherish ambitions of elevating themselves into indi- vidual nations, their history went some way to justify the famous cynicism that the true dividing line between Africa and Europe are not the Straits of Gibraltar, but the Pyrenees. No longer, however, can it be said that any of these virile young peoples are without their ideals. If the Argentine citizen had no other figure than the splendid one of Sarmiento to point to, he would still be justified in claiming for his country a place among the intel- lectual nations of our time. And Sarmiento is but one of many great men whom the Argentine has produced. 1 88 THE REAL ARGENTINE There is everywhere in South America to-day an unmistakable reaching out for better things. Along- side the sheer brutality, unhappily still existing, the tender plant of intellectual culture has been growing, and with it true humanitarianism must make progress. It is, however, the defect of virtue ever to be less in- teresting than vice ; not only in the Argentine, but also among ourselves, the baser elements of society have a knack of thrusting themselves in front of the worthier, so that the observer is liable to get his perspective askew. That is why it is easy to overestimate the im- portance of these baser elements of Argentine social life, though not to overdraw the picture of actual con- ditions. It may fairly be said that the baser ele- ments of social life touch a higher percentage of the whole in the Latin-American civilisation of to-day than in that of Europe or North America, but that the more elevating factors are present and, if less in de- gree, are similar in kind to those of the older nations, and will eventually produce a worthy social system, in which intellectualism and humanitarianism will tri- umph over the brute forces of self-seeking and indif- ferentism. But the time is not yet. The Argentine is credited with expending more on the education of its people than any other country in the world, with the exception of Australia, and if the truth must be told, it is not getting the best value for its expenditure. Since the days when Sarmiento, who took part in the insurrection against the notorious Rosas in 1829, and some twenty years later had a hand in overthrowing that gaucho tyrant, established in 1856, the first department of public education, the pub- SOME PHASES OF SOCIAL LIFE 189 lie schools of the Argentine have been regarded as one of the first considerations of every statesman. Sar- miento spent his life in the cause of education, which he had studied in the United States and in Europe be- fore rising to power in his native land, and during his presidency he achieved great things in the founding of schools and colleges throughout the country. A visitor to Buenos Ayres, and especially if he be one of official distinction in his own country, will be shown some most admirable educational institutions ini the federal capital, and among these the splendid Colegio Sarmiento, which perpetuates the memory of the wisest and most humane of Argentine presidents. So far good, but he will not be told, especially if he be under official guidance, that probably the school teachers throughout the country are four, five, or six months in arrears with their salaries, the appropria- tion for public education having somehow fallen short of the requirements. Just as an immense amount of the corruption and criminality among the police is due directly to the infamously low rate of re- muneration, which in 1912 was practically the same as it had been some fifteen or twenty years before, though the cost of living had meanwhile doubled, if not trebled, so is school-teaching rendered one of the most despicable of callings by reason of the shame- fully low wages paid to those engaged in it. In a country where the commonest forms of manual labour are highly rewarded, the rank and file of teachers are not so well paid as they are in the United States or in England, and thus, in financial standing, fall into the meanest class of workers. Nay, it is by no means 190 THE REAL ARGENTINE unusual for their wretched salaries to be as much as six months in arrears, and in any case the average teacher seldom has the satisfaction of handling his or her income, owing to a check system worked under the immediate auspices of the Educational Department it- self. The school teacher, being quite without resources and living from hand to mouth, wishes to buy, let us say, a sewing machine for his wife, or some household necessity. He obtains this on the instalment system, and the Educational Department becomes his fiador, or guarantor, for the transaction. It does more; it actually pays the instalments and marks them off against his salary ! In such wise many teachers do all their shopping, even to the purchase of their eatables, and rarely have the satisfaction of handling their ac- tual salaries. No wonder that the poor pedagogue, who ought to be the hope of his country, is more often despised and contemned for his inability to acquire money in a country where the possession of it is the sole measure of a man's ability. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that there is a genuine desire for knowledge among the Argentine people to-day, a willingness to be instructed, only sec- ond to that of the North American, whose advanced ideals of education first fired Sarmiento to emulation. The works of an informative character sold in the bookshops would, I am confident, greatly outnumber those of light reading, were statistics available. There is- throughout the Press the same evidence of a serious interest in subjects which in England would be consid- ered " heavy " or " dull." In a word, the good Ar- SOME PHASES OF SOCIAL LIFE 191 gentine is a man very much in earnest, given to pon- dering the problems of life in the light of the best criticism he can find, and if he is still overshadowed by his worser compatriots, he is by no means a negli- gible quantity, nor is he rarely to be met with. In many ways the country seems to be passing through much the same social development as the his- tory of the United States presents, always remember- ing, however, that it is based on a civilisation that dif- fers radically from the Anglo-Saxon. A further evidence of this is the extraordinary popularity of the lecture as an instrument of education* In the course of a single year, the procession of lecturers who invade Buenos Ayres assumes proportions that are almost comic. Not a week passes but the newspapers herald the coming of some European celebrity, whose por- trait is published broadcast, whose life is written up in every journal, and whose lectures (for which a high fee is usually charged) are pretty sure to be well at- tended. The subjects on which these lecturers dis- course are often of the most forbidding seriousness, and only people famishing for knowledge, or utterly at a loss otherwise to dispose of their time, could pro- vide audiences for them. These confer encistas come indiscriminately from France, Spain, and Italy, the languages of these countries being so widely repre- sented in the Argentine that a gathering capable of understanding any or all of them is not difficult to get together. Some of the lecturers are officially invited by the Government, who pay their fees and expenses, others the majority are quite as much interested in filling their pockets as in furthering the intellectual 192 THE REAL ARGENTINE development of the Argentine, and very willingly in- vite themselves, any lecturer of the Latin race being a gifted self-advertiser. A good many ladies, chiefly Spanish novelists of reputation or political agitators, also grace the lecture platform in Buenos Ayres and the large provincial centres. A reception committee is usually formed to meet the distinguished visitor at the boat, and there is the usual banquete, with the equally inevitable copa de champana, and the ubiqui- tous photographers from Caras y Caretas and the other pictorial papers. This movement has assumed proportions which in 1912 led the caricaturists to turn their attention to it, and cartoons of the different lecturers hurrying off with bags of gold, indicated the local cynicism on the subject; but apart from its amusing aspect it ought to be accepted as an earnest of the desire that does exist for instruction in subjects of public life. One popular lecture, for instance, was devoted to " The Manage- ment of Public Museums," but literary subjects, studies of the lives of famous authors, and historical studies, as well as travel-talks, seem to be most accept- able. One lady arrived from Spain with a lecture in which she endeavoured to prove that Columbus was a Spaniard, based upon the most slender evidence put forth by a Spanish antiquary, with whom the wish was father to the thought; but she was listened to in a good-humoured, sceptical manner, which spoke well for the common-sense of the people, who wisely do not care a straw whether Columbus was a Gallego or Genoese. Among the celebrities engaged under Gov- ernment auspices to lecture in recent years was a very SOME PHASES OF SOCIAL LIFE 193 famous French novelist, who is one of the favourite authors throughout Latin America. In common with most other authors, he not only lectured, but made use of his experience on returning home to describe the countries he had visited. His description of Uruguay is particularly remembered in Montevideo, as he is said to have mentioned the fine coffee plantations of that country, and this was the first that any Uruguayan had ever heard of them ! Although the final civilisation of the Argentine peo- ple will leave between it and any Anglo-Saxon civilisa- tion a marked cleavage, yet it will approximate more closely to the British or North American than to the French or Spanish. To say that the Argentines are Latins with certain aspirations which are essentially characteristic of the Anglo-Saxons, would be too broad a generalisation, but, closely analysed, we can discover even more characteristics in the Argentine sympathetic to British social notions, imitative of them, perhaps, than in the French or Spanish, though at bottom, the Argentine remains Latin, and every nation, like every individual, is doomed to carry, wherever it goes along the road of progress or retrogression, " the bag- gage of its own psychology." Socially, the British have passed through some of the phases from which the Argentine is only just emerging, and North Amer- icans have passed through others which at no time af- fected British social life. In concluding this chapter, I have to admit that I have been somewhat hampered in its construction by the fact that many illustrations which I have stored in my mind affecting the social side of things, fall more 194 THE REAL ARGENTINE properly into other sections of my book, so that it is impossible to avoid in some degree the overlapping of interests, especially when I deal with subjects such as that in my succeeding chapter, which is really a further consideration of the social life of the country. In the present chapter, I have therefore sought to do no more than touch discursively upon certain incidents and matters coming within my knowledge during my stay on the River Plate, which may shed some light on an aspect of the Argentine which few American or English writers mention in their usually flattering and too often uncritical studies of the country and its peo- pie. CHAPTER XII BUSINESS LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES ALTHOUGH I will not admit that Buenos Ayres is the most desirable place of residence, or that I should will- ingly pass any considerable portion of my life there, I can appreciate its fascination for the man of busi- ness. I was continually meeting Britishers who would, in the crudest fashion, contrast the Argentine capital with the cities of their Homeland, to the total eclipse of the latter, proclaiming that there was but one place on earth for them, and that was Buenos Ayres. But I never met an American there who pre- ferred it to any of the great cities of his own country. These British exiles who so rejoice in their expatria- tion are undoubtedly maintaining in their adopted city an existence that in all points of comfort cannot be compared with that within the reach of a person of very moderate means at home. Yet they are by no means to be regarded as asserting loudly what they^ only half-believe. It is more than probable that they are honestly convinced of what they say, and that, so far as they are concerned, they do but utter the simple' truth. The secret of the matter lies in the fact that in the Argentine, as, indeed, in most alert young countries, there is a quick response to the efforts of the business man, which is but rarely experienced in the markets of the Old World. In this progressive Republic we have 195 ig6 THE REAL ARGENTINE the phenomenon of some seven million people, of whom more than twenty per cent, are accessible in one city, crying out for commodities. It is a country al- most destitute of industrial resources, lacking coal, minerals, wood, the essential elements of industrial life, for though minerals and wood do exist within the political delimitations of the Republic, they are geo- graphically distant from the centres of population. Imported coal is extremely costly, while water power, owing to the extraordinary flatness of the land and the sluggishness of its rivers, is difficult, if not impossible to utilise. So that, for all practical purposes, unless the discovery of oil deposits in the southwest may work a revolution in industrial possibilities, we may regard the Argentine as a country at present limited to the pursuits of agriculture and cattle-rearing. These are the true bases of its wealth; for the development of these have English capitalists poured some 150,- 000,000 of money into the country, to cover it with a system of admirably constructed and well-managed railways. Mainly on the strength of these industries, have British, French, and other foreign investors taken up the millions of Government Stock for the na- tional development of the Republic. In all some 300,000,000 of British money have been invested in the country. Thus we may view the people as divided into two great camps : those who work the land and breed cat- tle, and those who make a living (and something to spare) by supplying the requirements of the former class, acting as middlemen between the European or North American exporter and the Argentine con- BUSINESS LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 197 sumer. Roughly into one or other of these very dis- proportionate classes every worker in the Argentine must come, although, of course, there are endless va- riations of relativeness, if one cares to search for them. It is true that here and there some slight in- dustrial progress falls to be noted. There is a good deal of tobacco making; there is more than one suc- cessful paper-making enterprise; in a timid way there is even the founding of iron; but broadly speaking, industries, apart from the land, do not exist. It is true you can get a table made, but it will be a very in- secure table, it will also be very expensive, and you will be sorry you did not buy an imported one. The same applies to many other simple kinds of manufactured articles, which might, with a little patience and care, be successfully and profitably produced in the Argen- tine; but it is a safe assumption that for many years to come, probably not within the lifetime of the pres- ent generation there is no likelihood of national in- dustry developing to such an extent that it would be able to replace in any great measure the imported arti- cle. Meanwhile, the commission agent is enjoying a golden age of gain. It is a fairly easy matter to in- duce people to purchase who are in a chronic state of needing all sorts of commodities, living, as they do, in a country which is but poorly supplied even with the commonest necessities of modern domestic life. The commission agent has merely to announce the fact that he has made arrangements with Messrs. So & So, the well-known manufacturers of this or that, and will be pleased to supply it on certain terms, for his cus- 198 THE REAL ARGENTINE tomers to find him out and make him busy, granted that the article in question is one for which there is a real need. The crudest sort of advertising, the bald- est form of announcement, will prove almost as effec- tive as the most skilful propaganda would at home. So it happens you will find many British residents of the meagrest intellectual endowments who have acquired considerable fortunes by doing nothing more brilliant than I have indicated, but who have been lucky enough or shrewd enough, if you will to secure the representation of some useful British or American-made device, such as a wind-mill water- pump, of which many thousands are in use throughout the country; a mechanical cash register, without which no Argentine business establishment is complete ; a pa- tent grass cutter; or almost any conceivable article of general utility. While the primal wealth of the country may come, as it does the world over, from the land, the most substantial profits made are those that go into the pockets of the agents, many of them unskilled, who handle the imported manufac- tured goods which the people of the country require in exchange for their grain, their cattle, their cow-hides, and their wool. Economically, of course, this is an unfortunate state of things, but I am concerned not with things as they ought to be, but as they are, and this is the present condition of the Argentine. The net result of all this is a very pronounced feel- ing of briskness in almost every branch of commerce. The country is steadily progressing in its agricultural development, the Government is steadily borrowing to advance public works, and, except for the tempo- C -*' L 1- BUSINESS LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 199 rary set-back in 1913, it may be said that credit all round has continued extremely good for many years. Consequently, men of business do not haggle and dis- cuss the fractional profits with which manufacturers and merchants have now-a-days to be content in the older countries of the world, and especially when there is a large amount of borrowed capital floating through- out a country, there is sure to exist something of that spendthrift feeling which we always associate with the individual borrower. This tends to make commercial conditions extremely " easy." Given that A possesses the article which B wants, or thinks he wants, or which perhaps A has told him he ought to have, there is every likelihood that B will purchase the same at A's price, or, if he insists on a reduction, that will probably be the result of a personal knowledge of A, who is most likely in the habit of placing a specially high profit on any article he offers to B, intending to rebate the excess of profit. This used to be the sole method of doing business throughout the Latin-American market, and here and there lingering traces of the Moorish system of asking double or treble what one expects to receive for an article, may be detected. Until quite recently, much of the shopping in Buenos Ayres was conducted on this ancient Oriental system of beating down the seller. No Argentine lady would ever have dreamed of paying what the shopkeeper asked her, and, equally, no shopkeeper would ever have dreamed of asking the customer what he expected eventually to accept; but the Argentines, more alert than most Latin-Americans, and more anxious to put themselves in line with Anglo-Saxon business meth- 200 THE REAL ARGENTINE ods, have largely abandoned this obsolete farce, and now in most business houses and in most of the shops, preclo fijo is the order of the day. The thanks of the shopkeeping community are particularly due to the pioneer house of Messrs. Gath & Chaves, the largest department stores in the Southern continent, who vir- tually broke down the old system when they opened their great establishments some years ago and an- nounced that all goods would be sold at fixed prices. At first they had to turn away innumerable customers, who simply refused to buy unless the prices were re- duced, but eventually the battle was won for honest trading, and the system has been largely adopted throughout the country. It is true that small dealers of divers sorts still endeavour to maintain the ancient bluff. One day, for instance, in the window of a bric- a-brac seller, I was attracted by a walking-stick of a peculiar Brazilian wood. I entered, and asked him how much he wanted for it. He named a price, the equivalent of about $18. " I'll give you twelve pesos ($5)," I said. " Muy bien " (very well), said the dealer, wear- ily, as he handed me the article and accepted the money; and there seemed to be no feeling of shame on the part of the seller at endeavouring to secure so high a price. Assuredly, what I paid him was all the arti- cle was worth, and probably a little more than its real value, but, assuming that I wanted the stick, he made a shot at a price which he fancied I might pay. This irresponsibility is characteristic of much of the business dealings not only in Buenos Ayres, but in all the South American centres where it has been my lot BUSINESS LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 201 to make purchases. There is an extraordinary igno- rance of intrinsic values. The restricting of imports, the delays of the Customs authorities (who will often hold up a valuable shipment from three to six weeks after its arrival), the lack of competition, all tend to the imposition of the most absurd prices. Just im- agine asking three printers in New York to estimate for a certain piece of work, and receiving from A a quotation for $1000, from B one for $457, and from C another of $1825. Such disparities are absolutely unthinkable in any country where labour has been properly organised, where prices of materials have been more or less standardised, and where the only difference must come from the ability of one firm to save a little more than its competitors in its working methods. Not once, but on scores of occasions, I ex- perienced discrepancies in estimates of which the above illustration is typical. Hence the man of business who merely employs one printer, without putting oth- ers in competition, may be losing heavily, as it is folly to place any sort of order without securing two or three checking estimates. Moreover, and here the foolishness of the methods adopted becomes apparent, - 1 have on more than one occasion invited the printer whose estimate was highest by upwards of $500, but whose work seemed to me the best, to accept the order at the estimate of the lowest printer, and he has willingly done so ! I also recall another printer who, on my protesting against an overcharge on an account for $750, made a reduction of $425, in order that I should not bar him from future work! This slight excess occurred on some work done without es- 202 THE REAL ARGENTINE timate. The same printer informed me that the ac- count in question was based on the standard rate, which for many years his house had been charging one of the principal banks for the printing of their stationery. The reader will scarcely wonder, therefore, that we used to remark, in discussing these discrepancies in estimates, that it was evidently no more than a toss-up whether you were to be asked to pay $50 or $450, and in view of this it will be seen how essential is some expert knowledge of the work in hand to any person who ventures to engage in business in South America. At the same time, the spacious feeling which comes from this disregard of small profits has its effect on the individual man of business, and the quick results which follow the friendly attitude of the public to all sorts of new offers is highly inspiriting. I can there- fore perfectly understand the enthusiasm of an Eng- lishman who, perhaps only moderately successful, or making insufficient progress at home, has emigrated to Buenos Ayres, and is enjoying the delights of handling a rapidly growing and remunerative business, feeling that here indeed is the only land worth living in. For, after all, to most business men their business is their life, and as there is so little to interest any man in Buenos Ayres outside of his office, conditions are mutually reactive, the inspiration of the business serv- ing to increase one's interest in one's work, and the increased interest tending to increased business. In this way the business man becomes doubly a worker, and knows not even the Saturday afternoon holiday, an English institution that is very slowly, if at all, creeping into even the English offices in Buenos Ayres. BUSINESS LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 203 Most business men have admitted to me that, while they like the place, it is only a place for working and sleeping in, and I suspect the majority of cherishing in their heart of hearts the hope of returning to their native land some day for good. I have known men who have lived there over thirty years, and who have lost every relative and friend they ever possessed at home, go back after all and close their account with Buenos Ayres. On the other hand, not a few I have met who, having retired to England, to France, or to Germany, as the case may have been, have eventually returned to settle and die in Buenos Ayres. These are the people who say there is " a something " that draws them back. They would even have you believe there is about South America that strange, intangible glamour of the East, which brings most who have lived in the Orient under its spell. This I will not believe; there is no glamour, there is no romantic beauty, there is no sensuous delight in the atmosphere of all South America. What happens is a far other thing. Men become so devoted to their business, un- der the conditions I have outlined, so engrossed in the mere circumstance of their prosperous affairs, that, neglecting all other interests in life, they have nothing left to them but their business, and when they return to their native lands, they have not brought that with them, and where their business is their heart is also. Glamour, no, but business, yes, as one would say in the phraseology of the country. Seldom missing an opportunity of making inquiries as to the business success of all sorts of people with whom I came into contact, I might set forth some quite 204 THE REAL ARGENTINE remarkable examples of how the conditions in Buenos Ayres compare very favourably, from certain points of view, with those at home, were it not that I hesitate to use the experience of friends in such wise that some readers might identify them. M. Jules Huret, in his admirable work, to which reference has already been made, offers many notable examples of prosperous careers in different branches of trade and commerce, related to him in his various travels throughout the Republic; but in every case these narratives were given for publication. I cannot fairly do the same with much of the information in my possession, but I purpose giving, as nearly as may be, the particulars of three comparatively young men of my acquaintance, and contrasting their present condi- tions with what, in all likelihood, would have been their positions in England had they remained at home. The first, whom I shall distinguish as Mr. X., is a young man of very considerable natural talent. In personal characteristics he is the very antithesis of the " pushing " young fellow, and, I rather suspect, had permitted others to push ahead of him at home. At all events, essaying a venture on his own account in London, it turned out badly, and he found it necessary to take up his profession again as an employee in a moderately responsible position, receiving not more than $1750 per annum. His integrity being above suspicion, his ability unquestioned in his particular pro- fession, which calls for much precise knowledge and long years of study, he happened fortunately, when he applied for the post of Manager of a very large enterprise in the Argentine, favourably to impress BUSINESS LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 205 the selective committee, and was engaged. In this very responsible position he has, to my knowledge, greatly improved the conditions of his company, ex- tended its work, increased its profits, sent up its shares. His remuneration, instead of being $1750 per annum, is about $10,000, and may increase, according to re- sults, to double that figure. The business in which he is engaged is of the same nature as he has been em- ployed in all his life, and to which he was trained in the provinces of England. Take Mr. Y., another young man, outwardly more suggestive of liveliness, sparkle, capacity, than Mr. X., but probably no better endowed intellectually. Mr. Y., who is not quite thirty, is at the present time director of the South American interests of an im- portant English firm, handling contracts in the Argen- tine and in Uruguay for hundreds of thousands of pounds, and himself earning a salary and commission something in the neighbourhood of $10,000 per an- num. This Mr. Y. would have had reason to count himself singularly fortunate if, remaining in England and engaged in the same class of work, he at the present time had been enjoying a salary of say $2500 per an- num. Moreover, in common with Mr. X., he has that splendid influence in character building which comes from the fine sense of self-reliance imposed upon one by having to control the destinies of many employees and decide large and vital questions on one's own in- itiative. Such positions for men of thirty to forty are extremely few in England, but are by no means un- common in South America. As regards Mr. Z., I think I may state without fear 206 THE REAL ARGENTINE of identifying him that his profession is that of archi- tect. The architects in Buenos Ayres are among the busiest of professional men. One can scarcely walk for five minutes in any direction without noting build- ing operations, and for scores of years to come the more central parts of the city will be in a state of re- building, as all the smaller and old-fashioned houses are bound to give way to modern steel and concrete structures. Hence the skill of the architect is in high request, and likely so to continue, although it must be admitted there is plenty of competition, as Italians, French, German, and all nationalities are represented in the ranks of the profession. The extraordinary cosmopolitan character of the city also justifies the variety of races among its architects, every conceiv- able European style, not to mention many inconceiv- able styles, being favoured by the property owners. Mr. Z., however, is an Englishman, and as an archi- tect I confess he is no better than the ruck, but I be- lieve he has the recommendation of being honest, and for that reason, if for no outstanding ability of any other kind, he has earned substantial success, so that it is no unusual thing for him, in the course of the year, to find himself in pocket to the tune of $15,000 to $20,000, which, I imagine, is by no means an ordinary sum for even an architect of unusual ability to earn in England. It so happens that not a single one of these young men I have mentioned really likes Buenos Ayres, but each is delighted with his particular work, and I am strongly of opinion that in the fulness of time they will all become submerged in the said work. That is ITALIAN "COLONOS" AND THEIR "RANCHO" IN THE ARGENTINE, A VILLAGE WHEELWRIGHT ix THE ARGENTINE "CAMP.' BUSINESS LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 207 to say, they will go the way of those I have already described, who, yearning at heart to be home again, be- come so engrossed in their business, trade, or pro- fession, that unconsciously with the lapse of years they grow into veritable slaves of their business and cannot live without it. If a man can make his fortune under, four or five years in Buenos Ayres and then withdraw, all may be well; but beyond that time, it seems to me, the genuine fascination which the spirited commercial life of the place exercises on any keen man of business will become too strong to permit of his cutting the traces, and I am just as sure that a day will come when, in totting up his profits and losses, he will feel he ought to put down on the debit side of his ledger of life a very large figure to represent what he has lost in his long years of exile from his home land. In connection with Mr. Z., I mentioned the fact of his honesty, which, it goes without saying, applies equally to Mr. X. and Mr. Y. Here we touch one of the most important matters in the business life of South America. Honesty is a quality that does not bulk un- duly in South American character. Having had peculiar opportunities of testing the honesty of the general public throughout the Argentine, Uruguay, and Chili, and having listened to all sorts of local and for- eign stories about the shameless disregard for the or- dinary usages of decent straight-forward business said to be characteristic of one country more than another, I am persuaded that there is little to choose in this matter between South Americans in general, if we ex- clude the Indians and mestizos, or half-breeds. In Buenos Ayres it takes very little searching indeed to 208 THE REAL ARGENTINE discover Englishmen as dishonest and unworthy of trust as any scoundrelly native. Nay, I am not at all sure that worthless English emigrants and English- speaking portenos children born of English parents in the Argentine, who speak both languages equally well cannot give most of the tricky natives and un- xScrupulous foreigners a strong lead in the matter of / dishonesty. Individually, I found among the native population a very high percentage of men of the strictest com- mercial integrity, men who were caballeros cor- rectisimos, not merely in the formal sense of the phrase, but in actuality. At the same time, I am forced to confess that there is something in the at- losphere of Buenos Ayres which seems to depreciate the importance of business rectitude. Ask me to de- scribe this with any definiteness, and I am afraid I should fail, but the fact remains that one is conscious of the feeling every day and in every business rela- tionship. It may be the influence of old tradition, the result of the Argentine capital having been for so long the resort of all sorts of foreign criminals and justice-bilkers, as much as the experience of business men in their dealings with Buenos Ayres houses to- day. But whatever the extent or reality of this com- mercial dishonesty may be, it is a factor to be reckoned with, and in all negotiations with commercial houses it is no doubt well to look carefully at their references if their credentials are unknown. A procurador, or attorney, for instance, who was employed very suc- cessfully in connection with certain legal matters that came under my notice, and who did his work so well BUSINESS LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 209 and so profitably to those who feed him that it was suggested to establish in other parts of the country similar connections for the recovery of debts, said to his clients, " Unfortunately, I know of no other honest procurador in the Argentine with whom I could co- operate in carrying out your suggestion " 1 The gen- tleman who reported the matter to me stated that he entirely believed his attorney spoke the truth as to the lack of honest lawyers, and he even had his doubts about him ! But how can we expect the legal fraternity to be shiningly honest when we know that justice is poi- soned at its source; that the Argentine Law Courts have nothing to learn and can probably teach even Tammany something new in chicanery? Eet me give but one instance of how justice is ministered. A young Spaniard, one of many em- ployed in a certain undertaking in which I was interested, had to be discharged for dishonesty. He was an attractive, gentlemanly young man, with tastes beyond his means, which is all that needs to be said of nine-tenths of the swindlers in Buenos Ayres. Dis- charged for dishonesty, he was immediately admitted as a clerk in of all places in the world a very prosperous bank! Within six weeks of his admission to the bank, he contrived to steal some $3500, a por- tion of which went to wipe out gambling debts, some $1500 he sent to Spain, and the remainder, nearly $1000, he lodged in another bank. Arrested, he was so conscious of the absolute proof of his guilt, that he signed a statement written by his own lawyer ad- mitting the whole matter, hoping thus to be clemently dealt with. The case came before a young judge who 210 THE REAL ARGENTINE took a personal liking to the prisoner, and deliberately made up his mind to discharge him. This seemed a difficult thing to do in face of the signed confession. Among the witnesses called was the gentleman who had discharged him for dishonesty prior to his be- ing admitted to the bank. This gentleman was called because the prisoner had given his name as that of his previous employer. The only question the judge would allow the witness to answer was " When in your employment did the prisoner strike you as a person who would be likely to have committed this forgery in the bank? " The witness, having no wish to force the prisoner into jail, answered " No." The judge then asked the prisoner whether, in view of the fact that his alleged confession was written by a third person and only signed by him, he had been fully con- scious of what that document contained, and whether he realised precisely the gravity of the admissions therein. The prisoner seemed somewhat bewildered as to how he should reply, and, not quite realising that the judge had actually turned himself into advocate for the de- fence, seemed on the point of committing himself by accepting full responsibility, when the judge, silencing him and whispering with the clerk for a few moments, asked the prisoner not to answer until he had con- sulted with his lawyer. The clerk of the court with- drew, with a sign to the prisoner's lawyer, who, also leaving the court, returned presently and whispered a few words to the prisoner. The forger was then asked by the judge to state exactly how the confession had been secured. Now, nothing loath, he brazenly asserted that he had signed it BUSINESS LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 211 most unwillingly, not realising how it incriminated him, and so forth. Result: prisoner not only discharged, who, according to the law of the land could have been put in jail for three years, but by an order of court, the money which he had stolen from one bank and lodged in another, and which had meanwhile been arrested by the court, restored to him! Is it surprising, in face of an experience such as this, that the business world teems with minor employees who have been guilty of all sorts of thefts and dishonest practices, but whom employers have not prosecuted because conviction is so difficult to secure and legal expenses are so heavy? A friend of mine who was robbed of $4000 by an employee, who forged his sig- nature and imperilled his credit in various directions, spent so much time and money in endeavouring to secure the conviction of the wrongdoer that he even- tually gave up the struggle and left him to be liberated from the jail where he had lain for some seven or eight months without a trial. Here, then, is probably the real reason of this feel- ing of low business morality which undoubtedly does prevail in Buenos Ayres the laxity of the law and the difficulty of securing justice. A further example and one of very recent date will serve to show to what extent audacity attains in the commercial world of Buenos Ayres. A cinematograph company secured at great cost from a European firm the exclusive right to reproduce an important film throughout the Argentine, Uruguay and Chili. In due course the film arrived, and was placed with a firm of photographic experts to make a number of copies for despatching to the various 212 THE REAL ARGENTINE centres where it was to be exhibited, and where the exclusive nature of the exhibition was already being loudly trumpeted in the press. Those entrusted with the making of the copies did not hesitate to multiply the number by a dozen or more, and to sell them at high prices to competitive theatres. In this delight- fully simple way, instead of one theatre in one town being able, as it had announced, to give the exclusive exhibition of the film, some eight or ten theatres were showing their unauthorised copies of it on the same evening. Confronted with such facts, it is hardly a matter for surprise that many foreign merchants look upon Ar- gentine transactions with suspicious eye, exacting con- ditions of payment that are more rigorous than apply in other quarters of the mercantile world. In the United States, I believe, and in England certainly, this feeling of Insecurity does exist, and exporters are usually chary of entering into negotiations with unproved houses in Buenos Ayres. Then, again, it is so difficult to find local representatives of strict integrity that many large firms who have made efforts to open up business out there have eventually given up the task, one well- known maker of a very profitable line of stationery goods, for which there is a large demand in Buenos Ayres, confessing to me that over a period of years each arrangement he had made for local representa- tion had eventually fallen through, owing to the slack- ness or dishonesty of his agents. It is a lamentable fact that the general laxity of business morals has the effect of developing in clever men their roguish propensities, with the consequence BUSINESS LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 213 that I have noticed all too often when the assistance obtainable in Buenos Ayres has been undeniably com- petent as regards intelligence and resource, it has failed in the matter of honesty, and, inversely, where honesty has been beyond suspicion, these other desirable quali- ties have been lacking. And thus we have employers deliberately, with eyes open, utilising the services of persons whom they distrust and whom they know to be capable of swindling whenever opportunity serves, simply because their other abilities are essential to the creation or extension of the business in hand. The atmosphere of suspicion thus engendered, and the high standard of incompetency in almost every branch of service, are two factors that must enter into the seri- ous consideration of all engaging in the business life of the country. I could describe at least a dozen individuals with whom, during my eight months in Buenos Ayres, I came into touch, all persons of the most obvious ca- pacity and worthy of employment, had that capacity been wisely directed, but each, on close investigation, so tainted with suspicion of trickery and trailing behind him an inglorious record, that it was impossible to utilise his services. One person in particular, with whom I almost entered into an important literary ven- ture, whose scholarly attainments were unquestionable, and who, at first, seemed a thorough gentleman, had, as I subsequently discovered, served three terms in provincial penitentiaries, and had even been guilty of attempted murder, which crime he had planned purely and simply for business ends, with a view to " putting away " a gentleman whom he and another had swindled 214 THE REAL ARGENTINE to the extent of nearly $5000, and who was proving inconsiderate enough to invoke the law against the swindlers. This person, whose portrait and finger marks are duly filed in the Criminal Bureau of Buenos Ayres where, by the way, the system of thumb prints originated had, during his various encounters with the law, become intimate with a comisario, who, prior to entering the police service, had himself been a successful criminal, and continued, not unsuccess- fully, his criminal career in his new capacity. With the aid of this official, the " liter'y gent " was able to defeat the ends of justice, and for aught I know is still busy under police protection fleecing new victims in or about Calle Florida. The laxity of business morality is, of course, a con- mitant of the laxity of general morals, or an effect of the latter, most of the commercial obliquity that exists having a first cause in the immoral life of the offenders. Just as it is the fashion of many Argen- tines, in addition to maintaining their legitimate wives and families, to possess openly two or three quendas; so among those who are financially ill equipped to play the pasha, the imitative spirit asserts itself, and even down to the office boys, it will be found when things go wrong with them there is " a woman in the case." This, and gambling, account for probably two-thirds of the commercial dishonesty, and the re- maining third has its most likely source in a pitiful effort to imitate their betters in the matter of high liv- ing, where the plainest of fare and the humblest ac- commodation cost more than genuine luxury does with us. Drinking enters very slightly into the account, as W "O I H o in 55 ' as r S O 'H Q rt H H I 0. BUSINESS LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 215 it would be difficult to find a large community where less tippling exists than in Buenos Ayres. Whatever there is of that will be found chiefly among British and German residents, so that any anti-temperance partisan desirous of proving that a temperate public is not necessarily a moral one, will find abundant ar- gument ready to his hand in the life of the Argentine. Turning from this unpleasant aspect of the business life, which is, after all, only one phase of it, and must not be allowed to darken completely our view of the commercial Argentine, there are several other aspects that must engage our attention, and perhaps to more profit. British readers especially will rejoice to know that their own country and its manufacturers oc- cupy a pre-eminent position in the affections of the Ar- gentine people. While on every hand there is evi- dence of great activity on the part of the Germans, who have laid themselves out, and with fair measure of success, to secure a large slice of the Argentine im- port trade, there is not only in the Argentine but throughout all South America a widespread distrust oJ the German. He is noted for commercial methods that are no more praiseworthy than many that prevail locally. His propensity for showing samples that are much superior to the goods supplied is notorious, and such progress as he has made may be regarded as largely the result of a readiness to flatter the native buyer by speaking the language of the country and dealing with him in terms of local usage. The Britisher, on the other hand, is guilty of the coldest indifference to the convenience of the Argentine con- sumer. 216 THE REAL ARGENTINE I have, for instance, met more than one traveller or a British house who has been visiting all the South American capitals and the great centres of population with samples of goods, and has not been able even to ask for a glass of beer in Spanish. I re- call one gentleman in particular who, by the sheer merit of the goods he was offering, had done a very considerable business, and yet was so hopelessly ig- norant of the native tongue that he could not even pronounce the names of the firms who had bought from him, or the streets in which their offices were situated ! This never happens with a German traveller. He may make the most atrocious mistakes with the language, but he at least does attempt, and usually succeeds, to explain himself without the aid of an interpreter, and the Spanish American accepts any .effort on the part of a foreigner to speak his native tongue as a compliment to himself and strives valiantly to understand what the foreigner is endeavouring to express. Then again, British manufacturers show an un- ruffled disdain for lqcal_j#ndkioas--in many of the ar- ticles they supply. Take, for instance, the sailors 1 hats so much worn by children in England, and even more in vogue with the minos of the Argentine, where everything that touches their naval aspirations is highly popular. Thousands of these are imported from Eng- land, and it always struck me as ludicrous to witness little Argentines going about with u H. M. S. Redoubt- able," "H. M. S. Dreadnought," " H. M. S. Ben- bow," or some such peculiarly British name, on their hats. Why on earth do not the British manufacturers have the common-sense to ascertain the names of the BUSINESS LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 217 principal vessels in the Argentine Navy, and use these for the hats they export to the republic? Evidently the Germans are doing so, as occasionally you will see " Sarmiento," " Belgrano," " San Martin," in place of the meaningless British names, and I was told these did not come from England. The patriotism of the Argentine and of every other South American is such that he would undoubtedly buy an inferior hat for his boy if it bore the name of a national warship, and even pay more for it than for a superior British-made hat with the name of a British man-of-war thereon. All sorts of sanitary appliances are also imported from Great Britain, with the instructions for their use painted or engraved in the English language. Take " geysers " as an example. It often occurred to me in using bathrooms in various part of the country, where the geyser is an inevitable fitting, that it was not only bad business, but very dangerous for these ap- pliances to be in use with English instructions engraved upon them. The working of a geyser is at best none too simple, and when every detail of its manipulation is explained on the machine in a language of which nine-tenths of the users are totally ignorant, the possi- bility of putting it out of order or of setting the place on fire, is considerable. Lavatory basins with " Hot " and " Cold " mean nothing to a native, who can only think of caliente or of fria. The same applies to pro- prietary medicines imported from Great Britain and the United States (though American exporters are waking up to the need of printing instructions in Span- ish), whereas German, French and Italian medicines are invariably supplied with Spanish directions. 