[Footnote 60: It must be remembered that this tract was four and a half times the size of England!——and this enormous country, in the heart of the Argentine, was offered for sale to foreigners! The process of buying it back when the terrible folly of the act was once obvious, would have been equivalent to making the country tributary for years, and for enormous sums, to Europe.——[TRANS.]]
The depreciation of rural property continued for some years. Thus, in 1897, the Government sold by tender to the highest bidder a large portion of its best lands, at the price of 3750 piastres, or £330 the square league (about £36 the square mile), payable in five years, with permission to pay in bonds of the patriotic loan, which then stood at about 75 per cent.[61]
[Footnote 61: The piastre note, was then worth 1 franc 71——1s. 4·4d., or 34·2 per cent. of the par value. It was later fixed by law at 44 per cent.——[TRANS.]]
This situation continued until 1902——a year which saw the settlement of the old question of the Chili-Argentine frontier; a year of abundant harvests and enormous development in the stock-raising world; a development which took shape first in the export of cattle on the hoof and then in the despatch of great quantities of chilled or frozen meat to the English markets; a year which also saw the advent of a financial stability resulting from the “law of monetary conversion,” which gave a fixed value to paper money, the medium of all commercial transactions in the interior. Then came a steady and decisive rise in the value of landed property in general and of rural property in particular.
Since the beginning of this movement the value of the soil has steadily increased; the last price is always greater than the previous one, although the latter may have appeared stationary, if not final. This being the case, we ought to ask whether this general rise responds to permanent and sufficient causes, or if it is only the result of capricious speculation, affecting landed property now as at another time it affected paper money.
In reply to this question, Señor Roman Bravo, one of those Argentines who are most familiar with all the complex aspects of land valuation,——for he is the Director of the house of business[62] which transacts the greater proportion of such operations——has at our request summed up, in the following terms, the causes which at present determine the increase in the value of property:——
