Most of the immigrants were Italians from Genoa and the north of Italy. A few came from Galicia, the home of Spain’s most sturdy peasantry. Neither immigrants nor residents wore picturesque costumes. Even the Gauchos are dressed in civilized raiment and bear little resemblance to the South American Indian of our dreams. It is too progressive a country to allow its clothes to get in its way.
The facts relating to Buenos Aires and Argentina are at every one’s elbow so it is all the more astonishing how ignorant the average American is regarding the great metropolis of the southern hemisphere. We are very fond of telling stories of our English cousins who imagine that our western states are overrun with wild Indians and desperadoes. And we think it inexcusable in them to judge from the frequent press reports of lynchings and “hold-ups” that we are an uncivilized, lawless people. Yet we judge the Argentino just as hastily. Not only are we quite ignorant of his material progress, we also frequently slander him for having an “unstable government.” “Revolutions” or struggles for governmental control occur, it is true, but they do not amount to much and hardly deserve the exaggerated reports of them which are published abroad. In a country that has been bound together by such a network of railroads as Argentina, making it possible for the government in power to send its troops rapidly wheresoever it will, the habit of playing with revolutions is sure to die out. In the old days when transportation was slow and difficult, it was possible for a popular leader to gather a considerable band of followers and prepare to march on the capital before the government knew of his existence. Such uprisings, however, are necessarily the work of days or weeks, and it is becoming more and more difficult to bring them to a successful issue. As an evidence of the more stable condition of the government and as showing how Argentina has recovered from the setback which it got at the time of the failure of the Baring Brothers, it is well to note that in the ten years between 1895 and 1905, the foreign trade of Buenos Aires more than doubled, growing to more than half a billion dollars annually.