2i8 THE REAL ARGENTINE In short, the pre-eminence of British goods, which I noted wherever I went, not only in the Argentine but throughout all South America, is in many respects undeserved. That pre-eminence is due to nothing but honesty and commercial integrity. The British manu- facturer is, with few exceptions, an honest man, selling a good article at a reasonable price; he keeps his bar- gains, and fortunately for him palabra inglesa (the word of an Englishman) is honoured throughout Latin America. But the German, if he cares, can also make good articles, quite as good as the English, and many German firms are honourable exceptions to the rule I have mentioned above, so that once an im- porter has secured German goods which are as sound as the English and have been made to suit local re- quirements, the English manufacturer has met the most serious kind of competition. I attribute a great deal of the indifference shown by British exporters to lack of proper representation on the spot. So long as the demand for every class of imported article continues as lively as it is at present, and the local agent can dispose of the stuff he receives without undue trouble, he does not worry about mak- ing his service more valuable to his clients by insist- ing on manufacturers doing their business in terms of the country. Meanwhile, one finds everywhere the most remarkable evidence of preference for British goods, British brands of tea, British preserves, pickles, sauces, sweets, British machinery, clothes, furniture, are every- where in prominent use and demand. A good deal of this preference is also the natural result of British capital having been so largely used to develop the coun- BUSINESS LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 219 try, they say locally " British money and Italian la- bour have made the Argentine " but let me warn the British manufacturer that things cannot continue as they are indefinitely; this happy condition of demand exceeding supply will change, and meanwhile if he is making no serious effort to consider more carefully the needs of his customers and to render them better service, his astute German competitor will be " climb- ing upward in the night " ! While British and American exporters are not al- ways represented as well as they might be in the South American market, there is yet another point for their consideration are they properly staffed at home for dealing with this particular field? I believe that not a few have clerks in their foreign departments entirely ignorant of South American Geography, if the " howlers " they commit are any criterion. The ig- norance which prevails in Great Britain in this con- nection is notorious, and from what I have been able to discover, general knowledge in the United States is no more advanced, less if anything. One example coming within my own experience will serve to illustrate what I mean. Staying at our hotel in Buenos Ayres was one of the managers of a very large British enterprise, with agents in different parts of North and South America. One of these was sta- tioned at Punta Arenas, a considerable town in the far south of Chili, on the Straits of Magellan. It is the port for a vast country in which sheep farming has of recent years been making remarkable strides, and where wealth is growing rapidly. This gentleman chanced to be on his way to England, and made a break 220 THE REAL ARGENTINE at Buenos Ayres to visit his superior at our hotel. Among the subjects discussed by them was the curious fact that for three years in succession the agent had received at Punta Arenas an account from the head office for goods supplied during the year to a certain Sefior P , whom he had failed entirely to trace. One evening, as the manager and the agent were scan- ning the list of hotel guests, the latter exclaimed " Why, there's a Sefior P . I wonder if that might be the man I'm after? " Further inquiry proved that the gentleman in question was a well-known merchant from Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay, whose busi- ness had brought him on a visit to Buenos Ayres, and that he was none other than the mysterious Mr. P whose accounts were regularly sent to Punta Arenas for collection. The point of the story is that while Punta Arenas is distant 1350 nautical miles, or a full four days' steaming south of Buenos Ayres, Asuncion lies 825 to the north of Buenos Ayres another three to four days' journey by rail and river, but the ex- port department of the English firm was so little versed in these matters that it selected its remotest agent to collect the debt! Punta Arenas and Asuncion were both in South America, and that was enough to estab- lish a connection ! This is but one of many instances I could give to show the lack of geographical knowl- 'edge even among British firms trading with the coun- try. Manufacturers in the United States show a much more intelligent appreciation of the possibilities of Ar- gentine trade than those of Great Britain, although the BUSINESS LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 221 latter handle double the volume of business.* Vari- ous trade journals published in the Spanish language emanate from different parts of the United States and are circulated assiduously among these Latin Repub- lics, though, I fear, so far with inadequate result. It is the misfortune of the United States that not a few of its citizens who have gone south in search of " Spanish gold " have not always been noted for their business rectitude. The result is that while palabra inglesa has become an accepted phrase in the language of the country, so has yanqui bluff, which may be said to stand for any sort of crooTceliness. There are, of course, as I shall have to point out further on, other reasons of a political nature which tend to make the South American at once jealous and suspicious of North Americans, and against these influences it is the duty of all good business men in the United States wishful to extend the market for their national prod- ucts, to fight incessantly, making special efforts to show to the business man of the southern continent that they are actuated by nothing but the strongest desire to cultivate a friendly commercial intercourse and an in- creasing exchange of commodities between the North and the South. At the present time, the United States is the chief source of supply for office furniture, type- writers, cash registers, and also competes with con- siderable success in the market for agricultural ma- chinery. But in all these directions, and especially the last-named, there is enormous room for expansion. * British exports to the Argentine in 1912 amounted to $103,555,485, while United States exports totalled $53,158,179. 222 THE REAL ARGENTINE Here is another aspect of business life that calls for the careful consideration of all who are ambitious of securing a share of the profits that await the seller in these lively markets of the south. The natural pros- f perity of the country is considerably exaggerated owing ) to the ease with which it has been able to borrow from \ Europe, and these heavy borrowings have led to gen- eral extravagance, raising the sense of prosperity be- yond what is justified by intrinsic values. I do not suggest for one moment that borrowing has vastly exceeded the potentialities of the country, but I do as- sert that it has anticipated these potentialities, and to that extent discounted future development. The pos- sibilities of the Argentine are colossal, and its power of recuperation after the severest trials, such as ruined harvests or destruction of cattle and sheep through drought, amazing. In this connection, it is unneces- sary to say more than that in one single summer the country has suffered the loss of several million sheep owing to a prolonged drought, without the com- munity as a whole being conscious of any financial strain from so great a destruction of capital. The British makers of sheep-dip, however, would prob- ably suffer a decrease of some thousands of pounds in their exports to the Argentine that year, and British wool-buyers who swarm over to the River Plate each year, would have to pay a great deal more for their purchases, owing to the shortage of supply. Still, the fact remains that, due largely to the popu- lar conception of the Argentine as the new Eldorado for European manufacturers, enormous sums of money are annually being wasted by ill-advised efforts o s * 3 .2 BUSINESS LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 223 to secure business v f or which competition has suddenly become keen. Now, we have to remember that with a borrowing people an element of thriftlessness is in- evitable, and that there is a necessarily high percentage of wastage in the heavy loans which the country has secured from Europe. Hence that general sense of prosperity and abundance which on closer examination is often found to be more apparent than real. Right through the Argentine this spirit of borrowing prevails. They are a nation of borrowers, and in all ranks of society by which is meant the various divisions graded according to the supposed dimensions of their banking accounts or their credit the one notion of doing business is by drawing on the Bank of the Fu- ture. The countless thousands of land-sales, which have brought unequalled prosperity to one class of the community and riches to the leading newspapers (daily crammed with advertisements of these auctions) have been and still are conducted on the principle of mensualldadeSy or monthly payments. The hire pur- chase system is universal. Mortgage banks abound and flourish on interest rates that range anywhere from 8 per cent, to 14 per cent, many such banks offering depositors 7 per cent, per annum for their money, which they lend out at 10 per cent, or 12 per cent, to help landowners in the development of their proper- ties. You will be told by local residents that this high rate of interest is perfectly compatible with the ca- pabilities of the country, and that the Englishman, with his time-honoured notions of 4^ per cent, on land mortgage, is a hopeless back number in the Argen- tine. There may be some truth in this, but it is diffi- 224 THE REAL ARGENTINE cult to get away from the feeling that there is the hec- tic flush of unhealthiness in any system that demands such high rates for its financial accommodation. As one could fill a whole book discussing nothing else than the aspects of the various branches of com- mercial enterprise, all so different in their essentials from most of our home conditions, I am making no at- tempt to enter into detailed consideration of the sub- ject, but to illustrate broadly the danger I have hinted at, arising from the almost uncanny feeling of pros- perity which the peculiar conditions of the country have induced. I may touch briefly on the motor-car business. Al- though, as I have already stated, there are few coun- tries in the world less attractive from the point of view of motoring than the Argentine, where roads such as we know them in Europe, or even in North America, simply do not exist; and no large city so ill-adapted for motoring as Buenos Ayres, where the principal streets are extremely narrow and badly kept, while those of the suburbs are almost entirely unpaved; the popularity of the motor car as an article of luxury and ostentation is supreme. The importation of expensive cars was proceeding in the most reckless manner dur- ing my stay there in 1912, with the result that I was informed by one of the leading automobile dealers whom I met in Chili some six months after leaving the River Plate, and who had come over to spy out the Transandine possibilities, that it was estimated by the various houses dealing in cars at the end of the 1913 season that there were no fewer than twelve hundred unsold cars in the store-rooms of the numerous agencies BUSINESS LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 225 in Buenos Ayres. In the previous season, I think the highest number I saw on a motor car was in the 4OOo's. No wonder there was general talk of " the Motor Crisis " in 1913 ! In my walks abroad during 1912, it was an endless source of wonder to me to contemplate the folly of the European companies in their mad scramble for this busi- ness. I saw dozens of establishments being opened at enormous cost, stocked with expensive cars and served by retinues of gorgeous youths who were to sell these to the fabulously wealthy Argentines. In eight months' time, I saw more than one of those splendid establishments shut up, and doubtless since then many another has pulled down its shutters (the use of metal shutters which pull down from above is universal). Of one in particular I secured some inside information. It was a German concern, and it took a magnificent exposicion in a fashionable quarter, paying a rent of $4,000 per month. In the first nine months, it had sold some thirty-five cars, the total value of which did not greatly exceed the rent of the show-room. In addition to the show-room, the concern in question re- quired a large warehouse and repajr shop in another part of the city, so that the man of business will be able to gather how such an enterprise was likely to end. Moreover, most of those cars were sold at so much " down," and the remainder in ten monthly in- stalments. I suppose it is a safe assumption that more money has been lost in the motor-car business in Buenos Ayres than is likely to be made in it for some time to come. One particularly astute foreigner with a large stock 226 THE REAL ARGENTINE of unsold cars devised a most admirable selling scheme. He made a bargain with a number of willing scoundrels that each should go to a certain organisation which provided any conceivable article to its customers on the instalment system, exacting from the customer an increased price, and from the seller of the article a substantial discount. These accomplices of the motor agent, each through this medium of the purchasing agency, bought one of his motor cars, tendering the initial payment, the money for which had been sup- plied by him, and the buying agency in due course fur- nished the car, paying the vender his trade price for it. Each car sold in this manner immediately came back into the possession of the vender, and naturally the accommodating financiers soon discovered no sec- ond payments were forthcoming. I understand this enterprising motor-dealer had thus netted quite a re- spectable sum on his surplus stock before his good work was interrupted by an unwillingness on the part of the purchasing agency to continue! All this will serve to suggest the general looseness of business methods and the accompanying wastage that is going on, which can be attributed to no other cause than the ease with which the country has been able to borrow, and the avidity with which foreign manufacturers have taken the bait by rushing into the market without due consideration of its risks and the characteristics of the people with whom business has to be done. In no wise do I wish to belittle the com- mercial possibilities of the country, for I am a firm and convinced believer that South America generally is " the Coming Continent," and that Buenos Ayres is BUSINESS LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 227 probably the most attractive of the newer business centres of the world to-day, with limitless opportuni- ties for sound commercial expansion to European and North American manufacturers, but by reason of its very attractiveness, the freedom with which money cir- culates, and the readiness with which the people bur- den themselves with responsibilities, the desideratum in all business enterprise is not boldness, but caution. One of the most experienced native business men assured me that in land speculation, which is even a more popular form of gambling than the public lot- tery servants and street porters actually owning " lots " they have never seen, and never will see, and for which they are paying every month, the venders never hesitate to make the number of instalments run into several years, in order to make the individual in- stalment as low as possible, because the purchaser, in- capable of a " long view," in no case realises the bur- den he is accepting, and merely looks at the amount he has to pay monthly. The sum total of payments is seldom mentioned, the accepted formula being a small initial payment and anything from twenty-four to sixty mensualidades, also of comparatively small amounts. The vast majority of the buyers never complete their purchases, surrendering, after a year or two, what they have paid, together with the land, to the seller, who will probably resell it to another purchaser, who will also make default, and in this way the land speculator grows rich. Every day the newspapers contain particulars of some fresh scheme for relieving the public of their money; sharks abound, and their variety is endless. 228 THE REAL ARGENTINE From the point of view of the foreign manufacturer, of the most pernicious forms of unfair trading is practised in connection with the registration of trade marks. The law grants the sole title in a trade mark to the first person who registers it, and exacts from him no evidence whatsoever that he is registering that which is his own property. The outcome of this delightful state of affairs is that a fraternity of long- sighted speculators has grown up in Buenos Ayres, whose business is to keep in close touch with the com- mercial worlds of Europe and North America, and the moment a manufacturer places a new article on these markets and registers his trade mark, one of these gentry hastens to secure the proprietorship of that trade mark for the Argentine, registering it as his own. His next movement which may be delayed for a year or so is to write to the foreign manufac- turer and to state that he shall be very pleased to act as agent for the article in question, which he thinks he can sell to advantage, and indeed so confident is he of being able to handle it successfully that he has taken the trouble to register the trade mark. The manufac- turer, if he wishes to introduce the article in South America, must then either appoint this nimble gen- tleman his agent or pay him an extortionate price for the right to sell his own article under its original name. One example of how this works will suffice. The Oliver typewriter is sold in the Argentine by its duly accredited agent as the " Revilo," because an enter- prising citizen had forestalled the owners by regis- tering the name " Oliver " as applied to typewriters, and the company, neither caring to appoint him its BUSINESS LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 229 agent nor to pay for the privilege of selling their type- writer there, adopted the plan of labelling their ma- chines for sale in the Argentine with the name spelt backward! Some famous brands of Scotch whisky cannot be sold in the Argentine, as a Jewish gentleman is in possession of their trade marks, which he regis- tered in anticipation, and thus the whisky drinker will discover all sorts of unfamiliar brands specially pre- pared for export, while it is possible that the pur- loiner of the familiar trade mark may arrange to bot- tle any sort of vile rubbish under the well-known label. This is a state of things, of course, that can easily be met by the foreign manufacturer, whenever he is in- troducing any new article of consumption, taking care to have it formally registered in the Argentine at the same time that it is placed on the home market, so that if in the future he should wish to export it, he will be able freely to do so. Owing to the accessibility of legislators to influence and bribery, all sorts of abuses arise. In Montevideo, for instance, a typical case came under my personal knowledge. A large British manufacturing house, which for many years had been suppyling an article of wide consumption throughout South America and in Uruguay particularly, suddenly discovered that an ex- cessive import tariff had been placed upon it. A large consignment of the article in question arrived in the harbour of Montevideo two or three days after the passing of the Act, and a battle royal ensued between the representative of the British company and the Customs officials, who endeavoured to exact the new tariff, but who were eventually defeated on the ground 230 THE REAL ARGENTINE that the tariff did not date from the passing of the Act, but from the signing of the same by the President, which, fortunately, had not taken place until two or three days after the arrival of the cargo. This in- creased tariff had been imposed solely on the initiative of an ambitious Uruguayan, who had determined to manufacture a competitive article locally and got his friends in the cdmara to assist him by choking off the foreign competitor. The result was that the British firm had immediately to buy land and build a factory in Montevideo in order to get " inside the tariff," which they did before the bungling native was able to work out his own plans, and so completely outwitted him. The probability is that the tariff will again be taken off, and the British company will be able to make the Uruguayan consumer pay for the inconvenience and expense which the unsuccessful trickery of their com- patriot incurred. Before turning from this subject, I must add a final word about the extraordinary incompetency of native labour, already mentioned, which conditions to so large an extent the business life, not only of the Ar- gentine, but of all South America. Inefficiency is the keynote of the Spaniard as a worker. A complete indifference to the pressure of time is another of his characteristics, and both of these we find more or less eminent in the South American. The Argentine himself is steadily escaping from the influence of his Spanish original, and will eventually become a more wide-awake, competent, and altogether a more intelli- gent worker. But even so, he has still to rid himself of innumerable faults in order to come into line with BAGS OF WHEAT AWAITING SHIPMENT AT A RAILWAY STATION. THREE HUGE PILES OF "JERKED BEEF" OUTSIDE A "SALADERO," OR CURING FACTORY. BUSINESS LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 231 what modern industrial conditions exact from the worker in France, Germany, and Italy, in Great Britain and in North America. The tradesman will dismiss you with the blandest assurances of completing the work he has in hand for you " to-morrow," and probably you will discover a week later he has not yet begun it. He doesn't care a hang whether you are pleased or not. The professional man will make no attempt whatever to keep an engagement within half an hour of the appointed time, and the employee does not believe that the interests of the employer and his own can ever possibly be identical. There is but one way to deal with the Spanish- American worker, and that is never to encourage him, never to express your approval of his work, never for one moment to let him feel you value his services, and never voluntarily to advance his wages! The master who finds his native helper really useful and shows his appreciation by doing any of these things will speedily have to meet a demand for an impossible increase of wages, or to suffer the annoyance of seeing his em- ployee " slacking " at every opportunity and assuming an attitude of disregard for his interests. The man reasons that if his master thinks so well of him as to advance his wages without a request, or to express his satisfaction with his services, he has become so in- valuable to that master that he can presume on him by taking liberties which a less useful worker would not expect to be allowed. Presently, the only thing his master can do is to discharge the man whom he has thoughtlessly encouraged, and it may be that the latter will retaliate by waiting at the door and 232 THE REAL ARGENTINE either shooting or stabbing the misguided employer. Especially in handling the peones is it necessary to maintain the severest, almost the most brutal condi- tions of discipline. Among my acquaintances in the Argentine is a wiry little Englishman, whose reputa- tion as a disciplinarian is so widely known that his services are much in request to " clean up " estancias where unsuccessful managers have allowed slackness to prevail among the hands, or " arms," rather: agri- cultural labourers being collectively brazos or braceros, though the latter term is also used in the singular. He looks the last man in the world for the job, having more the appearance of a natty, little London lawyer. But he was wont to ride among the rough Italian and Gallego labourers, always complaining about the inefficiency of their work, and if one ever muttered a protest, he calmly smashed him to the ground with a well-directed blow on the fore-head from the butt of his loaded riding whip. On various occasions he has even gone so far as to have two peones seize one of their number who had retorted to some complaint, carry him to a barn and strip off his shirt, and after having him tied to a post, personally apply a substan- tial number of lashes to his back. It might be thought that this was just the type of man to receive a shot some night, or a stab in the back, but that is not the way of things in South America. He has gone about his business for nearly thirty years and has won the respect of the creatures he has knocked down and flogged, as well as that of all the others who did not wish to feel the weight of his strong hand. No, the type of employer more likely to be assassinated is he BUSINESS LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 233 who has treated his employees with ill-directed kind- ness. I met a gentleman, the manager of an estancia, at our hotel in the middle of one week leaving for his home and heard the following Sunday that he had been shot dead by a labourer on the Saturday, because he would not re-employ the man whom the mayordomo had discharged during the manager's absence. The fellow had no grudge against the man who discharged him, who was probably in the habit of making his arm felt among the workers, but the manager, who had shown a kindly interest in the peones and braceros, and could, had he wished, re-engage this one, was the nat- ural object of his vengeance. Another gentleman with whom I came into occasional relationship was shot dead one evening by one of his workers because he would not advance him a day's money, declaring that he already had received sufficient for the week. Wages are paid nominally by the month, but improvi- dence is so common among the workers that seldom has a man, no matter his status, to draw his full pay at the end of the month, continual advances having been asked for week by week. Therefore any North American or European house that purposes branching out in the Argentine is faced with difficulties that do not exist, at least to the same extent, in almost any other great centre of trade, and some allowance must be made to discount these in loney values from the cost of doing business there. Blackmail and " graft " entering so largely into business and politics, it would be surprising were it entirely absent from the Press. In proportion to its 234 THE REAL ARGENTINE population, Buenos Ayres probably supports more periodicals than any other city in the world. There are about fifteen morning and evening journals de- voted to Argentine interests, "national" newspapers; two dailies which cater for the Spanish community in distinction from the native Argentine; three or four Italian morning and evening papers; two English dailies (one of which has a wide circulation and is extremely profitable to its proprietors) ; two French dailies; two or three flourishing German dailies; one Turkish daily (containing four pages about the size of a New York evening paper, printed in Arabic char- acters), and weekly, semi-weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly publications almost innumerable, catering for all manner of interests and representing a veritable babel of tongues Yiddish, Scandinavian, Syriac, Russian, Greek, Catalan, Basque, to mention a few at random. A mere glance at a list of these journals would be sufficient to indicate, even to the uninitiated, that they cannot all be getting an honest living. Those that are conducted on strict business principles are relatively few; the blackmailer is busy on the others. His methods are simple, nai've to a degree. The ad- vertising manager calls upon you and states that he has seen your advertisement in La Prensa, La Nation, La Razon, La Argentina, or El Diario, all of which are reputable and important journals, and that he would like you to put it into his paper, and if you do not think of doing that, his editor is contemplating pub- lishing an article attacking you, and it would be a pity to let that appear. They are foolish indeed who al- low such threats to induce them to use space in any of BUSINESS LIFE IN BUENOS AYRES 235 the numberless rags that issue from obscure printing offices, as the circulation of these sheets is so small, their influence so contemptible, that it would scarcely matter whether they published a full page denounce- ment of a Calle Florida tradesman as a thief and a swindler and offered their paper for sale at his door, so little attention do the general public pay to them. On the other hand, there is an abundance of good journalism, and neither New York nor London can pro- duce more profitable mediums of commercial publicity than several of the daily papers already named, or such weeklies as Caras y Caretas, Fray Mocho, and P. B. T. Relatively, the advertising rates in all these journals are higher than in American or British publications of the same circulation, but the ready response to the advertisements in them not only compensates for the difference in cost, but makes them work out cheaper mediums of publicity than the average in North Amer- ica or Great Britain. From every point of view, the Argentine offers to v v the man of business almost unequalled opportunities, > but, as I have endeavoured to illustrate in this chap- ter, it has the defects of its merits, and he who imagines it a veritable gold mine where there is no more to do than pick up the nuggets and bring them home, is the most deluded of optimists. It will give rich return for industry, for intelligence, and for honest merit, but while the business man in search of new fields of en- terprise may reasonably expect to do relatively better in the wonderful Argentine than in most other markets of the world, what I have written may show that busi- ness life in Buenos Ayres is not entirely a bed of roses. CHAPTER XIII THE ARGENTINE AT HOME As we make no distinction in English between the name of the country and that of its native, referring to both as " the Argentine," I am continually finding little difficulties present themselves in the progress of my writing, involving circumlocutions which are obviated in the Spanish. The Spaniard can never doubt the intention of a writer about the Argentine, la Argentina being the name of the country, or of a female native, while el Argentina indicates the male native. In the English, we have to depend entirely on the context of the sentence to make clear whether the reference is to the country or to a native thereof. In the present chapter, of course, the title sufficiently indicates that we are to look at the Argentine native in his domestic relationships, and I must confess the subject is one that does not admit of very extensive treatment, for the reason set forth by M. Jules Huret in one of his admirable studies. The French writer observes (I translate from the Spanish translation) : Only strangers of high social or official standing are received with any active sympathy. It is a matter of pride to be able to make these visitors realise the great progress of the metropo- lis and to introduce them to two or three salons, which are all precisely alike. But if the stranger, although he be of good family, arrive at Buenos Ayres provided with letters of intro- duction to real criollos (natives with generations of Argentine 236 THE ARGENTINE AT HOME 237 pedigree) he will receive cards in reply, and not always that courtesy; rarely a word of friendship or welcome. He will hear repeated on all hands mi casa es suya ("my house' is yours"); there will even be the usual courtesies with him should they meet, and he may even be asked to go to the Jqckey Club, if his stay in Buenos Ayres is not to be a long one. With few exceptions, he will not be able to penetrate into the intimacy of the " home " or of a family of criollos. Argentine family life, especially of the better class, retains many of the habits of the Spaniards and something of the customs of the Arabs. This is correctly observed, and if an amiable French- man found such difficulty as M. Huret evidently experi- enced in penetrating within the outer walls of Argen- tine domesticity, how shall the Anglo-Saxon succeed where a Latin had to confess failure? It is to be borne in mind, however, that this refers chiefly to the old families, who affect to despise the motley rabble of new-comers, and while profiting enormously by the in- dustry and enterprise of the Gringo, who has de- veloped and exploited the riches of their country, mak- ing them rich in the process, do not wish to be vul- garised by intercourse with the merely money-making element of the population. The exclusiveness of such families is notorious, and maintaining as they do the ancient patriarchal relationships, they are sufficient unto themselves, so that any foreigner who seeks to : orce himself into their small and narrow-minded cir- cle is an ill-advised mortal who will surely be snubbed for his pains. They are as truly republican, these criollos, as the families of the Doges of Venice, but politically, and even socially they are being over- 238 THE REAL ARGENTINE whelmed by the great tide of commercial prosperity on which all sorts and conditions of people and the mot- liest mixtures of nationalities have floated into wealth and power. Yet there is something austerely attrac- tive in their dignified isolation, their cold contempt of the ruck of the community. Like the Creole families of Louisiana, they are landmarks of the past, moulder- ing memorials of a social system that has served its day and is ceasing to be. We have really to go further back than Spanish origins to trace the influences that have moulded the Argentine criollo into what we find him. Just as it is a recognised law of heredity that certain character- istics are apt to skip one generation and reappear in the next, so do we find among these peoples of South America features that are more Moorish than Spanish. In modern times, while the Spaniards at home have been ridding themselves of many traces of the old Moorish dominion; those who settled in their American colonies retained customs and habits of thought which were disappearing in the home country, and owing to the isolated and circumscribed colonial life, tendencies to- ward exclusiveness have become emphasised to the point of exaggeration. Thus, in certain directions, the dusky hand of the Moor is even more noticeable in South America to-day than in Spain itself. This is a point of view which few Argentine writers would be willing to endorse, as it is the claim of the Argentine that his civilisation is purely European, though distinctive in its individuality. The fact remains, however, that the position of the womenkind, legally and socially, though now showing signs of rapid change, conforms more to THE ARGENTINE AT HOME 239 Moorish notions than to European ideals; the very arrangement of the house is Moorish, disguised, it is true, by progression through Spanish and French styles ; the tribal dignity of the head of the family is nearer to Arabic life than to anything still surviving in Euro- pean civilisation. It will be at once obvious to the reader that in a country where we find the very latest ideas of in- tellectual and industrial progress warring with social conceptions which we have long come to esteem as es- sentially oriental, we must have a very complex and unfamiliar system of family life to consider. Indeed, while there is but little for the writer to deal with, who confines himself to a record of familiar experiences, the subject is extremely fascinating and capable of treatment at great length. My present purpose, how- ever, is to deal with the obvious, with " things seen," rather than to attempt in any detail the tracing of origins of the Argentine social system. But the slight suggestion I have thrown out will show the bent of my thought in this connection, and perhaps help the reader to a better understanding of what is to follow. It must be understood that the foreign resident ac- tively engaged in business affairs might not, in the whole course of a lifetime, come in contact with any of the real criollos. Nor would it be matter for sur- prise if he seldom or never encountered a real Ar-' gentine. Personally, it was my good fortune to meet several gentlemen of eminent position and influence in Buenos Ayres who were natives of the countVy, whose parents in some instances had even been born there, and all were intensely proud to be Argentines. 240 THE REAL ARGENTINE It would be difficult, however, to determine to what ex- tent any one of them, had England been the scene of their lives, would have been regarded as an Englishman. The extraordinary power of the country to assimilate all races under the sun, the speed with which even the most unpromising material of immigration seems to be transformed into Argentine nationality, presents one of the greatest difficulties to the foreigner in his search for national characteristics. I was told by va- rious English residents that they had only been able to make their children grow up with the English tongue by thrashing them when they spoke Spanish, and M. Huret mentions the typical case of a Frenchman whose sons absolutely refused to learn their father's language, and were proud to speak only Spanish. He also tells how two sons of a wealthy German resident in Ro- sario, who had been sent to a German University, while staying at the Plaza Hotel in Buenos Ayres on their return, on being mistaken for Germans, felt so mortified that they wept! There are two immediate reasons for this fervid patriotism of the younger generation: (i) the fact that all male children born in the Argentine are re- garded as Argentine citizens and must perform their military service; and (2) the perfervid patriotism instilled into them at school, where the national flag is exhibited in every room and receives the homage of a sacred thing. It is perfectly understandable that a young man, feeling himself a citizen of no mean country, in which his father is no more than a foreigner rarely does a Frenchman become officially an Argentine, as that THE ARGENTINE AT HOME 241 involves the renunciation of his own nationality; the Germans are less squeamish in this respect; while the Italians and Spanish readily nationalise themselves will take a wholesome pride in his citizenship. And as language is the greatest instrument for binding a people together, and the predominance of Spanish in South America is unassailable, it is not surprising that the native-born should even prefer the language of his country to that of his father's country. In the course of my stay I met quite a number of persons bearing the most familiar English and Scottish names, who could not even say " Good morning " in English. With cer- tain of these I had frequent transactions, and it was in- teresting to study the racial characteristics of a gen- tleman named Campbell, a fanatical Argentine, whose parents two generations back spoke nothing but " braid Scots," yet whose every action and trick of speech was peculiarly Argentine. Another gentleman, one of the most able and businesslike men I encountered, boasted the name of Harris (pronounced "Arrees"), which was about the only English word he knew. Thus it happens there are unnumbered thousands of Argen- tines without a single drop of Spanish blood, but with all sorts of infusions of British, German, French, Italian, Belgian, Russian, Scandinavian, etc. As re- gards the patriotic teaching, here is an example of the catechism in daily use throughout the public schools: Question. How do you esteem yourself in relation to your compatriots ? Answer. I consider myself bound to them by a sentiment which unites us. Q. And what is that? 242 THE REAL ARGENTINE A. The sentiment that the Argentine Republic is the finest country on earth. Q. What are the duties of a good citizen? A. First of all, to love his country. Q. Even before his parents? A. Before all. Afterwards, the scholar responds in the following manner to another question from the teacher: In the veins of no human being ever flowed more generous blood than ours; the origins of no people in the world ever shone with a brighter aureole than that which illuminates the brow of the Argentine Republic. I am proud of my origin, of my race, and of my country. Whenever the name of General San Martin is men- tioned by the teacher in a class, the scholars are ex- pected to bob up and make the military salute, at the same time saying viva la pdtria! And very touching the extreme gravity of all classes in uncovering and their prayerful homage when the somewhat bizarre strains of the National Anthem, reminiscent of the Marseillaise mixed with a Sankey hymn, are heard, while the na- tional flag borne through the streets or exhibited on an official occasion involves the doffing of all hats. All this, to Europeans, exaggerated patriotism, will appear far less so to the citizen of any young country ^ and is not vastly more pronounced than that of the United States, but it is probably necessary to the fo- menting of a proper sentiment of nationality. Time will adjust the untrue perspective of the present day, which elevates the most trumpery shooting affairs into heroic combats and successful soldiers of no dazzling THE ARGENTINE AT HOME 243 genius with Wellington and Napoleon, if not with Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great! These, then, are two very potent factors in the mak- ing of the Argentine patriot : the claiming of every male child born in the country as a national unit and the de- termined inculcation of a vigorous patriotism. We have to add to them the influence of the language and also that natural love of country which makes the hu- man being prefer even the most forbidding and un- attractive scenes, if they happen to be the first on which his dawning mind has looked. So strong is this feel- ing, that I have found it quite impossible to utter a single word in criticism of Buenos Ayres in the pres- ence of young people, the children of British subjects, who had been born there and had never seen a Euro- pean city. Nay, they are to be met in England, full of contempt for poor old London and all things Eng- lish, and fired with the most unreasoning love of their native Buenos Ayres. Thus in a country where " the melting pot " so quickly turns all that is thrown therein into the same mould, it is almost futile to go searching for " the real Argentine," and we must be content to attempt no delicate differentiations, but simply to ac- cept in the broadest and loosest way the Argentine resi- dents as the Argentine people, excluding, perhaps, the larger portion of the British community. Early discovering the fact that there was no possi- bility of the average stranger being admitted into the charmed circle of the private family, I turned to other methods of discovering something of the family life, and confess that I did not even despise the observations of English governesses, whose services are in keen de- 244 THE REAL ARGENTINE mand among the well-to-do. Some of these ladies might do the necessary picture of the inner life of the Argentine family which no ordinary visitor is ever likely to be able to draw from personal observation. Let me give one glimpse of an Argentine interior, as I had it from a very able teacher of languages an English lady who had spent a number of years in the homes of different families. Unlike most Ar- gentine families, this was self-contained, the father and mother with their brood of young children, and a con- siderable retinue of servants, occupying an immense house in the fashionable district, with no other relatives sharing it. The gentleman derived a large income from his estates and was above the need to do more than draw his money periodically from the agents into whose hands he had placed their management. The wife, still under thirty, was the mother of some eight or nine children, and she had already attained to that condition of adipose tissue which is the ambition of every respectable Argentine lady. Her mornings were spent in aimless lolling about the house in a state of un- dress, her toilet being a matter for the afternoon, when she went for a short run in their big limousine, or visited some lady friends to take afternoon tea. In the evenings, she had her children with her until a com- paratively late hour, her husband spending almost every evening at his club, and he too would attend to his toilet in the afternoon, thinking nothing of sitting down to lunch in his shirt-sleeves with his suspenders hanging from the back of his trousers, while his wife would be in her dressing gown. The children wen not admitted to meals, but took their food with thi THE ARGENTINE AT HOME 245 governess and one or two nurses in a special dining- room, into which papa would occasionally wander at meal time, still in his shirt sleeves, and help himself to scraps from the dishes on the table or perhaps a spoonful of soup from the tureen ! This the governess found somewhat trying in her efforts to instil manners into the children, whose conduct at table was deplor- able. Once when one of the elder girls was picking the bread on the governess's plate, that much-tried lady explained to her gently that such was not con- sidered good manners, to which the bright young girl replied: " In England, yes; but here, no." To keep these lively youngsters from all sorts of monkeyisms, such as licking the dividing spoon, putting their knives, into their mouths, and making as much noise over a plate of soup as one does in a bath, left the governess scant time to enjoy her meals, and such manners among children are not altogether exceptional in Argentine homes. Young people are pampered to a dangerous degree, and while still mere children they have more pocket money to dispose of on their own little selfish pleasures than many a well-to-do English- man spends on himself. Although there is great and growing popularity for all forms of English sport, and especially football, the boys of the moneyed classes are usually somewhat ef- feminate in their manners. Those of the household above mentioned who were old enough to go to school were taken there, a distance of about a quarter of a mile, under care of a nurse or the governess, in one of the various motor cars owned by the father, and at the hour of dismissal each day they were brought home in 246 THE REAL ARGENTINE the same manner. I used to think it quite one of the characteristic sights of Buenos Ayres to notice the groups of nurses and governesses at the doors of the better-class schools, waiting to receive their little charges and conduct them as far as two or three squares away by electric tram, when the parents could not af- ford to send a motor or a horse-carriage for that pur- pose. Many of these helpless boys would be twelve years old! This is understandable in the case of the girls, nay imperative, but it tends to make the boys timorous and unmanly, afraid even to cross the street alone. In view of the universal pampering of the chil- dren, it speaks highly for the essential virility of Ar- gentine character that the youth of the country cannot, as a whole, be said to lack in manliness; they seem to throw off in adolescence the effeminacy which their boyhood training is admirably adapted to foster in them. Of familiar domestic intercourse, such as the social relationships of British and North American home- life make possible, there is absolutely none in the Ar- gentine, or, indeed, throughout the whole of South America excepting always those families in which Anglo-Saxon influence predominates. The drawing- room of most of the better-class houses is a gorgeously furnished chamber, in which the furniture, on most days of the year, is hidden under dust covers, and where the blinds are seldom raised. It exists for state occasions only, when the starchiest formality is ob- served, and these are by no means numerous and always duly announced in the social column of the daily pa- pers. The lady of the house passes most of her time ;THE ARGENTINE AT HOME V 247 between her bedroom and her boudoir, and it is in the latter, if she cultivate a circle of lady friends, that she will sip afternoon tea with her callers, although you will occasionally come across an announcement in the social news stating that some lady is going to give a " five o'clock tea room " at four o'clock, and inviting her acquaintances to be present. There is a great par- tiality for the use of English phrases, and " five o'clock tea," together with the addition of " room," is often used without any clear understanding of its meaning. But the Argentine mother, although her ways are not our ways, might in certain respects serve as an exam- ple to English and American mothers; entering not in the slightest degree into any of her husband's concerns that lie outside of their home, her devotion is entirely to her children, who will in large measure reflect her standard of culture, and when the lady of the house has had a European training, there will be nothing lacking in the behaviour of her children. This bond between the mother and children is very strong, reaching out through all the living generations, so that even a great-grandmother and there are many, as the women marry young, grandmothers of forty being not uncommon enters very intimately into the lives of all her progeny, who vie with each other in their love for her. The community of feel- ing between all members and branches of the family is most pronounced. The importance of this in knitting together the fabric of Argentine society cannot be over- estimated. Unlike the French housewife, the Argentine lady does not greatly concern herself about the finances of 2 4 8 THE REAL ARGENTINE the household, merely giving directions for the expen- diture, but usually leaving it to her husband to settle the accounts. In this she shows something of the " grand lady " and also something of the lady of the harem, acknowledging that it is no part of a woman's business to understand the value of money. Her con- ception of her office is to be pleasing and attractive to her husband and devoted to her children, in which duties she finds her full content. The very formality of her name indicates how far the Argentine lady is removed from the possibilities of Pankhurstism. She is proud to be known as Senora Maria Martinez de Fuentes, thus indicating that she is Maria Martinez of Fuentes, the latter being her husband's name. It is an admission of husband's rights which could not exist in a country of self-assertive womenkind. By the way, it may be interesting here to explain the peculiar customs that regulate family names in South America, and lead to continuous mistakes on the part of Englishmen and Americans, who have not taken the trouble to familiarise themselves with them. I have just explained that when a lady marries she retains her maiden name and adds to it, with the preposition de, the name of her husband. Almost certainly, however, her husband would have two family names; the pa- ternal and maternal. Let us suppose his name was Fuentes Mattos, the first his father's family name and the second his mother's family name. His wife, in adding his name to hers, ignores his mother's name, which is of secondary importance, and in many cases is entirely dropped. On the other hand, the children THE ARGENTINE AT HOME 249 of this imaginary couple would be named Fuentes Martinez, thus indicating that the father was a Fuen- tes and the mother a Martinez, so that we have the fol- lowing varieties of nomenclature in one family: Father: Jose Fuentes Mattos. Mother: Maria Martinez de Fuentes. Son: Alfonso Fuentes Martinez. When we remember that the names of the grand- parents and the grandchildren will all pass through sim- ilar changes, it will be seen how complicated South American family names may become. Still, always bearing in mind the simple rules I have illustrated, there is no difficulty in identification, and relationships can be much more clearly established than with our cruder system. There is a tendency in the Argentine, due to admi- ration of British brevity, to ignore the maternal name entirely, whereas on the Pacific coast it is the universal practice to use only the initial, so that Senor Jose Fuentes Mattos would there be expected to sign him- self Jose Fuentes M. As it is, in the Argentine a man will sometimes write his name in full and at other times use only the initial for the maternal name, or drop it entirely; but for Senor Jose Fuentes Mattos to receive a letter from England addressed Senor J. F. Mattos is an insult he does not readily forgive. Naturally, that is what happens daily in business correspondence between North and South America, and I well remem- ber a traveller for an American firm coming to me to solve the difficulties of a long list of names he had re- 250 THE REAL ARGENTINE ceived from his head office, in every one of which the surname was represented by an initial and the maternal name written in full. Returning to the Argentine at home, we have to con- sider for a moment that patriarchal system ofjivinj to which I have already made reference as one of the legacies of the remote past. Formerly universal in Spain, had it not existed in the mother country before the colonising days, it would almost certainly have been forced upon the colonial pioneers. For protec- tion against the marauding Indians, the colonists, even for many years after gaining their national indepen- dence in 1810, had to maintain themselves in closely banded communities. Even so recently as the year 1860, the now thriving city and port of Bahia Blanca, which may yet rival Buenos Ayres as a great centre of shipping, was no more than a military outpost to keep the Indians from penetrating too near the townships in the province of Buenos Ayres. Thus we might have attributed to the influence of environment the system of one family with all its connections, interested in the work of a large estancia, as extensive, perhaps, as an English county, living together under the one paternal roof, did we not know that it has a remoter origin. Now that the conditions which justified it have entirely passed away, its true origin is not only forgotten, but would probably be denied by those who observe the custom, which survives in the very heart of the metrop- olis, and among the best families of the land. I re- member well how impressed we were with some of the private palaces in Buenos Ayres, many of which rival in size and architectural ostentation the great public THE ARGENTINE AT HOME 251 buildings. It was a matter for wonder how any or- dinary family could tenant a house large enough to serve as the town hall of an important city. But all was made clear when we knew that in many of these private palaces there was not merely one solitary fam- ily nestling away in some corner of the huge building, but probably anything from six to a dozen related fam- ilies, living under one roof, so that I used to think of the head of the family in Gilbertian rhyme, abiding in peace, not only with wife and children, but with His sisters and his cousins, Whom he reckons up by dozens, And his aunts! To Britishers especially, it is a surprising fact that there are brethren in the world who can dwell together in harmony, to whom propinquity does not lead to family bickerings. That would be notoriously impos- sible in Great Britain, and I suspect equally so among the Anglo-Saxons of America. Our nature prompts to the independent life and an early good-bye to the pa- rental roof. Surely, then, there must be something radically different in the Argentine character which can enable halt a dozen or more interrelated families to live ha rmompusly ~f TT~ the- sainerrtaluseT Ut course, each family unit has its own particular quarters, and in some of the more stately residences each family is really self- contained as to its house accommodation, but more usually they will have common dining-rooms and sit- ting-rooms, the women folk passing practically all their time in each other's company. As a people they must either be abnormally good-natured, family affection 252 THE REAL ARGENTINE must be developed beyond anything familiar among us, or their racial inclination to indolence makes them so tolerant of one another that they do not have the spirit to quarrel. I suspect that something of all three, in- teracting on their lives, makes possible the existence of this unusual condition of happy family life. The system is one that has much to be said for it, and fostering, as it does, an intense feeling of family pride, which is reflected in the patriotism of the coun- try, it must be regarded as a valuable asset of national character. If it happens that any member of the com- posite family meets with misfortune, he can be sure of the immediate sympathy and practical help of his rel- atives within the domestic circle, for they would deem it an indignity that one of their family should be known to be in difficulties. If one of the married sons dies, leaving a widow with several children, there will never be a moment's doubt as to what the widow will do. She will continue in precisely the same position within the family, and even if her husband has left no money at all, his brothers will consider it their bounden duty to maintain her and her children in the same comfort as her husband would have done. Nor is there any charity in this, as there would be with us. It is a natu- ral concomitant of the family system. What we should consider generosity, the Argentine brother-in- law regards as a simple duty, and there is hardly a limit to what he will do in the shape of service to the family of his dead brother. In this connection, I recall a very interesting illustra- tion of the racial differences between Argentine and English. An English settler in Buenos Ayres had five THE ARGENTINE AT HOME 253 daughters born there, four of whom married British residents or the children of British residents. The one exception married an Argentine gentleman, and so nar- rowly British were her relatives that at first they looked with disfavour on the match. After some years, the English husband of one of the daughters died, leaving her with four children and an empty purse, having wasted all his wife's patrimony in foolish speculation there is no Married Women's Property Act, the hus- band becoming sole arbiter of his wife's fortune ! Her English brothers-in-law and her own sisters were more or less sympathetic, but the despised Argentine broth- er-in-law immediately made a home for her and her children with his own family, and, as one of her rela- tives told me, seemed to think he was only doing his bare duty. This is a very pleasant trait of character, and from all that I was able to gather it is entirely characteristic of the better-class Argentine. Cer- tainly, wherever I found that British women had mar- ried natives, they had good reason for happiness, and too often were able to commiserate with their own sis- ters and women friends who had married Englishmen. Another noteworthy resultant of the strength of the family bond is its influence for good on the men. In a country where, thanks to the cosmopolitan rabble of rogues and tricksters who swarm in every quarter, dis- honesty abounds in all its guises, the temptations to most men are greater than in the older and more firmly established countries of the world. Pride of family very often keeps a man in the straight path. It is a little reminiscent of the ancient system of the Japanese, which involved the entire family in the disgrace and 254 THE REAL ARGENTINE punishment of any one member who transgressed the laws of honour. The strongest deterrent to one tempted towards a wrong course is not what the com- munity at large will think of him, but how his action will embarrass and humiliate his whole family. And when a member of one of these composite family cir- cles is guilty of embezzlement or any misdeed which can be rectified by the self-sacrifice of the others, the matter seldom reaches the public; his father and his brothers and other relatives willingly make good his defalcations. Quite a number of cases of this kind came to my personal knowledge, and I believe it is a fact that the law has seldom to be appealed to when any one has suffered a loss through an employee, or a partner who is " well connected." For this reason, astute business men are always careful to inquire into the family connections of any person with whom they purpose having transactions, these connections being their best guarantee. It will usually be found that the most barefaced swindlers are either foreigners, or of foreign parentage, and not seldom have they a good deal of British blood in their veins. As to the " homes " of the Argentine, they approach more nearly Anglo-Saxon ideas of " comfort " than the French, Spanish, or Italian notions of " home." French styles of furniture and interior decoration still predominate. There is, however, a growing appreci- ation of the more solid comfort of English styles, and popularity for these is assured. Our capacious easy chairs are ousting the dainty, elegant and abominably unrestful French affairs. Little progress, however, has been made in the direction of heating the houses, THE ARGENTINE AT HOME 255 and an Argentine interior in winter, as I have said in an earlier chapter, is apt to be a picture of shivering cheerlessness. But there are signs that even this will be remedied in the increasing approval of what may be described as " English comfort." That the Argentine's home is likely, however, to be thrown open to the freedom of the North American home is inconceivable. His exclusiveness is a heritage of the past. He could not rid himself of it, even though he tried. Nor is he trying very hard. He may in time come to follow European customs in the ordering of his meals, which still remain, in real Ar- gentine homes, a topsy-turvy wonder to the European, the soup usually appearing about the end of the dinner, and the cheese being eaten indiscriminately between the earlier courses. This is no more than a fashion, but the other matter is " bred in the bone." Knowing this, it seems quaint to receive from a na- tive a letter on some ordinary affair of business, bear- ing his home address with the initials " s.c." or "s.c.u." appended. Here we have an old Spanish formal- ity, and one of the emptiest of courtesies. The initials stand for su casa de usted, meaning " Your house." That is to say, he informs you his house is your house! But he has no more intention of ever asking you to enter his house than you have of going there to stay. It reminds one of Mark Twain on his travels in Spain, when expressing admiration for a Spaniard's jacket, the owner retorted, " It is yours, sir," and further assured him when he also admired his beautiful waistcoat that it also was at his disposal, so that Mark, out of consideration of the Spaniard's 256 THE REAL ARGENTINE convenience, refrained from admiring anything else he wore. This is a custom of very primitive peoples, and I am told that something similar obtains among the Maoris of New Zealand, one of whose chiefs pressed upon King George, when, as Prince of Wales, he vis- ited the colony, the acceptance of some venerated ob- ject, and was greatly chagrined by the royal visitor, in all innocence and wishing not to offend the chief, ac- cepting the quite useless gift. We must never take Spanish courtesy literally, and we must remember in South America that their courtesy is one of the things they have imported from Spain. Among the minor characteristics of the Argentine which frequently interested me and for which I en- deavoured to find a reason, was the habit of repeating the most ordinary phrases in much the manner of a doddering old person reiterating the same story. Let me try to express this in English. A lady is telling how she narrowly escaped being run down by a tram in the street: It would be about four o'clock in the afternoon, when I was going down Calle Sarmiento. There was a lot of traffic in the street, and without looking backwards I stepped off the pavement. Just as I stepped off the pavement, I heard the bell of a tram, and looking back, it had nearly reached me, so I gave a scream and stepped back on the pavement, just as the tram passed me, in the Calle Sarmiento, at about four o'clock in the afternoon, when it was very crowded and I had onh just stepped off the pavement, when I heard the bell, and h; only time to step back when the tram passed me. If I hadn't heard the bell, I might have been run over, and I gave a sere just as I stepped back on the pavement. THE ARGENTINE AT HOME 257 That is no burlesque version of how this most thrill- ing story would be told. Then, suppose you have to arrange with one of your native employees to purchase a box of purple carbon paper and three shorthand note- books on his way to the office to-morrow morning. You will tell him so, and expect that to be an end of the matter when you are fresh to Buenos Ayres. But no, after listening attentively to your elaborate in- structions, he will then repeat: So, when I am coming in to-morrow morning, I will go to the stationer's, and I will get a box of purple carbon paper and three shorthand note-books a box of carbon paper, pur- ple, and shorthand note-books, three, to-morrow morning on my way into the office. Three note-books and a box of purple carbon paper. Bueno! This most tantalising habit of trivial repetition is uni- versal, and so endemic that English-born residents speaking both languages translate this mode of thought into the English tongue, with the quaintest results. There is surely no people in the world who can take a longer time to explain a little matter than the South American, and I have often thought that the volume of the Spanish language, which frequently calls for three or four times the number of words that would be used in English to express a simple idea, must have had some influence in producing this strange habit of repe- tition, in order to fix in the mind precisely what is wanted and the condition under which it is to be se- cured. The only satisfactory method of conveying ideas from mind to mind was to assume that the person you were addressing was still under fifteen years of 258 THE REAL ARGENTINE age. The swift exchange of thought flashes which is possible between Anglo-Saxons is unknown to users of the Spanish tongue, but the more go-ahead Argentine, who really represents to-day the brightest intelligence that expresses itself in Spanish, is deliberately aiming at the Anglo-Saxon ideal, and, disregarding the cir- cumlocutions of his native speech, is endeavouring to bend that to the brisker uses of modern commercial life. This theory of mine may be entirely wrong, but the facts, as I have endeavoured to illustrate them above, are substantially correct. If anything is likely to seduce the Argentine away from his oldest and most honoured customs of life, it is the spirit of emulation which pervades the whole social system, though it is present to a much greater degree in those of mixed parentage than in the criollos. By no means peculiar to the Argentine, it attains to almost equal strength in the United States, nor is it at all uncommon in English society. Social rivalry is really the motive force behind much of the commercial activity of the country. The family of Sanchez have just built a swagger new house and bought a 25 horse- power limousine. The Alonso family, having quite as much money and perhaps a trifle more than the San- chez, cannot brook this ostentation to pass without re- ply, so up goes a still more florid mansion, a 40 horse- power car is bought, and the chauffeur wears a dozen more brass buttons. This game of " Beggar my Neighbour " in social ostentation is being played mer? rily through every grade of Argentine society. It is extremely good for business. Not only does it create a brisk demand for luxuries, but it lays upon those who THE ARGENTINE AT HOMI 259 play it the necessity of energising to secure the where- withal, and is thus productive of creative effort in the making of wealth where formerly the impetus was lacking. So that perhaps it might not be wrong to suppose that what the European observer would write down in the one case as the vulgar striving of social " climbers," and as rotten economics in the other, is economically good in the development of a young coun- try. But it is imitative and nothing else, for there is as yet no evidence of the growth of a distinctively national taste, and this imitative tendency of the people is des- tined to bring them steadly nearer to European ideas, so that they will probably emerge with a social system that will bear the same relationship to that of all the European nations as a composite photograph does to all the portraits that have been overlaid on the nega- tive. CHAPTER XIV " THE BRITISH COLONY " AND ITS WAYS ALL the different nationalities represented in the pop- ulation of the Argentine are known as u colonies," excepting the Spaniards and Italians, who are at once so numerous and so involved in the life of the country that it is scarcely possible to think of them merely as colonial groups. The Republic, with a total population of seven and a half-millions, contains vast numbers of Italians and Spaniards, but reliable returns as to the various nationalities included in the population are dif- ficult to come by, if not impossible to secure. It is stated that there are upwards of 800,000 Spaniards in the country j while the Basques, both French and Span- ish, are said to exceed a quarter of a million; the Ger- mans number nearly 50,000, the total of German speaking persons, which includes Germans, Austrians, and Swiss, being upwards of 120,000. The British residents throughout the Republic probably do not total 40,000, but that is thought a fair estimate. As for Italians, their name is legion. In Buenos Ayres alone there are some 350,000 of them. But all figures must be regarded as approximate only, as the re-emigration movement is considerable. For example: in the year 1911 the total immigration into the Republic was 225,- 772, but the emigration from it amounted to 120,709, leaving an immigration balance of 105,063. Race statistics are easily obtained as to the incoming popu- 260 'THE BRITISH COLONY" AND ITS WAYS 261 lation ? but of the settled residents and those who leave the country, there is a good deal that is speculative in all estimates, official and otherwise. The Spaniards and Italians are split up into many subsections, such as the Basques, Asturians, Andalusi- ans, Neapolitans, Tuscans, Lombards, Sicilians, and so forth. It would thus be correct to talk of " the As- turian colony," but scarcely so of " the Spanish col- ony "; of the Neapolitan colony, but not of the Italian. To a remarkable degree do these communities pre- serve their racial distinctions, as I have already ex- plained, this applying more particularly to the cosmo- politan centres of population, such as Buenos Ayres, Rosario, La Plata, and Mendoza. In the smaller country towns, where the nationalities thin out, there are not the same inducements to maintain distinctions of race ; thus, paradoxical though it may seem, the proc- ess of " Argentinising " the Gringo proceeds apace more rapidly in the Camp than in the larger towns, or even in Buenos Ayres, which might be thought the hot- test part of the " melting pot." Naturally, the capjtal^ contains the major portion of the British^colony, yet, not even the ubiquitous Italian, though always^overwhelming the British in sheer num- bers, finds his way to remoter parts, for everywhere throughout the vast territory of the Republic the Brit- ish have penetrated, either as lonely overseers or " con- struction engineers," in little groups as prosperous estancieros, or managers of divers concerns. In Ro- sario there is a very considerable colony of them, in Bahia Blanca, in Junin, Mendoza, Tucuman wher- ever there are banks to be managed, railways to be 262 THE REAL ARGENTINE maintained, machinery to be sold, there you will find the enterprising sons of Albion busy, and usually pros- perous; though it must be confessed that the figure I have just used may not quite apply, as the most famil- iar names borne by these self-exiles from Britain are Scots and Irish. In many respects, the Irish Argentine was one of my most interesting studies. As a journalist, it was some- thing of a revelation to find two comparatively pros- perous weekly newspapers, the Southern Cross and the Hiberno- Argentine Review, both printed in English and very, much alive, dedicated exclusively to the inter- ests of the Irish Catholic families of the country. The Irishman is well-known for the part he has played in the development of South America. In that wonder- ful statesman and governor, Ambrosio O'Higgins, and his no less brilliant son Bernardo, the liberator and first President of Chili, did not Ould Ireland give to South America two of the noblest men of action whose lives illumine its history? In the Argentine also, the Hi- bernian has played no mean role in the development of the young nation. His influence in her counsels to-day is considerable. Prepared as one may be by previous reading to discover him prominent in its life, it is none the less strange to meet eminent men of business, in every fibre of their being fervid Argentines, using the Argentine tongue with all the nuances of the native, who speak our own language with the most pronounced Irish brogue. Comparatively few of these Irish Argentines, more- over, have ever crossed the seas to the green isle of their ancestors. Almost without exception they are " THE BRITISH COLONY " AND ITS WAYS 263 bitterly anti-English in sentiment. Originally sprung from the lower class Irish peasantry, to whom the mis- erable conditions of emigrant life in the Argentine, a generation or two back, were far less forbidding than to the average British emigrant, the dress-suit and silk- stockinged stage of luxury attained by the many who have gathered a bit of fortune from the generous soil, is to them a satisfaction that might not appeal so strongly to the classes which England and Scotland are pouring into Canada at the present time. His religion also fitting in with that of the country is another factor that has helped to make the Irishman at home in the Argentine. Under the British Treaty wjth the Argentine, the children born in the country of BritisITpare'nts" occupy a~~5ume"what curious position as__regards nationality. WKHeTtEeTr parents remain British subjects, unless and this rarely indeed they deliberately renounce their birthright to become nationalised Argentines, children born in, the country are reckoned as Argen- ^mej[ and~amenablejto_the taws of the Republic so long as th^ynEontinue^to ljye_thfir.eiiiJ)ut they beicomBrit-j ish subjects on entering^ Mtish_territorY. Thus, the native son of British parents must conform to the law of military service, while the native-born daughter ranks with all other Argentine women in her disabili- ties as to the personal control of her property in the event of her marrying in that country. Yet, on going to London, that son and daughter cease, for the time being, to be Argentine subjects, so far as British law is concerned, and are there accepted as native-born Britishers. 264 THE REAL ARGENTINE Whether this curious international arrangement ex- ists in connection with any other European countries, I know not; but suspect it does not, else the heroic ef- forts of many foreign women residents, and especially the French, to maintain the nationality of their chil- dren, would not be necessary. Seldom does a steamer leave Buenos Ayres for Europe without .carrying sev- eral lonely women who have left their husbands, per- haps in some remote corner of the Pampa, in order that the child to be born may see the light under the flag of its parents' country. M. Huret mentions the case of a French lady who, in addition to a long and toilsome journey from the interior, undertook the trip to Europe and back on two occasions within three years thus to preserve the French nationality of her children. With English mothers the chief, indeed the only reason for following this course is to save any son of theirs from the burdsn-of military service. And many a poor lady who has' made the trip has been disappointed to be told the child was a girl ! Argentine statesmen are most insistent on the main- tenance of the conditions that go with Argentine citi- zenship, and to such a point that the famous Bartolome Mitre, one of the greatest men the nation has pro- duced, declared that, rather than withdraw the condi- tion, that he who becomes a citizen of the Republic must renounce his allegiance to his native land, he would " set fire to his country from all sides." Officialism is alert and open-eyed in its watch and ward over the native-born sons of foreigners who seek to evade their military obligations. So far as I could gather, there was but little disposition to do so on the " THE BRITISH COLONY " AND ITS WAYS 265 part of most of the young citizens sprung from Gringo parents; rather are they apt to look down upon the country of their fathers, and to swell with pride at be- ing privileged to serve the Argentine. Exceptions to this rule will most usually be found among the sons of resident Britishers, though many of them, and especially the Irish, willingly do their duty by the Republic. I remember overhearing the mother of one of these young Irish portenos scolding him be- cause he insisted on speaking Spanish, even among his own people, where English (with a thick brogue) was the language of the family circle. He had served his term in the Republican army, and gloried in reciting its illustrious achievements, before which the efforts of the poor blunderers who muddled through with such foot- ling officers as Napoleon and Wellington paled into insignificance. What were the British Grenadiers to the Granaderos de San Martin? What indeed! But the Englishmen and Scotsmen who, by accident of birth, rank as Argentine citizens, and have done their military service, are comparatively few in proportion to the whole. I have met native-born Argentines not a few who were far less enamoured of the country and its ways, and more sanely appreciative of old England than many British residents who had better reason to entertain these sentiments. A certain lofty contemgt^ for the Englishman at homejs to_be noted in the attitude of the " British^ Col- ony_" to things British. " I have no use for the un- travelled Englishman," said an Argentine-born Eng- lishman to me. This gentleman's parents had evi- dently been so essentially English that their son, now 266 THE REAL ARGENTINE a man of about fifty, had grown up and attained to prosperity without being able to speak more than " Gringo Spanish." He had no use for the untrav- elled Englishman, and yet I shall venture to say that many a Lancashire or Yorkshire man who has trav- elled no farther than London will have as broad an outlook as the English porteno who has never been outside of the Argentine. This very gentleman, one of the most charming and agreeable of the British res- idents with whom I came into touch, had himself vis- ited England for the first time two years before I met him, and confessed that the old land, with its unlim- ited facilities for the larger enjoyment of social life, made a deep impression on him, even to the point of awakening the desire to go " home " and avail himself of his British birthright for the rest of his days. Judge ye, therefore, to what extent he was entitled to sneer at the untravelled Englishman ! So far as enlarging one's horizon or enriching the mind is con- cerned, a month on the Continent of Europe, amid historic scenes and in touch with the grand, great things of the past, will do more than many years of Buenos Ayres. Thus I was at first inclined to stiffen against my porteiio friend and resent his suggestion, but I had misunderstood him, and we were really in entire har- mony, he and I. His point was that the Englishman who arrives in Buenos Ayres direct from England, and has never before travelled throughout his own coun- try or even troubled about that Continental tour is apt to prove a social bore to his fellow-countrymen in Buenos Ayres. I concur most heartily, for this is the very type of Englishman who discusses in the loud- ' THE BRITISH COLONY " AND ITS WAYS 267 est voice and with the most unreasoning bigotry the in- comparable advantages of the Argentine over the be- nighted little island he has left. Nor must it be sup- posed that the seven thousand miles from the Thames to the River Plate do anything appreciably to reduce the untravelled state of this Englishman. There is not a great deal to see, and what there is slips past the average voyager without notice, so that he reaches his journey's end in the same splendid state of untravelled ignorance that he left his native town in England. In any consideration of the British colony, we ought to have established in our minds what exactly are its constituents. A"Teiy^TgeTrumber ^TTts members are associated with the management of the railways. Even readers who are only indifferently informed on South American subjects are probably aware that the British are the great railway makers of the world, and that the thousands of miles of lines which interlace the far-flung towns of the Argentine are monuments of British enterprise, while some 150,000,000 of good English money has gone to their making. In this alone the Britishers have proved themselves the great- est benefactors of the country, although it has not been entirely a work of philanthropy. The railways, then, being chiefly British concerns, ^how a natural prefer- Vnce^for jBritish employees, and thousands of young Britons are serving on tTTem to-day in all sorts of ca- pacities, but chiefly as clerks, accountants, draughts- men, engineers, and department managers. Time was when the young railway employee in Eng- land who secured a post in the Argentine went direct from a thistly pasturage to a field of clover; was able 268 THE REAL ARGENTINE to keep his horse and ruffle it with the best. That was before the standardising of the currency, when a paper peso would occasionally be as good as gold, and usu- ally a great deal better than it has been since the es- tablishment of the caja de conversion. To-day they speak of those times as of a Golden Age that has van- ished, and now the lot of the minor railway employee is by no means an enviable one. It is true that he will probably receive a salary twice or two and a half times greater than he got at home, but, as I have already made clear, the net result of such a salary will be that financially his Argentine condition, if not worse than his British, will be but little better. He will handle more money, and he will get a great deal less for what he spends. Meanwhile, he has signed his two or three years' agreement, and must struggle on, however in- adequately he is financed for the fight. Falling read- ily into the ways of his better situated countrymen, he endeavours to vie with them, and in the process is lucky indeed if he avoids running into debt. From this class, to which naturally there are many exceptions among the higher placed officials many of whom are men of outstanding ability, handsomely paid and more liberally treated than they would be in similar positions in Great Britain or North America we have not the best of material for the building of the British colony. TheJBritish banks and financial agencies, so numer- ous througho^F~fKe~^rpubTic, "afe^very largely staffed from home, though there is also a large native element in every office, as it is not to be supposed that the oper- ations of these banks are confined to a British clientele. Far from that; I should imagine that the large major- ' THE BRITISH COLONY " AND ITS WAYS 269 ity of depositors with such as the London and River Plate Bank were foreigners. Certainly, to judge by my occasional visits to that busiest of banks, there were always fewer Britishers among those waiting on the outside of the counters than there were English-speak- ing accountants and cashiers on the inside. In addi- tion to the heads of departments who were, I think, without exception, Britishers, the staff contained many English-speaking portenos, but working away at the books, and not in touch with the public, one could note many essentially British faces. This is typical of most of these banks operating in South America, some per- haps employing more of their fellow countrymen than others. If anything, the Anglo-South-American Bank seemed to me to find employment for even more Eng- lishmen than the average in its various branches in the Argentine and along the Pacific Coast. The young men drafted out from England for em- ployment in these banks are, I imagine, of a somewhat better social status and also better paid than the ruck of the railways employees. In contrast with the condi- tions of service and remuneration at home, the bank clerk in the Argentine certainly does seem to better his position somewhat, or, more correctly, he attains ad- vancement earlier than he would at home. He is, on the other hand, doomed to a long and probably perma- nent exile, as there seems little disposition on the part of the home offices to find openings in London for any of their employees once they have become accustomed to the work and life of South America. This is prob- ably one of the reasons why the British banking com- munity throughout the country appears to be very set- 270 THE REAL ARGENTINE tied in its character, the constant shifting, so unsatis- factory a feature of the clerical staffs of the railways, not being a characteristic of the financial fraternity. Then, the business of the banker, bringing him into direct touch with the public, imposes upon all those anxious to progress therein, the necessity of acquiring the language of the country, whereas the railway clerk, beyond a string of technical words used in his book- keeping, may never find any need for it, and rarely in- deed does an Englishman (and here I must bracket the American with him) make any attempt to learn the language unless under pressure of circumstances. This is another of the reasons for the superiority of the banking clerk over the railway clerk, as it will be found that the intelligent Englishman who has acquired a good command of the language, with whatever object in view, always holds a position superior to his fellow countryman who has not done so, or he is at least likely to outstrip him in the long run. A third element in the making of the British colony are the " Cable boys." The various cable companies are all served by very young men, who among British- ers abroad probably bear away the bell for their un- limited power of " swanking.'* It is altogether de- lightful to pass an hour or two in the company of some of these breezy youths. They leave you with the im- pression that the whole modern civilisation has been moulded by men of their kidney. They talk about their work with a zest that no mere banker, engineer, journalist, or architect could possibly impart to his humbler calling. They call it " The Service," and to hear a group of them discussing the personalities of "THE BRITISH COLONY" AND ITS WAYS 271 their great men in charge of branch offices at fabulous salaries of 5 to 6 a week, is most refreshing to the wearied man of affairs. Often have I watched and frequently had intercourse with these glorious youths, of whose romantic exist- ence I had only the haziest notions until I went a-trav- elling in South America, and they always contrived to make me feel something of a worm for not having dedicated such abilities as I possess to " The Service. " Yet there is a pathetic side to them and their work. The Cable Service and Wireless Telegraphy are two potent snares for the youth of our time. It really re- quires a very modest supply of grey matter in the cra- nium to discharge the duties of either, and a young man of twenty is as good a cable operator as he will be at forty, and probably better than he will be at fifty. Few are they who can hope to rise to the more responsible managerial positions. The bulk of them grow up into disillusioned, under-paid, and aimless men. It is a service for youths, in which they quickly attain profi- ciency, and what, for youth, is a substantial wage; but " soon ripe, soon rot." So that whenever I came in touch with those swaggering " boys," I used to see hovering behind them shadowy figures with grey, sad faces, and did not grudge them their swanking days. Yet another of the constituents of the " colony " is furnished from the ranks of the commission agents and local representatives of our export ing^firms. Many >s 7)?~lKe large' inan^factu ring firms maintain their own offices and staffs under the management of able assist- ants who have been trained at home, while many more are content to be represented on a commission basis by 272 THE REAL ARGENTINE agents, who are their own masters and handle the busi- ness of several firms whose interests do not clash. Among these will be found not a few of the most pros- perous members of the British community, men of self- reliance, initiative, individuality. There are also to be considered in this connection, though the bond that binds them to the British colony is ever loosening, fellow countrymen who have permanently established themselves as local tradesmen, conducting every vari- ety of business, such as chemist, draper, grocer, jewel- ler, bootseller, furniture dealer, bookseller, and so forth. In all parts of Buenos Ayres, and in a lesser degree in the larger towns of the country, the wan- derer will note familiar British names over shop win- dows, often with the Christian name in Spanish, Juan for John, D^ego for James, and so on. It is a fair assumption that when the English tradesman has taken to use the Spanish form, he intends to strike his roots deep into the new soil. His children will become more Argentine than British, and theirs British not at all. But perhaps the most important, and I suspect the most substantial of the British community who have made their homes in this Land of Fortune are those of the estanciero class. It is true that the wealthiest of thern~cannot T)e compared on a mere money basis with the wealthier natives, who have seen their landed properties increase some hundred times in value in the last forty years, whereas most English estancieros had to buy their holdings after the upward movement be- gan. Many of them carry on farming on what, com- pared with the average conditions in their native land, is a baronial scale, and as a rule they seem to be pleased " THE BRITISH COLONY " AND ITS WAYS 273 with their lot and happy in the country of their adop- tion. They are frequent visitors to Buenos Ayres, and flock there, particularly at the time of the Agricultural Show, when their women-folk vie with each other in the display of their latest hats and dresses. Included among the agricultural class are many highly paid man- agers, usually Englishmen of good education and or- ganising ability, who conduct the intricate affairs of large estancias either for private owners or for public companies. It is impossible, of course, to give in complete de- tail an analysis of the British colony, and all that I have attempted has been to suggest very roughly the classes that go to its composition. It will be seen that it is first and last a purely commercial community. In no sense is it a repficaTof society as one knows it in Eng- land. Every member of it is there to make money, and by the extent to which he is succeeding does he stand in the estimation of the community. It could not be otherwise. It is true there are British schools with British instructors, British churches a pro- Cathedral among them with clergymen, Noncon- formist pastors, and Irish priests, societies for literary discussion, British clubs, charities, hospitals, missions to seamen, Salvation Army workers, and amateur the- atrical societies; but the fact remains that it is in the very fibre of its being a business community, where commercial standing takes precedence of most other considerations. At the same time, I found ample evidence in the British colony of a desire to approximate more nearly to the social observations of the homeland, to look 274 THE REAL ARGENTINE more closely at the credentials of newcomers before taking them to its bosom. In the early days, Buenos Ayres was one of the many dumping places for was- trels, and the colonial freedom which accepted every- body at his face value produced an inevitable mixture of sorts, so that not rarely did Britishers of dubious antecedents manage to secure a wife among the daugh- ters of some prosperous British resident. It is well- known that the daughters of these families even still have great difficulty in finding suitable husbands of their own class, and during our stay I confess I saw sufficient of the British community to have made me extremely careful, had I intended to settle in the town, in the choice of my friends. There is in all this noth- ing that reflects upon the worthier elements of the com- munity; it is the inevitable outcome of peculiar condi- tions, and rather than finding much to censure, one may discover a great deal to commend in the life of these exiles. That it is provincial to a degree is scarcely sur- prising, and that it is productive of much genuine friendship, sympathy, mutual helpfulness, is due to the generous British nature on which it is based. Its class_distinctions are being emphasised, and not before time. At first blush one might be repelled by what seemed the pettiness of its interests, the little cor- roding jealousies, its snobbishness, but the last men- tioned is at bottom a praiseworthy effort to raise the social level beyond that obtaining with the indiscrimi- nate mixing of good and bad which characterised the earlier life of the community. The pettiness is ines- capable. A country town in England would probably " THE BRITISH COLONY " AND ITS WAYS 275 provide no more gossip and scandal than any British community several times its size in a foreign land. A nursery governess comes out to Buenos Ayres and stays at the by-no-means-luxurious headquarters of the Y. W. C. A. until she finds a job. She will probably be back there frequently in the periods between her various posts, as she will have many changes before she is " suited." Eventually she will meet some decent, lonely Englishman, managing an estancia a day or two's journey away in the Camp. They will get mar- ried, and make a brave show of it at the Y. W. C. A., and next day the Standard will publish a column de- scribing the great event, with the list of presents spaced out in single lines. Need one be surprised if the nursery governess suddenly finds herself something of a snob ? She will immediately " put on airs," and on her visits to the capital with her husband she will ruffle it for a day or two in the smartest of new dresses and the biggest of hats, just to advertise the agreeable fact that they are " getting on." Marriage possibilities form the favourite gossip of the community, and the Standard even publishes copies of invitations that have been sent out by the most or- dinary members of the community, introducing them with the words " The following wedding invitations are now in circulation." The most vital crisis in Eu- ropean affairs will receive less space than the wedding of John Jones and Mary Smith. The favourite paper of the community teems daily with the most trivial per- sonalities, even the social movements of a railway clerk not being deemed unworthy of record. The lack of 276 THE REAL ARGENTINE entertainment causes amateur theatricals to flourish, and the English papers will " spread themselves " on a three or four column criticism of the most ordinary amateurish production of, say, " The Count of Lux- embourg," while there will not be lacking foolish peo- ple to assert that the amateur production was in every respect finer than anything that could be seen in the principal London theatres. There are two or three of these dramatic societies with long rolls of member- ship, and the performances are given in the regular theatres some half-a-dozen times per annum, these functions being admirable occasions for the display of new toilettes on the part of the ladies of the audience, and an airing for the gentlemen's swallow-tails. I often thought it was evidence of the dearth of so- cial entertainment that British residents were always eager for an opportunity to dine at any of the hotels, although they could have done as well, if not better, in their own homes, so far as food was concerned. An invitation to dinner at the hotel had evidently all the charm of an " event " for them. Those who main- tained a widish circle of friends would also occasion- ally offer an " At Home " at the hotel most patronised by the English and the Americans. In short, one felt from the straits to which they seemed to be put for amusement and distraction, that there was a great so- cial hunger in the community; but on reflection I could see that even those evidences of pettiness which some- what grated on one fresh from the larger life of Lon- don, were more apparent than real, and the British residents in Buenos Ayres were solving fairly well the problem of existing as social beings in an unfavour- " THE BRITISH COLONY " AND ITS WAYS 277 able environment. It was the little round of the most ordinary social engagements, magnified into artificial importance, that helped to make their exile pleasant. I can even imagine myself falling into a condition out there that would make the report of the wedding of two local nobodies quite interesting reading. The various literary societies were also productive of some intellectual intercourse, and although I at- tended none, thanks to the English dailies I was able to read many papers delivered at their meetings, reprinted at full length, which showed a fair average of literary attainment. On the other hand, the most contemptible rubbish that I have seen in print took the form of letters to the editor of the Standard or the Herald, which gave admittance to good and bad indiscrim- inately. Ignorant diatribes against English politicians and home affairs from uneducated residents, who re- joiced to sneer at their motherland, too often found their way into type instead of into the waste basket, and could not but exercise a bad influence on other ignorant members of the community. Nay, jt_was among the British colony that I found more ignorance and bigotry than I did amongst trTe natives, the Spamarcfs, the French, or the Germans. Snrne of the sanest c7IEcismsl5f~~the country to which I listened were made by natives and Spaniards, and also by Italians. I found the Britishers seldom had a well-balanced opinion to deliver: they were either disgusted with everything and longing to be home, or delighted with everything and never wishing to re- turn. Out of many I can recall to mind, I shall select two, both young men, and both typical asses, whom I 278 THE REAL ARGENTINE may describe as pro-Argentines, although neither was naturalised, and both had only been about five years in the country. The first I shall describe as Mr. Q , a notorious bore, who must surely have earned a wide reputation for his habit of monopolising the talk in whatever com- pany he finds himself. I first came into contact with him after listening patiently to a long harangue, ad- dressed chiefly to a group of innocent ladies, on the amazing progress of the Argentine. Not a single statement that he made had a remote connection with fact. I sat by uncomplaining until he assured his ad- miring female group that Buenos Ayres in the last thirty years had not only become the third largest city in the world, but that in fifty years it would unques- tionably have exceeded London in the matter of popu- lation. This was too much. I offered to bet the gen- tleman a thousand pesos to one that he was talking nonsense, and that Buenos Ayres, apart from being already notoriously disproportionate in population to the country as a whole, was not third, but thirteenth of the world's large cities, in proof of which I was fortunately able to produce within ten minutes Whitaker's Almanac for 1912. I did not, however, receive my peso, as Mr. Q declined to accept Whitaker as an authority, stating his information was based on statistics issued by the Argentine Govern- ment! Of course no such fool statistics have ever been issued, the third city of the world (Paris) containing twice the population of Buenos Ayres, though covering a much smaller area. " THE BRITISH COLONY " AND ITS WAYS 279 I had many other encounters with the same gentle- man, who, having acquired some land which he was en- deavouring to transfer to the public on the most philan- thropic basis (to himself), had turned himself into a walking advertisement for the glorious Argentine, and never ceased to explain to visitors how completely played out was Great Britain, how rapidly she was slid- ing down the slippery slope to oblivion, while the Ar- gentine was forging ahead on the path to world-em- pire ! Please do not imagine I am exaggerating one tittle the declarations of this British driveller, who, by the way, hadn't acquired a single sentence of Span- ish in five years ! He pictured Buenos Ayres as the future hub of the world's civilisation, this purely agri- cultural country of the Argentine (featureless and ill adapted for any purpose other than the growing of luxurious crops and the rearing of vast herds of cat- tle), as a teeming land of wondrous industries, before which such things as England, America, France, and Germany have achieved would have to pale their in- effectual fires. No argument of sanity that could be advanced disturbed the calm serenity with which this self-constituted trumpeter of the Argentine reiterated stupidities that would have put the most perfervid pa- triot to the blush. I have described Mr. Q at some little length, because, bore though he is, he is typical of a certain class of Englishman whom one encounters in the Ar- gentine, and for whom Argentine and average Eng- lishman alike have a wholesome contempt. He is one of those aggressive, self-assertive " Anglo-Argen- 280 THE REAL ARGENTINE tines " who go home occasionally and blow about this new land of promise, to the ultimate disillusionment of such as give ear. The other Englishman I have in mind, who also typifies a certain class, is less offensively anti-British than Mr. Q , and his observations being based upon a little knowledge and a large inexperience, he is more amenable to reason than the Mr. Q's, who are mere windbags, that seek to cloak their lack of suc- cess at home by magnifying their changed condition in the new land. Mr. F , as I shall call the other, had a little knack from time to time of dropping such sage remarks as, " Where in the whole of London will you find such evidence of wealth as you do in a walk along the Avenida Alvear?" "Where in Lon- don will you see so many beautiful dresses, such wealth in millinery, as at Palermo on a Sunday after- noon? " "Talk about the business of London, what is it in comparison with the business of Buenos Ayres?" "Were you not astounded at the mag- nificent buildings when you came to Buenos Ayres, all so bright and clean looking, after London?" and so on ad nauseam. We dubbed Mr. F " the silly ass observer." For each of these examples of his acumen in the art of comparative observation breathes of ignorance and thoughtlessness. They are, indeed, almost too stupid to call for notice, but as Mr. F was personally a pleasant and amiable young Englishman, I was often at pains to explain matters to him, and always found that at the root of his odious comparisons lay the "THE BRITISH COLONY" AND ITS WAYS 281 simple fact that he had lived in London with his eyes shut and his mind untouched by the grandeur that surrounded him. How many hundreds of thousands of young men are like Mr. F ! They look on the old familiar things of home with unseeing eyes, and when, perchance, in some new land they begin to take notice, they lack standards of comparison to guide them. When I explained to poor Mr. F , who was honestly overwhelmed by the glory that is Buenos Ayres, that Threadneedle Street or Lombard Street in ye antique city of London, though they look as noth- ing to the eye that cannot see beyond their drab and smoky walls, might comfortably purchase the entire Argentine and all that in it is, from the torrid north to the foggy south, and have something over to be go- ing on with ; when I impressed him with the undoubted fact that most of the wealth which he saw around him had come into being thanks to British money, and that a very substantial portion of the profits being de- rived from the exploitation of the country went every year into London pockets, he began to see things in a new light. To compare the Avenida Alvear with Park Lane, merely shows that one has not observed Park Lane, or that he is not aware that the Avenida Alvear and the few streets thereabout which repre- sent the Mayfair, Belgravia, and West End of Lon- don, are as an inch to an ell. Mr. F is very rep- resentative of the "cable boy" standard of intelli- gence, but in other respects a fine, clean English type, that one would value all the more as an element in the British Colony were it given to a little reflection be- 282 THE REAL ARGENTINE fore it aired its opinions on Argentine and the world in general, of which its experience has been notably slight. ^Hardly at all does th^ejmigrant^lass^nlexJnto the British Colony. British workpeople there are occa- sTonally to be met throughout the Argentine, but the country as a whole is ill adapted for them. Any per- son who by word of mouth or writing spreads abroad the idea that artisans or those of the labouring class of Great Britain will find the Argentine an attractive field, may be doing a very mischievous thing. The con- ditions of life in which the Italian emigrants, the Spaniards, Poles, Russians, Syrians, and all the rest of them herd together in the cities or make shift to exist in rough shanties in the Camp are impossible to even the commonest class of English or Scots work- people, if the language difficulty did not exist to make matters still worse for them. But many British workpeople are there under con- ditions very different from those of the other emi- grants. They are chiefly railway engineers, employed as foremen or as expert workers in the great work- shops of the different railway companies, or as locomo- tive drivers. Their conditions of life, although I fail to see wherein they are greatly superior to those ob- taining in their native land among their class, having regard to the different purchasing value of the wages earned, are at least made agreeable by association with fellow-workers of their own race, and the possibility of saving more money than they would be likely to do at home. For example, where a working man in Eng- land might be able to save 20 ($100) per year, he " THE BRITISH COLONY " AND ITS WAYS 283 can at least contrive to save the same relative propor- tion from his wages in the Argentine, and as his wages will not be less than double, and perhaps two and a half times what they would have been in England, by the same ratio may his savings be increased. These workmen have also security of employment, and, in fine, must not be confounded with the emigrant class. They find grievances, none the less, and even went on strike in the year 1911. Owing to the little communities in which they live being almost entirely British, they do not Assimilate with the natives, and few of them, even after~many years inlrie country, have picked up more than some odd words of the language. A friend of mine, who was rather shaky in his Spanish, was waylaid at a railway station in the interior and wished to have a train stopped at a point along the line where there was no station, to enable him to reach a certain estancia. He managed to explain this in Spanish to the station- master, but the latter was unable to interpret it to the engine-driver, who turned out to be English and did not know a word of what he called " their blooming lingo ! " These sturdy and skilled artisans naturally do not count in the British Colony of Buenos Ayres, and most of them live in the railway centres of the provinces, and come only occasionally to the capital for a trip. What must strike the British visitor in Buenos Ayres with a curious air of home is the railway bookstall at Retire, Once, or at Constitucion. The former looks as familiar as a London suburban bookstall, with all sorts of English periodicals, from the Strand Magazine 284 THE REAL ARGENTINE to Comic Cuts, bundles of " sixpenny " and " seven- penny " novels, The Times, weekly edition, Lloyds' News, and many another familiar title, though the prices charged are naturally two or three times those printed on the periodicals. These are evidence of the large English community residing in the various sub- urbs served from the stations named. The English bookshops in the heart of the city are also well-known centres, being entirely patronised by the " colony," but the English grocers drive a large business with the na- tive population, and employ many assistants who only speak Spanish. Still, British housewives have no need to acquire the language, as they may transact all their business in their native tongue, and it is no rare thing to meet a lady who in twenty years of Buenos Ayres has not even got to know the Spanish names of the common objects of the dinner table. In the provinces, however, most foreign lady residents have to acquire at least a smattering of the native lingo. A further element in the " colony " may be de- scribed as the floating jpopulatipnL of British visitor s_ who make periodicaTJourneys to the Argentine in pur- suit of business. The stay-at-home has no faint no- tion of the extraordinary trafficking of his race in for- eign parts. Veritable battalions of commercial travellers representing British houses visit the Argen- tine each year, staying from two to six months at a time, and the hotels are always sheltering Englishmen who seem to have nothing to do beyond taking their meals and playing billiards for weeks on end, but who are really waiting the signing-up of contracts. One gentleman I knew had put in nearly nine months of " THE BRITISH COLONY " AND ITS WAYS 285 this strenuous work, and eventually left in despair. The contract for which he had been waiting so long was fixed up about three weeks afterwards, and went to a German firm whose representative had perhaps been more patient in waiting, or more liberal (or more discreet) in his bestowal of backsheesh. Those visitors whose stays are short do not fare badly in the Argentine capital, and as a rule retain rather pleasant memories of the place, although not a few with whom I conversed really dreaded the neces- sity of having to return, as they found time hang so heavily on their hands. Then there comes occasionally one of the scribbling fraternity, who fixes a little round of engagements, hurries to see the sights of the place, and flits away again to entertain a public quite as well- informed as he or she may be by the little that he or she has seen in the few days' stay. I spent some time with an American correspondent, who did not know a word either of French or Spanish, and yet had the fortitude to contribute a series of articles to one of the local papers, giving his valuable impressions of a coun- try and a people into whose mind he was not able even to peep. His articles, of course, were written in Eng- lish and translated into Spanish, and were published with great fanfarronada, although his literary rep- utation was unknown even to me, whose business it has been for many years to keep in touch with literary reputations on both sides of the Atlantic. The regulation course for the " globe-trotter " who flits through the Argentine for a week or so, to write a book thereon, is to motor round the various pub- lic buildings, interview a few of the official heads, en- 286 THE REAL ARGENTINE deavouring, if possible, to have a talk with the Presi- dent, a comparatively easy matter in all South American Republics, the President being sort of ex- officio Chief of Publicity, engineer an invitation to a model estancia to stay overnight, and an interview with a reporter from the Standard to announce the gestation of the great work that will later see the light in London or New York. The usual practice of the more or less distinguished visitor is to deliver himself of the most fulsome flattery of all that he has seen, and to lay on the butter with a trowel. To this rule there are occasional exceptions, and I gather that the Princess of Pless, who paid Buenos Ayres a visit in August of 1913, when I was staying in Chili, was one of these exceptions. The Buenos Ayres corres- pondent of La Union of Santiago sent to his paper an amusing little article on the Princess, which I think worthy of translating, as it will make an acceptable tailpiece to this chapter. He wrote: She has gone! A wandering star, seeking a constellation wherein she may shine with due refulgence and without suf- fering eclipse from other stars of greater brilliance. She had a glimpse of the Argentine in her dreams as the ideal land of aristocracy by having read in the " British Cyclopaedia " (sic) that in this country there are no titles of nobility other than those of the wash-tub. Yesterday she stated in one of her farewell confidences: "I go away horribly disappointed! Not a sauvage (sic) 9 not a tiger, not a Paraguayan crocodile!" What a useless voyage! To confront the dangers of three thousand leagues of sea and twenty days of poor food and worse sleep to come to see savages, when these can be found " THE BRITISH COLONY " AND ITS WAYS 287 in thousands within twenty- four hours of London! In this poor America there remain no other savages than those Euro- peans who exploit the miserable natives of Putumayo. The veritable Indians of the tales of Fenimore Cooper and of Gustave Aimard, the scalp hunters, the throat cutters, the mutilators of children, are to be found in the very heart of Europe, in the countries of " The Merry Widow." There the Princess ought to have gone a-hunting for those sanguinary curiosities and to satisfy her appetite for exotics. She came here nervously afraid of the prospect of being car- ried off by Calufucura, and even resisted the temptation to visit the estancia of Pereyra, fearing lest the Cacique Catriel should force her to prepare the pipe of counsel surrounded by his tribe, and she goes away disenchanted by not having seen an Indian even in the distance, and disgusted at having had to suffer the sugary gallantries of some of our dandies of the old school, little fortunate in the conquest of princesses. But, above all, what mortified her most and most precipi- tated her departure, rendering her ill at ease during her stay in Buenos Ayres, is the fact that she did not rank here in the front file of beauty, nor shine above the rest in fashion, nor find herself in any sort a protagonist. She was no more than one among the mass of our women, and less than many of our distinguished ladies. Thus she has gone as she came, after having attempted to discover some labyrinthine forest nevef visited by man, without encountering more than cultivated soil and agricultural machines where she had hoped to see Indians discharging their poisoned arrows and brandishing their for- midable tomahawks. And thus it is that she says in her despite " America has lost all her virginities, even the celebrated vir- ginity of her forests ! " Yesterday the Princess embarked, and on seeing her aboard the Arayaguaya, using her walking-stick like a crutch, to disguise her mincing gait, alone, with not even the companion- ship of a " snob," who might have attempted to win her good- 288 THE REAL ARGENTINE will, not even a lady of honour dazzled by her noble title, there came to our mind, though altered by the circumstances, the lines of that farewell elegy on the remains of Sir John Moore : " Not a drum was heard, not a triumphal note As she arrived at the Darsena Norte Not a soldier discharged his farwell schot When the steamer left the Argentine shore ! " The intrinsic merits of this little sketch and the charm of the concluding effort in English, surely justify its reproduction! What on earth the Princess of Pless may have said to lead to this display of jour- nalistic courtesy, I do not know, but I suspect that she must have ventured some words of frank criticism, and that is precisely what the common, untramelled Ar- gentine does not want. He asks for butter, and he wants it thick, and if you can add a layer of sugar, for he has a sweet tooth so much the better. Most of the British Colony know this, and also know on which side their bread is buttered. Thus the English visitor who is indiscreet enough publicly to express a frank and honest opinion of anything that does not meet with his approval in Buenos Ayres or the Ar- gentine, will scarcely expect to be grappled to its bosom by hooks of steel. I am persuaded, however, that the better-class of native Argentine opinion is quite ca- pable of sustaining honest criticism and profiting thereby. CHAPTER XV THE EMIGRANT IN LIGHT AND SHADE THERE is a popular story in Buenos Ayres of a Spanish emigrant who had just arrived with wife and children, and as the group was crossing the Paseo de Julio, the wife espied a silver coin in the gutter. She called to her husband to pick it up, but he disdainfully answered, " I have no concern with mere silver money, when I have come here to gather gold ! " The story usually ends here, but I suspect the frugal wife of picking up that coin herself and thereby making money more easily than her husband would be like to do for some time to come. For certain it is that the Argentine is no " land of gold," such as our world has had to marvel at in California, Australia, South Africa, and Alaska. No, it is something better than any merely aurifer- ous land! So rich is its soil, it returns to those who work it such wondrous increase of harvest that it is truly an inexhaustible gold mine. But the first and final essential to the winning of its gold is Labour. This, as we know, Italy has given to the Argentine in abundant measure, and those who only know the Italian by such specimens of his race as grind organs and sell ice-cream in England, have no least, small notion of what a splendid fellow he is, his many vices notwith- standing. Before we take a look at the different classes of emigrants which the Argentine attracts and their in- 289 290 THE REAL ARGENTINE fluence on the development of the country, a word or two on the land system may be in place. The time will come, I doubt not, when some revolutionary change will be forced upon the country, as the land is too closely held by the landed aristocracy the mul- titudes^ of small lots sold by speculative dealers not- withstanding. In this young country, with its Repub- lican Government and its progressive ideas, we en- counter the anomaly of a mere handful of fabulously wealthy proprietors owning the greatest part of a vast country nearly eight tinies larger than the British Isles. Meanwhile, these prodigious tracts of terri- tory being so tightly held by a few private owners, have the effect of increasing the values of the negoti- able land, of which there is evidently still sufficient to meet the demands of the moment. Double the popu- lation, however, and such a change will pass over the scene that legislation to force the hands of private owners and loosen their grip on the lion's share of the Republic's soil will be inevitable. The system on which the land is worked is also charged with danger to the social development of the community, and some day it, too, must give place to a better adjustment as between the owner and the worker. I have made frequent reference in previous chapters to the estancias, without entering into any de- tail as to the working of these great agricultural estates, which, curiously enough, are known by the Spanish word for a dwelling-house or a sitting-room (estancia in South America means either a farm, a country house, or the whole area of landed property under one ownership). Here, however, I must ex- THE EMIGRANT IN LIGHT AND SHADE 291 / plain something of the peculiar methods of working these estates. The owner himself will cultivate at his own cost a certain portion with alfalfa, wheat, maize, or linseed, as the case may be, and will maintain immense herds of cattle, sheep, and horses, according as he specialises in agriculture or in live-stock. But the estancias are usually much too large for their owners to develop to their full extent, and thus have grown up two meth- ods of co-operation, neither of which has in it the germ of permanency, both being based on one man's need and another's opportunity. The one system is worked by the medieros, the other by the colonos. The mediero is a man who has come out from Spain or Italy with some tiny capital in his pocket that en- ables him to purchase certain agricultural implements, seeds, and probably to knock up a shanty of corrugated iron, wood for building purposes being a highly priced commodity. But he cannot afford to purchase agricultural land in any locality where his crop would be of adequate value to him once he had raised it, for wherever the land is within reachable distance of a railway line, it is impossible to purchase it at anything like its actual market value, the method of the Argen- jtine land-seller being invariably to demand the price which the land may be worth in ten or fifteen years. The land-vender takes " long views," he is big with the future, so confident of it that he values his pos- sessions of to-day at the dream prices of a somewhat distant morrow. Now, the mediero cannot come to grips with such as he, and cap in hand he approaches the estanciero, offering in return for the right to work 292 THE REAL ARGENTINE so many acres of his land, to " go halves " with him in expenses and in profits hence mediero, or " halver." The colono (colonist) is a genuine knight of the empty purse, with nothing to offer save his labour and that of his wife and children; but that is a great thing, and he is received with open arms throughout the length and breadth of the Argentine. The estanciero not only grants him as many acres of land as he may be able to work with his wife and family, but lends him cows for milk, horses for the plough, and through his almacen supplies to him on credit the necessary implements, seeds, and food, as well as corrugated iron and planks of wood for the building of his rancho. It should be explained that the almacen on every estancia is an important institution, a sort of universal provider for the hundreds of medieros and colonos who have taken up land on the estate, selling to them all sorts of commodities at a substantial profit to the estanciero. The " colonist " is now expected to labour incessantly on the land allotted to him, so that he may repay to the almacen the pretty heavy debt he has contracted there, while an agreed percentage of his crops will go to the owner of the estate. These medieros and colonos include all nationali- ties, but are chiefly drawn from the Italian emigrants, the Spaniards being more commonly tradesmen. Everything looks couleur de rose to the poor toilers; they set about their task with high hope, a new feel- ing of freedom, little recking that they have tied them- selves to a new serfdom by the bond of that initial debt with which they start. The mediero has a better chance than the colono of " turning the corner " soon, THE EMIGRANT IN LIGHT AND SHADE 293 and it too often happens that the latter, after two or three years of incessant labour, has no more than cleared his feet, when comes a bad harvest, and he is back where he was at the beginning. Withered are his roses, poor fellow. Disgusted at the result, and hoping that a change to some other part of the coun- try may turn out for the better, he disposes of the few things he owns, quits his " camp," and shifts to some other quarter, perhaps only to repeat this chapter of his history. Meanwhile, it will be seen the estanciero has had another corner of his estate brought into cultivation, its value considerably increased thereby, and the poor Italians have spent their strength for a bare subsist- ence. That many of them do succeed in earning some profit, especially those of the mediero class, and start- ing in some other business, is undeniable; but the roll of those who have turned over the soil of the Ar- gentine and brought it into bearing to the great benefit of its owners, and their own non-success is, I am told, beyond reckoning. This, then, I submit, is no system that can endure. It carries its own seeds of decay. So long as the stream of immigration flows as steadily as of recent years, the system will doubtless continue, but a time will come when disappear it must, and some method of employment based on a fairer distribution of profits, or on adequate wages, take its place. Apart from the ethics of the Argentine land system, which ~axe clearly open to criticism, one can have noth- ing but praise for the manner in which emigration is officially encouraged, and. the way in which the emi- grants are handled on arrival at the River Plate. 294 THE REAL ARGENTINE There is a fine saying reported of President Saenz Pena when he represented his country at the Pan- American Congress in Washington on the occasion of the fourth centenary of the discovery of America. In the course of a speech he was making, some fervid Pan-American thought it a fit occasion to interject the watchword, " America for the Americans " ! Quick as a flash Dr. Saenz Pefia retorted, " Yes, but Latin America for humanity ! " This certainly is the spirit that informs the policy of Argentine immigration. A hearty welcome is given to people of all races, whose only right of entry into this new land of promise is the possession of brawny muscles and the will to work. Every week they are arriving in ship-loads, and the manner in which these cargoes of humanity are received at the docks in Buenos Ayres and speedily transhipped by rail to dif- ferent parts of the interior, according to the demand for brazos, is ^one of the most businesslike things the visitor will have an opportunity of noting in the pub- lic administration. Ship-load after ship-load of Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, and other nationalities arrives and melts away, absorbed into the thirsty coun- try like water into sandy soil. During our stay, a splendidly equipped hostel, or shelter, was opened for the emigrants. Erected by the riverside close to the scene of their disembarkation, this building is capable of sheltering a large number of new-comers. Sleeping-rooms fitted with wire mat- tresses upon which the emigrants may place their own bedding (always the most precious of their personal possessions) are provided for the men, and similar THE EMIGRANT IN LIGHT AND SHADE 295 accommodation for the women and children. There is no excuse for any of them to go unbathed, lavatories specially fitted with showers being provided for those who care to use them (the superintendent told me it was seldom that an emigrant ventured on such an ex- periment), while in the great common dining-room they may take their meals in comparative comfort and can secure eatables at a low rate. The accommoda- tion, if I remember correctly, is free, and the whole place is so admirably clean that it must come with something like a shock to most of the emigrants who pass through it, habituated as they have been, almost without exception, to dirty ways of life in their native lands. Many of the emigrants never see Buenos Ayres at all, as the trains that take them into the Camp pick them up at a short distance from the vessels which have borne them oversea, and at the very doors of the shelter where they may have passed the night of ar- rival. Laughter and tears mingle a good deal in the land- ing of these poor people from the Old World. Hud- dled almost like cattle in the steerage of the steamers, their condition at sea presents what seems an unbridg- able abyss between their lives and those of the saloon passengers. Day after day I have watched them sit- ting aimlessly on deck in their dirty, faded clothes, the effluvia from the mass of them, even tempered by the sea breeze, suggesting conditions of horror when they " turned in " at night, that might recall the Black Hole of Calcutta. The captain assured me it was not so very bad, but I never had the stomach to prove it for myself. Yet, on the morning of arrival at Buenos 296 THE REAL ARGENTINE Ayres, what a transformation! Girls who have seemed the dirtiest of sluts throughout the voyage step down the gangway quite neatly attired. The married Women, tricked out with little bits of finery, the men mostly in suits of black, with sombre soft hats, and every Spaniard armed with an ample umbrella, are difficult to recognise as the slovenly creatures one has seen for weeks feeding out of tins and using fingers, for lack of knives and forks. But even among the emigrants there are many grades, and not all are able to make this sudden transformation, many having no more than the soiled and shabby garments in which they have made their voyage, a little handkerchief tied at the corners being a pathetic index of their worldly gear. But even from among these, there will be some that one day shall bridge that awful gulf between the steerage and saloon, and make a voyage home as cabin passengers to advertise the magic Argentine! Hope is_^e^^^va_iling_note in the demeanour of every newTatch__of fortune-seekers. It shines bright- est, perhaps, in the eyes of the alert and wiry little Italians; the Spaniards, also, step ashore with a firm and confident tread, but mostly among the Poles, the Bulgars, and the Russians do we see the dull look of something very like despair. In discussing the char- acter of the emigrants with M. Huret, Senor Alsina, a former Director of the Emigration Service, re- marked : What surprises one most in the careful observation of these people from the four extremes of Europe is the rapidity of their transformation, Spaniards from Galicia, brutish and wretched, sordid Jews from Russia, lift up their heads (levan- THE EMIGRANT IN LIGHT AND SHADE 297 tan la cabeza) at the end of a few months. I have seen them arrive bent and downcast, with all the timidity of a dog that has been badly treated, so dejected and timorous, indeed, that I thought it necessary to engage some Russian students to lecture them on the dignity of humanity in general, and the conditions of liberty which they could enjoy in the Argentine. A few months afterwards, seeing many of them again, I could observe that they had so entirely changed that they had become argumentative, noisy, and given to discussion. The case of the Armenians is in this respect entirely typical. Some eighteen years ago they arrived here for the first time. Becoming pedlars, they travelled all over the Pampa, some with " bundles " on their backs, others pushing before them their wares. Little by little they made money, even growing rich. Many of them went in for politics, and to-day occupy positions of influence in the public life. Very active in business, they are in a fair way to surpass the Italians in the retail trade. Proud of their title as free citizens, they refuse to sell their vote, which is the common practice among the populace, and their prosperity is so real, so positive, that the Armenian Col- ony is offering to the Argentine a monument which will cost them 120,000 francs. I am afraid that appearances are very much inclined to be deceptive in studying the faces of emigrants. Surely there are none who can look more dejected than the Armenians and the Poles, who closely resemble each other in facial appearance, yet the money-making potentialities of these sad-faced emigrants are rela- tively much higher than those of the merry, little, guitar-strumming Italians and Spaniards. On the arrival of every new contingent, there is al- ways a considerable group of friends awaiting the vessel, and fortunate are they who have come out on 298 THE REAL ARGENTINE the initiative of some relative that has gone before and prepared the way. These emigrants of yesterday, who have already come to grips with fortune and won the first bout, form one of the pleasantest features of the disembarkations, as they stand on the quayside in their " Sunday best," with their watch chains, tie pins, finger rings, and highly polished boots to announce to all the world that they are " getting on." This friendly co-operation is of immense service to the Emi- gration Bureau, and is really a sounder sort of propa- ganda than the familiar widecast publishing of allur- ing pictures of the riches of the country and the ease with which fortunes may be made. The emigrant who comes because a brother or a friend has already sub- stantially changed his condition, and will have the ad- vice of that friend to help him in securing employment, is at least on sure ground, and where labour is in such demand he cannot well make a mistake, provided he is willing to work. In this way have grown up the distinctive " colo- nies " throughout the country, the majority of the Russians making direct for the neighbourhood of Bahia Blanca, where their services as agricultural la- bourers and as craftsmen are in high demand; the Turks and Syrians concentrating in a district of Buenos Ayres, where they seem to engage in every variety of occupation in which there is a minimum of creative work and the possibility of profiting as middlemen by the labour of others. A great many French find their way to Mendoza, the centre of the wine-growing, in which business not a few have become masters of mil- lions. The German emigration is of more recent THE EMIGRANT IN LIGHT AND SHADE 299 origin, and embraces, like the French, a superior class of people, as well as supplying a modicum to the toil- ing community. Although all the emigrants, save the Spanish, are at first conditioned in their occupations and their localities by their ignorance of the native lan- guage, so that they must needs go where they find their fellow-countrymen and more or less follow the pursuits in which these are engaged, they speedily pick up the language, and once acclimatised and furnished with the means of universal intercourse, they begin to look around, weigh up the possibilities of the coun- try, and strike out their independent courses. In this movement, the British have practically no part what- ever, and with the exceptions of the scanty Irish emi- gration of past years and the Welsh colony settled, with very equivocal success, on the River Chubut some twenty years ago, the annals of the British in the Ar- gentine present no parallel whatever to those of the other European nations. When we talk of Argentine emigration, we refer chiefly to the Italian and the Spanish, though the Basque provinces of France and Spain have probably sup- plied the very finest element of foreign blood in the Argentine nation to-day. Italy is sending from eighty to a hundred thousand of her sturdy sons to swell the Argentine population every year. The newcomers from Italy each year number about 200,000, but in these later years there has been a very considerable movement towards repatriation among the Italians and also among the Spaniards, so that there is an off- set of at least 50 per cent, for re-emigration. The Italian who does not determine to make his home in 300 THE REAL ARGENTINE the Argentine is quickly satisfied with a comparatively small amount of savings. Once he has netted from $1000 to $2500, he considers himself a man of in- dependent means, and is apt to return to his native vil- lage with his tiny fortune, which will enable him there to live far more comfortably than he has been exist- ing in the Argentine, and to enjoy a life of comparative leisure. The call of the Homeland is always very strong to the Italian, and if he acquires his little for- tune quickly, before his family have become thoroughly Argentine in character and sentiment, he will almost surely go back. The hundreds of thousands of his race who are fixed and rooted in the Republic are they who, either through superior fortune have come to hold such a stake in the land, or from longer delay in " turning the corner " and the influence of their chil- dren, have become habituated to their new environ- ment. The quickest fortunes, the easiest gained wealth, assuredly do not come to those who take up the life of the colono or the mediero, as above described, for there are innumerable other ways in which money cam be made more readily, and those who engage in shop- keeping always a superior class to the tillers of the soil, as they require some little capital for a start as well as the many Spaniards who enter the already established business houses, are in more immediate touch with money-making possibilities than the braceros. It is always thus, that they who are of least use in the economical development of the country should be most speedily rewarded. I heard of an Italian waiter, who arrived in Buenos THE EMIGRANT IN LIGHT AND SHADE 301 Ayres some time in November of 1911 and immedi- ately went on to Mar del Plata, the fashionable sea- side resort, where he readily secured a situation in one of the hotels. In one month he netted a thousand pesos in " tips," and with this vast sum ($420) he incontinently returned to his native country in order to purchase a piece of land and set up as a small farmer ! A coachman, also an Italian, whose services I occasionally employed during our stay in Buenos Ayres, informed me that he was making a clear profit of 600 pesos (or $252) per month. The coach, a very handsome one, and the horse, a splendid animal, were his own property, and so careful was he of his coach that he did not care to bring it out on very sunny days, lest the upholstery might fade, while he disliked driving on very wet days, so that he suited his own convenience as to the hours and days of work! Withal, he was speedily acquiring a competence. He assured me he drank as good wine as he got at home, and if he did not eat so well, it was because nobody did in the Argentine, owing to the difficulty of getting good food at reasonable prices. He also- had been a waiter, but evidently had his eye on a higher mark than his compatriot who hastened back from Mar del Plata with his first month's gratuities. I do not doubt that if one had gone about, note- book in hand, collecting experiences from all sorts and conditions of people who had emigrated to the coun- try, no end of "human interest" stories could have been obtained. Such as I came by, however, were the fruit of casual conversations, and the absence of the British and North Americans from the emigration 302 THE REAL ARGENTINE movement was probably the reason why I did not study it in more than its broadest aspects. To follow it here in detail would involve so much in the way of com- parative statistics, that I make no apology for touch- ing the subject in the most sketchy, but I hope not unsuggestive, manner. I did receive, after leaving Buenos Ayres, some copies of the Herald containing a long and interesting correspondence, originated by an Englishman in Buenos Ayres, entitled " Is Argentina as Bright as it is Painted?" Some excellent letters were written by Britishers while the correspondence continued, and although the Mr. Q's and Mr. F's could not allow the occasion to pass without casting a stone at the unworthy land of their birth, the whole weight of opinion was in tune with what I have written. If anything, most of the writers went further, and some even piously called upon the Almighty to protect the wretched English workman whose lot it was to live in such places as Bahia Blanca and Rosario. Personally, I must confess that I have seen worse places to live in than Rosario, and even considerably worse than Bahia Blanca. I have been in Antofagasta ! But enough of the British in this connection, for they certainly do not amount to anything of real con- sequence in the sum total of Argentine immigration, the Americans to still less.* What is to be noticed, * From the year 1857 to 1912 inclusive 4,248,355 persons of all classes entered the Argentine. The nationalities represented were as follows: Italians, 2,133,508; Spaniards, 1,298,122; French, 206,- 912; Russians, 136,659; Syrians, 109,234; Austrians, 80,736; Germans, 55,068; Britons, 51,660; Swiss, 31,624; Belgians, 22,186; Portuguese, 21,378; Danes, 7,686; Dutch, 7,120; N. Americans, 5,509; Swedes, 1,702; Others, 79,251. During the year 1912 the total number of new- comers was 323,403, comprising Italians, 165,662; Spaniards, 80,583; THE EMIGRANT IN LIGHT AND SHADE 303 however, is a very distinct forward movement among the Germans. The German has come rather late in the day to discover the Britisher very thoroughly estab- lished in all branches of commerce throughout the Re- public. But, undismayed, the Germanjias set him- self to the task of undermining Brrtisji jupremac^ lay- ing hTs"prans^fb~^pture a Targe share of future busi- ness. There is, of course, no comparison in sheer bulk between the German and the Italian immigration, as the number of Germans arriving in the Argentine in 1912 was only 4,337, (to which we might add 6,545 Austrians) against 165,662 Italians. But in the smaller Teutonic group lay greater money-making pos- sibilities than in the Latin horde. These Germans represent all classes of the com- munity; there are quite a few titled Teutons engaged in business in Buenos Ayres to-day. They are de- veloping their banking connection throughout the Re- public with great energy; German manufacturers are establishing branches everywhere; German clerks are flooding into all sorts of businesses, their superior working qualities to the Spaniard, their readiness to accept the lowest wages that will support an existence, and their ability to acquire speedily the language of the country, being all sound reasons for the ready de- Russians, 20,832; Syrians, 19,792; Austrians, 6,545; French, 5,180; Por- tuguese, 4,959; Germans, 4,337; Britons, 3,134; Danes, 1,316; Swiss, 1,005; N. Americans, 499; Belgians, 405; Dutch, 274; Swedes, 94; Oth- ers, 8,786. While the repatriation of hundreds of thousands would reduce these figures greatly, the increase by births in the country, which cannot readily be traced, is an important countervailing item. The Argentine authorities naturally set great store on this, and even state at times the number of " women of child-bearing age " entering the country. 30 4 THE REAL ARGENTINE mand for their services. The competition of these German clerks will soon change the complexion of the office staffs of the railways, for they are even sup- planting the British employees, and, if the cold truth must be told, they are really better employees. One seldom meets a German who cannot at least contrive to make himself understood in English, and who, al- though seldom speaking the Spanish language with grace or correct pronunciation, will not in a few months be able to converse in it with a fair degree of fluency. In addition to those different classes of Teutonic in- vaders come the hand-workers engineers, carpen- ters, builders, agricultural labourers. In considerable numbers these work people, who share the ability of their compatriots in the acquiring of languages, are filtering all over the Argentine and in certain districts of the southwest, especially around the celebrated Lake Nahuel Huapi, some thirteen hundred miles distant from the capital, there are entire settlements of Ger- man farmers, with their native school-teachers and Protestant missionaries. In fine, the Germanising of the Argentine has begun, and if it is still far from at- taining the dimensions it has already assumed in Chili, I do not doubt that a day is coming when the German will have ousted the British, the French, and the Italian from their present supremacy in their respec- tive fields, although never likely to compete with Britain or France in the matter of invested capital. At the time of writing, it is evident that there is a fur- ther movement to encourage German enterprise in the Argentine. I read in the London Times this morning that the Kaiser's brother, Prince Henry of Prussia, ac- THE EMIGRANT IN LIGHT AND SHADE 305 companied by his Princess and suite, are sailing on an official visit to the Republic in one of the fine new passenger steamers with which the Germans are suc- cessfully competing against the British lines for South Atlantic trade. It is not to be supposed, although I have emphasised the fact that the Italian immigration is essentially a movement of unskilled labour, that it is exclusively so. For the Argentine offers to the observer a very re- markable lesson in the industrial progress of Italy, which may entirely escape him in his travels in Italy itself. To encounter at every step, as one does wherever one goes throughout the Argentine, the most persistent evidences of Italian enterprise in every ~Branch of commerce, is to discover the Italian in an entirely new light. Most of us are in the habit of going to Italy to look at old things, to revel in the glories of her past, and are apt to come #way from Rome, or Florence, or Venice, and especially from Naples, with an impression of bygone grandeur and lingering poverty. It is true that we must set against this the evidence of her prosperity and modern activity, which we find in Milan and in Turin; but, on the whole, our popular notion of Italy is that of a country living mainly on its past. The Italian in the Argentine will speedily dispel this. Not only does he supply the strong arms that are till- ing the soil of countless leagues, but he maintains many of the great importing establishments in Buenos Ayres and the principal towns. Italian engineering agencies and workshops abound. A large proportion of the splendid motor cars that crowd the streets of the capi- 3o6 THE REAL ARGENTINE tal hail from Italy. Some of the finest chemists' estab- lishments are Italian. Not only are Italian workmen vastly in the majority on all building operations, but very often Italian brains are directing the whole un- dertaking; Italian contractors are paving the streets. In short, Italy stands forth in the life of the Argentine to-day as a magnificent industrial and commercial force, supported by the widespreading base of Italian emigrant labour. There is also a very large traffic between the two countries in casual labour, shiploads of Italians com- ing out each year for the harvest season during which wages jump up from 40 to 50 pesos a month to 5 or 6 pesos a day and return home immediately on its conclusion. The Italian steamers (the fastest that ply between Europe and South America, some of them doing the journey from Buenos Ayres to Genoa in twelve days, whereas the average of the English mail steamer from the River Plate to London or Liver- pool takes nineteen to twenty-one days) provide spe- cial facilities for the shipment of these labourers at a very low head rate. To the remarkable return movement among Italian emigrants, on which I have already touched, this large element of casual labour has contributed not a little. As regards the Spanish emigrant, I had many dis- cussions with Spaniards settled in the Argentine, from which I gained a good deal more information than I had ever been able to acquire from any printed source. One of these gentlemen in particular had studied the question in five or six of the republics, and was en- gaged upon a book for circulation among his country- THE EMIGRANT IN LIGHT AND SHADE 307 men at home, putting the matter in a new light. In his estimation, the Argentine conditions represent an improvement for only the lowest class of Spaniard. This class of Spaniard I remember being very fully described in a leading article in La Prensa. His no- tions of thrift were there illustrated by his habit, when in his native country, of journeying about the country- side bare-footed, with his boots and stockings hung around his neck. When he approaches a village, he pauses by the roadside to put on his stockings and boots, and so shod traverses the village; but as soon as he has emerged on the highway again, he removes them and continues his journey with them around his neck once more ! Such a custom touches the zero of social comfort and those habituated to it could scarcely fail to do better in almost any other country in the world. According to my Spanish friend, such of his coun- trymen immediately become enthusiasts for the new land, and not only being able to go about permanently with their boots and stockings, but perhaps to buy a white collar for themselves and even a pair of silk stockings for their wives, feel they have suddenly made a magical transition into the very lap of luxury. But for the craftsmen, the village carpenter, the black- smith, the modest tradesmen, he assured me the change was not always for the better. Spaniards of these classes can, thanks to the cheapness of commodities in their native country, and despite the lowness of wages, secure infinitely better household accommoda- tion, and will eat better food, drink better wine, and altogether live a less strenuous and more satisfactory 308 THE REAL ARGENTINE existence, than the majority, at least, will be doomed to maintain in the Argentine. As to all this, I can speak with no exact knowledge, and I do no more than report the opinion of a Spanish gentleman, confirmed to me, I may add, by several others of his race who ought to have been in positions to judge. The gentleman in question was probably somewhat prejudiced, as he was a patriotic Spaniard, fond of elaborating his theory that Spain to-day had lost her head over the Argentine and was hastening her decay by orienting her literature and her journalism towards the lucrative market of South America instead of towards purely Spanish ideals. Looking to South America as a land of employment for her children, as in the past her kings had looked to it to fill their coffers, she was guilty of a crowning folly. If the energy she is pour- ing into South America were properly utilised at home, it would return far greater profit to the nation and the individual. Such, at least, was his line of reasoning, and I more than half suspect it was well based in fact. And withal, from what I could gather, in the annals of Argentine immigration, the most interesting chap- ter that might be written would describe the activities and achievements of the Basques. This splendid race of people who seem to unite the finest qualities of the French and the Spanish, have distinguished themselves above all others in the making of modern Argentine. The geographical position of their homeland, enabling them to acquire, in addition to their own most difficult language which polyglot Borrow found his hardest nut to crack both French and Spanish, are peculiarly THE EMIGRANT IN LIGHT AND SHADE 309 adapted for making their way in Latin America. But apart from the language question, their personal char- acteristics, in which industry joins with intelligence and imagination, would inevitably carry them to success. Th~ey stand to ^outh American colonisation as the Scot to British Empire-making, and the peculiar custom of their country, whereby the eldest son inherits all the family goods and remains at home to maintain the family succession, while the younger sons have to fare forth into the world to seek their fortunes, marks them out for colonists. My acquaintance with the Basques was limited to one family only a wonderful family; they are French Basques, and some fifteen or sixteen brothers and cousins are united in a great business, which has important warehouses and distributing centres in every large town along the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts of South America, as well as in many of the business centres of the interior. But for a typical story of the Basques, I turn to the pages HK General Library University of California Berkeley LD 21-100m-6,'56 (B9311slO)476 YC 10223 5 ' UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY