Men, manners & morals in South America

MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS
IN SOUTH AMERICA

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
China Under the Empress Dowager

Being the History of the Life and Times
of Tzu Hsi, compiled from State Papers
and the private Diary of the Comptroller
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and E. BACKHOUSE. Illustrated. Cr. 4*0.
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Popular Edition. Illustrated. 7*. 6d. net.

Annals and Memoirs of the
Court of Peking

From the i6th to the 2Oth Century. By
J. O. P. BLAND and E. BACKHOUSE.
Royal 8vo. 16*. net.

Frontispiece.

IN THE SHADE OF THE BIG PARAISO

Men, Manners & Morals
in South America

V* BY

'

J: O. P. BLAND

ILLUSTRATED

.LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN

London: William Heintm^nn i

r 9 ao.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I. INTRODUCTORY .1

II. OUTWARD BOUND ...... 13

III. RIO AND PETROPOLIS ...... 41

IV. POLITICS EN PASSANT ...... 60

V. IN AND ABOUT SAO PAULO ..... 68

VI. BUENOS AIRES . . . . . • • 93

vii. UP THE PARANA: A GLIMPSE OF THE CHACO AUSTRAL 117

VIII. THE DELECTABLE CITY OF ASUNCION . . .141

IX. ASUNCION TO MONTEVIDEO OVERLAND . . . l66

x. URUGUAY: SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE ART OF

GOVERNMENT . . . . . . 185

XI. CHIEFLY ABOUT WOMAN ..... 2O2

XII. MONTEVIDEO . . . . . . .217

XIII. ESTANCIA LIFE IN URUGUAY . - . . 234

XIV. THE SON OF THE SOIL . . . . . . 258

XV. TRIBES ON OUR FRONTIERS . , . * > 285

INDEX 311

.^ .<"" \ JP

..-

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Facing page
IN THE SHADE OF THE BIG PARAISO . . Frontispiece

SUNSET OVER RIO BAY . . . . . . 40

IN RIO HARBOUR ....... 48

A TURCO PEDLAR . . . . . .64

A HAWKER OF BRUSHES AND BROOMS, RIO ... 64

RUFFO, THE SHEEP-SHEARER 64

A PEDLAR OF TIN AND IRON WARE . .64

A PICNIC IN THE WOODS ...... 76

THE PLAZA CONGRESS, BUENOS AIRES .... 96

A "CARNE CON CUERRO/' ARGENTINA . . . . Il6

CORRIENTES (ARGENTINA) SEEN FROM THE RIVER . .126
THE WHARF AT ASUNCION, PARAGUAY . . . 142

THE CITY HALL, ASUNCION ...... 142

CROSSING A RIVER IN THE DRY SEASON, URUGUAY . ,. 1 66
VIEW NEAR COLONIA, URUGUAY . . . . . l86

A MODEL ESTANCIA: HORSES AT PASTURE, "CANTA FIERO" 212

212
234

THE ESTANCIA UP-TO-DATE I "LOS CORALES," RAFAELO,

SANTA FE, ARGENTINA .... . 234

A LACUNA OF THE MACIEL ...... 240

viii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Facing pa.ge
LOADING THE WOOL CLIP ...... 244

THE CAPATAZ . . . . . . . . 250

BENITA . . . . . . . . 250

LUNCHEON TIME AT THE BRETE . . . . . 260
PLOUGHING UP "ESPARTILLO" CAMP . . . .260

A LACUNA ON THE SAN SALVADOR .... 266
GAUCHOS AT DRABBLE STATION, CENTRAL URUGUAY . . 280

"PANTALEON" — A PEON . . ., . . . 280
A GAME OF PELOTA ....... 288

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

HAVING regard to the present parlous price of paper and
to the patience of much-suffering readers, the perpetration
of yet another book on South America might appear at
the outset to call for some explanation, if not for apology.
The list of books published under this heading in recent
years is indeed so formidable that the world may well be
weary of it. From the library catalogue point of view, the
subject might well seem to have been exhausted, every
part of the continent having been ransacked and described,
all its words and works recorded. Yet, how few there be
amongst all these works (as some of us know to our cost)
that properly and worthily inculcate the profitable exercise
of travel, or that appeal to and justify the wandering
instinct of rational man 1 Say what you will, the great
majority of them are so dreadfully infected with stodgy
commercialism, so monumentally useful, that their general
effect upon the mind (unless it be the mind of a bagman)
can only be compared to a surfeit of suet pudding. Here
and there only, ran nantes, amidst all these dreary volumes,
will you find the sort of company for which the Lord of
Montaigne looked (alas, how oft in vain !) in all his
journeyings — that "rare chance and seld-seene fortune,
but of exceeding solace and inestimable worth," to wit,
" an honest man, of singular experience, of a sound
judgment and of manners conformable to yours, which
company a man must seek with discretion and with great
heed obtaine, before he wander from home," ay, even in

2 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

the spirit. I make no claim, in this desultory narrative
of uneventful journeys, to provide company of that rare
refreshing kind; but at least I hope to follow modestly
and, if it may be, profitably, in the path of that prince
of travellers, of him who believed that there is " no better
school to fashion a man's life than incessantly to propose
unto him the diversities of so many other men's lives,
customs, humours and fantasies, and make him talk or
apprehend one so perpetual variety of our nature's shapes
or formes."

A strange thing, surely, this modern obsession for
encyclopaedic information about trade and manufactures,
this all-pervading blue-book stodginess of statistics, which
permeate the works compiled by laboriously travelling
politicians, economists and globe-trotters, concerning
lands which (could they but discern them rightly) afford
matter for philosophical speculation at every turn of the
road or river. It is only another proof, I suppose, of the
lamentable truth, that one of the chief results of our
vaunted civilisation, of all our labour-saving and man-
killing devices, is to deaden the mind of man to the things
that matter, to deprive us of those spiritual activities and
adventures that are the proper business of life, and to
destroy our perception of relative values. How else shall
we account for the fact that, with the exception of one or
two naturalists like Waterton and Hudson, or wandering
word-artists like Cunninghame Graham and Knight, all
those who have written, and are writing about South
America, seem to be completely obsessed by the com-
mercial and industrial possibilities of the country ? I am
not referring, mark you, to the works written by hungry
hacks to the order of South American politicians and
financiers, of those magnificently bound volumes which
confront you in hotel lounges and steamer saloons (the

IN SOUTH AMERICA 3

ground bait used by company promoters and Ministers of
Finance to attract capital), that read for all the world
like prospectuses for investors, and deserve to be treated
as such. I am speaking of the standard works of reputable
men, even men of high degree, like Lord Bryce, who went
there to learn, or M. Clemenceau, who went there to
lecture, not to mention the lesser fry of honest journalists
and bona fide travellers. All alike seem to revel in
compiling soporific statistics of marketable products, in
recording the increase of whizzing machinery and the
building of railways and grain elevators, just as if the
entire population of these delectable lands lived and had
their being for the sole purpose of producing pabulum
and raw materials to feed our feverish industrialism.
How drearily great the host of writers who have gone
steadily from one end of the continent to the other, faith-
fully describing the present and potential resources of
each Republic, singing paeans of praise to the " produc-
tivity of capital," as if Brazil and Chile, Argentina and
Uruguay, had been created and developed solely so that
congested Europe might draw from them sustenance and
absolution for its economic and social sins ! Throughout
all their dismal pages, you hear no sound of laughter, no
echo of the Gaucho's guitar, nor any of the songs of Old
Spain that have lingered melodiously in the pampas since
the days of the Conquistadores. These scribes deal not
with the humanities, make no attempt to look beneath
the surface of men's lives, to tell us of the things that are
eternally important, of the way of a ship upon the sea, or
the way of a serpent on the rock and the way of a man
with a maid. And yet man in South America, even though
he descend not to the mental state of an amalgamated
Engineer, is just as worthy of study as he is elsewhere;
to regard him solely as a wheat-producing, cattle-raising

4 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

machine is merely to proclaim that, because of life, we
ourselves have lost the secret and art of living. What
we should ask travellers to tell us is not what the
country produces per capita — there will always be official
automata in Government offices to compile these fearful
records — but how the native lives, what are the rational
purposes of his existence, what his dreams, and the
subjects of his noontide speculation.

It is not as if these countries did not provide plenty
of fresh and fruitful subjects for speculation and much
matter for our learning. Agassiz and Humboldt are there
to prove the contrary, to show that a traveller may be
concerned with things profitable to commerce and yet
remain alive to the humanities. Here, as in the Old
World, the stones have their profitable sermons and the
running brooks their books. Here, he that has eyes to
see and ears to hear, may contemplate mankind in the
making, may look forward and descry this continent,
veritable heir presumptive of the ages, gathering unto
itself the wealth and the culture of Europe. Here one
may stand and watch, from the strangers' gallery, many
interesting phases of the human comedy — the curious and
yet eminently logical results of the working out of Europe's
political and social nostrums, transplanted to soils for
which they were never intended. Here one may see to
what base uses the worldly wisdom of Rousseau and Mill,
of Lloyd George and Jaures, may be converted when
applied to races essentially incapable (in their present
stage) of representative self-government. One may see,
as in a moving picture, the modification and fusion of
ancient European types — Spanish, Basque, Portuguese
and Italian — slowly but surely yielding to climatic
conditions and intermarriage. A journey up the Parana
river is as interesting in this respect as the journey from

IN SOUTH AMERICA 5

Moscow eastwards by the Siberian Railway, through those
regions where East and West meet and insensibly merge.

In these days of universal upheaval, the traveller
interested in political systems may contemplate in South
America the triumphant emergence of the Graeco-Latin
ideal and the ignominious eclipse of Germany's pinchbeck
and poisonous Kultur ; also he may observe the struggles
of that exotic growth " Pan-Americanism/' a Washington
State Department dream, foredoomed for all its vividness
to futility in lands where the soul of the people holds
firmly to the Latin ideal. He may study the growth of
socialism in the great cities which live by the labour of
the unsophisticated " camp." Or he may observe the
development of party politics, with all the tricks of that
evil trade, and the systematic exploiting of productive
industry by an unusually attractive, but none the less
pernicious, type of demagogue.

But above all these, in perennial interest and value,
there is the son of the soil, the man in the streets of Rio de
Janeiro, and Sao Paulo, of Buenos Aires and Montevideo,
the peon of the camp, the light-hearted, hard-working,
philosophical hijo del pais f Speaking without prejudice,
and from experience based chiefly on observation of the
natives of Uruguay and Argentina, I should say that the
peon of South America, like his social equivalents in China
and Japan, has a keener appreciation of the things that
make life worth living, a more philosophical perception of
relative values, than a Manchester mechanic or a Glasgow
riveter. He certainly has preserved, far better than the
denizens of our drained and paved ant-heaps, a more
abiding sense of the wonder and mystery of existence and
of the " glory of the universe." He does not need to kill
time : he " makes " it (to use his own word), and when
the day's work is done, or even while he is doing it, he can

6 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

take a disinterested and genuine delight in simple things.
He knows something of the joie de vivre and of the love
of beauty for beauty's sake. Even as a Japanese crafts-
man, he brings a measure of aesthetic enjoyment to his
daily task and can manifest its spirit in the work of his
hands.

Therefore, it seems to me, that despite the crowded
state of our bookshelves, there may be justification and
room for a book that shall endeavour to speak of men
and things in South America from the human, rather than
the commercial, point of view. For the great host of
travellers who shall hereafter make their way, either for
business or edification, to the lands of the Surplus Loaf, it
is surely advisable that every ship's library should contain
at least one book about these lands, that a man may read
without being reminded of his investments. To tell the
truth, our ships' libraries very seldom contain anything
new or interesting about the countries to which they
carry us. Even those of the Royal Mail give the im-
pression of having been selected, towards the close of the
Victorian era, by a cautious purser with one watchful eye
on the Company's purse and the other on Mrs. Grundy.
The bulk of the collection is usually in English, and
consists of samples of Scott, Dickens, and other respectable
classics, supported by modern stalwarts of the Rider
Haggard, Conan Doyle, Hall Caine, Wells, Marie Corelli
kind, and a few sea-dogs, such as Clark Russell and Bullen.
French literature is generally represented by Bourget,
Daudet, Erckmann-Chatrian and Pierre Loti, with Flaubert
and de Maupassant discreetly thrown in, as a concession to
the literary taste of the jeunesse dorie and viellesse rouee
of Rio and Buenos Aires. Then there are a few Spanish
and Portuguese volumes of the harmless romantic kind,
calculated to give no cause for alarm to anxious mothers

IN SOUTH AMERICA 7

of convent-bred flappers ; and for the rest, one or two of
the stodgy books aforesaid — Koebel or Foster Fraser on
the Argentine — and a miscellaneous lot of decorative
works of the propagandist ground-bait order, supplied
gratuitously by Ministries of Finance or other Government
Departments of malice aforethought.

I suppose all this is so because Corporations, even when
they deal with those who go down to the sea in ships,
really have no souls, and, like the War Office, cannot be
expected to have them. If such a thing as a Shipping
Company's soul could manifest itself in Leadenhall Street,
it could hardly fail to perceive that the best way to
encourage travel would be to nourish the wayfarer's mind,
while yet they are in the way with him, upon such literary
fare as should stimulate the romantic adventurous spirit
of wanderlust ; to attune it to the tutelary influences of
these new lands and cities, which only yesterday (as time
goes) were as remote from us as if they belonged to another
planet, and to-day bid fair to rival those of the Old World.
Your German shipping companies will use their library,
of course, as they use everything else, to sow the insidious
seeds of poisonous Kultur, taking every advantage of the
fact that he who reads aboard ship is not in a position to
run; but on English boats the catalogue reminds one of a
jumble-sale lot at a suburban bazaar. As a matter of
fact, it represents no process of selection or mental struggle
on the part of any of the ship's company ; for I am told
that the builders provide them, en bloc, as an item in the
general specification. Two hundred books (assorted) for
bookcase in social hall, one parcel music for piano, ditto ;
six dozen cushions, one dozen miscellaneous parlour
games, and there you are; who could ask more in the
matter of comfort for body and soul, on a journey through
turquoise seas beneath the Southern Cross ? And yet, as

8 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

I have looked down the promenade deck of the good
ship Araguaya or the Avon, rolling down to Rio, and
marked the intellectual fare provided for the post-prandial
edification of the deck-chair recumbents, how often have
I longed to write to Lord Inchcape, or whoever it is that
reviews the progress of the Company at its annual meet-
ings, and tell him what an excellent opportunity they are
missing. Never was there a time and place on this feverish
planet so suited to the inculcation of the art and philosophy
of travel, as this unbroken spell of sunlit days and star-
spangled nights, this oasis of silence and blue sea, beyond
which lies infinity. There should be on every ship that
makes these voyages, a " Travellers' Joy " library, selected
with care and understanding, consisting of books written
by men who knew that there are things far more important
in a journey than one's destination; the Odyssey should
be there, and Montaigne, Agassiz and Waterton, and of
the present generation books like Belloc's Path to Rome,
Knight's Cruise of the Falcon, and Graham's Vanished
Arcadia, with Sterne and Stevenson, Barrie and Locke;
so that a passenger, even though he be a financier, might
haply hear a new spirit-stirring message in the song of
the south wind, and dream dreams more profitable to
his soul than are any that are bred of preference stock
or canned beef. Thus might he come to the shores of
the New World, as Pizarro and Cortes came and all the
splendid dreamers of old Spain, with a fitting sense of
wonder and a proper spirit of adventure.

The ultimate objective of the three journeys around
and about which the present vagabond narrative is
compiled, is a certain Uruguayan estancia, a place of
flocks and herds, lying far from the haunts of men in the
province of Soriano, somewhere betwixt and between the
slumbering old " camp " towns of Mercedes and Dolores.

IN SOUTH AMERICA 9

These journeys were made in the years of strife 1915, 1916
and 1919 ; but before and beyond their concern with the
pastoral affairs of that remote sequestered spot, they
included certain digressions into odd corners of Southern
Brazil, Paraguay and the Chaco Austral of Argentina;
also they comprised polite visits to such cities as lay by
the way, with certain subsidiary purposes of propaganda
therein, intended to foil the insidious plots and stratagems
of the Hun. This last business provided opportunities for
studying the then neutral attitude of South America from
more than one interesting point of view, and of gauging
some of the probable results of the war, upon men and
affairs in that continent. But fear not, patient reader,
this is not going to be an addition to the mountainous
growth of war literature. It may contain some brief
exposition (clearly labelled, that they who read may run)
of South American politics in the melting-pot ; but as to
the opinions of politicians and trade prophets, concerning
either the world at large or their own sordid affairs, I
promise you that there shall be as little as possible. As
times go, it has not been possible to write of anything
under the sun without reference to the four years' con-
vulsion of Europe, because go where you will, even in the
remotest wilds, its results confront you at every step, in a
hundred ways. Of these things, of the reverberation of
the great struggle, its effects on the bodies and souls of
men at the other side of the world, there must needs be
some occasion to speak. But the estancia in Uruguay is
our ultimate object, the piece de resistance, of this writing —
the rest may be regarded as hors d'ceuvre — and the whole
thing is in reality only a pretext (publishers insist on these
things) for discursive speculation on the world in general
and the moods and manners of South America in
particular.

10 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

Also be it understood at the outset, I make no claim to
speak with special knowledge of these lands, or as one
having authority. These casual impressions and reflec-
tions by the wayside are not of the kind that are likely to
help any man to embark on the business of cattle raising
or coffee growing; suffice it if they help him, when once
his cattle are sold or his coffee picked, to think and talk
about something that, in his haste or his absorption, he
may have overlooked; something other than the virtues
and vices of horses and the price of commodities. I am
well aware that there is a certain type of estanciero, the
good old crusty, forty-year-in-the-country resident, who
regards it as unqualified impertinence that any tenderfoot
gringo should venture to discuss, or even to pretend to
understand, the life and affairs of the " camp." To him I
would observe, with all the respect due to ancient in-
stitutions, that it may sometimes be vouchsafed to any
person of average intelligence, who has travelled and
studied life, to perceive truths that are hidden, by reason
of their very nearness and familiarity, from the wisest
of permanent fixtures. To tell the truth, experience in
many parts of the world, East and West, has taught me to
admire the oldest resident, but to distrust his judgments
of the country of his adoption and particularly his opinion
of its people. Even his faculty for observation may
frequently become atrophied by long disuse and by the
routine nature of his mental exercises; his mind, that
once was a sensitive plant (even as yours or mine) may
have been over-exposed, so that familiar phenomena make
little or no impression upon it. Amongst themselves,
estancieros and other acclimatised residents recognise and
profess to deplore the existence of this state of mind in
their midst. Nevertheless, your really good conservative
specimen infinitely prefers this state to the critical

IN SOUTH AMERICA 11

condition of mind which asks the why and wherefore of
things, and which may occasionally be led to the conclusion
that all is not for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
Of which things, more in due season.

The impressions of a new-comer have at least the virtue
of being clear-cut and vivid, and if he happen to possess
sufficient experience of human affairs and institutions in
other parts of the world to enable him to draw valid
comparisons and conclusions, it may be (who knows?)
that in the long run, his activities may prove as useful
as the garnered wealth of an inarticulate wisdom which
has forgotten the existence of most things beyond its
immediate horizon. The thing is conceivable. In any
case, disregarding the warnings of old crusty, let us go
blindly forward. Half the world, they say, does not
know how the other half lives, nor does it care. It
is the business of the peripatetic observer, howsoever
foolish, to remind Peru of China's existence, and vice
versa.

At least I may claim to have dealt faithfully with men
and things, by the light of such faculties as Heaven has
vouchsafed me; wherever possible, I have gathered the
crumbs that fall from the table of local wisdom. The
result gives no consecutive record of travel deliberately
planned to establish either facts or theories ; at the same
time, the description of life on the " camp " in Uruguay,
closely studied on the spot for half a year, assumes to be
something more than a casual impression. A gringo,
unless to the manner born, may not be able in that time
to pick the scabby sheep from out of a moving flock;
he may not be able to recite the two-and-thirty names
under which that noble animal, the horse, figures eternally
in " camp " conversation, and by which his colour, qualities
and vices are distinguished. But he must be a poor

12 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

traveller and singularly lacking in curiosity and observa-
tion if he has not gathered useful materials for the com-
parative study of beasts and man, and picked up by the
wayside trifles that may serve either to adorn a tale or
point a dozen morals.

CHAPTER II

OUTWARD BOUND

THERE are several pleasant ways of getting to the
eastern coast of South America. For those who, in normal
times of peace, would approach it in a leisurely mood,
conducive to the appreciation of lands wherein time has
been relegated to its proper insignificance, I would suggest
starting through Russia, crossing Asia by the Trans-
Siberian Railway, thence via Peking and Shanghai to
Japan ; from Yokohama either direct or via San Francisco,
to Santiago de Chile, and thence across the Andes to the
Argentine. Thus travelling, through lands that have seen
many an Empire rise and fall, many an outworn creed perish
in oblivion, ay, many a race utterly wiped out in the fierce
struggle for a place in the sun, one may come to civilisa-
tion's latest playground and storehouse with a fitting
sense of the mystery of existence and the effect of time,
climate and religion on the destinies of mankind. After
contemplating the revolutionary chaos that has overthrown
Imperial Russia, the departed glory that once was far
Cathay, the swift spreading of the Empire of the Rising
Sun, now aspiring to overlordship in the East and the
equally stupendous growth of " God's own country,"
the traveller must needs come to these lotus lands of the
South with something approaching to a philosophical
conception of the riddle of the universe and a tolerant
attitude towards the state of mind of the Spanish- American,
who declares that sufficient unto the day is the good and
the evil thereof. To come into this atmosphere of manana,

13

14 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

of mas 6 menos, straight from the feverish hustle and bustle
of New York or London, is to impose too severe a strain
upon the average man's capacity for rapid adaptability ;
one should approach it with such mental preparation as
may lead to sympathetic consideration for the peon's
outlook on life. As a philosophy, it is probably just as
good as that of Wall Street, even when it asserts that
nothing really matters except love and war and reasonable
intervals for laughter and sleep. And then, gazing across
the Gulf of Time, behind this present-day background
of easy-going prosperity, behind this vision of a promised
land, flowing with milk and honey, the traveller who has
heard and understood the teaching of old Europe and Asia
may see these lands, these great silent places, as they
were before Babylon was, cradles and graves of nations,
that, like those of Persia and Babylon, Egypt and Parthia,
have gone the way to dusty death and left scarcely a sign
of their passing. He may hear the distant footsteps of
the hungry generations that have trodden one another
down and vanished utterly. Approached in this spirit,
Peru, Bolivia, even Brazil and the Argentine, become
moving figures in the great shadow-play of human history,
more instructive than if we attempt to interpret them by
the fierce light of their newspapers or the wind-borne
words of their politicians. We shall get nearer to the
heart of things by accepting the wisdom of the peon and
its conclusion, namely, that because of the brevity of his
tenure, and the uncertainty of his end, man is not justified
in taking himself too seriously, either as an individual or
a race; that to have lived, to have known laughter and
love, to have done the day's work without haunting fears
for the morrow, is enough. Which wisdom is rarely vouch-
safed to editors, politicians and other word-ridden, restless
shadows.

IN SOUTH AMERICA 15

But pending the passing of the Bolshevik, and thereafter
for those who have not leisure or inclination for this round-
the-world approach, there is another way of getting to
South America which combines economy of time and
money with a pleasant and profitable process of initiation,
namely, the overland route from Paris to Lisbon. It is
indeed difficult to understand the minds and manners of
men in Brazil, unless one has learned something of Portu-
gal ; the big unruly child resembles its parent more closely
than any of the Spanish Republics resemble Spain. Under
proper guidance, a week in Lisbon and Oporto will serve
to give even a complete stranger some insight into things
which, seen from England through the medium of Renter's
politico-journalese, are always a puzzle, and frequently
an irritant, to the uninitiated. Lisbon, home of a noisy
and unstable proletariat, is not Portugal by any means;
to understand how and why the nation has been able to
survive as an independent State and to preserve something
of its ancient dignity, one must go north to the valley of the
Douro and beyond and see the thrifty laubrious peasantry
and gallegos at work. All through the country, the hand
of the politician lies heavily upon productive industry of
every kind; ignorance and poverty testify to the chronic
misrule of a bureaucracy given over to word-warfare and
la politique de I'estomac ; yet four centuries of this misrule
have not succeeded in breaking the stout heart of these
rugged toilers or in quenching their native spark of cheerful
fortitude. Portuguese officialdom has lived since the
seventeenth century upon the labour of these peasants,
both in the homeland and in Brazil ; the provincial caciques,
Lisbon lobbyists, and other bureaucratic parasites are all
alike faithful to the aristocratic tradition that bids them
neither toil nor spin. Lisbon lives in imagination upon
the glories of her golden age of epic deeds, upon the con-

16 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

quests and discoveries of Vasco da Gama and Albuquerque,
but since the French Revolution, her actual life has become
a sordid struggle between the haves and the have-nots,
and her destinies have been at the mercy of political
agitators and adventurers, of anarchists and terrorists,
of dreamers who preach the gospel of Bolshevism in the
sacred name of liberty. The Republic which, according
to its founders, was to restore the glorious traditions of
Portugal and to inaugurate a new era of prosperity, has
proved that the pet theories of political dreamers, applied
to an undisciplined and highly emotional people, cannot
give them the rare and refreshing fruit of their hearts'
desire. The germs of revolution are ever in the air ; con-
spiracies of Royalists, Freemasons, Carbonarios, of the
army and navy, are endemic — and amidst all their tumult
and shouting, the " toil-worn craftsman, with earth-made
implements, laboriously conquers the earth," sending
forth his sturdy progeny to the new world overseas, from
which they also will remit part of the price of their labour
for the maintenance of tax-gatherers and word-spinners
in the old country.

The history of Portugal, and the present condition of
the country, afford many and fruitful object-lessons for
the guidance of Jacobins. The most obvious of them all
is that nations, like individuals, can stand adversity better
than prosperity, and that wealth, when easily acquired
by plunder, brings its own swift Nemesis. In the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, the gold and treasures that
were poured into Portugal from Brazil made her the envy
of Christendom. At the time of the Napoleonic invasion,
the nation had been living on this unearned increment so
long, that the idea of honest work had become thoroughly
distasteful to any man with social pretensions; and the
body politic had therefore become completely demoralised.

IN SOUTH AMERICA 17

To-day the man in the street has come to expect his daily
bread and bull-fight as the price of his vote, and to conspire
against any Government which cannot pay that price.
Moreover, another result of the law of retribution confronts
us, writ plain in the features and morals of the people,
namely, the infusion of negro and Brazil-Indian blood
which came, through bond-servants and slaves, with the
plundered wealth of the New World. It is to the negro
strain, with its indiscipline, its fatalism and incapacity
for initiative, that Portugal (and, in like manner, Brazil)
owes many of her social and economic afflictions. Even
under the old Burgundian dynasty, the Moorish and
Jewish ingredients of the nation had never fused with the
semi-oriental stock of Lusitania sufficiently to give the
nation solid stability. The importation of the negro
strain saddled it with a weight that cannot be shifted for
centuries. At the present day, half of the soil of Portugal
is uncultivated, three-quarters of her people illiterate, and
her cities are become stamping-grounds for the wild asses
of visionary politics. Yet for all that it is a good land and
fruitful, the muscles and sinews of the people are healthy.
All it wants (like Russia, China and other victims of mis-
rule) is a period of progressive education under strict
discipline. There are Portuguese in the north, worthy
men who lament the expulsion of the religious orders
and the befooling of Demos, who will tell you that the
people was never so happily prosperous as during the
ten years when Wellington's army upheld law and order
in the land.

It may seem to the reader that here, at the very outset
of our wanderings, he is getting an intolerable amount of
political dough and very little sack. But we are going
to Brazil, and I repeat, in extenuation, that unless one has
studied mankind in the making in Portugal, it is not

18 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

possible to form a correct judgment of men and events in
that greater Portugal overseas. There, as you shall see, the
qualities and defects of the transplanted race have persisted,
bearing much fruit, some good, some bad, in the prolific
soil of their new habitat.

There were other reasons, besides a desire for enlighten-
ment, to commend the overland trip to Lisbon, in war-
time. In the first place you avoided all the nervous
strain of anticipating a torpedo attack anywhere and
everywhere from Liverpool to Leixoes, not to mention
the strain of the Bay of Biscay on the centre of all human
emotions. Then, too, you saw Paris, and to see Paris
after three years of war was a liberal education in philo-
sophy and courage of the highest, because the most intelli-
gent, order. It was my good fortune to visit the French
capital several times during the war — the first time was
just after the Government had migrated to Bordeaux —
and each time I left it with what Americans call a sense of
" uplift/' with renewed confidence in human nature and
a moral certainty that France and civilisation were going
to consign the German's shining armour to its proper
place in the world's Chamber of Horrors. " France is
dying," said Hindenburg in 1917. I heard that message
in Paris, and took it with me to the Place de la Concorde,
where the statue of Strasbourg, still decked with the
wreaths of a great nation's mourning, was awaiting the
day of redemption, all confident, surrounded by her peers.
" France is dying," said the idol of the Huns. The lie
was good enough to keep the Berliner in good humour,
but the German had not our advantage of seeing Paris,
sore stricken but serene and splendid, in the sunlight of
that autumn day.

Then by the overland route you get little glimpses of
Spain — not very satisfactory to new-comers, but to those

IN SOUTH AMERICA 19

who know and love this land of idleness made perfect by
a race of artists, like the wayside greetings of old friends.
There are two main roads for reaching Lisbon from the
French frontier, one by Irun — Medina del Campo — Villa
Formosa, the other via Hendaye to Madrid (Wagons-lits
service) and thence to Lisbon by the so-called " Rapide,"
direct. In summer both routes are extremely dusty and
stuffy. But from your carriage window you can see, with
the eye of faith, the Knight of the Rueful Countenance
and his trusty squire faring forth in their immortal quest
of chivalry. You can see agriculture as it was by the
sources of Time, bullock-carts of the type men used in
Egypt ages ago and use in Manchuria to-day; women
gleaning in the fields as Esther gleaned, and everywhere
glad sunlight, and snatches of half-forgotten songs.

At Lisbon, before embarking on the Royal Mail, and
even more emphatically on returning to Portugal, one
learned in war-time something of the possibilities of local
bureaucratic formalities, when combined with those of
diplomatic routine, as effective checks on anything like
unseemly haste; the education thus acquired is valuable
anywhere between the Isthmus of Panama and the Straits
of Magellan. To get one's passport stamped by the
Gobernador Civil and the French Legation, for example,
was a splendid test of philosophic calm ; there were others,
provided by the Government's official launch service,
which monopolised the carrying of passengers to and from
vessels lying in the Tagus, by the Health Officer who
boarded you next morning because his wife was ill last
night, and by the Servicio da Republica, Policia Adminis-
trativa, which undertook to carry one's luggage expediti-
ously from the wharf to the Avenida Palace Hotel — about
800 yards — and took half a day to do it. It needed but
little experience of these official monopolies to confirm

20 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

one's faith in Cobden and the virtue of private competition.
To remonstrate with anything in Portugal that wears
gold lace and brass buttons is futile : you might as well
argue with a penny-in-the-slot machine. Then, too,
there were chronic dislocations of labour, due to the
frequency of national festivals, to the inscrutable workings
of the repos hebdomadaire and to strikes, whereby
your ship was prevented from coaling or discharging
cargo — many inventions, in fact, for persuading the
traveller that to-morrow will do just as well as to-day, and
that it is not seemly to look upon Lisbon as no better than
a jumping-off place. Take your time, Senhores : what
matters a day more or less in a lifetime, especially when
all the world is upside down ? Saunter down the Via Aurea,
on the shady side, and learn how man may be completely
idle and yet well satisfied. Sip your vermouth at the
cafes of the Rocio and read the latest exposition of Affonso
Costa's plan for establishing the millennium on the principle
of the widow's cruse. Or take leisurely trips to Cintra and
Bussaco and the sleepy old towns of the northern coast
and learn how contentedly men may dream their little
lives away, a stone's throw from the hurly-burly of your
machine-made modernity, yet worlds apart.

This may not have been the idea at the back of the mind
of Lisbon's officialdom — perhaps it does not entertain
ideas — but it was the impression that one got from it.
Take the case of the Gobernador Civil and the stamping of
passports. Let us say that you landed at Lisbon from
South America in the evening, and wanted to take the
express via Madrid, leaving next day at 4.55 p.m. The
Civil Governor's office bore a legend to the effect that it
was open from 10 to 4. So it was, but the janitor (weary,
because he had explained it for years and years) informed
you that His Excellency never arrived till 11.30 and usually

IN SOUTH AMERICA 21

at twelve. You employed part of the interval in a voyage
of discovery to find the place, some streets away, where
they sold you the stamps which the Civil Governor's office
would presently affix; only the uninitiated would expect
to find them in that office, said the tired clerk, who relieved
the tedium of your subsequent waiting with a careful
enumeration of the various formalities to be observed.
The vise at the French Legation was a serious matter,
unless you were an old hand at the game and carried a
stock of photographs suitable for pasting on to passports,
for they required you to deposit two copies in the archives.
(Why is it, by the way, that passport photographs, all the
world over, make you look like a criminal in posse ?) It
usually took two days to get your papers passed by the
French Legation and they charged you two and a half
milreis (roughly seven shillings) for the privilege, which,
judging by the number of applicants, must have gone
some way towards paying the expenses of the establish-
ment. No doubt the object of all this was to make war-
time travelling difficult and unpleasant; but to the
unofficial mind it would have seemed simpler and better
for all concerned to check it, by refusing to issue passports
in the first instance, except for approved purposes. The
purposes once approved, why harass the traveller with
clinging coils of red tape and regulations that merely
reflected the vacillations and vagaries of the official mind ?
In June 1915, when I passed through Lisbon to join
the good ship Avon, the city was recovering from its latest
Revolution, busy also with demonstrations — these people
are born demonstrators — in favour of the Allies, with
processions, much firing of loud bombs, and a great flow
of oratory. The Revolution had been more serious, in the
matter of bloodshed, than that which relegated King
Manoel to the seclusion of Twickenham; not because the

22 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

political ends in view were more fiercely contested, but
because arms were freely distributed at the naval barracks
to all good patriots, and many applicants ot the baser
sort secured them for purposes quite unconnected with
politics, to wit, for the sniping of over-zealous policemen
or the settling of private feuds. There was an aftermath
of nervous unrest in the air; prudent politicians were
seeking to divert attention from home affairs by stimu-
lating public resentment against Germany and by prepar-
ations for Portugal's entry into the war. Amidst all this
excitement, the German merchant ships lay calmly at
their moorings, some thirty-five of them ; a goodly fleet in
idleness, a menace or an invitation, according to the point
of view. On Sundays, the German colony were wont to
use them in turn as picnic resorts, eating up their stores
and drinking their wines to the glory of the Fatherland —
a continual offence, this, to those who foresaw the day
when Portugal would seize these ships and find their
cupboards bare.

When next I passed through Lisbon, in March 1916,
Germany had declared war against Portugal for violations
of neutrality, and the Republic was taking itself very
seriously as a belligerent. The German ships, all effec-
tively damaged by their crews, had been taken over by the
Portuguese Government; no longer were Hans and Fritz
to be seen, of a fine morning, hanging out their wash on
the rigging. Down by the river's bank, where King
Joseph's Black Horse stands majestically surrounded by
Government offices, there was much running to and fro
of important persons with portfolios, and groups of citizens
were gathered in the colonnades, endlessly discussing the
fortunes of war with much gesticulation. But beyond the
square, which is the gathering place of professional and
amateur statesmen, the tide of life flowed in its usual

IN SOUTH AMERICA 23

leisurely channels. The morning air was fragrant with
the roses and violets of the flower-sellers, elderly citizens
and nursemaids were placidly taking the sun on the benches
of the palm-clad Avenida; women, carrying large flat
baskets filled with silvery shining fish, were going their
daily rounds, and everywhere, as usual, the raucous cries
of the newspaper sellers and the hawkers of lottery tickets
rose shrill, dominating even the clamour of wheeled traffic
on the cobble stones and the ceaseless clanging of the tram-
car bells. Somehow, it was not easy to persuade oneself
that this furthermost corner of the Continent had been
drawn into the maelstrom of man-killing; that these
easy-going and (for all their revolutions) peaceful people
would soon be contributing their quota of victims to the
insatiable holocaust in far-off Flanders.

But the good ship Araguaya (one of the splendid Royal
Mail ships then still unrequisitioned for transport work)
has arrived on time from Liverpool, and lies yonder on the
dancing waters a mile down the river, flying the Blue
Peter. And so, for a season, farewell to Europe and her
armed camps. For a little while, the burden of her strife
lingers with us aboard ship, by reason of the absence of
lights and volunteer watches kept by the passengers on
the look-out for submarines. Also we have a business-
like gun in the stern and handy men to work it, and one
notices that the ship's stewards are no longer the smart
young fellows of a year ago, whilst the band (thank good-
ness !) has dwindled visibly. But after Madeira, as we
pass out into the limitless horizons of the unchanging seas,
we forget much of the significance of these things; the
world towards which we are heading is the world we have
always known, pleasantly proceeding with its peaceful
affairs in comfortable security. As one looks out from the
bows, gently rising to an invisible swell, where the flying

24 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

fishes break from the blue in flurried shoals, all the hellish
havoc of war behind us seems a monstrous, incredible
nightmare. Next morning the ship's gazette brings us
faint echoes of Armageddon, voiceless messages myste-
riously gathered out of the darkness by the Marconi
magician ; we hear of children slain in their beds in London
or Paris by German airmen, new horrors perpetrated on
the defenceless civilians of ravaged Belgium ; but the vision
of these things becomes remote, unbelievable, almost
fantastic, amidst the unbroken peace of these halcyon
days, when the south wind comes soft as a caress and the
velvety rhythm of the ship's way sings its gentle lullaby
unceasing. Never before have the great silences of these
pathless waters, the serene glimpses of the moon, brought
such a sense of calm, security and restfulness. Yet all
the time behind this sense, there lurks an uneasy feeling
of compunction, almost of shame, that life should be so
comfortable and free from care whilst, over yonder, our
bravest and best " gcTto their graves like beds."

There were not many passengers in war-time; none of
the usual crowd of rich Brazilians and Argentines returning
with new wardrobes, and purple memories of la vie galante
in Paris and London; after the war began, the native-
born estanciero was shut off from his happy hunting-
grounds. A few travellers on business, mostly British,
a few women going out to join their husbands in Buenos
Aires, an Irishman and his family returning to their sugar
factory in the wilderness of the Gran Chaco, an English
girl on her way to marry a man in Pernambuco, in response
to an advertisement in a matrimonial paper ; half a dozen
more or less mysterious gentlemen travelling on Govern-
ment business for the Allies; a number of artists of the
operatic and light comedy stage, without whom no ship's
company for South America is ever complete, and a few

IN SOUTH AMERICA 25

other ladies of the kind one subsequently sees in purple
and fine raiment at the gambling tables of Guaruja or
Pocitos ; but nothing like the gay flock of birds of paradise
that migrate to the lands of the prolific peso in piping times
of peace. Some forty or fifty passengers perhaps all told
in the first class, not enough to fill more than half the seats
in the dining saloon; but still quite enough to provide
material for the usual board-ship romances and comedies
and gossip for the smoke-room.

Two days after leaving Lisbon, Madeira. As .we made
the harbour, a British cruiser passed out, to patrol the
traffic highway of the St. Vincent route. A goodly and a
grateful sight was the white ensign on these seas, from
which the German flag had been swept utterly. But the
German spy, of various breeds and brands, still lurked
around and about us, his activities directed to the sinking
of ships by means of clockwork bombs and other typical
Hun methods of war, and to the collection of information
concerning the movements of allied shipping homeward
bound. These activities were responsible for precautions
aboard ship at every harbour on our route ; all gangways
were closely guarded, landing permits de rigueur, and the
motley collection of touts, fruit -sellers and miscellaneous
traders, that used to invade the ship, compelled to do their
business from bumboats with the aid of baskets and boat-
hooks. The ship's barber-shop trade, heretofore no small
item in the Company's business, suffered severely from
these restrictions; no longer might the elite at ports of
call — notably in Brazil — come aboard by dozens to
replenish their wardrobes and defraud their country's
revenues, by wholesale purchases of duty-free soap and
scent, lingerie and other luxuries. A very interesting
and instructive business it used to be, this free-trading
aboard of ships from Europe by thrifty citizens of high-

26 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

tariff countries. At certain protectionist ports (e. g.
Santos) the Customs authorities, backed by local dealers,
found its effect on their revenues so serious that they
required the barber's shop to be closed during the vessel's
stay in harbour; but enterprising members of the crew
usually had their private ventures and regular clients at
such places, and the game was well worth the candle, even
when Customs' tide-waiters and watchers had to be
liberally rewarded for assuming an absent-minded interest
in things beyond the horizon. I have known worthy
citizens of Pernambuco and Bahia to make down-coast
trips for the sole purpose of doing a day's quiet business
with the barber's shop, and to profess themselves well
satisfied with the results of their enterprise.

On my way home from Buenos Aires, aboard the
Araguaya in 1915, I noticed that the assistant barber,
borne on the ship's papers as a Swede, spoke English with
an accent more suggestive of Berlin than of Stockholm.
He was a sleek and shiny creature, talkative and ingrati-
ating after the manner of barbers, much given to discussing
the war, and effusively hostile to Germany; a sociable
fellow withal, and a man of many friends and much
business ashore, even at uninteresting places such as St.
Vincent. In harbour I observed that he was always
hanging about the deck, and the oily furtiveness of
the fellow was suggestive of unpleasant possibilities.
Giving him the benefit of all possible doubts, it seemed
absurd to harbour a dubious alien of this kind in our
midst ; better, surely, if no British barbers were available,
that half the ship's company should grow beards. But
I was assured, with all the happy insouciance which
characterises British methods in such cases, that the
fellow was really all right, well known in Liverpool, got
an English wife and all that. His case had been very

IN SOUTH AMERICA 27

carefully investigated and there wasn't a chance of his
being a German spy. So be it. But on going for my
shave the first day out after leaving Lisbon in the same
ship six months later, I missed the fellow's ferret face and
oily tongue, and on inquiry ascertained that the unim-
peachable Swede had turned out to be a German, and a
highly paid spy in the regular service of the German
Government to boot. He had done two years' good work
for the Fatherland aboard this hospitable British ship,
but eventually the nature of his mole work was discovered
and he got nine months' hard labour, because, grown over-
bold with impunity, he had omitted to allow for a possible
increase of vigilance on the part of our naval Intelligence
Staff and Censorship. There may be something magnifi-
cent in our insular indifference to the activities of doubtful
aliens, but it certainly is not conducive to success in war.
How many British ships, one wonders, how many British
sailors, paid the penalty of our easy-going confidence in
that slim soi-disant Swede ?

At Madeira there were four German ships, all of which
had been effectively destroyed as to their engines by their
crews so soon as they got wind of their impending seizure
by the Portuguese. The neatness and despatch with
which the Germans disabled their merchant shipping in
the nick of time whenever neutral countries decided to
join the Allies (except in China, where we managed to get
ahead of them) testify to the thoroughness with which
their secret agents worked in places ostensibly cut off
from all communication with the Fatherland.

As one looks down the terrace on the hill over Funchal
and the harbour, one of earth's fairest scenes, one can
scarcely help regretting that we did not accept the guard-
ianship of this beautiful island when Portugal was ready
and willing — not so long ago — that it should become a

28 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

British possession. One needs but little imagination to
realise what might be made of it, what an ideal place of
refuge for sunshine seekers, honeymooners and other
dreamers. As it is, the semi-tropical slumbrous charm of
Madeira, the beauty of its luxuriant hills and wooded
heights, the old-world semi-oriental quality of its inhabit-
ants, linger in the memory with a distinct and peculiar
fragrance. It is one of those places through which the
traveller passes regretfully, to which he resolves to return,
" some day/' a place of which to dream wistful dreams,
amidst the grey monotony of our machine-made civili-
sation.

Most of us have some such island of refuge in our mind's
eye (I have ear-marked several myself in the inland sea
of Japan, in the south seas, and up the Puget Sound),
restful, lotus-eating spots, where you might get a mail
once a month, just to remind you of the distant hurly-
burly, where you would live in a bungalow looking out to the
sea, catch your fish for dinner and gather the kindly fruits
of the earth. Of course, the thing wouldn't work; your
house of dreams would leak, and there are no plumbers in
Paradise. We are too late for allotments in Arcadia, we
who have eaten of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.
All the same, if, after the war, the income-tax in England
goes to ten shillings in the pound, as some predict, or if
Ramsay Macdonald, Smillie and their friends are able to
put their Bolshevik principles into practice, it seems to
me that places like Madeira are likely to attract a consider-
able number of permanent exiles from the British Isles.
If the accepted definition of liberty, equality and fraternity
comes to be, as our Snowdens and Outhwaites would have
it — liberty, the licence of undisciplined mob rule ; equality,
conferring one and the same dignity of citizenship on a
senior wrangler and a fuddled bar loafer; fraternity, a

IN SOUTH AMERICA 29

brotherhood for purposes of plunder, inspired by class
hatred — then, merry England, a long farewell !

The Funchal funicular railway carries you up, through
vineyards and gardens and sugar-cane plantations, to the
top of the hill ; in the town itself you can have your choice
of locomotion between an automobile and a bullock-
sleigh, the latter a nice leisurely conveyance that meanders
bumpily through the narrow streets and stops of its own
accord at the shops where tourists are expected to buy
lace and wickerwork. Coming down from the hill you
hire the same sort of conveyance (minus the bullocks)
which is used as a toboggan, the path being constructed so
as to make a glissade ; two elderly natives guide and check
its descent, calling on you and the Madonna to bear witness
to their perspiring energy, their poverty and the duty of
generosity incumbent upon wealthy travellers. The
machine stops at certain points, ostensibly for the men to
take breath, but more obviously to afford opportunities
of baksheesh to the swarms of beggars, touts, and other
birds of prey that here lie in wait. Children emerging
from ambuscades bombard you with faded flowers,
clamouring for coin ; photo sellers thrust their wares upon
you at every corner ; this in a land where an honest day's
work should feed a family for a week. Beggars are an
inevitable product of Portuguese administration and
economics, just as they are in Ireland. The subsistence,
with comparative success, of a social class which habitually
declines either to toil or spin, may be partly due to the
semi-religious conception of charity, which leads people
to believe they are laying up treasure in heaven by bestow-
ing largesse on scrofulous loafers; but the root of the
matter is laziness, laziness of the giver, as much as of the
receiver, of largesse. If only donations were occasionally
made in the form of soap or a ticket of admission to the

30 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

nearest hospital, the streets of this enchanted isle would
smell far sweeter.

From Madeira, southwards, along the bulging coast of
Africa, through the tropic of Cancer, down to the Cape
Verde islands, the sea is like a shining disc of molten metal,
shimmering in the heat wafted on a faint easterly breeze
from the Sahara desert. Tweeds and stiff collars have
disappeared, replaced by flannels and soft raiment; little
affaires de cceur, tentative and unsettled until now, take
on a serious complexion. After dusk, cosy coigns of
vantage on the boat deck testify to the rapid growth of
love's young (or old) dream ; beneath the glimpses of the
crescent horned moon, romance weaves her magic web,
in blissful anticipation of seven lotus-eating days, seven
tropic nights to come before the enchantment shall be
broken by contact with the world of painful realities. In
the smoking-room, bridge fours establish a prescriptive
right to favourite corners; the leading members of an
Italian opera troupe, who rise at mid-day and conduct
flirtations of bewildering promiscuity till dinner-time,
have organised a sort of family poker party, in which
stern business and glad-eyed sentiment are curiously
blended. The young Frenchwoman of attractive appear-
ance who shares a cabin de luxe with an elderly Brazilian
millionaire, and who made her first pallid appearance on
deck at Madeira, now emerges resplendent in the latest
confections of the Rue de la Paix, to sip champagne and
munch chocolates in a long chair. She mixes not with the
vulgar; her cabin emits a pungent fragrance, suggestive
of wholesale business at Morny's, and she and her cavalier
have a table for two in the far corner of the dining saloon ;
but other passengers for Rio, who profess to know all
about her prosperous partner, hasten to enlighten you
with savoury details of a typical chronique scandaleuse,

IN SOUTH AMERICA 31

and to narrate the lamentable experiences of the lady's
predecessors.

Before reaching St. Vincent, that melancholy jumping-
off place and telegraph station where a little cluster of
white men's houses crouch in the heat of the sweltering
sands, with the great barrier of barren rocks behind them,
one of those indefatigably bustling persons who always
emerge on such voyages, had organised a perfect orgy of
deck and parlour games and roped in nearly every one
on board — every one, in fact, except the Brazilian love-
bird and his mate aforesaid, and another little French
lady, lawful spouse of a Rio magnate, who had learned to
assuage the pangs of exile with opium, smoked a la Chinoise.
The energetic gentleman on this occasion was an Italian
(we will call him Pozzi) who was pleased to describe himself
as a supernumerary secretary of (shall we say?) the
Bohemian Legation at Rio. A dapper little man, some-
what loud of voice and familiar of manner, who picked his
teeth at meal-times with something more than South
American thoroughness, but otherwise a very paragon of
sociable activity, and a born leader of functions. By
common consent of the smoke-room, and upon his own
initiative, Signer Pozzi was elected to be Chairman of the
Sports Committee. In that capacity, he organised a
Fancy Dress Ball, deck sports of every description,
lotteries and concerts ; there was no gainsaying the mer-
curial cheeriness of the man. I found him one morning
playing draughts in the second-class quarters with the
Italian barber — for all his masterfulness, his was evidently
a companionable soul — and he had with him a strangely
silent mysterious Italian " niece," a dark girl of the peasant
or shopkeeper class, of whom he seemed to be somewhat
nervous. The smoking-room came in time to have lurking
doubts about the Chairman of the Sports Committee,

32 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

especially after the Fancy Dress Ball, on which occasion
he gave a display that suggested undue familiarity with
the midnight manners of the Moulin Rouge, and after a
British Secretary of Legation had disclosed the fact that
the name of Pozzi did not figure in the directory of the
Diplomatic Body at Rio. Nevertheless, until the social
evening which closed the list of his activities after leaving
Bahia, and until the approaching end of his journey cast
a certain veil of thoughtfulness upon him, Pozzi continued
to be the life and soul of gaiety aboard.

But there is a sequel to this tale of a glad knight-errant,
and it may as well be told here. A week after landing at
Rio, I was invited by the representative of Bohemia, an
old friend of mine, to spend a day or two with him at his
charming summer residence at Petropolis, the restful
retreat and fashionable centre in which diplomacy in Brazil
takes refuge from the sordid commercialism of the capital.
I arrived at his palm-shaded villa one evening towards
sunset, and who should open the door at my ringing
but Pozzi — Pozzi, wearing the black coat and white tie
of ceremonial occasions and a somewhat shamefaced
expression.

" Hallo, Pozzi," said I. " How are you? Didn't know
I was going to meet you here. Is His Excellency in ? "

" Yes, sir," said Pozzi. " Will you wear dinner dress or
a smoking- jacket ? Dinner is at 7.30."

The fellow was quite cool and collected. He seemed to
assume that I would respect smoking-room confidences and
betray no ill-bred surprise at discovering the ex-chairman
of the Sports Committee in the major-domo of the Bohe-
mian Legation. Without the quiver of an eyelid he
unpacked my bag and prepared my bath; neither of us
referred again to the Araguaya or the mysterious niece,
or to any of the social amenities wherein he had moved

IN SOUTH AMERICA 33

with such distinction and success. He played his part
with all the sad dignity of Monsieur Beaucaire, renverse.
All the same, the strain must have told upon his nerves,
for at dinner my host, apologising for the service, explained
that his major-domo had hurt his hand and couldn't wait
at table. I saw no more of Signor Pozzi at Petropolis,
but later on, walking one day in the Avenida Branco at
Rio, I caught sight of him and the niece, both fashionably
attired, taking the air in a hired victoria. And later still,
at Sao Paulo, I met an English lady who had travelled from
Lisbon to Rio with him three years before, when, as she
said, he had been the life and soul of the ship, only, on that
occasion, his niece had auburn hair. A gay dog, I fear,
was Pozzi, and a bit of a blade. But all the world's a
stage, and who shall blame him if his soaring soul, escaping
now and then from the fetters of butlerdom, prompted
him to strut and ruffle it awhile among his so-called
betters, to play the Admirable Crichton and revel in his
masquerade ? Not I, for one. He certainly did more to
enliven the voyage of the Araguaya than most of us, and
he achieved at least one memorable flirtation with an
Argentine lady, reputed as of eighteen- carat dignity in
her own circle.

Five days of the " mild, lightsome, temperate and warm "
Atlantic, as old Hakluyt has it, bring us from St. Vincent
to Pernambuco, our first port of call in Brazil — five days
of sunshine and summer seas, five nights of starlight
splendour. Life has its golden hours of many kinds,
hours that memory enshrines in the innermost chamber of
her treasure-house; imperishable moments in which the
soul has won brief freedom from the trammels of its time-
garment and heard the choir invisible at the very portals
of the infinite. The golden hours that remain with us
unto the end, trailing clouds of glory to the very banks of

34 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

Styx, are generally not of our premeditation, or even of
our selection ; not we for ourselves, but Memory, on some
mysterious system of her own, selects for us these deathless
flowers from the garden of our swift-fading days, whose
fragrance, as the sunset draws near, inspires the " sessions
of sweet silent thought." How many of our red-letter
days, days of triumphs in love and war, of hopes fulfilled,
have faded swiftly into the formless past; days that, at
the time, seemed to us above all memorable, when we felt
inclined, like Joshua, to bid the sun stand still, that we
might rejoice in the attainment of the heart's desire. Yet
these have gone from us, while those that linger are hours
that came of themselves, often unbidden, imperfectly
realised, hours in which the touch of a magic hand, the
notes of an echoing song, have searched out the very depths
of our being, out of the world of littleness into harmony
with the infinite wonder and mystery of existence. I
know of no time or place on this restless whizzing planet
in which a man is more likely to find secret bread for
memory's storehouse than the bows of a ship, making its
way, beneath the thousand eyes of night, towards the
great unknown, where sky and ocean meet. The south-
east trade wind moving softly over the great waters, sings
to the rigging its song of far-off frozen wastes ; the phos-
phorescent sea, gleaming like sheets of metal in our wake,
is a thing of mystery and beauty unspeakable ; above our
heads, from the uttermost depths of space, comes the
message of innumerable worlds. At last we are on the
way to the never-never land ; yonder beyond the horizon,
we shall find the gates of gold.

Pernambuco, as one sees it from the anchorage, is hardly
suggestive of the City Beautiful. It is indeed rather a
dismal introduction to the new world of our dreams, a
mouldy, melancholy spot, with an unsavoury reputation

IN SOUTH AMERICA 35

for yellow fever, bubonic plague, syphilis and other unpleas-
ant diseases. The inner harbour, with a depth of twenty
feet, lies between the shore and a curious natural reef of
stone, parallel thereto, very safe and snug; its entrance
guarded by a fort built on the reef. The town, whose
real name, almost forgotten by foreigners, is Recife, stands
on the sandy beach of a lagoon delta where two rivers
meet, with the hill of Olinda rising five miles to the north-
west; behind it, the wooded hills merge gradually into
the flat-topped chapadas of the sertao region. As to its
internal condition, the town does not seem to have for-
gotten much, or learned anything worth mentioning, in
regard to public sanitation or aesthetics, since Waterton
saw it in 1816; it still gives the impression that " every
one has built his house entirely for himself, and deprived
public convenience of the little claim she had a right to
put in."

" The lamentable want of cleanliness," the mouldy and
neglected appearance of many houses, which he deplored,
are still in evidence ; but the surrounding country is very
green and restful to the traveller's eye, and one feels, with
that gentle critic, that " had art and judgment contributed
their portion to its natural advantages, Pernambuco at
this day would have been a stately ornament to the coast
of Brazil." As it is, the coast of Brazil is an ornament
to Pernambuco. But the damp heat of the tropics is
pleasantly tempered by the fresh south-east trade winds,
and the voice of romance, the ghosts of many a great adven-
ture of older days, still whisper at dusk in the shadow of the
palms. Is not the Governor's palace built on the founda-
tions of a great house built by Maurice of Nassau ? The
Dutch took Recife in 1620 — they took most places in their
day — and before then the city had been rich enough to
attract the attention of a roving English privateer, James

36 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

Lancaster, who captured and plundered it very thoroughly
in 1595.

The Araguaya rides to the never-ceasing swell a mile
or so from the shore; half a dozen of our passengers are
landed by means of a swinging " cage," which dumps
them into a lighter alongside. Amongst these is the young
woman bent on marriage to the man she has never seen ;
there was no sign of him in the offing, but this did not
prevent the courageous lady from going ashore in full
bridal array; she was evidently taking no chances. In
return for her, Pernambuco gave us many strange-looking
fruits. The mangoes were the best of them, but, compared
to the Manila variety, a poor thing. As we steamed away
at sunset, my thoughts were of the enterprising bride — did
she find her swain, and, if not, what was the end of that
story ?

Here, as at Bahia, thirty hours' journey down the coast,
we took in a goodly number of Brazileros for Rio, fearful
and wonderful menages, whose features and raiment bore
eloquent witness to the Black Man's revenge on Portugal's
once-conquering race. There were stout matrons, like
brood hens, shepherding swarms of swarthy infants, who
spent most of their time rummaging and bargaining in the
barber's shop. There were Brazilian nuts, oiled and curled
like the Assyrian bull, laying in new stocks of English
flannels, umbrellas and scent. The Brazilians' penchant
for scent amounts to a passion ; upon their coming aboard,
all the perfumes of Arabia contended for mastery in the
social hall, and even in the smoking-room the fragrance
of Havana and bird's-eye was smothered by patchouli,
verbena and fleur a" amour. There is nothing subtle or
instinctive about it, as there is in the Oriental's use of
sandalwood, musk and myrrh, nothing even elemental
or racy of the soil. The thing is obviously exotic, like the

IN SOUTH AMERICA 37

local cult of French novels of the decadent type; the
race's sense of smell seems to have gone on a perpetual
"jag," that nothing but the strongest excitement can
satisfy.

Bahia de Todos os Santos looks more attractive from the
sea than Pernambuco; there is more life and movement
of shipping, and the harbour works, under construction by
a French company, testify to local enterprise. But in
1915 and 1916, in fact until the United States' declaration
of war against Germany in April 1917, there was not much
cause for satisfaction, as far as Englishmen were concerned,
in Bahia's commercial activities. The trail of the German
was over them all. The policy of the Governor of Bahia
was unmistakably guided by the insidious influences of
German propaganda, substantially backed by German
money, and materially assisted by the flabby ineptitude
which even after two years of war characterised the pro-
ceedings of our own Foreign Office and Board of Trade
in the matter of enemy trading. The Brazilian Federal
Government's attitude of prudent neutrality, like that of
Argentina, was natural enough under the circumstances.
If the United States remained aloof from the war, if Great
Britain and her Allies lacked the intelligence and initiative
required to prevent Germany from obtaining vast supplies
of food and raw materials, Brazil could scarcely be expected
to refrain from taking advantage of the situation to supple-
ment her diminished revenues, nor could the Federal
Government at Rio be expected to deal severely with the
Governors of States like Bahia, which thought fit to
interpret neutrality in the way their German friends
wanted it. Every Englishman on the coast was perfectly
well aware of the ultimate destination of the huge ship-
ments of cocoa and coffee that left Bahia, ostensibly for
the United States and Sweden, every week; the regular

38 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

steamer traffic between Brazil and Scandinavia was a
constant subject of jubilation to the German colonies in
Brazil and a source of impotent wrath to the British
cruiser patrols on the coast.

The Germans at Bahia had a firm grip of the machinery
of trade in 1916; even when no shipping facilities were
available they bought up large stocks of goods, partly
because their astute merchants at Hamburg and Bremen
regarded Brazilian coffee and Argentine wool as a better
investment than the German mark, and partly to con-
vince Brazil that it would pay her not to break with
such an open-handed customer. It was only after the
institution of the Allies' Black List, and when it became
clear that North America would soon be in the fray,
that facilities for German commerce overseas came to
the end which, but for the inexplicable obstinacy of
our lawyer politicians, would have overtaken it early
in 1915.

There were several German ships interned at Bahia,
and the place was alive with truculent Teutons and more
than dubious aliens. All cargo and luggage coming aboard
the Araguaya was very carefully searched. Only a little
while before, one of Germany's semi-official exponents of
Kultur had succeeded in smuggling a clockwork bomb on
board the s.s. Tennyson, packed in a case of photo films
consigned to New York. The bomb was timed to explode
on the fourth day, in order to fulfil the Luxburg idea of
" sinking without trace " and far from land ; by a fortunate
accident, however, the ship was detained for three days at
Bahia, so that the explosion took place just as she was
nearing Pernambuco, and she was able to make the harbour
in a damaged condition.

The heavy swell that never ceases at Bahia, combined
With the defective tug and lighter arrangements of the

IN SOUTH AMERICA 39

harbour authorities, make the working of cargo no easy
matter. On the night we left, a sudden squall coming up
from the north, three unwieldy lighters, laden with cocoa,
broke away from the ship's side, and, having no tug in
attendance, went drifting hopelessly shorewards with much
shouting — which was the last we saw of them. Local
officialdom, more suo, was less concerned with the safety
and smooth working of shipping than with the building
of the new boulevard-promenade from the town to the
lighthouse at the end of the bay.

From Bahia we roll down to Rio, the north wind pursuing
us with the hot breath of the equator most of the way.
The ship seems to have absorbed something of the flavour
of decaying tropical vegetation which exudes from these
shores, where the swamp-fed jungle comes down to the
verge of the sea; there is a listlessness, a sort of senti-
mental drowsiness in the air, distinct from the usual feeling
of suspense induced by the imminence of sad, or glad,
farewells. After dinner, a sentimental young woman
from Sao Paulo, who has done a good deal of overtime by
moonlight on the boat-deck, sings Tosti's " Good-bye,"
as if she meant every word of it, and the social hall simply
oozes sentiment. Only the members of the opera troupe,
long inured to such things, are impervious to the subtle
influence of the hour; their eternal game of " chips that
pass in the night " goes steadily on.

There is yet another, and a very pleasant, way of going
to South America, namely, by one of the " V " boats of
the Lamport and Holt Line, that roll down from New York
through the tropics and the Caribbean Antilles. As a
rule, these vessels only make two stops on the voyage
to Buenos Aires, viz. at Barbados and Rio de Janeiro.
They travel at a dignified fourteen knots, and do the

40 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

trip in twenty-one leisurely days. For those who love
the tropic seas and dream-fed days of pampered idleness,
no journey could offer greater attractions. From personal
experience (1919) I can recommend the good ship
Vestris as a thoroughly comfortable and well-conducted
habitation.

CHAPTER III

RIO AND PETROPOLIS

WHETHER you see it by night or by day, from the sea
or from the heights of Santa Theresa, Rio is beyond all
question beautiful, with a beauty that lingers like that of
solemn music. Its approaches from the sea are as mag-
nificent as its background of wooded hills ; it is a dazzling
gem, set in a splendid frame of blue and green; and
very stately and seemly, on a scale befitting the grandeur
of the scene in which the city is set, are the public gardens
and esplanades that skirt the water front. But I think
it is at night, from a height overlooking the harbour,
where amidst the whispering pines you forget the jarring
noises of the day, that Rio is beautiful beyond anything
that words can express. All around and behind us the
hills close in, as if guarding their treasures and mysteries
against further invasion, their flanks teeming with the
fierce tropical vegetation against which all the works of
man's hands are but as the labours of Liliputians; out
yonder, just topped by the rising moon, the sugar-loaf
casts its vast shadow across the bay. Beneath us the
myriad lights of the city, a perfect blaze at the centre
and on the water front, stretch out on every side in
graceful lines, like fairy processions, until in the far dis-
tance they flicker and are lost in the curves of the
hills.

Never was a city so brilliantly lighted as Rio. Seafaring
men will tell you that you can sometimes detect the glare
of it a hundred miles away, and always within sixty miles.

41

42 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

It is the boast and pride of all her citizens. As a matter
of aesthetics and a preventative of the evils that walk in
darkness, the money is doubtless well spent ; nevertheless,
for a city and a people that are always pleading hopeless
insolvency, this lavish consumption of gas and electricity
(especially with fuel at war and famine prices) seems
somewhat improvident. It is not for us, who sit in the
free seats, to criticise the cost of the entertainment, not
for us to be disturbed by the explanation which residents
volunteer concerning the personal interest taken by certain
of the City Fathers in the matter of public lighting. You
hear many strange things about officialdom and its ways
at the Club Central, but so many of the men you meet
there are hanging on in the forlorn hope of collecting
good or bad debts from the Government, that they cannot
but diffuse an atmosphere of uncharitable suspicion.
They tell you, for example, that the Brazilian Dread-
nought did not put to sea, to meet the U.S.S. Tennessee
on March 23rd, 1916, but remained snugly moored to
the wharf (as she had been for several months) because the
Admiralty found it more convenient to light her from the
city mains than to let her generate her own electricity.
This arrangement also saved cruising coal and kept her
crew, largely composed of revolutionary po^ticians, in
good humour. For all of which I vouch not.

In Rio, by day, there is something almost oppressive
in the spectacle, and at the thought, of the giant strength
of Nature, held here in check at the cost of man's unceas-
ing labour. One feels that the forest jungle, this resistless
sea of clinging green which laps and saps at every unde-
fended point, has not been beaten ; it is only pushed back,
curbed and restrained for a little while, and some day
Nature will take her revenge. She gave us a slight sample
of her resources in March 1916. As the result of unusually

IN SOUTH AMERICA 43

heavy rains, a large part of the lower sections of the town
was suddenly flooded, and a few superfluous people were
drowned in the streets; further back, slices of the hill-
side were washed away, so that from the tram-line you saw
the back rooms of a villa from which the terrace had
departed, leaving wisps of drain-pipes hanging in mid-
air, or a front staircase that had slithered gently down to
rest among a group of supremely indifferent palms. But
even without a sudden onslaught like this, you see un-
mistakable signs of the ceaseless pressure of the forest
whenever you move even a little way beyond the main
arteries of the city's traffic — creepers that swiftly cover
and strangle every undefended wall, great spreading roots
of trees that raise the concrete pavement from its bed,
as with a Titan's hand.

A trip on the Leopoldina Railway between Rio and
Petropolis reveals something of the grimness of the
struggle that lies before the modern conquistador, the
tiller of the soil, in this country. In bygone days this
region was all cultivated by hardy Portuguese and even
by German settlers, but to-day the line runs through
dreary wastes of swamp and matted jungle growth. The
settlers moved on, it seems, seeking easier labour further
west, and the gradual silting up of the river made swamps
of what had been fields. Later, a German company
secured a concession to reclaim the land by dredging,
and to grow rice and cotton thereon, but their money
gave out in the struggle and once more Nature came into
her own. Wherever she is still held back, in scattered
clearings, it is with a puny hold. The little houses with
their fenced gardens look like islands in the tangled wilder-
ness, their outposts and defences often buried in the
invading undergrowth. Here you may see a blue-painted
mud-cabin, bearing the pathetic legend " Casa Paz y

44 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

Amor " ; and there a wooden shanty labelled " Bazar
Aurora," with a goat, a few hens and a patch of vege-
tables ; and crowding in upon them are the vanguard of
the forests' armies, palms and tree-ferns, acacias and bam-
boos. Even the railway line seems to shrink before
them, confessing itself an impertinent intruder. Horlick's
" three cows " advertisement, suddenly looking up
against a background of jungle, becomes a fantastic
derelict and a warning. The prolific richness of this tropic
soil is its defence against the hand of man.

The city itself gives the impression of being remarkably
energetic and well organised as to its business. Railways
run down to and along the wharves, taking cargo directly
to and from the ships. Porters and police, all in neat
uniforms, are numerous and generally civil. It is difficult
to reconcile all these outward and visible signs of bustling
and orderly activity, with what one knows of the condi-
tion of Brazil's trade and finances. Later on, when you
have looked beneath the surface of things and compared
the activities and achievements of Rio with those of
other Brazilian cities, you begin to realise that the capital
is essentially a landing-place and a port of distribution,
its profitable business derived chiefly from pickings and
commissions, and that even this business is to a very great
extent in the hands of aliens — Italians, British and
Americans, and not of the native born. Your pukka
Brazilian of the educated class has never got rid of his
Portuguese forefathers' distaste for honest work : his
idea of a respectable vocation is a Government job, and
a sinecure for choice. The number of portfolios one meets
in a morning's walk affords a fair idea of the locust-
swarms of bureaucracy that prey upon productive industry
in this country — no self-respecting clerk will go without
one. Rio in this matter is Portugal translated, with a

IN SOUTH AMERICA 45

wider background of opportunity ; moreover, it is charac-
terised, just as Lisbon is, by feverish political activities,
and by an ostentatious imitation of Parisian fashions in
dress and social amenities. There is, of course, a frugal,
hard-working class of Brazilians, but the great majority
of these are comparatively recent immigrants drawn from
the peasantry of northern Portugal. The class of citizen
produced* by the intermarriage of Portuguese with
negroes, mulattoes and quadroons would appear to be
socially and economically less profitable to the State than
the full-blooded negro ; it is a breed which acquires the
modern proletariat's exaggerated idea of individual's
rights without any compensating idea of duty to the
State, and produces a curious blend of primitive childish-
ness and precocious modernity. In Rio evidence con-
fronts you at every step, and in all classes of society,
of the extent to which this interbreeding has affected
the race — far more so than at Sao Paulo and other inland
cities, where the flowing tide of Italian immigration has
determined the structural character of the community.
The country's financial necessities, which had reached
a critical stage at the end of 1914 (with a foreign debt
of one hundred and four millions sterling), became much
less acute in 1916; the war had by that time done for
Brazil something that its politicians could never have done
by talking, that is to say, it had compelled the country
to produce for itself many things that it had been in the
habit of buying on credit ; it had thus led to a consider-
able development of agriculture and reduced the number
of shopkeepers. The Government's expedients for raising
money, and the prevailing scarcity of cash, were none
the less clearly perceptible. Everything taxable is taxed
in Brazil, either under a tariff so complicated that it
takes a despachante expert to deal with it, or under

46 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

the consumption impost. If you buy a hat, you will
find a ticket pasted inside it showing that the Government
has levied 2000 reis on it ; on a bottle of eau-de-Cologne
they pinch 1000 reis. Even a syphon of locally made
soda-water has to have its spout sealed with a forty-reis
stamp. The ingenuity of an army of Custom House
employes is continually directed towards bringing more
grist to the tax-mill. In the summer of 1916, for example,
one of them conceived the brilliant idea of charging duty
on foreign newspapers arriving by post — the Postal Union
regulations to the contrary notwithstanding — and this
they proceeded to do, levying duty on the weight, so that
the local newsagents had to employ special men to clear
their papers through the Post Office. The Times rose
promptly to the dignity of a sixpenny paper.

Another visible result of the war, and of the increasing
difficulty of collecting debts in 1916, was that many
trades had seen fit to adopt the cash system. It is a
system which has its merits, but it may be carried to
excess. I understand paying on the nail for goods
received, but it goes against the grain to be asked by a
photographer to pay for the development of films before
he has done the job, or to be mulcted of a dentist's fee
before he has extracted your tooth.

It was vouchsafed to me to study the workings of the
tariff at close quarters. For the furtherance of the good
cause of the Allies, and in order that the Brazilians might
come to a better understanding of Germany and the
Germans, I had brought out several complete sets of
Raemaekers' coloured cartoons, intending in the first
place to organise an exhibition which might lead to their
distribution through the country. The idea, fortified by
official blessings from London, was warmly welcomed by
the local Committee of the Liga pelos Alliades, a small

IN SOUTH AMERICA 47

but enthusiastic body of German-haters, who undertook
to organise the exhibition. But we had reckoned without
the Custom House. After two days of ponderous thought,
the appraisers decided that duty must be paid on the
pictures by weight at the rate of 231 milreis (about
£11 IDS.) per set of 180 cartoons. They were good enough
to explain that most of the weight was in the cardboard
mounts, and that if the pictures were unmounted, the
duty would be much less. As this meant an end to all
ideas of bringing Raemaekers home to the Brazilian
masses, the League indited a petition to the Minister
of Finance ; but His Excellency was going for a joy-ride
to the Pan-American Conference at Buenos Aires, and
naturally cared for none of these things. Then we engaged
the services of a despachante, reputed to be an expert
in circumventing the tariff, but he speedily proved to be
a wind-fed man of straw. Finally, supported by a member
of the British Consulate Staff, I secured admission to the
office of the Chief Inspector of Customs — a highly scented
sanctum, decorated with floral offerings and several
ladies' photographs ; from this bower I emerged, r$ infecta,
deeply convinced of the universal power of red tape, and
of the blood brotherhood of bureaucrats. The cartoons
remained in durance for over two months, and were ulti-
mately released, I believe, on solemn recognisances being
given by the Liga pelos Alliades, and upon the under-
standing that the case was not to be regarded as a
precedent.

The attitude of the great majority of Brazilians at this
period was unmistakably anti-German, but the far-
reaching effects of Germany's propaganda and political
finance were equally reflected in the cautious neutrality
of the official and mercantile classes. Even a French
bookseller in Rio, whom I approached on the subject of

48 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

exhibiting the Raemaekers cartoons in his window,
declined the honour on the ground that he could not afford
to irritate his Brazilian clients, amongst whom many had
close relations with Germans, and that the price of plate-
glass had become prohibitive. Amongst British importers
and shippers also, there were to be found those who
thought it best not to antagonise Wille, the all-powerful
(local boss of the Hamburg- Amerika Line), so long as no
definite order in Council had prohibited the carrying of
German goods in British ships. Business is business, all
the world over, and until the United States took the lead,
Brazil was not taking any rash chances of German
reprisals. But the sentiments of the populace were just
as clearly hostile to Germany in Rio as they were in
Buenos Aires, once the nature and objects of Deutschdum
became understood, and when people had begun to realise
the cold-blooded cynical devilry of German diplomacy, as
practised by Count Luxburg and his agents. And the
Germans themselves were beginning to realise the situa-
tion. No longer, as in the early days of the war, did they
swagger and boast of what they were going to do in South
America, when once England and France had been con-
quered. No, Fritz and Hans were walking delicately and
speaking smooth things in Rio in the summer of 1916,
evidently beginning to perceive that, even if Germany
should escape military defeat, no power on earth could
ever serve to obliterate the infamy which had become
her portion throughout the seven seas. After the sinking
of the Lusitania, all Germans were expelled from the Club
Central at Rio; the Kaiser's portrait disappeared from
shop windows, and the five able-bodied Teutons who
made their living by discoursing music in the streets, found
discretion the better part of valour and modified their
repertoire on international lines. Herr Wille's stately

IN SOUTH AMERICA 49

marble hall, the Hamburg-Amerika's place of business in
the Avenida Rio Branco, now tenanted by two listless
clerks and void of customers, conveyed the meaning of
sea-power in a way that even the humblest citizen could
appreciate. Its impressive and aggressive style of archi-
tecture, a combination of the mailed fist and old Heidel-
berg sentimentality, had become definitely associated in
the public mind with the unspeakable depravity of German
Kultur. Like the arrogantly-exclusive German colonies of
Santa Catharina and Rio Grande de Sul, it had come to
represent something permanently alien and sinister, a
menace to the future safety of the Republic. Long before
diplomatic relations were broken off by their Govern-
ment in April 1917, patriotic Brazilians were wont to
expectorate on passing a German Consulate or Bank.

In the spring of 1916, the best hotels in Rio, the " Cen-
tral " in the town and the " International " on the hill,
were still too much frequented by Germans to be pleasant ;
I took up my abode, therefore, at the " Moderne," half-
way up Santa Theresa, where mine host, a good French-
man, would have none of them at any price. There is a
wonderful view of the harbour and hills from the terrace
of the " Moderne," and it is fairly out of the mosquito
zone; also, from that terrace, in the early morning and
at sundown, you can study the domestic habits of many
humble households, chiefly negroid, in the little valley
just below. The average Brazilian of the humbler class
(especially the negro) does not regard domestic privacy
as essential; in fact, judging by the glimpses of family
life that one gets as the tramcars pass the houses which
line the approach to the old aqueduct bridge, they display
their vie intime as cheerfully as gold-fishes in a glass
bowl.

From the little cluster of thatched cottages below the

50 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

" Moderne " there comes, day and night, a strident
clamour of barking dogs and crowing cocks. Every cabin
has its cur or two, and apparently every cur has a griev-
ance, which it never ceases to air. On moonlight nights
the noise assumes the dignity of a demonstration. Why
the cocks should persistently crow at night is a mystery,
but they do, and the practice in no wise diminishes their
lung-power at dawn. At that hour all the energies of
human and animal life in this little valley seem to be con-
centrated on the production of noise. Vociferous domestic
argument, rising and falling amidst the blowing of pedlars'
horns, the howling of babes and the lamentations of much
miscellaneous live stock. Much of the hamlet's toilet
was performed al fresco, with a good deal of interesting
dishabille in evidence. Thereafter, when the men had
been fed and gone forth to their labours, comparative
peace reigned. Babies and clothes were washed during
the forenoon, by women whose raiment never got beyond
the slipper-cum-peignoir stage. The peignoir habit,
indeed, extends from the humblest up to the highest
ranks of society; and in many ways it seems to typify
the national habit of mind. The capacity of the average
half-bred Brazilian for sitting by the hour in absolute,
blank-minded idleness almost equals that of the Oriental.
But when one considers how great has been the admixture
of the imported African negro stock into the population
of Brazil and how recent the abolition of slavery (1888),
one ceases to wonder at many characteristics and customs
of this people. It is sometimes a little difficult to remem-
ber how slowly for centuries, how quickly of late, things
have moved in Brazil, to realise that many of the negroes
one meets were actually slaves thirty years ago, and that
it will take something more than a generation to eradicate
in the wealthier classes the habits of body and mind that

IN SOUTH AMERICA 51

grew out of the owning of human chattels. And in
judging of the future of the country one has also to bear
in mind that the importation of African negroes ceased
in 1860, and that since then the country, especially the
south, has been receiving a steady influx of white immi-
grants, sturdy Portuguese peasants and thrifty Italians.
In time, no doubt, South Brazil will be white while the
north remains largely black.

When, after the hour of the siesta, the wives and
daughters of the people don garments of respectability
and take the air en famille in the Avenida or in the public
gardens, the general absence of all apparent motive in
their movements also reminds one of the contemplative
East. Men and women alike walk the street like somnam-
bulists; the women's faces generally wear a stolidly
detached expression, emphasised by the conventional
decorum, which in public ignores the existence of the
other sex and feigns not to hear its Rabelaisian quips.
The men either saunter along or stand in groups, patting
each other affectionately on the back and discussing local
politics with much wealth of gesture, complacently block-
ing the footpath. The Avenida after four o'clock is a
place for conversation rather than for locomotion;
Europeans, and other foolish people in a hurry, generally
hire a taxi. These vehicles are good of their kind, nearly
all French machines, and greatly patronised for joy-riding
by Brazilian blades. Each carries two drivers, solitary
labour being uncongenial to the native mind ; the second
man's duty seems to consist in winding up the car, lighting
the driver's cigarette, and keeping his eye on the police.
Observe a Rio policeman directing traffic, and you will
begin to understand something of the mental habits and
political institutions of this people. Before everything
else, your Brazilian bobby is an official. He stands for

52 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

the majesty of bureaucracy, where the English type stands
for the majesty of abstract law and order. From the
hospitable precincts of the Engineers' Club, looking down
on the Avenida, I watched one, a slim young negro, at
his work. There was nothing of the soulless automaton
about him; he represented all the infinite complexity of
the human equation. With his white wand of office in
his hand, artistically extended, he would weigh in his
nimble mind the merits of vehicles approaching from
opposite corners and suddenly decide in favour of one
or the other on grounds best known to himself. This
done, he would sign or even call to the favoured one to
advance. At each change of his baton's semaphoric
direction, he would whistle, and the whistling was prac-
tically incessant. If a pedestrian interrupted the perform-
ance to ask him a question, the entire traffic was stopped,
unless, in his eagerness to give the desired information,
he happened to gesticulate with the wand, in which case
every vehicle proceeded to interpret the signals in its own
favour.

Rio is very proud of its shops, and of their display of
all the latest imported luxuries and vanities. It is proud
of its ornate tessellated pavements and distinctly decora-
tive system of street lighting. Like every other city in
South America, it has acquired the picture-palace disease
in an acute form, and those who cater to the public's taste
in this kind of entertainment appear to have a very low
estimate of its morals and mental condition. The class
of film from which these people derive their ideas of life
beyond their horizon, consists almost entirely of maudlin
sentimentality, crude tomfoolery, crimes passionnels and
burglary invested with a flavour of romance. When one
thinks of what the Cinema might do towards educating
this imaginative, emotional race, and what it is actually

IN SOUTH AMERICA 53

doing to debauch their minds and give them a perversely
distorted conception of the rest of the world, one is
inclined to question the benefits of our civilisation with all
its inventions of clicking machinery. Most of the paternal
governments, run by and for professional politicians, in
the Latin Republics, are eloquent, like our own demagogues,
in the profession of highly moral sentiments. You will
find their exhortations to public virtue circulating, in
lieu of advertisements, on Government matchboxes and
in other unexpected places, but neither the Board of
Education nor any other Government department would
appear to have considered the demoralising results of the
intellectual hogwash in which the citizens are invited to
wallow by the Press and the Picture-palace.

The Cinema, like the Lottery, is, of course, a stimulant,
and human nature demands stimulants of one kind or
another ; but it is the business of intelligent rulers to see
that they are supplied in a form that is not positively
poisonous. As for the Lottery, pace our Anglo-Saxon
ideas on the subject, it seems to me that properly con-
ducted, there is no reason for this institution to be demoral-
ising. On the contrary, it may be made to supply a
perfectly natural craving for harmless excitement at a
moderate cost to the individual, and with benefit to the
State. To buy for five milreis a month's day-dreams
of well-fed ease, or visions of a cosy little fazenda in the
foothills, is surely to get better value in stimulants than
if the money were spent on gin ? Indeed, what could be
wiser, in dealing with a people that insists on dreaming,
than to provide them with roseate visions at a price
that even the humblest peon can well afford by denying
himself other and less innocent luxuries ? But the craving
of the Brazilian race for this kind of stimulant is a thing
which a wise Government would tackle gently ; in Brazil

54 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

it is gratified to excess, and the profits which the State
makes in the process are excessive. The votaries at the
shrine of the fickle goddess are made to pay an exorbitant
price for their dreams, and the dreams are too short.
The bureaucracy here fattens on the Lottery business,
just as in old Russia it lived by exploiting the national
craving for drink; Church and State see to it that the
drawings succeed each other with feverish activity. At
Easter and other high festivals prizes and prices are
doubled ; the streets swarm with ragged urchins and touts,
who press their tickets upon you at every step, raucously
shouting their numbers and inviting you to step up and
win 80,000 contos de reis. Nazareth and Co. and their
ubiquitous kindred do a roaring trade, profiting, after
the manner of their race, by the foolish weakness of the
Gentiles.

For the stranger within its gates, Rio is withal a very
pleasant place; full of the ethereal fragrance of tropic
days and nights, of quivering lights and shadows; a
garden city, set with orange groves and rustling palms,
between blue waters and soft, shimmering hills. Beyond
the raucous voices of the main streets you may wander
and dream in restful by-ways, like those of the sea-bound
towns of northern Portugal, through little plazas slumber-
ing in the sun, past old-world gardens, where children
laugh and play, and shaded patios, whose marble pave-
ments glisten and gleam amidst white and purple flowers
and cool ferns. Even in the heart of the city there are
spots which remind one of the people and days that were
before tramways were invented ; one such is the fountain
in the Largo da Carioca, where the women come to gossip
and draw water. They carry it (generally in kerosene
tins) on their heads, as Latin women should, and they walk
with a curious undulating movement of the hips and a

IN SOUTH AMERICA 55

flexibly rigid back, that remind you at once of the market
women of Lisbon and Vigo.

It is winter in Rio from May to July, but the days can
be unpleasantly hot in the lower levels of the city, when
the north wind comes laden with the heavy breath of the
wilderness of forest and swamp, that lies between us and
the Caribbean. Even when the fresh south breeze blows,
it is quite warm enough for the average Anglo-Saxon;
but the climate is not unhealthy, if one will live sensibly,
now that the yellow fever danger has been removed.
The scourge which of old made the ports of Brazil a by-
word and a terror to British seamen, has been lifted from
the land ; medical science (which, by the way, attains to
a very high standard in South America) has shown that
the fever-bearing mosquito can be prevented from breed-
ing in and about the abodes of man, and the regulations
on the subject of stagnant water are now well observed
as a rule. Here and there a certain amount of laxity,
born of immunity, is noticeable, and sooner or later Rio
will no doubt pay the penalty of easy-going ways in
dealing with Stegomyia Calopus, as they have paid it
at Colon, Bahia and other places ; but the plague can never
again infect whole districts, or close the harbour to trade,
as it used to do before Doctors Nazear and Cruz had
convicted the mosquito of its crimes and had freed the
Caribbean zone from the " pestilence that walked in
darkness and the destruction that wasted at noonday/1

Within two hours' journey by rail from the capital,
snugly ensconced among the hills, lies Petropolis, fashion-
able resort of native legislators en villegiature and of foreign
diplomacy en neglige. A cool and pleasant resting-place
is this monument to the aesthetic business instincts of
Dom Pedro, with its bijou residences and trim streets,
its bamboo hedges that grow to twenty feet in height,

56 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

its gardens ablaze with hydrangeas, its fuchsias and roses.
Just the sort of place to which diplomacy, weary of well-
doing or convinced of futility, loves to escape from the
indignities of office, to dream in peace of old age, covered
with decorations and nourished on a liberal pension. All
over the world la Carriere has found or created ideal spots
of this kind, far from the madding crowd, where tea-
parties and tennis, bridge, badinage and all the other
parlour tricks of polite society may be enjoyed in comfort
and without interruption from the outside world; spots
in which, for three or four months in the year, a harassed
Minister and his faithful staff may dodge most of the
commercial travellers, wandering journalists and inquisi-
tive M.P.s, who consider it their duty and their right
to infest the Chancelleries. Delightful oases all, in a
wilderness of sordid affairs, these retreats of diplomacy
abroad : Pei-taiho for Peking, Chusenji for Tokyo, New-
port for Washington, Alt-Aussee for Vienna, Yalta for
Petrograd, Petropolis for Rio. If you have no business
to discuss, or will refrain from discussing it, nowhere on
earth will you find better entertainment or more hospitable
hosts.

Very interesting, in this land where you see mankind
in the melting-pot of mixed races, are the descendants of
Julius Kohler's 3000 German settlers, imported by Dom
Pedro II in 1845 as examples of industry for his people
and for the making of Petropolis ; curious, how the pure
Teutonic type has persisted in spite of all temptations,
and of comparative isolation ; even where there has been
intermarriage, the German stock seems to predominate
in the offspring, and to be devoid of any instincts of
assimilation. They manage their own affairs, these exiles
from the Fatherland, serving the good old German god
jn the good old German way, educating little Hans and

IN SOUTH AMERICA 57

Gretchen to despise their thriftless fellow-citizens, and to
stand firm for Deutschdum in partibus infidelium. Up
to the time of Brazil's joining the Allies, these grateful
recipients of the New World's hospitality ran their own
German school in Petropolis, as they did at many places
farther south, under the auspices of State-assisted colonisa-
tion companies, affiliated to the German Banks as agents
of welt-politik. Meeting the children as they came out
of school one morning, I asked one sturdy blue-eyed lad
what they taught him there. " Nur Deutsch," said he;
and no doubt the Hymn of Hate was included in the
curriculum. Here, amidst the hills, the war was worlds
away, but the truculent swagger of this Brazil-bred
German boy was a significant reminder of its fundamental
origin.

At the time of my visit, the bourgeoisie of Petropolis
was doing its best to celebrate the Carnival. There was
a " German Ball " for the general public, roulette and
a dance at the Palace Hotel, and other mild functions.
But the rain fell steadily, in a steamy downpour that kept
most people indoors (Brazilians have an almost Oriental
dislike for getting wet — even the navvies at work on the
railway line carry umbrellas) and the festival was shorn
of its customary pomp and ceremonies. I do not know
why it should be so, but rain certainly has a more damp
and depressing effect in the tropics than with us. It
may be because behind it there lurk no heart-warming
visions of cosiness and coal fires; again, it may be due
to the demoralising effect of moisture upon the habita-
tions and handiwork of man in this climate. On a wet
day the houses ooze and drip as if in sympathy with the
dank vegetation around them; the copings of walls and
the plaster statues dear to the Brazilian soul seem to be
melting visibly. In the micjst of Petropolis there stands

58 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

an imposing and melancholy ruin of a great church that
was begun by Dom Pedro's daughter, the masterful
Princess Isabella, some time after her marriage with the
Comte d'Eu in the 'sixties. Churches are of slow and
stately growth in this land, where the donations of the
faithful are apt to depend on the vicissitudes of the coffee
and rubber markets, and this one was not completed when
Dom Pedro, Isabella and all the machinery of monarchy
were shipped back to Portugal in 1889 by the founders
of the Brazilian Republic. The effect of wind and rain
on this relic of the past makes it look like the unsightly
wreckage of a fire ; it would certainly be more seemly if
the clerical powers that be would only let Nature mercifully
cover it up, as she would swiftly do, with trailing, curtains
of green and sweet-scented blossoms. But the Church
militant knows its business, and no doubt this eyesore
points a useful moral for the wayfarer and the scoffer.
Certainly many things were done better in the days of
genial Dom Pedro than they are under the praetorian
methods of the Republic.

Three things linger gratefully in my memories of
Petropolis. One is the vision of a humming-bird, a
flashing jewel of bronze and blue and green, harvesting
honey from a fuchsia tree in the shade of a terraced garden.
The second was the delectable discovery of a certain
cream cheese, made by Swiss and German settlers. Eaten
with qua Java from Pernambuco, 'tis a food for the gods,
a very dream cheese, in itself well worth a month's journey.
The third was a visit to the home of Senhor Carlo Rod-
rigues, formerly editor and owner of Rio's most notable
newspaper, the Jornal de Comercio. A brisk young fellow
of seventy-two, Senhor Rodrigues; after an eventful and
successful career, he has given up journalism and retired
to the shade of bamboos and bananas to write his opus,

IN SOUTH AMERICA 59

a work on the origins of the Christian religion. Indis-
putably one of the makers and master minds of modern
Brazil, the influence which Rodrigues has exercised over
his countrymen has been greater than that of any of his
political contemporaries ; it only shows what conscientious
and consistent journalism may achieve, even in a land
where yellow is the popular colour. The building up of
the Jornal to the height of dignity which it attained was
all his own doing ; he made it a first-class newspaper and
educated his public to appreciate it. He took The Times
of Delane and Buckle as his model, and firmly refused to
conform to twentieth-century ideals of commercial journal-
ism ; it was his boast, for example, that he never allowed
advertisements to appear on the same page as reading-
matter. Discussing the effect of the war upon Brazil
and the financial outlook of the Republic, he was distinctly
pessimistic, holding the view (not uncommon nowadays)
that wise government is not to be expected of the type of
professional politician produced by modern democracy.
His conversation and views on life reminded me forcibly
of those of Juan Franco, the Portuguese dictator, when
in exile at Biarritz, looking down from contemplative
heights of detachment on the noisy arena he had left.
Rodrigues was something of a shock to one's preconceived
conclusions about Brazil and the Brazilians; and Petro-
polis was somehow the last place in the world where one
would expect to find a philosopher.

CHAPTER IV

POLITICS EN PASSANT

IN March 1916 there was a great sending of prominent
citizens from the United States, headed by Mr. Secretary
McAdoo, in connection with the Pan-American Conference
at Buenos Aires. Looking back on the political opinions
expressed by these delegates of the Great Republic in
Rio on that occasion, and later in the Argentine, what a
distance we have travelled ! In those days, if the truth
must be told, the relations between Englishmen and
Americans in most of the leading Republics were not
enthusiastically cordial. At Rio there never had been
much intimacy, partly because of trade rivalry, but more,
I think, because the two communities, generally speaking,
reside in different sections of the city, and because the
climate does not lend itself to the pursuit of those outdoor
sports in which Anglo-Saxons rub off each other's angles.
At the Club Central the race line was drawn clearly enough
for even a stranger to notice it — there were still English
tables and American tables, even after the Germans'
places knew them no more. After the sinking of the
Lusitania there was an unmistakable feeling of restraint,
a discreet avoidance of politics, on both sides. Every
American there, having travelled and understanding some-
thing of world politics, resented the idea of being included
in the " too proud to fight " category; they knew that
sooner or later Old Glory must come in against the Hun,
but they chafed at the delay involved in the President's
process pf educating the nation to abandon its long-

60

MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS 61

cherished ideals of pacifism. The futility of each succes-
sive Presidential Note to Berlin made the American
colonies in South America more and more restive; but
their chagrin was not a matter to be relieved by sympa-
thetic discussion of the situation with such Englishmen
as the war had left there.

At the reception given to Mr. Secretary McAdoo at
the U.S. Embassy in Rio by the American Chamber of
Commerce, one could feel, despite the music and the
flowers and pretty speeches, something of the fierce under-
currents that ran beneath the polished surface of
diplomatic and official ceremony. All the official world
and his wife were there, besides a good many of the poly-
glot peripatetic kind of people, journalists, financiers and
what-not, that seem to crop up wherever there is anything
doing, and, of course, the usual sprinkling of artistic
butterflies and birds of paradise. Such talk as was
meant to be overheard was carefully confined to safe
subjects, such as the weather, the Carnival festivities (twice
postponed by rain) and the Pan-American programme;
but the shadow of the war was upon us, for all our pious
platitudes. It was all very well to talk of benevolent
neutrality : every Anglo-Saxon there (including Mr.
McAdoo), every Latin and nearly every Brazilian (not
including Senhor Lauro Miiller), could not but feel that
the presence of Germans on such an occasion was unseemly,
not to say offensive. It seemed a monstrous thing that
by any shibboleth of convention of civilisation Germans
should be received on a footing of equality and as decent
members of society, while yet the ravaged cities of Belgium
and northern France cried to heaven for vengeance on
their unspeakable barbarism. Every decent man felt
that there must be something rotten in a system of
manners and morals which at a time like this not only

62 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

tolerated their presence, but invited them to drink to
the health of an American envoy in the company of
Englishmen, Belgians and Frenchmen. Setting aside
their record of crime in Europe, every man there knew
that the German Legations in South America were deliber-
ately violating every obligation of neutrality and abusing
the hospitality accorded them, plotting murder on the
high seas and stirring up sedition and strife all over the
continent. Even the average Brazilian had come to
regard the diplomatic exponents of Kultur as calculating
Calibans and pariahs : yet here they were, smirking, and
clicking their heels under the hospitable folds of Old
Glory ! No doubt it had to be, but it made a good many
of us sick; diplomacy, even neutral diplomacy, was for
once quite obviously uncomfortable. As for me, I looked
out across the bay, where the heavy clouds were shedding
themselves in torrential rain, and drank to " the day "
— the day of Germany's expiation. And I offered up a
little special prayer that wisdom may hereafter be vouch-
safed to us to abandon the outworn creed of diplomacy
which entrusts the discussion of international affairs to
well-bred marionettes trained in the arts of polite men-
dacity and chicane; that grace may be given us to for-
sake the shibboleths of subterfuge and flapdoodle, whereby
until now we have sought to maintain the British birth-
right in foreign lands. Surely no self-respecting English
or American diplomat will ever again regard it as part of
his duty to ask an unrepentant German to dinner, at least
in the lifetime of the present generation ?

There was a good deal of talk about the Monroe doctrine
at this reception to Mr. McAdoo, and later, in Buenos
Aires, a good deal about the " European system " and
Pan-American ideals, but somehow all these things seemed
to have lost their vital essence in a world confronted by

IN SOUTH AMERICA 63

the reality of brute force. Senator Root had not then
stated the self-evident truth that old Monroe's doctrine
had hitherto been maintained by an even balance of power
in Europe and by the supremacy of the British fleet, but
the fact was instinctively recognised none the less.
Americans had come to perceive that if all the collective
pledges given by the civilised Powers at the Hague had
been ruthlessly swept aside by the Prussians, there was
no longer any safety for North or South America in a
declaration of continental isolation, which had never even
attained to any recognised force as international law.
Here in Rio there was evidence and to spare that the
famous doctrine was played out, as Admiral Mahan had
foretold it would be ; every one concerned was now fully
alive to the fact that if Germany emerged triumphant
from the war, nothing but ships and guns could prevent
her from invading and annexing territory on the American
continent, and imposing her own trade conditions for the
future. Mr. President Wilson's latest message to Con-
gress, reiterating his faith in " the rights of the American
republics to work out their own destinies without inter-
ference," and his new dream of a League to Enforce Peace,
served as texts for many eloquent orations, but behind
them, more substantial and convincing, were the visions
and voices from ravaged Belgium and Serbia. No
panoply of sounding phrases could henceforth guard any
nation against unprovoked aggression, that much was
clear ; and for those who could read the writings on the
wall at these gatherings of neutrals, it was also clear that
America, for the sake of her ideals and as a matter of self-
preservation, could not afford to stand aloof much longer.
If it had not been for the insidious influences brought to
bear by German political finance on individuals and
groups of politicians in the Argentine, Chile and Brazil,

64 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

and also for the pro-German activities of the Roman
Catholic clergy, the unmistakable sympathies of the masses
in South America for the Allies would have been declared
much sooner than they were ; as it was, the inarticulate
public could only relieve its feelings by processions and
the breaking of German windows.

Amongst those who professed to hope and believe that
the shadow of Monroe might still serve some useful pur-
pose in days to come, it was quite evident, even before
Mr. Roosevelt's olive-branch tour of the South in 1913,
that Brazil, Argentina and Chile were no longer prepared
to accept the doctrine, unless they were admitted by the
United States to full equality in the matter of policing
and protecting the continent. The ABC Republics had
become very restive, long before the war, because of
Washington's assumption of a censorship of morals and
manners over the southern continent. Their dignity as
sovereign States was offended at the idea of any such
protectorate; so much so, indeed, that the activities of
Mr. John Barrett and the international idealism of the
Pan-American Bureau, had become matter for derision
and even for suspicion, in more than one southern capital.
South America expected the United States to act up to
its motto " E pluribus Unum " ; furthermore, the leading
Republics evidently intended to insist on their right to
reject any kind of " Monroismo," or Pan-Americanism,
which might hereafter interfere with their independent
relations with European countries, either in finance or
politics. All these things were in the air, vague yet per-
ceptible, when North and South America came to take
counsel together as neutrals, and when the Northern
Republic was at pains to disavow not only " the vague
and barren responsibilities " of the Monroe doctrine, but
the idea of northern predominance. The shadow of

A TURCO PEDLAR

A HAWKER OF BRUSHES AND
BROOMS, RIO

RIJFFO, THE SHEEP-SHEARER

A PEDLAR OF TIN AND
IRON WARE

[To face p. 64.

IN SOUTH AMERICA 65

coming events was clearly marked, for those who cared
to see : the Monroe doctrine was clearly doomed to ex-
tinction, relegated to the limbo of creeds outworn. In
the struggle of civilisation against Prussiandom, Pan-
Americanism was bound to include Great Britain and
South America, to identify itself with the cause of Italy,
Portugal, England and France. The moral, intellectual
and economic ties that bound the New World to the Old
were not to be weakened, but greatly strengthened, as
the result of the war. Later on, when the infamies of
Luxburg and his hirelings had been fully revealed, and
when Brazil had followed the example of the United
States in declaring war upon the Hun, the sympathies of
the Latin republics were expressed in a manner which
showed how deep and widespread is the affection of this
people for France, the spiritual home of their civilisa-
tion. Even in the Argentine and Chile, where German
money and German threats retained their hold upon
venal and timorous officialdom, it was manifest that
loathing for the Prussian and all his ways had become a
force to be reckoned with, something that will cost Ger-
many dear in the days to come. To have incurred the
hatred and contempt of the young and vigorous nations
of the New World, of those upon whom Germany must
rely for most of the raw materials she needs, this is one
of the triumphs which von Tirpitz and his Junkers failed
to foresee when they decided to violate all the recognised
rules of civilised warfare.

It was no small joy for one wandering Briton to realise
these things, to perceive men and events shaping them-
selves slowly but surely for the final discomfiture of the
common enemy in this gathering of neutrals, cautiously
polite. In the same way, four months later, at the
celebration of the Argentine Republic's centenary at

66 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

Buenos Aires, it was with no small satisfaction that I
found on all sides evidence of the fact that the pro-German
policy of President Irigoyen and his political henchmen
was in no sense representative of the sentiments of the
Argentine people, or even of a majority in Congress.
There is, no doubt, a section of the mercantile community
in the Argentine (just as there is, alas, in England) whose
private interests are bound up with maintenance of their
trade relations with Germany; there are the German
training and traditions of the army; there are a number
of hybrid cosmopolitans and a group of disloyal Irish,
whose wealth gives them a certain influence in politics,
and there is always, as a dominant factor in international
affairs, the jealous rivalry of the Argentine with Brazil
for predominance and leadership in South America, and
a chronic tendency to assert the dignity of the Republic
by snubbing the United States; but all these influences
combined were unable to check the increasing manifesta-
tion of strong anti-German feelings throughout the
country. Every addition to the list of outrages com-
mitted by German submarines and aircraft against non-
combatants served, here as elsewhere, to stimulate the
Hymn of Hate, the universal song without words, which
Kultur has inspired from China to Peru.

There were no German or Austrian flags to be seen in
the streets of Buenos Aires during the Centenary festivi-
ties in July 1916. On the other hand, there were enthu-
siastic demonstrations of popular sympathy with the
cause of the Allies, so much so that many worthy neutrals
(possibly in anticipation of the Black List) were going
out of their way at this time to assure the British and
French Ministers that they had never had any German
connections. The number of our Dutch, Swedish and
Swiss friends was far greater, it seemed, than anybody

IN SOUTH AMERICA 67

would ever have believed before the successes of the
Anglo-French offensive in Flanders. The President, it
is true, supported by the German subsidised section of
the Press, persisted in his policy of benevolent neutrality,
but it was clear that in so doing he was ignoring and irritat-
ing public opinion and sowing poisonous seeds of internal
discord, from which he and his friends will eventually
reap a harvest of severe retribution.

But enough of these things. Let us leave the tangled
undergrowth of politics, let us cease from pursuing the
poisonous track of the Prussian, and get back to the fresh
air of the open road.

CHAPTER V

IN AND ABOUT SAO PAULO

THERE is no subject more interesting in Brazil than that
of the evolution of the race under the combined influences
of climate, immigration and the fusion of many stocks.
Men who have studied these things foresee that before
long the result of the tide of emigration that has flowed
into the southern and temperate States from Europe —
chiefly from Italy — for the last hundred years will
eventually produce two different types of humanity
and civilisation in Brazil, that of the north remaining
dominated by the negro strain. There is no doubt that
in the south the negro is destined to disappear, gradually
eliminated and absorbed by process of intermarriage into
the numerically superior European stock. Temperate
South America may thus escape the racial problem which
confronts the United States in its unassimilated negro
population. Humanly and economically, who shall say
which is likely to produce the better results, the Anglo-
Saxon's instinctive aversion to fusion with the coloured
race, or the catholic cross-breeding, sanctioned by the
creed of the Conquistadores ?

In the city of Sao Paulo, only 300 miles from Rio, one
can see at a glance the effect of a slight difference in
climate on the destinies of a new people whose evolution
has been, and still is, determined by immigration. The
city stands at a height of about 2500 feet above sea-level,
on the fertile tableland of the Sieixa do Mar — high enough

68

MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS 69

to make its climate healthy and congenial for an Italian
or Portuguese peasant labouring with his hands, and
suitable for the rearing of his children. Thanks to that
half-mile of elevation, the whole atmosphere of this, the
most beautiful and prosperous city north of the Parana,
is entirely different from that of Rio, as different as Milan
is from Lisbon, and much in the same way. In the first
place, the negro element is conspicuously less; the
general type of citizen that you see in the busy streets
and on the flowery way of the Avenida Paulista has in it
very little to remind one of the old colonial days, of the
Sao Paulo of the Mamelucos or even of the more recent
Sao Paulo, remembered of many of its inhabitants, when
the great coffee estates were still worked by slave labour.
Both in its architecture and the appearance and manners
of its people, the city gives one the impression of modern
Italy, or Basque France, transplanted, rather than of
predominant Portuguese influence; and as a matter of
fact, more than half its population are of Italian descent.
Between 1830 and 1900, over a million emigrants came
from Europe to the State of Sao Paulo, and of these 700,000
were Italians. Not all were settlers, for here, as in the
Argentine wheat lands, there has always been a migratory
tide of labour, men who cross the Atlantic year after
year to harvest the coffee crop and then return to their
beloved Italy with a full purse; but over 250,000 have
made their home in the city of Sao Paulo since 1890 and,
until the war, the cry was still they come. Six years
after the abolition of slavery, the population of the city
was only 40,000 ; it is now close on half a million. Small
wonder that the negro figures less and less in the Paulista
crowd — for he has had no reinforcements from Africa
since 1860, and in the meanwhile the children born of the
union of negro women with whites or Indians or Mulattoes,

70 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

gradually merging into the half-breed stock, assist in their
turn to eliminate the black strain.

It is a far cry from this most picturesque and prosperous
city, this place of beautiful gardens and well-planned
streets, to the days when the fierce half-bred Mamelucos
made the name of Paulista a byword and a thing of
fear, when their slave-hunting bandeiras drove the Jesuits
from Parand and made life miserable for peaceful men
wherever there was anything worth stealing, from the
borders of Peru and Bolivia to the mission settlements of
Paraguay. And yet, it is not so long ago that this cut-
throat breed of Portuguese and Indian blood preyed on
all productive industry in this region. And when you
think of the change which has been wrought by Italian
immigration, the magic significance and evolutionary
influence of these little hills becomes plainly manifest.
Were it not for them, this land now teeming with fruitful
industry would have remained a black or brown belt,
the haunt of malaria and marauders. Further south, in
Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catharina, prosperity and
progress have similarly come within the great colonies of
German and Polish settlers; but whereas the majority
of Italians have become loyal citizens of the Brazilian
Republic, the Germans have remained contemptuously
aloof, unassimilated aliens, a menace to the State. All
this region is evidently destined to become a teeming
granary, a source of food supply for the Old World, a white
man's country to be populated from overstocked and
underfed Europe. A hundred years hence, it is safe to
say, there will be less left of the negro strain in the
Brazilians of the South than in the Portuguese race itself.
Here you have mankind in the making, a new race in
its childhood, full of promise for the future. Brazil has
many storms to weather, many sins of the fathers to be

IN SOUTH AMERICA 71

expiated by the children, but the wealth of the land is
all undeveloped and the rising generation are rapidly
learning the lesson of good citizenship. Also the war
has taught them to see what opportunities are theirs in
a land whose vast resources have as yet been scarcely
touched by commercial enterprise.

In political ideals, in civic administration and in its
social institutions, the life of Sao Paulo reflects the gradual
fusion of the new and virile Italian Latinity with the
adulterated Latinity of the old Brazilian stock. From
these two sources the city derives its intellectual and
political activities; from them are drawn its lawgivers
and the upholders of its social code of manners and morals.
The swift moods and passions, the fatal instability that
characterise elsewhere in Brazil (as in Portugal) the
mixed race of Iberian, Indian and African descent, with
all the marks left upon it by Moorish domination, are
being steadily tempered and subdued to the intelligent
vivacity and practical common sense of the Italian. These,
being by nature adaptable, conform easily to Brazilian
ways in many things, and marry freely into Brazilian
families. This very adaptability goes far to explain the
influence of their ideas and activities. No doubt that in
time the Italian immigrant loses something of his birth-
right and is in subtle ways influenced by the tutelary
spirits of his new home. One notices, both in politics and
in the social code, recognition of the maxim that in Rome
one must do as the Romans do ; there may be a certain
relaxation of moral fibre (probably climatic), an aggrava-
tion of the Neapolitan tendency to oratorical heroics and
inflated rhetoric, and an exaggeration of Latin idealism
and of faith in the virtue of political dogmas. But the
net result, beyond all doubt, is a very satisfactory balance
of healthy activities, physical and mental.

72 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

The social code, and particularly the unwritten but
drastic laws that govern the relations of the sexes, are
apparently much the same in Sao Paulo as they are in
other cities of South America ; new blood and new ideas
from overseas seem to modify them but little. To the
stranger at first sight there is something strange in the
persistence, in these highly cultured and mentally pro-
gressive communities, of traditions and customs clearly
traceable to the domination of the Moors and the influences
of the Semitic East in the Iberian peninsula; something
almost mediaeval in the passive semi-oriental attitude
of women and the undisguised prevalence of irregular
polygamy amongst men. But gradually one comes to
perceive that a system which seems monstrous in temperate
Argentina and Uruguay may be defensible in subtropical
Brazil; that the code, which thus confines respectable
women within narrow limits of duty and decorum, has
grown out and because of the conditions of life in a land
where fierce hot-blooded passions lie very close to the
surface and where for centuries slavery and subject races
facilitated the polygamous instinct in man. It is a code,
like most others of its kind, designed to protect the family
as the basis of ordered society and woman against the
dangers prevailing in that society. Its laws are rigidly
enforced by public opinion, which is partly an inheritance
from the teaching of the Jesuits, but even more the result
of the instinctive conservatism and caution of the women
themselves. If they appear to hug their chains, it is
evidently because they realise that freedom of social
intercourse with the average Brazilian, in his present
state of evolution, would mean chaos. As things are, the
relations of Brazilian women of the educated classes with
men are practically confined to their own family circle.
Every girl of good family is educated to the idea that her

IN SOUTH AMERICA 73

future life belongs entirely to her husband and children.
For the rest, she is expected to practise prudent circum-
spection in following the example of Caesar's wife, lest the
heathen, quick of ear and glib of tongue, find cause to
blaspheme. As the French wife of a wealthy Brazilian
tersely put it : " II faut beaucoup de tenue." Under such
conditions, human intercourse is naturally restricted and
displays but little intellectual activity and few social
amenities. Social functions, public and private, exist
chiefly under the direction and for the purposes of mothers
with marriageable daughters ; and their attitude towards
the male sex is one of artful encouragement tempered
with unsleeping vigilance. Of this matter, and of the
many curious results of the segregation of the sexes in
South America, I purpose to say more hereafter. In Sao
Paulo, one of its consequences is conspicuous in the
frankly bored attitude of the younger men, especially
those of the wealthier class, who have travelled in Europe.
For them, outside the family circle, there are but few
social distractions, and the only women they have any
chance of meeting unchaperoned are the demi-mondaines
of the " Etoile de Montmartre," of the Parisian cabarets
and pensions d' artistes — observe the euphemism — which
flourish exceedingly in all these parts. For the young
blood there is no respectable half-way house between the
wilderness of wild oats and the enclosed garden of matri-
mony, no sports or public amusements in which young
men and women can meet on frank terms of friendship.
There are dances, of course, and bazaars and the theatre,
but at all of these the unmarried girl is protected by
barbed wires of vigilance from the wolves in sheep's
clothing. At a ball there are no cosy corners, no facilities
for flirtation; the young woman must treat her partner
with austere ceremony and after every dance go straight-

74 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

way back to mother. Married women should not dance —
ce n'est pas bien vu — nor may they with impunity be seen
talking to a male acquaintance in the street or driving by
themselves in an open carriage. The virtue of a married
woman is a matter so closely touching the honour of her
lord, according to the hidalgo tradition, that she must
needs walk circumspectly all the days of her life if she
would avoid poisonous tongues of scandal. But a married
man may, and does, keep a mistress openly, and lose
little or nothing in public esteem. He may not flaunt his
liaisons quite so unblushingly in Sao Paulo as in Rio, but
Senhora Grundy knows all about his peccadilloes and
calmly winks the other eye. There are Brazilians of the
old school, who preserve dignified traditions of sincerity
and loyalty in the married state, but with the nouvelle
couche, man's attitude towards woman is a mixture of
proprietary rights and polygamous activities. Socially
and sexually he passes through three phases : a spring-
time of riotous dalliance with the daughter of the horse-
leech ; a sober summer of matrimony and paternity ; and
an autumn of wild oats brought under careful cultivation.
Physically, the native-born Brazilian, like other descend-
ants of the Spaniards and Guarany Indians further
south, is generally picturesque and graceful; mentally,
he is romantic, impulsive and undisciplined ; add to these
qualities a strong philoprogenitive instinct and luxurious
proclivities, and you begin to realise why the social code
is what it is.

Things being as they are, your young Brazilian blade,
his appetite for romantic adventures frequently stimulated
by yellow-back novels, is apt to denounce the rigid restric-
tions of the code which encompasses him, and to sigh
loudly for the superior civilisation of New York, London
and Paris. The vision is ever before his eyes of lands in

IN SOUTH AMERICA 75

which a man may take a young woman for a walk or a
meal without being expected to marry her next day;
where it is lawful for one, whether contemplating matri-
mony or not, to talk to the object of his affections without
the assistance of third parties. He fails to make allowance
for the facts which compel Brazilian mothers to be so
careful, and is apt to wax very indignant on this subject.
Pending the conversion of those who make and maintain
the existing social code, however, he consoles himself tant
bien que mal. In piping times of peace, for those who can
afford it, there is always the prospect of a trip to Europe,
and when Mahomed cannot go to the mountain, fragments
of the mountain detach themselves, for purposes of profit,
and migrate cheerfully to South America ; opera troupes,
light comedy companies and variety artistes, not to
mention petites mattresses and grandes cocottes of migratory
instincts. And behind these, less conspicuous but ubi-
quitous, is the White Slave traffic, which grows with
the wealth of these South American communities. The
rigorous seclusion of women, alluring, provocative but
inaccessible, in communities where polygamous instincts
are undeniably strong, has got to be paid for, in one way
or another. The ancient and permanent social code of
the Orient has solved the problem by frank acceptance of
youthful marriage and polygamy as recognised institutions,
based on the patriarchal family system; by so doing, it
has escaped the network of intrigue and artificial con-
ventions, the evils of prostitution and illicit relations,
which the European system has incurred. On the other
hand, it pays the penalty for its social code in a birth-rate
that vastly exceeds all possible means of subsistence, and
in a struggle for survival far more severe than anything
known in other parts of the world. A choice of evils, you
may say, arising like so many others out of the eternal

76 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

conflict of human nature with its material environment
and moral aspirations, only to be solved by long processes
of education and by the elevation of the masses. No
doubt; and possibly in course of time even the New
World may come to follow the road to the millennium of
morality, as laid down by Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Sidney
Webb and women legislators in England and the United
States. But judging by the actual state of public and
private opinion prevailing on the subject throughout
Latin America, the emancipation of woman in that region
at all events lies in the dim and very distant future.

Of its public institutions, education and administration,
Sao Paulo has every reason to be proud. The Avenida
Paulista, with its magnificent gardens adorning the
palatial homes of coffee kings, bureaucrats and captains
of industry, is an object-lesson in the art of making a city
beautiful. The Theatre Municipal is a stately dignified
building, besides being an active centre of social and civic
life. (It contains even a public bar, where good music
is performed, which from midnight till 1.30 a.m. attracts
a mixed, unconventional, but very orderly crowd of
viveurs and demi-mondaines.) The streets, especially in
the fashionable suburbs, are nobly planned, and lined
with goodly trees. Particularly pleasing and effective
is the general scheme of metal work, designed and made
in the local technical schools and workshops, for the
decoration of lamps, doors, railings and balconies; light,
graceful work pleasantly reminiscent of Italy and Spain,
yet with a distinctive note of its own. The general
standard of technical and professional knowledge is high,
as indeed it is in other centres of learning throughout
South America, for the State believes in the benefits of
education and supplies it practically free (50 milreis a year
is the fee for a college student — say £2 ios.). It costs

A PICNIC IN THE WOODS

[To face p. 76.

IN SOUTH AMERICA 77

the community something considerable for every doctor,
engineer and lawyer that it turns out, but except perhaps
in the case of lawyers (addicted here as elsewhere to
politics) the expenditure seems to be justified by results.
The medical profession, in particular, has attained a
remarkably high pitch of progressive efficiency; the
public health of Sao Paulo is distinctly satisfactory.

A very interesting example and achievement of medical
science at Sao Paulo is the Institute at Butantan, where
since 1901 serum has been made for protection against
snake-bite, bubonic plague and other calamitous diseases.
Snakes, poisonous and harmless, are the chief business of
this remarkable establishment, under the direction of Dr.
Vital Brazil, a man whose name is blessed wherever rattle-
snakes, adders and vipers lie in wait for bare-legged man.
The Institute makes three kinds of snake serum, for use
respectively against the bites of Crotalus terrificus, the
nine species of Lachesis, and venomous species in general;
it keeps for the purpose a model snake-farm, where
hundreds of these deadly beasts, collected from all over
the country, lie basking in their own snug place in the sun,
or bathing in the moat — a spot which, from a distance,
looks uncommonly like one of the horseshoe graveyards
of Southern China, with its trees, tunnel and circular wall
of concrete. Here the snakes, some 5000 or 6000 every
year, are gently but firmly dealt with, compelled to
discharge the contents of their poison pouches into re-
ceptacles not of their own choosing. To see Dr. Vital and
his men handling them is to appreciate the contempt
that familiarity breeds. Their poison, on its way to
becoming serum, passes a certain time in the veins of
horses (who seem to thrive on it) and is eventually dis-
tributed all over the continent. On coffee or sugar-cane
plantations, in swampy regions where men labour with

78 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

their hands, the efficacy of this antidote to bites that were
formerly fatal, has become so generally appreciated that
no major-domo is without his tubes of serum; by a law of
the State, it is on sale at every chemist's and available
at all hospitals and health offices. The need for a remedy
of some sort was urgent, for the Brazilian peon, like his
brother of Mexico, prefers the risks of snake-bite to the
wearing of boots. The most frequent cause of fatalities
is the small, comparatively inconspicuous and swift-
striking " jararaca " (Lachesis lanceolatus) ; 60 per cent,
of the casualties are bitten on the foot and 22 per
cent, on the hand. Boots, therefore, would save many
a life, but no doubt a tube of serum comes cheaper,
and your Brazilian forest worker is enough of a fatalist
to say, better swift Death, if it must come, than the
intolerable burden of putting on and taking off one's boots
every day.

Dr. Vital's ideas in the matter of snakes are not confined
to providing a remedy against their bites. He has a
separate enclosure at the Institute in which he collects,
breeds and observes all manner of non-poisonous serpents,
with a particularly watchful eye for those whose tastes
lead them to slay and devour their poisonous cousins. Of
these there are several lively species, and the Institute
makes it a branch of its business to educate fazendeiros to
distinguish them, so that their beneficent appetites may
be encouraged. Judging by the general appearance of
these brutes, however, I should say that the average farm
hand will require to be very firmly based in his knowledge
and faith before he desists from slaying them, especially
as Nature has compensated them for their lack of poison
by giving them horrid vicious tempers, sinister looks, and
a nasty way of advancing upon one open-mouthed, with
every appearance of deadly intent. On the other hand,

IN SOUTH AMERICA 79

the poisonous ones, secure, I suppose, in their sense of
power, are sluggishly disposed, and allow themselves to be
handled almost placidly. I saw one small and com-
paratively harmless-looking Lachesis allow itself to be
swallowed, almost amicably and without protest, by a very
horrid striped monster of the innocuous kind, which had
previously made a vicious attack on the attendant's boot.
But it is not the exclusive property of the serpent tribe
to assume offensive manners for lack of other effective
argument.

Railway travelling is much the same all over Brazil, but
the lines connecting Sao Paulo with the rest of the country,
and especially the fifty-mile road that runs to the port of
Santos, are better laid and equipped than the majority.
The Santos line is, indeed, a little wonder in its way; it
is not often nowadays that a railway has to spend money
freely on ultra-provident work of a decorative kind, so as
to keep its earnings within limits that shall not provoke
official criticism or cupidity. The Santos line has a
monopoly of very lucrative traffic, connecting the State
capital and the richest coffee country in the world with its
port of shipment ; it is therefore wise to guard it against
wash-outs and other calamities; an elaborate system of
surface drainage in concrete intersects every steep incline
on the hillside clearings, right up to the edge of the forest,
and the Company's rolling stock is of the very brightest
and best. On the Sao Paulo branch of the " Central do
Brazil " (the line that runs to Rio) there is less decorative
activity, but the service is good enough and the fares
reasonable. A first-class ticket for the 309 miles journey
costs 32 milreis ; in the Pullman it is 50 (say £2 IDS.) ; the
trip takes twelve hours, the going is fairly comfortable,
and they serve an excellent lunch en route. The loco-
motives and observation cars are North American.

80 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

Whenever you speak of the United States in connection
with Brazilian Railways, or indeed whenever you speak
of any Brazilian enterprises in which foreign capital is
concerned, sooner or later some one says "Farquhar";
and from that moment the conversation leaves the domain
of commonplace undertakings and soars into the region of
Napoleonic, not to say Homeric, speculation. The trail
of Farquhar finance lies broad across the South American
continent, a thing of gorgeous colours and splendid visions.
Like the dolphin of the classics, mille trahit moriens adverse
sole colores ; compared with its rainbow hues, ordinary
everyday business seems for ever flat, stale and unprofit-
able. For reasons already explained, I do not profess in
this book to discuss matters financial and commercial :
if I speak now of Mr. Farquhar, it is because of his peculiar
quality as a man, because the ideas which radiated from
him in such profusion, whether financially profitable or
not, have left their mark upon the continent. Farquhar's
follies, they call them sometimes — for example, that
Palace in the wilderness, the hotel and gambling casino
at Guaruja — but the impression that one forms of his
meteoric career, even when other company promoters and
financiers discuss it, suggests something of the conquistador
quality, something of the superman capacity for seeing
and seizing opportunities which, with a little luck, makes
a Cecil Rhodes or a Pierpoint Morgan. The difference
between a great man and a little man is only a difference
of ideas ; between a successful man and a failure it is often
only a matter of luck in finding the right underlings to
carry out ideas. Farquhar in the end seems to have
fallen a victim to his hobby for collecting railways; as
with others who have indulged in this hobby, it came to
such a pitch with him that if he found a little fatherless
line, lost stolen or astray in the wilderness, he would

IN SOUTH AMERICA 81

forget everything else, quebracho and the cattle on a
thousand hills, to follow after it. In the inception of
brilliant ideas and in their swift pursuit, he seems to have
had many of the qualities which go to the making of
pushful politicians, of the Northcliffe-Churchill type, but
he lacked continuity of method and mastery of detail,
things which may not matter so much in politics, but are
still profitable in business.

Another impression that one gets from casual and
disinterested observation of railways and railway finance
in Brazil — and indeed throughout the leading Republics —
is that, in the long run, the public of Great Britain is
likely to do better by investing its surplus cash in home
industries, or even by playing domestic ducks-and-drakes
with it, than by lending it to South America to build
railways. I am aware that this is not the idea which the
intelligent public has been led to hold on the subject by
those whose profitable business it is to float foreign loans ;
but observation on the spot tends to emphasise the fact
that the attitude of any State (naming no names), like
that of the people behind it, is not* quite the same towards
capital when it wants to borrow, as it becomes when it has
borrowed and has to pay the interest. All the world over,
the mauvais quart d'heure of borrowing States is becoming
more and more frequently accompanied by manifestations
of the modern syndicalist or Bolshevist's creed, which
denounces the capitalist as a blood-sucking iniquity, and
requests the Government to tax him out of the country,
if not out of existence. No wise Government, no matter
how republican, will ever quarrel outright with the money
market ; it will continue rather to encourage competition
among lenders, and to borrow upon terms which will
enable it to placate the proletariat by the provision of
pickings and perquisites for place-seekers. Brazil is by

82 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

no means the only country in which railways are made to
serve ends other than those of transportation, in which
they become prolific milch cows for the benefit of politi-
cians and pluralists ; but no one who studies the way in
which they are worked here can fail to perceive that the
local individual with a " pull " is likely to get considerably
more profit out of them than the bondholder overseas.
Things have improved, no doubt, since the days of Senhor
Frontain, when more than one milch cow showed signs of
impending paralysis, but on many lines the system of
administration seems to be framed on the modern trade-
union principle of setting three men to do one man's job.
In a trip between the little wayside town of Apparecida
and Sao Paulo, on a so-called " express," which stopped
at every station, a Brazilian friend and I had a first-class
carriage to ourselves so far as passengers were concerned ;
but there was no lack of company, inasmuch as four
employes of the Company shared it with us all the way,
smoking, eating, sleeping and chatting with much cheerful
sociability. One was the chef de train, who slept with his
feet on the cushions, a thing which the conductor had
politely requested us not to do. Another was in charge
of the mails, the third looked after baggage, and the
fourth punched tickets, when there were any. A fifth
individual, who tapped the coach wheels when so disposed,
looked in for a smoke at intervals. Their talk was chiefly
of politics and their professional prospects, the two subjects
being evidently interdependent. At every station, the
number of gentlemen in uniform was on the same lavish
scale; their pay is generous and they become entitled to
pensions, I believe, after two years' service, should they
break down under the strain of their exertions. Assuredly
democracy is a goodly spreading tree and its fruits are
rare and refreshing, as has been finely said by one who

IN SOUTH AMERICA 83

has freely watered its roots ; but concern for the public
purse is not one of them. They tell me that there are
eighteen field-marshals, over a hundred generals, and
10,000 privates in the Brazilian Army. For " privates "
read " passengers," and you get a fairly correct idea of
the Brazilian Railway administration.

On the way from Rio to Sao Paulo, passing through
the southern strip of Minas Geraes, you notice cattle-
bearing tracts of grass country, scattered amidst the coffee
plantations and the rice fields ; in the fazendas of the Sao
Paulo plateau the cattle industry is rapidly growing, as
the result of the war and of the interest displayed in its
possibilities by the great Chicago packing firms. Even
had there been no war to stimulate the demand, it is
certain that the Brazilian herds must soon have attracted
the attention of Swift, Armour and other canning fellows,
for a vast amount of good beef had long been going to
waste on the primitive ranches of the southern plains,
lacking only freezing plant at suitable spots to convert
it into food for Europe and wealth for Brazil. Most of
the new American meat enterprise is centred in Rio
Grande do Sul, but frigorificos have already been started
in Sao Paulo, and there are big things doing in the State
of Parana. South of that State, where the night frost
region begins, the conditions for cattle ranching are in
many respects the same as those of Paraguay and Uruguay,
over the border, but north of Parana there are no frosts
to kill the rich " fattening grass " (caipim gordura) ; so that
the pasture value of the northern States, and especially of
Matto Grosso, would seem to be higher than that of the
south, and the future of the great ranching companies
only a matter of transport and frigorificos. An amateur,
looking at the surface of things, wonders why Chicago
did not stretch out its tentacles over these Brazilian herds

84 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

long ago. Doubtless the explanation is, that it is only
within the last ten years that the United States has
become an importer, as well as an exporter of meat;
that, like England and for the same reasons, its vast
warrens of industrial workers will in future have to be
supplied with food by countries that have a surplus to
dispose of. Be this as it may, the war has shown Brazil
a way out of the financial morass into which the Govern-
ment was plunged by the collapse of its main source of
revenue, the duty on rubber, and it looks as if the Republic
might do great things for herself, and for us of hungry
Europe, in the beef line. Mr. Murdo Mackenzie thinks
so, at all events, and as he is paid £10,000 a year to
know all about cattle, his opinion is entitled to. respect.
Mr. Mackenzie is a braw Scot from Texas, with a kind
face, an imperturbable calm of body and mind, and a firm
faith in the future of Brazil in general and Sao Paulo
in particular. The Brazil Land, Cattle and Packing
Company, which he represents, owns a matter of five
million acres of land in Brazil and another trifle of four
millions or so in Bolivia — a good deal more land, in fact,
than they could stock, and some of it wild and unworkable
under present conditions. The American ranchmen who
are teaching the Brazilians up-to-date cattle methods,
believe in crossing the native stock of the country, the
gado crioulo, with pure-bred Herefords or Shorthorns, in
order to produce the high-class meat that the packers
want. The results obtained at the experiment fazendas
of Morongaba in Parana and at Senhor Prado's model
farm, " San Martino," in Sao Paulo, have certainly
justified the introduction of foreign-blooded stock; never-
theless, many Brazilians hold that the thoroughbred
native caracu is likely to pay better, because of its
greater immunity from garapata and other insect pests,

IN SOUTH AMERICA 85

to which the unacclimatised imported beasts often
succumb.

The native types of cattle, franquerio, curralleiro and
caracu, are the descendants of animals imported in
colonial days from Portugal, freely crossed since then with
Zebu stock from India. Their average quality is generally
higher than was that cf Argentine native cattle twenty
years ago ; it remains, therefore, to be proved that what
the breeder may gain in quality of meat from crossing
with European thoroughbreds, may not be counter-
balanced by loss of stamina. The climate and insect
pests of Brazil are factors in the problem not necessarily
to be solved by applying the experience of Texas or
Argentina. It remains also to be seen whether the packing
factories' buying price for highly bred cattle will be so
much higher, in the long run, than what they pay for
caracu or other native stock, that it will encourage
Brazilian ranchmen to devote time and money to ex-
tensive breeding experiments, and to the scientific culture
of fattening pasturage.

Round about Sao Paulo, where most fazendas have until
now been chiefly concerned with dairy farming, very good
cattle have been obtained by crossing with Dutch, Flemish
and Jersey strains. ''But the thoroughbred, hornless and
soft-horn caracu stock is still in favour with many breeders.
These animals are good milkers, hardy and of good weight.
At Apparecida do Norte, four and a half hours by railway
from Sao Paulo on the Rio line, there is a pasteurised
Milk Factory, which collects milk from the fazendas of
the district for the supply of the city. At the invitation
of their hospitable owners, I spent some days visiting
two typical ranches of this locality, a beautiful country
of fat pasture land and semi-tropical timber, where the
bamboo, used for boundary hedges, grows to a height of

86 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

twenty feet, impenetrably close, very useful and
ornamental.

One of these, the fazenda San Raphael, lies midway
between Apparecida and Guaratingueta, another station
on the Central Railway. These two small towns are
united by a tram line, which strikes a stranger as curiously
superfluous when first he contemplates the deliberate, not
to say languid, movements of their inhabitants. Its
explanation lies in the fact that Apparecida is a place of
pilgrimage, the shrine of a certain miraculous statue to
which, on holy days, the faithful come from far and near
to pray. The number of the devout is not what it was
under the Empire, but the festivals of the Church and the
joys of a bustling pilgrimage still preserve their attractions
in these rural communities where, outside of them, very
little happens. One is reminded that the Church is no
longer of the State and that its revenues and bequests
have sadly diminished under the Republic, by the un-
finished shell of a great building at Apparecida that was
to have been a convent. The Government, they say,
offered to take it over for use as a secular school, but the
Bishop refused to traffic with the mammon of unrighteous-
ness, so that, failing a spiritual revival of the kind which
subscribes cash, the place is likely to remain a, melancholy
monument to the growth of materialism. But it is not
only the would-be convent that remains void and silent
in Apparecida. There are two factories in the town, one
for making matches, the other for textile spinning, both
ingloriously idle, behind closed doors; but not, it would
seem, without profit to their far-seeing founders, nor
without significance as to the bearing of politics on
industrial enterprises, even in these apparently unsophisti-
cated regions. If popular report speaks truly, both these
factories receive compensation for remaining closed, from

IN SOUTH AMERICA 87

Trusts which prefer a small output and high prices to cut-
throat competition and a free market. The match factory
started under the auspicious title of " O Progresso " ; its
owner being a brother of the President of the State of Sao
Paulo, who gave the Company its concession. From the
public point of view, a little healthy competition applied
to the match trade monopoly might reasonably come
under the heading of progress, but for the bureaucrat such
an innovation would sap one of the main supports of
profitable statecraft. All the same, one would like to
know the inner history of the founding of this matchless
factory.

The roads were impassable in and about Apparecida, as
the result of heavy rains, so we reached the fazenda San
Raphael by way of Guaratingueta, where the surveyor of
highways enjoys either ampler revenues or better luck.
Judging by outward appearances, the local elders and
guardians of this borough are entitled to credit for well-
kept roads and other manifestations of civic virtue,
including an excellent school. But the Cinema was there,
as it seems to be everywhere, effectively frustrating all
purposes of decent education ; the walls of the town were
placarded with its invitation to the citizens to revel in a
film entitled " O Rapto do Venus." And even here the
affairs of men were feeling the far-flung effects of the
war. A harness-maker complained that he could no longer
get leather, because certain French agents had been buying
up all the local hides at absurd prices. Could not the
distinguished Senhors assist him to secure a contract to
supply the Allies with saddles and collars of superior
quality? He could then afford to compete for hides.
Even this unsophisticated trader had mastered the
fundamental principle of war finance.

Land is cheap, amongst these foothills of Sao Paulo, a,s

88 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

compared with Argentine and Uruguay prices, and likely
to remain so, as long as conditions in Europe continue
to check the flow of emigration. The price of cattle is
also considerably lower than in the south, though rising
as the local frigorifico demand expands. Newly arrived
Americans believe that there is a future for sheep and pig
farming in the hill country round about and a good opening
for capital with brains behind it, throughout all this
district. Until now, however, sheep farming has not been
a success. A few Englishmen have tried it, but given it
up; the flocks did not thrive on the hill grass, and the
casualties caused by jaguars and by various insect plagues
were too heavy. But many experts maintain that, with
scientific culture of pasture by burning, ploughing and
sowing good grass, and with selected stock in well-fenced
potreros, the business will yet be made to pay. To the
inexperienced gringo, the climate of these hills seems
admirably suited to sheep, but 'tis a beast of crotchety
digestion, and nicely capricious in the matter of grass.

In 1916 the effect of the war was clearly manifest in
the increasing cost of living, and particularly in the price
of imported luxuries, throughout Brazil; amongst the
poorer class of farm labourers, the pre-war scale of wages
was no longer sufficient to provide food and clothing. An
ordinary fazenda labourer in Sao Paulo, earning thirty
milreis a month, was faced with problems similar to those
which perplexed the working classes in England, but
having no means for venting his grievances, he suffered
the hard lot of the inarticulate. In the city of Sao Paulo
the price of butter was four and a half milreis a kilo
(roughly two shillings a pound), milk was sixpence a litre,
eggs two shillings a dozen, rice fourpence and potatoes two-
pence a pound. Coal was at prohibitive prices and fire-
wood extremely dear. Beef was about fourperice a pound,

IN SOUTH AMERICA 89

mutton sevenpence halfpenny and pork sixpence. As
the lowest coin in common circulation is 100 reis (even
now more than a penny), high prices mean serious hardship
for workers, whose wages are often less than two shillings
a day. For the wealthier classes, the war only meant a
curtailment of luxuries; fewer and dearer Paris clothes,
no new motor-cars, a serious shortage of coal, and less
petrol. The cost of champagne, generally a fair test of
the scale of prices in polite society, was twenty-five
milreis at the " Rotisserie Sportsman," the fashionable
restaurant of Sao Paulo, and thirty milreis at the exotic
Monte Carlo plaisance of Guaruja.

To go down from the Sao Paulo tableland to Santos by
the sea is to pass from a temperate climate to the tropics ;
in 1916 it also meant passing from the isolated detachment
of the interior, to sights and sounds of the sea, that brought
one back to consciousness of the war. There was still a
good deal of German activity and influence at work at
Santos in the spring of 1916. Up to that time, thanks to
the curious disinclination of Downing Street to put its
foot down firmly on enemy trading, German goods still
continued to be imported in neutral, and even in British,
ships, to the scandal of all decent men and the profit of
inveterate free-traders. The Santos Trawler Company
(originally a fishing enterprise in British hands, which
passed under German control shortly before the war, and
was eventually black-listed) was generally suspected of
having rendered valuable services and information to
German warships. The machinery that carries the never-
ceasing stream of coffee-bags along the docks and to the
ship-loading feeders at the berths was conspicuously
German ; the guttural accents of the Fatherland offended
one's ears at the " Sportsman " restaurant and on the
balconies of the big hotel on the beach. Such news of

90 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

the war as was to be found in the local papers was carefully
attuned to the exigencies of a prudent neutrality. It
is pleasant to think that in Brazil, at all events, the ex-
ponents of piratical Kultur have since then become alien
enemies, and that it was their privilege to learn what
the civilised world really thinks of Germany, some time
before that knowledge was vouchsafed to the Fatherland.

Santos has a beautiful river approach, guarded by a
venerable Portuguese fort, which time has mellowed to
graceful conformity with its peacefully slumbering en-
vironment. The harbour, too, is beautiful, in its setting
of luxuriant tropical vegetation, and the town, behind
the bustling wharves, conveys an impression of unbroken
siestas and serenity. There are trumpet-tongued news-
vendors and rattling tramcars, as usual, in the main
streets, but beyond these voices there is the peace of a
people that has eaten of the lotus, which has learned the
futility of haste, and the virtue of idleness unashamed.
The houses are of the unpretentious Portuguese type,
with stucco work and plaster, generally painted in bright
colours; most of the shops have no windows, only wide
doors that open inwards. The town, that was once a
plague spot, is well drained and healthy enough; its
mosquitoes are many and voracious, but their bite no
longer means yellow fever. In the bathing season, the
long curving beach, dotted with the villas of domesticity,
is invaded by the high life of Sao Paulo, with its Paris
fashions and limousines.

But for the everyday traveller, whether on pleasure or
business bent, the charms of Santos are apt to pall.
Whether you come from the northern hills or the southern
seas, the place feels stuffy, its air heavy with the breath of
decaying vegetation, suggestive of malaria, which clings
to river banks in the tropics, Therefore, if you have a

IN SOUTH AMERICA 91

day or two to pass here, waiting for a steamer, take the
barca and cross the river to the spot on the opposite
shore, whence a railway runs to Guam] a and its Palace of
Enchantment by the sea. It is a toy railway, on which
a locomotive of the type of Stephenson's " Rocket" pulls
two cars on a raised trail through the densest of jungly
swamp, with here and there a clearing of bananas and
sugar-cane, until suddenly and without warning it emerges
upon Trouville transplanted. There is something fan-
tastically theatrical, almost impudent, in the spectacle of
the huge hotel, all brilliantly lighted, as it comes upon
you at dusk out of the heart of the dismal swamp, some-
thing aggressively incongruous in its paraphernalia of
bathing machines, chalets, band-stands, casino and trim
flower-beds. It is as if you met a ballet dancer in the
depth of the desert. Magnificent, no doubt, but not war ;
you feel instinctively that this Temple of Fortune is
nought but the baseless fabric of a dream, a fool's paradise,
which must speedily be dissolved and engulfed between
the jungle and the sea, and leave no trace behind. Already
its wood and metal work bear testimony to the insidious
havoc of the moist tropic air. Meanwhile, it is a very
pleasant place in which to dream, lulled by the restful
murmur of the rolling surf. The Casino season, during
which the coffee kings and their women-folk come here
to hold high revel at the sign of the spinning wheel, lasts
only some six or seven weeks, and in that time the tables
are expected to make profit enough to pay for the year's
upkeep of the establishment and to give dividends to the
enterprising capitalists who built it. Before the war,
when South American society could travel in its wonted
comfort and security, Guam j a in the season attracted a
fashionable crowd of plungers and birds of Paradise,
from Rio, Montevideo and Buenos Aires, but with the

92 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

war its glory and its profits departed, like those of Monte
Carlo. As I saw it, in the dull season, the gambling (a
little mild roulette at the Petit Casino) attracted only a
handful of habitues from Santos ; a few transient guests,
mostly Englishmen, kept the torpid remnants of the
hotel staff from succumbing to sleeping sickness. Seen
thus, in the restful silence of drowsy noontides, and at
night, when the fireflies danced to the music of the sea
breeze in the palms, the exotic quality of the place and its
garish ostentation were blissfully forgotten. Under the
silver glimpses of the moon, its beauty became a thing
ethereal, as of Arcady, the hotel an Elysian palace of
dreams ; and in the insidious charm of this fairy-tale oasis
there lurked a special quality of ghostliness, an element
of fearful joy, because of that untrodden jungle waste,
that wilderness of dismal swamp and noisome creeping
things, that lay so darkly threatening and so close.

CHAPTER VI

BUENOS AIRES

HERE and there, in the older narrower streets of its
congested centre, Buenos Aires suggests fleeting memories
of Colonial Spain; memories, too, of the days when the
Paris of the New World was still a " camp " town, when
the city fathers reckoned that a street was wide enough
if a man could hitch his horse to the sidewalk without
tear of its being hit by a passing carocoche.1 Not so
very remote, as time goes, those days, though the present
generation with its busy wharves, trains and tramways,
its broad boulevards, opulent suburbs, and cosmopolitan
society, has almost forgotten them. It is only since 1880
that the Argentine hinterland has been open to the
" starvelings of the Old World," as Hudson has it, to
the tide of Italian, German and Polish peasant immigrants
who have ploughed their prosperous way across the
great pampean plains, from the Atlantic to the Andes.
Until 1879, when the Government of the Republic ordered
General Rosa to enlarge the boundaries and justify the
purposes of civilisation, by getting rid of the aborigines,
the white man's country that lay behind Buenos Aires,
Rosario, Concordia and other outposts of colonial days
was but a thinly settled strip of territory conquered from

1 Just as the English founders of the Model Settlement at
Shanghai in the 'fifties thought that its streets were wide enough
when there was room for two tea -carrying coolies to pass each
other.

93

94 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

the Indians. The rest was still their happy hunting-
grounds.

In its broader aspects, the capital of to-day is less
Spanish, even less Latin, than the cities of the interior.
The silent years that lie between the coming of the Con-
quistadores of the fifteenth century and the polyglot
invasion of the twentieth, have left their mark upon the
life of the " camp " towns all over the country, not easily
to be effaced by the flowing tide of new men and new
ways. But Buenos Aires is become essentially cos-
mopolitan, after the manner of New York, a place of
feverish commerce, where (except in the conservative
world of officialdom) the Spaniards' good old manana
philosophy has gone down before the assaults of German
clerks, cash registers, telephones and other pernicious
inventions of Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic hustling. There
is scarcely time in the business world of Buenos Aires
for a decent siesta, no leisure for mate drinking, no dis-
cussing the details of the latest scandal or the political
situation as preliminaries to a leisurely bargain. Over
the way, across the river, in Montevideo, where the voice
of the seventeenth century still echoes faintly in the ears
of men and quite distinctly in the hearts of women, there
may be time for such amenities; but Buenos Aires,
unmistakably destined to become the greatest emporium
of a hungry world's food buyers and sellers, is the gather-
ing place of those for whom time is money, a centre of
frenzied finance, a place of bustling business and cos-
mopolitan activity.

In its cosmopolitanism, and in the outward and visible
signs of its gigantic commerce, the city resembles New
York, but it possesses its own distinctive qualities of
spaciousness, of free-handed affluence; an exuberant
atmosphere suggestive of the land flowing with milk

IN SOUTH AMERICA 95

and honey, of the superabundance of flocks and herds,
of corn and wine, that lie behind it. Fifty years ago,
when there were more farmers than " base mechanicals "
in the United States, New York displayed this same
quality of spaciousness, the easy-going optimism which
distinguished the well-stocked seller from the hungry
buyer. But since then, while the industrial nations at
the centres of European civilisation have become more and
more dependent on the resources of the " Pampas and
Savannahs," North America (with a doubled population,
rapidly industrialised) has been added to the long list
of competitors for the Argentine's surplus food. The
wharves, frigorificos and grain elevators of Buenos Aires
carry the message, plain-writ for all who have eyes to
see, namely, that the surplus food resources of South
America are destined to bring to Argentina more and
more of the Old World's hoarded wealth, and of the
luxuries and vanities in which wealth expresses itself.
During the last hundred years the social and economic
burdens of Europe have been vastly multiplied by reason
of the unprecedented increase of population which has
resulted from the transient prosperity of urban industri-
alism, assisted by new methods of food transportation.
Civilisation at its centre has been living freely on its
capital, bringing into the world millions of lives for whose
fitting maintenance the world's diminishing fertility
offers less and ever less provision. The next half-century
is bound to witness a steady transference of economic
power from the centre to the circumference, from the
lands that must buy food and raw materials to the less
populated fertile countries that have these things to sell.
Amongst these, South America stands easily first. And
so the whirligig of Time brings about its revenges; the
continent that was plundered of its gold and silver by

96 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

the Conquistadores, that since has lain fallow and almost
forgotten of the conquerors, is destined to become an
Eldorado richer than that of any buccaneer's imaginings,
and to exact vast tribute from the Old World.

Buenos Aires bears evidence to the rapidity of the pro-
cess; affluence, actual and increasing, is the keynote of
the impression that the city conveys in all its mpods
and tenses. And because Argentina is essentially a white
man's country, capital, and the captains of industry who
handle capital, have foregathered here, not as transient
concessionaires, but as resident citizens. This makes the
community of commerce and enterprise even more cos-
mopolitan than that of New York, though, for reasons
that I have never heard explained, the Hebrew of high
and low finance is less ubiquitous and less dominant than
one would expect him to be in this land, where money and
prodigals are plentiful. The Speyers and the Meyers, the
Blumenthals and Rosenbaums are here, of course, but
their names do not encompass you on every side as in
Broadway, nor do they seem to have acquired the same
stranglehold on banking and business that they have in
New York, Johannesburg, London and other chief market-
places of the Gentiles. Why is it that the vastly lucra-
tive pulperia business of money-lending is left all through
the country to Spaniards, Italians and Basques ? Is it the
influence of the Roman Catholic Church, or the rigidity
of South America's social barriers, that frightens the
children of Israel from this land of promise? These be
mysteries.

English, Scotch and Irish, Italians, Spaniards, Germans
and Poles, Frenchmen and Basques, Greeks and the various
breeds of Levantines who in these regions are collectively
classed as " Turcos," all these go to the making of the
conglomerate cosmopolis of modern Argentina; but the

IN SOUTH AMERICA 97

features which distinguish the social life, business and
sports of the capital, wheresoever they depart from Spanish
tradition, are very markedly British. In literature,
philosophy, and to a certain extent in politics, the Argen-
tine is inspired by French ideals, France, the fountain-
head of Latin civilisation, is his spiritual home, and the
fact has been emphasised by the war, despite the pro-
German activities of the clerical faction and of politicians
with overdrafts in German banks. But in other direc-
tions the prevailing influence is conspicuously English.
Your Argentine blade gets his clothes from London, owns
an English terrier, decorates his walls with English
pictures, knows all about football, and belongs to a rowing
club. The swell shops in Florida are full of English goods
and, next to Spanish, English is the language of com-
merce. All this is very grateful, an abiding testimony
to the virtue of those pioneers of bygone days, traders
and estancieros, who built on sure foundations the tradi-
tion of the palabra d' Ingles. Very comforting, too, is the
disappearance, since the war, of German goods from all
their former coigns of vantage, and the hope that here-
after British trade and enterprise may be greatly extended
and consolidated in this country, as the result of the wide-
spread antipathy which the Teuton has aroused.

But there is a fly in the ointment of this hope, a fly
born in Manchester, bred in the dark places of its cos-
mopolitan free-trade. If the German is to be made to
expiate his sins as he should, if he is to be prevented from
working back on his mole-like tracks to the undermining
of British enterprise, he must no longer be encouraged
in the pernicious belief that his " English friends " are
disposed to allow him to resume his business of peaceful
penetration. In Buenos Aires, even more than in Rio,
he has been justified in his cautious opportunist neutrality

98 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

by our own Board of Trade and Foreign Office, whose
inexplicable reluctance to put an end to enemy trading
during the early days of the war enabled the German
merchant to hold on in a situation from which he might
otherwise have been completely ousted before the end of
1915. It may seem incredible, yet it is nevertheless true,
that until the middle of 1916 a great deal of business
for Germans in South America was actually financed
from London. As The Times correspondent to Buenos
Aires stated at the beginning of the year, " Up till now
German firms here have been as free to trade with British
firms, and British firms at home with local German houses
here, as if there had been no declaration of war and no
Orders in Council." Patriotic Englishmen at home and
abroad spoke bitterly about " the hidden hand," and
wondered by what means the powers of darkness were
able to maintain their evil influence in high places, but
as a matter of fact, there has never been any real secret
as to the nature of the sordid cosmopolitan creed pro-
fessed by the pro-German faction at the centre of the
Empire, nor any possible doubt as to the power exercised
in political circles by naturalised Germans and German
Jews in high finance. It was only when it became clear
that the United States intended the join the alliance
against Germany that an efficient censorship was estab-
lished between Great Britain and South America, and
the Black List instituted to curtail the activities of German
traders and their " neutral " friends. But ever since
then, Germany's good free-trading friends in England
have been able to help her to keep her place in the sun,
and indirectly to supply German traders in South
America with Manchester goods. At the end of March
1918, at the very moment when Germany was staking
all on a supreme attempt to overwhelm the British Army

IN SOUTH AMERICA 99

and destroy the British Empire, the same Times cor-
respondent reported that the beneficial results of the
measures taken against German trade had been " largely
nullified by the action of the British Government." That
action, as he explained, served the purposes of the German
in two ways. In the first place, it allowed " Turkish
importers " — i. e. Syrians and Levantine Jews and other
nondescripts — to continue to receive Manchester textiles,
which meant that the German dealer would receive them
indirectly and undersell his competitors to keep up his
trade. In the second place, it removed the names of a
number of German firms, among them several of the most
prominent, from the South American Black List " with-
out consulting the local authorities and apparently regard-
less of the deplorable effect upon local allied and neutral
opinion."

To those of us who have witnessed the effects of govern-
ment by lawyers and plutocrats on our policies overseas,
who have seen honest English officials in Consulates and
Legations compelled to act upon orders that made them
ashamed to look their countrymen in the face, there was
nothing for wonder, little even for criticism, in the prudent
neutrality of countries like Argentina. Every one at
Buenos Aires knew, after the sinking of the Lusitania,
and still more after the revelation of Count Luxburg's
diplomatic activities, that the sympathies of the vast
majority of Argentines were with the Allies. But they
were also aware that public opinion in the Republic
possesses comparatively little influence with the Govern-
ment, partly because politics in this " democracy," as
in many others, is a game which the workers generally
leave to the talkers, the producer to the professional
politician. Public opinion in this case expressed itself
frequently and freely in denouncing the pro-German

100 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

neutrality of Senor Presidente Irigoyen and his followers ;
it " demonstrated " and shouted in favour of the Allies
on feast days and other occasions; but it never went to
the length of organising an effective political opposition
to the President's passivity or of putting a stop to the
pernicious activities of the Germans and their hirelings.

The deluded idealists and party politicians in England,
who have prated and preached about " conciliating "
Sinn Fein and persuading Ireland's rebel faction, by
graceful concessions, to become loyal and law-abiding
citizens, may be interested to learn that in South America,
and particularly in the Argentine, the cause of the Allies
was never more openly opposed, the side of Germany
never more openly espoused, than by a certain section
of the Roman Catholic Irish. These men, many of them
naturalised Argentinos and prosperous settlers, have
preserved, even unto the second and third generation,
all the characteristics of the priest-ridden, turbulent,
ignorant peasantry, whose perverse hatred of all consti-
tuted authority is the real curse of Ireland ; the plotting
of disloyalty and the brooding over ancient fantastic
grudges are inbred in their bones, unreasoning racial
animosity the very breath of their nostrils. It was not
enough for these traitors to the common cause of civil-
isation that Ireland should have been scandalously pam-
pered by British politicians, relieved from bearing her
share of the Empire's burden of war, exempted from
food rations, war taxation and the defence of the realm.
From their place of comfortable security, they continued
to satisfy their atavistic instincts of tribal warfare and
to conform to Ireland's pitiful traditions of sordid con-
spiracy and religious bigotry. I will cite merely one
instance of their activities. On the 20th of June, 1916, at
the Irish Roman Catholic Chapel at Rosario, a Mass was

IN SOUTH AMERICA 101

celebrated under the auspices of the St. Patrick's Society
" in memory of the dead who fell fighting for the freedom
of their country in April and May " — not, mark you, of
the Irishmen who had fallen on the battlefields of France
to preserve Europe (and incidentally Ireland) from the
heel of the Hun, but of those who had met their fate
after murdering British soldiers in the streets of Dublin.
Describing this interesting ceremony, the Irish Monthly
(a German subsidised rag published in Buenos Aires)
deplored the absence of a number of influential members
of the St. Patrick's Society; the entertainment was
undoubtedly calculated to attract prosperous renegades.
One Father Stechy, assisted by Father Murray (O.S.F.),
said the Mass in the Chapel deeply draped, and thereafter
a card, printed in Spanish, was distributed amongst the
faithful, announcing the death " due to a serious attack
' Germanofilo,' comforted by holy shells and torpedoes,
of the Queen Mary, Indefatigable, Invincible, Black Prince,
Warrior, Princess Royal, etc., etc." The imperishable
quality of Irish humour was manifested in the statement
that " Lord Kitchener would not attend the funeral,
having gone to inspect British submarines at the bottom
of the North Sea." Well might the anonymous author
conclude with " God save Ireland ! " And well may any
sane, self-respecting Irishman, sick of its priest-ridden,
drink-sodden politics, despair of salvation for the dis-
tressful country, so long as the United Kingdom con-
tinues to be governed by opportunist demagogues. Our
present ills are not to be cured by Home Rule for Ireland,
but rather by pogroms of shifty politicians in England.
Fortunately for the Argentine, there are not enough Irish
of the scheming, trouble-breeding kind within her borders
to debauch her internal politics as for years they debauched
those of the United States.

102 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

I do not mean by this to suggest that either national
or municipal politics in the Argentine are conducted
exclusively by Bayards and Galahads — far from it. But
such unwholesome fruits as result here from the graft of
modern socialism on to the sturdy stem of Latin repub-
licanism, are at least free from the sordid, corner-saloon,
vice-forming features which have come to be identified
with the activities of Hibernian politics in North America.
Here, as in our European democracies, politics is become
a profession unattractive to men of punctilious honesty
and fastidious conscience ; a necessary business, no doubt,
but unpleasant. In the Argentine, as in Uruguay, your
average decent citizen speaks of politicians much in the
same way that he speaks of locusts. He accepts them
and all their works as evils to be endured, because experi-
ence has shown him that a change of government is
merely a new and expensive shuffle of the same old greasy
pack. The game itself never changes.

It is evident that there must be public offices and men
to fill them, a public purse and men to empty it ; but in
South America, as in England, the game of exploiting
the community in the sacred name of democracy has
become too obviously transparent, and the number of
hands that demand access to the till is, therefore, con-
tinually being increased from the ranks of the thriftless
and the inefficient. These and their dependents, and all
those who hope to derive benefits, direct or indirect, from
office-holders, form a body of citizens by no means incon-
siderable. At election time — there was a Presidential
election in April 1916 — the stranger within the gates of
Argentina might be led by their tumults and shoutings
to think that the entire population takes an intelligent
interest in the business of government, and possesses a
fitting sense of responsibility in the exercise of the fran-

IN SOUTH AMERICA 103

chise. But, bless you, the interest that the average non-
official takes in the Presidential election is much the same
as that which he takes in a horse-race, except that attend-
ance at races is optional, whereas if he declines to vote
at elections the State fines him ten dollars. In reality,
he no more controls the nomination and election of those
who will dispose of the public purse and patronage for
the next six years, than the deluded folk who shout them-
selves hoarse at the bidding of the party-machine in
Great Britain. But the tub-thumpers and gargoyles of
the contending factions loudly assure him that he does,
and a well-nourished Press keeps up the pleasant illusion
of a representative Government freely chosen by an
enlightened electorate. As a matter of fact, and as the
result of applying our crude ideals of democracy to com-
munities untrained in the duties of citizenship, the spoils
system in politics is carried here (as in other American
Republics) to a more logical and straightforward con-
clusion than with us. When a President's term of office
expires in Argentina, not only do all the Ministers of his
Government vacate their offices and retire with their
secretaries, protege's and satellites, but all the chief
municipal dignitaries — Police, Post Office, Public Health,
etc. — must also resign. Thus the world-wide game of
Ins and Outs, of Haves and Have-nots, is played once
every six years, with the public purse as prize, and for
a few brief riotous days nearly every one is more or less
concerned, in pocket or in prospect, with the shuffling
of the executive pack.

At the time of the celebration of Argentina's centenary
of independence, the country had but recently recovered
from one of the most keenly contested elections in its
history. The usual machine-made differences between
Reds and Whites, between Ins and Outs, had on this

104 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

occasion been supplemented by a real difference, which
appealed to something higher than the pocket of many a
citizen, namely, the question whether the Republic should
have a pro-German or a pro- Ally Government. There is
no doubt whatsoever that had the country been in a
position to vote on this issue only, Senor Irigoyen and his
Radical friends would never have obtained a majority
of the votes of the Electoral Colleges ; but the war was a
long way off, and the glib politicians were able to divert
the voter's sympathetic glance from France and Belgium
by directing it towards new and highly attractive pictures
of loaves and fishes. So the Radicals came into power,
backed by the clericals and a highly organised German
propaganda, though by this time the name of German had
begun to stink in the nostrils of every decent Argentino.
Thus is representative government based on universal
suffrage in a modern democracy. The Centenary cele-
brations emphasised in more ways than one the transient
and precarious nature of the satisfaction which the system
affords to Demos himself. With the exception of one
thoroughgoing partisan, who endeavoured to give the
populace genuine cause for rejoicing by shooting at the
President, the acts of the apostles of democracy, the
manifestations of politician orators and organisers, were
curiously lacking in enthusiasm, not to say conviction.
There were patriotic speeches, of course, by National
Deputies in the Plaza San Martin, torchlight processions
(the torches were forgotten) and other " demonstraciones
por el glorioso aniversario," but somehow they all seemed
to be even more perfunctory and artificial than such things
usually are. The oratory was sonorous and dramatic
enough, and the procession business was done, as the
Latin only can do it, with a certain dignity, artistically
suggestive of some worthy purpose ; but there was nothing

IN SOUTH AMERICA 105

in the attitude of the crowd to create the impression that
the pulse of the nation was beating any faster than usual,
or that any statesman had got his finger on it.

The narrow ways of Florida, San Martin, Maipii and
Reconquista, all gay bedecked with flags and arched
festoons of electric lights, reminded one of the business
quarter of a Chinese city. At the height of the festivi-
ties the crowds were packed so tightly in these fashion-
able streets that movement became impossible. Even in
normal times, carriage traffic can only use them in one
direction, for the cross streets — Cangallo, Corrientes, etc. —
are equally narrow ; so that to get to any particular spot
you frequently have to drive round an entire " block,"
and if you look like a stranger, Jehu will generally throw
in an extra block or two for luck. In the Avenida Florida,
all vehicular traffic ceases at four o'clock in the after-
noon, in order that pedestrians have a chance to " circu-
late," which with one accord they decline to do. On
the contrary, half the population seems to have acquired
a fixed habit of giving and taking the day's news, with
occasional refreshment, in this its favourite street.
Talking of favourite streets, there is something pathetic
in the fearful monotony of their names, all over South
America. From Panama to Patagonia, the Conscript
Fathers, or whosoever is responsible for these things,
appear to have exhausted all the resources of their his-
torical knowledge and patriotic imagination when they
have christened their chief Plaza with the date of the
Republic's Independence or Constitution, and their streets
by the names of neighbouring provinces or prominent
politicians. It would seem as if the entire history of
South America began and ended with the birth of its
Republics, and their subsequent puerperal fever; as if
the nostrums of the modern demagogue had consigned art

106 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

and literature to oblivion, together with the great epics
of the Spanish navigators and Conquistador es. Stout
Cortes, Columbus and Cervantes, Pizarro and Mendoza
are all forgotten; there is scarcely a narrow calle of the
suburbs to do them reverence. Even the sleepy rustic
townlets of the " campo " call their Plaza " 25 de Mayo."
From the speeches of the orators of the Centenary
celebration, and the general tenor of the patriotic festi-
vities, I gathered that the fundamental cause for Argen-
tina's rejoicings lay in having thrown off the yoke of
Spain, together with all the foolishness of Europe's effete
monarchical traditions and mediaeval superstitions. The
Republic, it appears, has lighted the lamp of Liberty with
the oil of democracy and its brightness of felicity is
ensured, henceforth and for ever, on a basis of equality
and fraternity. That any freeborn citizen should think
it necessary to demonstrate his feelings on an occasion of
this kind by shooting at the President, would appear to
indicate the presence of flies in the democratic amber.
And there were others : for example, the local Press
vaunted itself on the fact that the street illuminations
had cost $300,000; they made little or no mention of the
fact that the Municipality was heavily in debt to the Gas
Company (a British concern), and that the City Fathers
were evidently relying on the Monroe doctrine or a German
victory to evade their obligations. Much eloquence was
devoted to extolling the city's civic splendours; deputies
and delegates spoke melodiously on this theme during the
four days of the fiesta, but nobody appeared to attach any
importance to the fact that the street scavengers had just
gone on strike to secure a living wage. The educational
activities of the Republic were emphasised in processions,
exercises and games, and rightly so, for taken as a whole,
liberal education stands at a high level in most of the

IN SOUTH AMERICA 107

South American Republics. Nevertheless, on the evening
of Sunday, the 5th of July, chief day of the fiesta, I
witnessed the performance of a play (Articulo 7, it was
called) at the Theatre Royal, grossly and stupidly indecent
to a degree which no civilised community of effete Europe
would tolerate, a mixture of bawdry and buffoonery,' only
equalled by the exhibitions of the local picture-palaces
and calculated to nullify all the uplifting efforts of the
best-intentioned teachers.

Doubtless, to the eye of the well-fed wayfarer, these
festivities of the young Republic, with all its vast resources
of undeveloped wealth, might well portend a new world
made prosperously safe for democracy. What other land
on this hard-worked and anxious planet could close its
Custom House and its Post Office for three hilarious days
of feasts and torchlight processions, taking no thought
for the morrow? They will tell you at the Jockey Club
that there are no beggars in Buenos Aires (it is true that
the only one I met was an English beachcomber), but
they cannot shut their eyes to the unpleasant fact that
socialism, of a type very nearly akin to Bolshevism, lies
very near to the surface of local politics, endemic and
malignant. The anti-social activities of Polish Jews are
just as dangerous in the New World as in the Old. Ccelum
non animum mutant. To have thrown off the yoke of
mediaeval monarchical Spain is, no doubt, an achieve-
ment; to live in a land of spacious fruitfulness is to be
favoured of the gods. But can any one who contemplates
Demos in South American cities, restless, wayward, full
of windy words, say truthfully that the average citizen
has come much nearer to the source of happiness than the
veriest beggar who suns himself on the steps of the
Cathedral in old Seville, or the ladrones of the Barcelona
waterside ?

108 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

Certain things stand out, distinct in their significance,
against the blurred background of my brief days in
Buenos Aires. These, in the order of their importance,
are, the Jockey Club, the Cattle Show at Palermo, and
Count Luxburg, in splendid isolation at the Plaza Hotel.
Each, in its way, throws a little light on the peculiarities
of the great southern city's politics and social evolution ;
in a sense they stand respectively for typical local manifes-
tations of the world, the flesh and the devil.

The Jockey Club is a sermon in stone for those who have
eyes to see, a striking testimony to the wisdom of old
Socrates which foretold the perils of a democracy un-
restrained by an aristocracy of character and intelligence.
The lesson conveyed by this gilded palace of plutocrats
is particularly significant, now in the time of our mortal
life when the Old World, looking to democracy for salva-
tion, has seen it in Russia transformed before its very
eyes into a bloodthirsty gang of plundering tyrants.
For here, on virgin soil, democracy started with a clean
slate, free to work out its salvation and to find the
promised Utopia, having cast off all the tradition and
trammels of autocracy with the yoke of Spain. And
what is the result ? A distribution of wealth more unequal
than that of Europe, and the growth of a plutocracy
possessed of greater opportunities and greater power than
any class of aristocrats in the Old World. Here, in a
land which professes to be ultra-democratic, in a Republic
ostensibly founded on principles of liberty, fraternity
and equal opportunity, an exclusive plutocratic clique
systematically exploits the nation's ruling passion for
gambling, and neither the law nor public opinion seems
to take any exception to the arrangement. Over the way,
in Montevideo, the same strange apathy exists in the
matter of public gambling encouraged by the Government,

IN SOUTH AMERICA 109

which at the same time professes to be guiding the Republic
straight to Utopia, by the way of Sefior Battle's super-
socialistic theories.

The Jockey Club gets 10 per cent, of the totalisator
receipts at the Palermo Races, and as they have races
every Sunday and Thursday, the Committee have to
exercise a good deal of ingenuity to spend the money
and at the same time to maintain the hidalgo exclusive-
ness represented by a $3000 entrance fee. To become a
member is the ambition of every successful Argentine,
but if report speaks truly, the blackball moves here with
a discrimination worthy of the best haunts of an esoteric
aristocracy, and no less irritating to its victims. The
Club premises are the last word in opulence, a little florid
perhaps — opulence of the kind which seeks solid comfort
embellished by the artistic temperament — but undeniably
magnificent; a joy for ever to the diplomats and other
honorary members who tread these marble halls and eat
these dainty meals at a cost that may be called nominal,
as things go in the Argentine. As for me, while I gaze
reverently on the gorgeous pictures, tapestries and old
porcelain that adorn this home of Dives, while I walk
humbly through its salle d'escrime, its baths and all the
cosy corners where well-fed Croesus takes his ease, I see,
behind and beyond these things, those which have made
them — the Gauchos trooping their slow-moving herds,
the endless, strenuous labour of the " camp," the pampas
slowly yielding to the plough — and I wonder whether,
as the politicians say, democracy will ever devise and
establish a world-wide state of society in which the
labourer shall not only be worthy of his hire, but shall
enjoy a fair share of the fruits of his labour. There has
certainly been nothing in the recent record of Demos, from
China to Peru, to justify confidence in the Wilsonian

110 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

type of academic optimism or to lead one to believe
that, when the world has been made quite safe for demo-
cracy, the strong will cease to prey upon the weak, the
clear-headed to exploit the brainless, and the thrifty to
profit by the foolishness of the spendthrift.

At the Palermo Cattle Show I saw a champion bull,
bought for sixty thousand dollars by Senor Drabble.
The placid beast showed no sign of interest in the admir-
ing crowd; from out his monstrous bulk of heavy flesh
his pensive eye gazed upon the beauty and fashion of
Buenos Aires in mild abstraction; no praise of cattle
kings could move him from his sadly contemplative mood.
All these Pashas of the bovine aristocracy are purposely
fattened for the exhibition, and then must go into training
to reduce their weight before they become serviceable for
stud work. It seems an absurd arrangement, until you
recollect that the final end of all this exhibition of the
blue blood of pedigree beasts and all the activities of
cattle kings is to produce food, ever more and more food,
for the hungry town-bred masses of Europe's congested
civilisation. The more layers of fat these beasts can
accumulate, the better the immediate chances of square
meals for London, Paris and Vienna. Thus seen, all the
herds of the Pampas represent so much Bovril and Oxo,
so many sides of beef, standing yet a little while between
Europe's improvident industrialism and the disastrous
penalties of its purblind economic sins.

For me, the thought of the saladero — that awful place
of never-ending slaughter — is unpleasantly near to the
surface at an exhibition of this kind. I have an uneasy
feeling that the beasts know all about it; I see a dumb
reproach in their far-gazing eyes. Out in the " campo,"
moving amongst accustomed things, busy with their own
ruminations, the menace of man is remote from them,

IN SOUTH AMERICA 111

his visitations brief. There I can look upon them without
feelings of compunction, but here I feel as if I should like
to apologise to them in some way for humanity in general.
So let us leave the stalled beasts and visit him who hath
dominion over them, in the person of the auctioneer, now
conducting a very rapid and remunerative business in
the sale ring. A very voluble person was the rematador,
on this occasion member of a firm with the highly appro-
priate name of Bullrich & Co. His patter was like hail-
stones on a corrugated iron roof, " domil-domil ; beedup-
beedup," breathless and incessant; to judge by his fierce
rapid gesture, his beseechings and ironic running com-
mentary on the parsimony or apathy of buyers, he might
have been selling high explosives instead of Herefords and
Durhams. At all events, a highly efficient auctioneer, and
typical in his way of the infusion of Anglo-Saxon business
methods, of a certain liveliness, which distinguishes men
and affairs in Buenos Aires from those of the easy-going
towns of the interior, more faithful to the Spanish tradition.
Count Luxburg, of " Spurlos versenkt " fame, remains
a curiously prominent figure in my impressions of Buenos
Aires in 1916, for several reasons. One is that I had known
him ten years before as Secretary of the German Legation
at Peking, and had then had occasion to learn, at no small
cost, what depths of treacherous guile lay beneath his
suave, dilettante manner and faux bonhomme urbanity.
In those days he cultivated a sort of British Guardsman
style of dress and deportment, a pretty taste in Rhine
wines, and a hobby for Oriental carpets, but for all that
he was an unmistakable Junker to the tips of his slim
fingers. Having studied him at close range and watched
his honest broker methods of advancing Deutschland
uber Alles amongst the Chinese, it was interesting and in
keeping with the fitness of things to find him here, all his

112 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

airs and graces gone, the leader and forlorn hope of
Deutschdum on a continent where the name of Germany
had already begun to stink in the nostrils of all honest
men. Having many friends in the Argentine Government
and in the Clerical party, and plenty of money to spend in
proclaiming the certainty of Germany's ultimate victory,
he was not yet disposed — as he became after the " Spurlos
versenkt " incident — to walk humbly, or even to be polite.
On the contrary, secure in the protection of Argentina's
neutrality, he swaggered and blustered in true Junker
fashion; but it was obviously the bravado of a bully,
desperately afraid. He showed none of the cool, cynical
effrontery which helped Bernstorff to remain dignified
even in disgrace. Luxburg, surrounded by a group of
faithful henchmen in the hall of the Plaza Hotel, was
given to much boastful talking and truculent glaring at
any English or Frenchman who might be present, but
the man was none the less evidently rattled and ratty.
He had bluntly declined to act upon the Plaza manager's
polite suggestion that he should remove himself and his
entourage from the hotel. Every ingenious device to
dislodge him had failed, but splendid isolation was telling
on his nerves. He behaved like a bear with a sore head,
and in that role provided much pleasant entertainment
for those who gathered at the Plaza, for the five-o'clock
thes dansants. On one occasion he made a tremendous
scene because he had overheard some one talking about
the Boche; on another he declined to go up in the lift
with a member of the British Legation, and was accord-
ingly left foaming with rage, the centre of a scene that
became suddenly charged with innocent merriment.
In public and in private this fretful representative of
Kultur dragged his dismal coat-tails, looking for the trouble
which in the end overtook him. Anything and every-

IN SOUTH AMERICA 113

thing that offended his nice German sense of honour
became the subject of indignant protest to the Argentine
Government. He complained, for instance, that the
German flag had been left out in the great tableau of
the performance of Excelsior at the Colon. The theatre
authorities made suitable amends at the next performance
by having two small German ensigns brought in at the
tail of the procession by lads in Chinese costume. Then
he complained of the performance of the Cadeau de
Noel, and the Government had the play withdrawn.

Sweet are the uses of neutrality. There is no doubt
whatsoever that, until the United States came into the
fray, and until the seamy side of Luxburg's diplomacy
was revealed in the " Spurlos versenkt " despatches,
Seiior Irigoyen and his friends effectively tempered the
wind to the shorn German lamb. But those were the sad,
bad days, when the Argentine politician believed in the
invincibility of the German army and trimmed his prudent
course accordingly, when the extremely cautious neutrality
of the Buenos Aires Press justified its deference to the
feelings of the Hun by reference to its " very conservative
clientele," and by emphasising the benefits which Argen-
tina might expect to derive after the war from German
trade. Even Sefior Mitre, of the Nation, I remember,
declined a suggestion that they should publish some of
Raemaeker's cartoons, on the ground that they would
annoy his Conservative subscribers. Argentine neutrality,
in fact, was purely a matter of business, into which no
sentiment was allowed to intrude. Well and good; but,
as I ventured to observe to Sefior Mitre at the time, if all
the eloquence which Argentina has devoted to splendid
ideals of civilisation and the rights of humanity, faded
thus into oblivion when confronted with business, if the

signature of the Republic on the Hague Conventions was
i

114 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

nothing more than a pious expression of irresponsible
opinion, what will be the position of Argentina at the next
gathering of the family of nations ?

Before bidding farewell to Buenos Aires, let me record
one pleasing and instructive little scene of which I hap-
pened to be a spectator. In the street in front of Harrod's
replica of the Brompton Road Stores, I noticed that the
crowd was more than usually congested, and that all its
attention was directed to the shop windows, which, in
the fashionable promenade of Florida, was noteworthy.
The centre of attraction, I discovered, lay in a group of
new dress-model dummies, lifelike waxen beauties of the
type which has been created in recent years, so delicate
and dainty in their pale loveliness that, remembering
the simpering horrors of the shop windows of our youth,
one would wish to raise a monument in honour of their
unknown creator, that nameless benefactor of the human
race. These peerless specimens at Harrod's, arranged in
all the glory of the latest Paris fashions, were fascin-
ating enough to evoke unrest and invidious comparisons
in the bosom of most male Argentines and fierce longings
in the breast of their women-folk. " Caramba," said a tall
young Gaucho to his campanero, " porque no hay mujeres
como estas aqui ? " Not that the smart women of Buenos
Aires have much to learn in the way of dress — in their own
way they are as chic as any in the world — but the tall,
voluptuous figures of these waxen queens, their expres-
sion of patrician hauteur tempered by roguish allure-
ments, their blue eyes and dainty curls — well, they may
be good business, but I am not sure that in the long run
it would not pay better to design Spanish-type dummies
for the South American market. What is the good of
arousing in highly susceptible breasts hopes that can never
— or hardly ever — be realised?

IN SOUTH AMERICA 115

As a matter of fact, women of the smart set in Buenos
Aires are ahead of the London and Paris fashions — to their
no small satisfaction — for the simple reason that Europe's
summer models are generally designed in Paris in Decem-
ber and reach Buenos Aires in January or February, that
is to say, in time for the summer season of the Argentine.
The wealthy fashionables of the New World are very
fashionable indeed, and in the matter of dress, as in
everything else, they seem to esteem things chiefly for
their costliness. Cheapness they despise; any shop-
keeper will tell you that it does not pay to recommend
low-priced goods. The higher the prices, the sweller the
shop, and the more satisfactory the lordly buyer. Small
wonder that life is expensive, where luxuries are concerned,
in this land of swift fortunes and open-handed prodi-
gality. The scale of wages is correspondingly high for all
domestic service amongst the town dwellers; a kitchen
wench, raw from a farm in Lombardy, will earn fifty
dollars a month, and a chauffeur £300 a year and all found.
Nevertheless, taking it all round, the cost of living was no
dearer here in 1916 than in New York or Petrograd before
the war ; it is certainly lower to-day than in Montevideo,
for the reason that the Uruguayan gold dollar is worth
about two and a half times as much as the Argentine silver
peso. In such matters as hotel charges, public convey-
ances, gambling, lottery tickets, laundry bills, the Argen-
tine dollar seems to go almost as far as the Uruguayan, so
that if you reckon your expenditure in sterling, Montevideo
is a good deal more expensive than Buenos Aires. For
example, a taxicab driver in Montevideo (with his taxi-
meter permanently out of order) asks you a peso (say,
45. 6d.) for five minutes' drive in his rickety old box of
tricks . The Buenos Aires man will charge you a peso worth
is. 9^. for about the same distance. Montevideo's laundry

116 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

charges, calculated in sterling, are only equalled by those
of a fashionable hotel in Paris ; so much so, that one can
only conclude that the bulk of the population must do
their family washing on the back premises,1 Hotels in
Montevideo are nothing to write home about, but the cost
of a room at the best of them is not much less than at the
Plaza in Buenos Aires — about £i a day for a good room
with bath. Somehow or other, Buenos Aires has acquired
a legendary reputation for being the most expensive place
on earth; all I can say from personal experience is that
there are many cities on both sides of the Atlantic which
take it out of you just as thoroughly, if not more so.

Enough of cities. From their pomps and vanities let
us away to the wilds, to Paraguay, the sore stricken, and
the fringe of the Chaco Austral.

1 Very possibly they do. Spanish women are all artists de
natura at laundry work, which may account for the price they
set upon it.. In Buenos Aires their handiwork is as immaculate
as in Madrid, which is saying a great deal.

A " CARNE CON CUERRO," ARGENTINA

To face p. 116.

CHAPTER VII

UP THE PARANA I A GLIMPSE OF THE CHACO AUSTRAL

THERE are more ways than one of reaching Paraguay
and the city of Asuncion. Bold spirits and explorers
may follow the old northern and western war tracks
from Bolivia or Brazil, and rough it there to their heart's
content. But for weaker vessels handicapped by age
or fixed habits of sleeping and eating, the best starting-
point is Buenos Aires. Thence you may go by railway,
in thirty-six hours, or by river-boat up the Parana,
which last is a matter of four or five days, according
to the state of the weather, the ship's engines, the amount
of traffic at the ports of call, and the remnant of spasmodic
energy abiding in the cargo-purser. As a rule only
such unfortunate persons as have goods to sell or debts
to collect in a hurry, or New Yorkers obsessed by the
incurable time-saving delusion, elect to go by railway.
Apart from the physical pains and penalties of that
rough road, no traveller with any sense of the fitness
of things, none who would rightly conciliate the tutelary
spirits of this lotus-eating land, should approach Asuncion
at anything more rapid than the steamer's eight miles
an hour. During the hundred and odd hours of the
leisurely progress of the river-boat, watching the banks
go slowly by, with their struggling settlements and
little clearings standing out pathetically, like brief visions
of Arcadia, against the everlasting wilderness of jungle
and swamp; studying the words and works of the
strangely interesting mestizo race that has sprung from

117

118 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

the admixture of Iberian and Indian blood; above all,
learning to realise something of the immense silent
force and fertility of subtropical plant life, an incalcu-
lable factor in the history of this part of the continent;
this, surely, is the right and seemly way to pass from
the bustling modernity of Buenos Aires to the silent
places, haunted of dreams that never yet came true, at
the heart of South America. Furthermore, to create
the atmosphere proper to the study of Paraguay and
her remnant people, the searcher after knowledge may
profitably beguile the leisure of these drowsy ship-
board days by reading Father Dobrixh offer's History of
the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay, and
Cunninghame Graham's Vanished Arcadia.

In the estuary of the Rio de la Plata, and in many a
long stretch of the Parana, this river travel reminds one
forcibly of the Yangtsze-kiang in summer. The water has
the same pea -soup quality ; there are the same shoals and
banks of silted loess and the same swift changes of tem-
perature, dependent on the direction of the wind. China
is over-populated, and the Yangtsze's banks swarm with
pullulating humanity, wheresoever cultivation is possible ;
Paraguay is a land of grim silences, a wilderness that
stands untrodden and untamed, as it stood when first
Sebastian Cabot and De Solis ascended the Parana.
Nevertheless, in both lands one is oppressed by an ever-
present sense of the inscrutable destinies of man, of the
eternal and apparently meaningless mystery of the
struggle for life on this ever- warring planet. In both one
comes to sympathise, as by a sense intuitive, with the
stoic fatalism which characterises the peoples of these
far-divided continents; the one so old, the other so new,
as measured by man-recorded time. Here, just as in
Far Cathay, life is cheap and time of no account.

IN SOUTH AMERICA 119

From Reconquista northwards to the river Bermejo,
skirting the lagoons and thickly-wooded shore of the
Chaco Austral, you have time and to spare for meditation ;
to dream and picture to yourself the life of this land in
those far-distant days when, after the passing of the
Conquistadores, the Jesuits established their Arcadian
Commonwealth amongst the Guaran^ Indians of the
wilderness, between the Parana and the Paraguay. Look-
ing back across the misty gulf of two hundred years, to
the happy life of the prosperous Mission towns, which
now lie swallowed up in the green sea of this fiercely
hungry vegetation, one wonders what the Republic of
Paraguay might have been to-day if the work of Alvar
Nunez, Ruiz Montoza and their devoted brethren had
been permitted to endure, if the wise priests had not been
driven forth and their flocks despoiled and dispersed,
by the political and commercial exponents of our restless
civilisation? A pitiful tale this, of splendid ideals and
efforts brought to naught, which one may still read in
scattered vestiges of cultivation, in the creeper-covered
belfries of ruined churches, from Corrientes in the Argentine
to Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil.

But of all this, of the hopes and fears and martyrdoms
that lie deep buried in these deserted Missions, and in a
few forgotten books, you will seldom hear a word spoken
amongst the estancieros, commercial travellers and function-
aries, who take their meals and play their interminable
" truce " and poker in the saloon of the river-boat. For
the native-born, the hi jo del pais, once you get away from
the Europeanised life of the commercial cities of the
Atlantic coast (whose intellectual capital is Paris), and
lose the main current of white immigration, the history
of the country begins with the post-revolutionary period.
It centres habitually in the sordid struggles of the military

120 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

dictators and political adventurers, who, in the sacred
name of Liberty, have cultivated every noxious growth
of tyrannical bureaucracy and shown to what straits
an undisciplined people may be brought by the despotism
of a false democracy. The farther you penetrate into
the inland fastnesses of the South American continent, the
more sonorous become the periods of the politicians who
proclaim the inalienable rights of man and the doctrines
of liberty, equality and fraternity; the more conspicuous
also the parlous condition of the States which have
hearkened unto them. Several causes have combined
to make Paraguay the happy hunting-ground of the
demagogue, and a most remarkable example of democracy
pour rire — et pour pleurer. In the first place, its geogra-
phical and climatic conditions have naturally tended to
foster the cheerful self-sufficiency which accepted the
military dictatorship of Francia and followed the tyrant
Lopez in his heroic, suicidal wars of aggression. But
we must go down deeper, back to the days of the Spanish
conquest, to find there in social causes a convincing
explanation of the mestizo soul, as expressed in Paraguayan
politics, and of the gradual shrinkage of one of the
noblest provinces of Colonial Spain to its present narrow
boundaries.

The state of society in Paraguay, at the time of the
Spanish conquest, was rendered essentially different from
that of Chile or Mexico by reason of the simple fact that
the followers of Mendoza and Irala brought practically
no Spanish women with them, and therefore intermarried
freely with the Guarany Indians. From the offspring
and descendants of these marriages arose the ruling class.
In the absence of new white immigration, they came in
course of time to regard themselves as Spaniards, whereas,
jn the other provinces, the offspring of mixed marriages

IN SOUTH AMERICA 121

remained practically Indians. Moreover, the devastating
wars waged by Lopez killed off (together with nine-tenths
of the able-bodied male population) the little remnant that
then remained in the country of pure-bred Spanish stock.
Since that time the decimated country, preserving its
independence solely because of the mutual jealousies of
Argentina and Brazil, has been the undisputed stamping-
ground of predatory demagogues, windy Jacobin preachers
of the false doctrine of social rights without civic duties,
who have made the spirit of revolution endemic. All the
racial qualities and defects of the aboriginal Guarany
stock have tended to dispose the mestizo product to accept
with alacrity the political heresy which makes every man
a despoiler, and never a supporter, of the public purse.
Idleness, inbred by centuries of ease in a highly fertile
land, comes naturally to this people ; by the authority of
imported modern Socialism, it has been raised to a fine
art, so that no self-respecting man works if he can help it,
and all look upon the State as the milch cow miraculous,
the universal provider. Therefore, and also because no
people can live for ever by taking in each other's washing,
the Paraguayan dollar (still proudly described by the native
as the peso fuerte, to distinguish it from the rival debased
currency of Bolivia) is worth three or four cents to-day in
the world's markets.

But to leave the barren field of politics and return
awhile to the humanities aboard our river-boat. One
of the things that chiefly impresses the European traveller
— unless already familiar with the social code and the
relations of the sexes in South America — is the way in
which the men and women are kept severely apart.
Aboard the Berna there were several families, occupying
side tables, whilst the Captain's central table was occu-
pied solely by men, The Rabelaisian character of the

122 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

conversation at that table, conducted by caballeros, priests
and cow-punchers alike, afforded in itself a sufficient ex-
planation (Moorish traditions apart) of many things that
might otherwise puzzle the uninitiated. At every baile
(dance) you will see the same thing; the women were
virtuously clustered together on one side of the room, and
the men on the other. You will find it strictly observed
in the travelling booths of the humblest marionette show,
playing to the peons and their families on some lonely
estancia in the wilds; and even in the comparatively
sophisticated drawing-rooms of Montevideo and Buenos
Aires, the same social code is generally imposed, with
similar precautions.

The position of the Captain aboard these river-boats
is chiefly social and ornamental; he has little or nothing
to do with navigation. This is entrusted to the capable
hands of praticos or quartermaster-pilots, supported by
a numerous crew of leisurely and loquacious citizens.
The ship carries a postal clerk and two pursers, one for
passengers and one for cargo; all three officials have
smart uniforms and command the services of assistant
autocrats ; their duties (between meals and siestas) consist
largely in the discussion of politics and the playing of
cards with the Captain and his guests, with occasional
excursions down the primrose path of flirtatious dalliance.
Such posts are naturally greatly coveted by the relatives
or proteges of Argentine statesmen, with the result that
Government interference in the business of navigation on
the Parana has sometimes reached a point at which ship-
owners have seen fit to transfer their vessels to the slightly
less bureaucratic administration of Uruguay.

But the praticos know their work, and their naviga-
tion on the whole is singularly free from accidents and
delays, considering the erratic behaviour and dangerous

IN SOUTH AMERICA 123

shoals of the river. Only once on this trip, just after
leaving Corrientes, did the Berna run aground on a
sandbank, thereby damaging her rudder. We lay there,
effecting repairs, most of the night, but neither Captain,
crew nor passengers appeared in the least disturbed
by the prospect of the addition of twelve hours, more
or less, to the journey. Mas 6 menos and manana, in
these latitudes, run each other very close for first place
as the expression of the philosophy of the race. Here,
as in the wise old East, men have discovered that time
is not money unless, for our sins, we choose to make
it so.

Time was certainly not money with the officers and
passengers of the S.S. Berna, a cheery, light-hearted poly-
glot lot, whose life on board consisted of meals, sleep,
conversation well spiced with wine, women and song,
and card-playing, which went on from siesta time till the
small hours of the morning. The poker players included
the Captain, purser, and postal clerk, a Greek Argentine,
a doctor returning to his home in Corrientes, two estanciero
brothers of Scotch descent, a dentist, a journalist bound
for Parana, a North -American German, a Frenchman in
the yerba trade, and an Italian belonging to the orange-
growing company at Villeta. I had witnessed at Buenos
Aires the conjugal embraces and admonitions, the demon-
strative farewells, the taking of valedictory snapshots,
with which the wives, mothers and sisters of these intrepid
travellers had sent them forth upon the great adventure
of this river journey, and I knew that under most of their
Tartarin waistcoats there lurked a genuinely domesticated,
if somewhat wayward, soul. I had seen the Corrientes
doctor come aboard, singing purple songs of Araby, so
to speak, and his chartered libertine pose was hardly
to be reconciled with the Benedick care he lavished on his

124 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

baggage, consisting chiefly of three bowls of goldfish and
a cageful of canaries.

For a gringo travelling in search of knowledge, there

was much to be learned from these men, for all their

light-hearted insouciance; and they made the learning

very easy and pleasant. Whatever undesirable types of

humanity there may be in South America, there are no

snobs; the social taboos and fictitious class barriers in

which our Upper Tootings delight, are unthinkable here.

These people take (or leave) you on your merits, as a

human being, not on those of your ancestors or your

bank account ; every peon will give, and claim, the same

courtesy as his padron. After a brief acquaintance, if

you are sociably inclined, they will call you by your

Christian name; as Don Juan or Don Carlos, henceforth

and for ever, you will be known to them and to their little

world. Except for ultra-serious purposes of business,

surnames are superfluous in these regions; in the case of

an Englishman, at all events, the son of the soil prefers

to ignore them, for names like Thistlebottom and Macgilly-

cuddy are beyond his linguistic capacity, and involve an

absurd waste of mental effort. If you are a stranger

and friendly disposed, he will call you Senor, or, as a

concession to your nationality, plain " Mister " ; later,

in moments of expansion, he will use the more intimate

" che," that curious Pampas-born term of affection,

universally used amongst friends and familiars in these

parts. It is not Spanish, this " die " (though you will

hear it used by seafaring men at Valencia and Barcelona),

but seems to have been borrowed from the Guaran^,

in which language it means " mine." Anyway, Spanish

South America could not get on without it. To be

addressed as " che " means that you have been promoted

to the brotherhood of the elect.

IN SOUTH AMERICA 125

Amongst this polyglot gathering on the Berna, and at
the cafes of our various ports of call, one could not fail
to notice how sensibly the Spanish language is being
modified by the frequent admixture of Italian and Portu-
guese idioms; it looks, indeed, as if in many places the
result would be a new lingua franca. The influence of the
Italian tongue is particularly noticeable. In certain
districts of the Chaco, for instance, settlers from the
Piedmont are more numerous than those of other nationali-
ties; these men seem to forget their mother tongue very
readily, but conspicuous traces of it survive in the vocabu-
laries of the entire district. At Villeta, between Formosa
and Asungion, where a large Italian-Guarany community
is prosperously engaged in the orange business, natives
and emigrants alike speak an olla podrida tongue, very
musical, but perplexing to the uninitiated. A very
beautiful sight, by the way, is the wharf at Villeta, where
the graceful, gentle-featured women unload the golden
fruit from great oxen-drawn carts and pack it swiftly
into bags, which the men carry aboard. Looking at the
kindly intelligent faces of these descendants of the
Guaranys, one can understand why the Jesuits made of
them such good Christians. I have no means of knowing
what the nature or state of their souls may be, but physi-
cally they are certainly far more attractive, more simpatico,
as they themselves would say, than a wharf-side crowd in
London or Liverpool, New York or Nagasaki.

At Corrientes, where the Berna reposed leisurely for
the better part of a beautiful day of sunshine and cool
breezes, there is a big trade in oranges. As many as
forty wagon-loads a day go hence, by the railway to
Concordia, to Buenos Aires. A queer old place, this
Corrientes, with its streets dimly lighted by kerosene
lamps, the grass growing luxuriantly between the rails

126 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

of a decrepit tram line, dogs drowsing in the sun, and the
inhabitants all apparently busy at midday with the local
paper, a sheet about the size of a page of John Bull. It
has the reputation, however, of being an enterprising and
prosperous town, in spite of its generally mouldy appear-
ance, its shocking bad roads, its lack of drains and other
public works. The provincial elections were in full swing
the day we were there, and a prominent citizen who did
the honours — one of the poker party — assured us that
the destinies of the Republic depended on the result.
Beyond a certain liveliness at the Cafe de Buenos Aires,
there was, however, nothing to indicate that Corrientes
was aware of the fact, or that any of its inhabitants had
sufficient faith in politicians to hope that either the Ins
or the Outs would ever make a decent road to the race-
course and the " Jardin Madrid." There is something
very strange in the slumbrous, well-satisfied repose of
these " camp " towns of the Argentine and Uruguay,
when one reflects that, for nine months in the year, the
climate is temperate, and that immigration is continually
bringing them infusions of new blood. No doubt it is
only on the surface, like the apparent inactivity of little
prairie towns in the States or the great wheat plains of
Canada ; for, after all, a place like Corrientes is the gather-
ing place and market for the ever-increasing produce of
a vast tract of country.

The manager of the Cafe de Buenos Aires — a very up-
to-date hotel — was (I know not what he is to-day) a very
rabid pro-German, who made no secret of his sympathies.
In his office you had the satisfaction of paying your bill
confronted by truculent effigies of the Kaiser, Hindenburg
and Co., backed by the German flag. With this gentle-
man's idiosyncrasies the local politicians, being neutrals,
were evidently unconcerned, but I will record it to their

CORRIENTES (ARGENTINA) SEEN FROM THE RIVER

[To face p. 126.

IN SOUTH AMERICA 127

credit that when, at dinner, the manager's son told his
German pianist (whose efforts were supposed to assist
digestion and conversation) to play the " Wacht am Rhein,"
three or four of them insisted on his following it up with
" God Save the King." And this he did without demur,
whilst half the room stood up, with the three Britishers
present, in honour of His Majesty.

Above Corrientes, the river broadens out into long
shallow reaches, full of shoals and sandbanks, and navi-
gation is as tricky as on the Peiho or the Mississippi. Very
beautiful, especially at sunset, are these long stretches of
river, flowing amidst the silence and shadows of the
Paraguayan jungle and the untamable wilderness of the
Chaco Austral. One sees an alligator, here and there,
hardly distinguishable from driftwood, on the sand-flats ;
a few parrots, toucan and wild-fowl, but scarcely a sign of
human habitation or handiwork. At Las Palmas, four
hours from Corrientes, I left the Berna and her cheerful
company, being invited by the hospitable Irishman who
manages a great sugar and tannin factory in these wilds,
to see something of life in the Chaco.

When you land on the mudbank at Las Palmas, and
contemplate the little puerto, which consists of a few
ramshackle buildings and a tinpot station at the end of
the factory's Decauville line, you begin to understand the
feelings of Martin Chuzzlewit when introduced to the
delectable city of Eden. You look at the half a dozen
ragged specimens of humanity who have just come across
from the Paraguayan shore, ostensibly to sell oranges;
your eye takes in all the visible details of the further
landscape, consisting exclusively of mud, swampy jungle
and a dozen miserable-looking hovels, and you ask your-
self, by what inspiration of courage or superior knowledge
came it that an Ulsterman from Ballymena should elect

128 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

to make a fortune in such a spot and with such materials ?
You know that he did achieve a fortune and that he has
made the wilderness to blossom, if not precisely like a
rose, at least very fruitfully; and so, like him, you go
forward in faith and hope.

After six miles of the Decauville line on a bumpy motor
trolley, through country waterlogged by recent thunder-
storms, and interspersed with sugar-cane plantations, you
emerge at the factory. The wilderness encompasses it
about so closely on every hand, it seems so utterly remote
from the world that lives by machinery and trade, its
steam whistle strikes so fanciful a note amidst these
wastes, as fallow now as they were by the sources of time,
that, in spite of the huge stacks of quebracho and the
fussy activity of the tinpot railway, you never quite get
over the first impression of incongruous unreality, of an
Aladdin-lamp or magic-carpet illusion. This impression
grows, in fact, when they show the palatial mansion that
Hardy of Ballymena conjured for himself out of the swamp,
his wonderful house of tessellated floors, marble baths and
stained-glass windows. It is empty and silent now for
eleven months out of the twelve, because Hardy has been
gathered to his fathers, and all this goodly messuage
serves only as the monument of one who made his dreams
come true, and as a gathering spot for the seven Directors
of the Company which now reigns in his stead. These
come from Buenos Aires once a year to inspect the property
and to hold revel — a Directorial joy-ride, so to speak-
in the place that once was his. I do not know what a
Director's reflections are on these occasions, but for
myself, walking in the cool of his deep-shaded pleasance, I
offered up thanksgiving and praise for Hardy ; for by such
men has the Raj been builded, and when their breed dies
out the Raj dies with them. He was one of those hard-

IN SOUTH AMERICA 129

bitten, tenacious men that Antrim rears, with all the dogged
obstinacy of the Scotch and the intelligence of the Irish,
whom you find struggling and prospering throughout the
seven seas. His father kept a small draper's shop in
Ballymena, but it could not hold the wanderer and his
dreams. After a spell in Australia, he came to Buenos
Aires, where he started a small dry goods store, made
money selling Belfast linen, and married a native lady.
Then he became an estanciero, and in the end sold his shop
and fenced lands to stake his whole fortune on the develop-
ment of the sugar and tannin business in the wild Chaco.
It took a brave man to create this oasis of industry in
the heart of the jungle, but he did it and the results have
justified his courage.

The admixture of breeds amongst the workers in the
factory is extraordinary, and probably unequalled even
in Chicago. The bulk of the labourers are native Indians,
but the " Colonists," as those of European parentage are
called, include Italians, Poles, Germans, Greeks, Spaniards,
Montenegrins, Paraguayans, Australians, Frenchmen and
even Finns. Some of the Australians have an interesting
past, being the remnants of that ill-fated colony of com-
munists which came from Australia to take up free grants
of land and to create Utopia in Paraguay in 1893, which
hopeful scheme eventually failed because the honest hard-
working members of the community grew weary of toiling
for the benefit of their loafer brethren. Three or four of
the Frenchmen came from Brittany, and had brought their
families with them. Why any Finns should ever have
elected to cast their lot in the hottest part of the Argentine
is something of a mystery, but no doubt they, like other
colonists, are attracted hither in the first instance by the
fact that the terms of the Company's charter compel it
to sell or lease land to settlers at very low rates. When

K

130 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

they have once seen the land, they generally prefer the
factory. It is the Italians who generally take most
kindly to the cultivation of this rich but rough-hewn
country; many of them rent land from the Company, at
a peso per hectario, and make small fortunes out of sugar
and cattle.

All these colonists are keen, staunch Argentines.
Knight, in The Cruise of the Falcon, refers to the strange
fascination of these lotus-eating lands for the wandering
mariner, a lure that calls and keeps them to the end. It
is the call of the wild, no doubt, added to the attractions
of a land where food is easily come by, and woman well-
favoured, soft-hearted and hard-working. What more,
indeed, could a man ask ? Be this as it may, there is no
doubt that, with the exception of a few Germans who
cling steadfastly to memories of their Vaterland, all this
flotsam and jetsam from the shores of Europe is being
rapidly and consciously amalgamated into a new and
sturdy generation of Argentines. The sons of an English-
man, born here of a native woman, will grow up without
knowledge of the English tongue and no desire to learn it.
In the colonists' school attached to the factory (there is
a separate one for Indians) the cult of the flag is a very
sincere and serious ceremony, in which the children take
intense pride.

The intermarriage of colonists with native Indian
women produces a very creditable type of human being,
but from the social point of view it presents certain
undeniable drawbacks. Even in society as it exists
around and about the factory, these drawbacks are mani-
fest ; in fact, the more isolated the community, the more
conspicuous their results. As a good many colonists
marry native ladies of humble rank, before attaining
to the dignity of a house with a tiled roof and a salary,

IN SOUTH AMERICA 131

and as some of these ladies' relatives remain in the humble
category of peons' wives and daughters, it is evidently
difficult, very difficult, to draw a satisfactory line of
distinction between Indian and white blood, or between
wages and salaries. Yet here, as in all Spanish- American
communities, social etiquette, nice distinctions, and a severe
code of decorum are supremely important. Thus the
giving of a baile becomes a very serious, formal affair,
involving as many delicate problems as a diplomatic
function in Vienna. To draw the line at servants is not
easy, for, after all, a sister is a sister, even though she be a
peon's wife. Hence many heart-burnings on the border
line of society, and little serpents of bitterness in the
garden of good-fellowship.

Assisting at the opening of one of these entertainments,
as solemnly punctilious as a State ball, with the men all
stiffly seated on one side of the room and the women on
the other, I found much food for meditation as to the
strange causes and results of the peculiar relations between
the sexes which obtains throughout Latin America.
Looking at these primly decorous males, all apparently
willing conformists to a conventional code of manners and
morals, and knowing something of their natural state of
body and mind, the explanation would seem to be that
for these latest heirs of the Conquistadores there are two
voices, both compelling yet conflicting, which call them.
One, the voice of old Spain, which learned from the Moors
the philosophy and social code of the East — this is the
voice which inspires his attitude towards women, his
dislike of manual labour, his panached pride. The other
is the voice of the New World, of that ardent spirit of
democracy which threw off the yoke of Spain; it is this
which inspires his flamboyant idealism, his turbulent and
revolutionary restlessness. And between these two voices,

132 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

he often seems to stand a little bewildered, ineffective,
uncertain of his ground.

The native Indians are, as a rule, a hard-working and
peaceable race, as they were in the days of the old Jesuit
missions, but incurably thriftless and, from the domestic
point of view, primitive ; more or less promiscuous in their
affections, unsophisticated mortals, addicted, under the
influence of love and cafia, to swift moods of passion.
Their wages at the factory are from $1.50 to $2 a day,
but very few of them ever save any money. Pay day,
for the men, means a good deal of drinking and quarrelling,
and, for the women, lavish purchases at the factory store.
The huts and houses in which they live, some close to the
factory, others in little clearings amidst the swamps and
woods through which runs the Decauville line, are incred-
ibly dirty and untidy, so much so that one 'wonders how
the women who inhabit these hovels manage to turn
themselves out as decently as they do. In some of the
pueblos far up the line, where the quebracho workers live,
their huts are such flimsy things that rain and wind go
right through them, and all the family's domestic economy
is exposed to the gaze of the passer-by — a paper-covered
trunk, in which its possessions are locked up, mosquito-
curtained camp-beds, and the wash hanging up to dry.
Their working hours are from dawn to dusk, either
labouring at the haulage of heavy quebracho logs or in the
malarial mud where the sugar-cane grows. As these
simple folk are being educated and can already read the
newspapers, no doubt but that in time they will learn to
strike for a pound a day and six hours' work — why not ?
especially as war has sent up the price of quebracho tannin
from $60 to $240 a ton, and brought no little wealth to the
shareholders in Buenos Aires, who pay no excess profits.
But it will be some time before the Indian attains to the

IN SOUTH AMERICA 133

wisdom of Snowden, Smillie and Co., and meanwhile,
judging by his cheerful demeanour, he seems by no means
discontented with the world of things as they are.

Under the auspices of the Argentine Government,
which takes an intelligent interest in matters of public
health and education even in these remote wilds, the factory
at Las Palmas provides its workers, colonists and natives,
with a good hospital, schools, benefit of clergy, and occa-
sional recreation in the form of dances and cinema
shows. A doctor is provided by the Company; there is
plenty of practice for him, as both bubonic plague
and leprosy occur in this district, not to mention snake-
bites, malaria and a good deal of pulmonary sickness;
but at the time of my visit, the last incumbent had just
left, finding the place either too dull for him, or too hot.
Opinions differed on this point ; at any rate, he must have
been a bit of a blade and no stickler for hygiene, for he left
his quarters in a shocking state and had beguiled his
leisure by using the bath and water-jug as targets for
revolver practice. Nobody in the hospital seemed to
mind his going; the padron's good Irish wife gave the
patients all the care they wanted.

Except in surgical cases, the native has not much use
for a doctor ; he prefers his own old-wife remedies, most of
which are compounded on the venerable principle that
great virtue lies in all things outlandish and fantastic.
They cup and bleed, of course, as earnestly as our own
forefathers did in the good old days. For a burn or
wound, they rub in the ashes of an old hat. To relieve
internal pains, the fat off a duck's back is applied in the
form of a small plaster over each eye, and where ducks are
not procurable, the fat of an alligator will serve. Certain
of these native nostrums are popular, not only in these
farther pampas and savannahs, but throughout all the

134 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

towns and " camp " of Argentine and Uruguay. There is,
for instance, one widely prevalent cure for quinsy; you
must get a Paraguayan dog and spit thrice down his
throat. The same unfortunate animal is reputed to cure
rheumatism by the simple contact of the patient's feet
against his back. In the matter of domestic animals'
ailments, the country is alive with sovereign specifics,
many of which are interesting as folk-lore. To cure a
horse or cow of maggots, you walk the beast across the
corral so as to form the sign of the cross; then, having
got a clear impression of his footprints, you cut out the soil
and replace it backwards. This is never known to fail.
For a horse suffering from stricture, you kill a dog and hang
its head on to the patient's neck; if you haven't got a
dead dog, the string from a lady's petticoat will do.

In 1916 the factory school for colonists' children
boasted 240 pupils and three mistresses (two sisters and
a niece), who drew good salaries from the Government.
The system of education, including instruction in the
duties of citizenship and discipline, seems to be excellent,
both in methods and results; this makes it all the more
regrettable that the authorities have so far done nothing
to regulate and improve the type of Cinema entertainment
provided for these highly impressionable people. The
Cinema is the chief amusement of these workers on Sundays
and holidays, but the films, which come to them by way of
Corrientes, are almost all either of the sentimental-slushy
or the " mysteries of New York " type, the kind of thing
with which the movie-makers of the States have vitiated
the taste and falsified the imagination of five continents.
Even these untutored peons have been known to declare
themselves sick and weary of the drawing-room pruriency
of these so-called love dreams, with their everlasting angel-
child and their Bowery style of humour, and to resent

IN SOUTH AMERICA 135

the obscenity of other films which are specially produced,
it seems, for Argentine consumption. But if this be so,
one asks oneself why a government which takes so keen
and praiseworthy an interest in education should neglect
the obvious opportunities which lie ready to their hand in
using the Cinema for purposes of rational recreation and
instruction? The way the United States Government
have lately been using it for purposes of political propa-
ganda in South America, affords an object lesson that any
Minister of Education should be able to appreciate.

The business of the Church amongst these colonists
seems chiefly confined to christenings, marriages and
burials; attendance at Sunday Mass is desultory and
confers little or no social distinction. The padre's appear-
ance and deportment were not those of the Church mili-
tant; they suggested rather cheerful acquiescence in the
lot of the lotus-eater, slightly handicapped by the routine
of professional duties. These also he took lightly : on
the occasion of my one attendance at Mass (there was a
total congregation of three) his reverence scamped the
service with a casual jauntiness that brought to mind the
ministrations of the uxorious priests of little Russian
villages. Of course familiarity breeds contempt, but
desinvolture may be overdone, and when he stopped
suddenly in the middle of the Credo to spit, with great
force and accuracy, at the wall behind the altar, I decided
to conclude my devotions in the open air. For the benefit
of such Protestants as are to be found among the colonists,
there are occasional visitations by the English bishop,
whose services — in full canonicals — are requisitioned for
baptisms en bloc.

The Chaco is not a province of Argentine, but " national
territory." It is therefore possessed of a Governor — that
is to say, its affairs are generally controlled by one who

136 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

has achieved distinction in the pursuit of politics. Judging
by the conversation of politicians and officials, the chief
business of the authorities hereabouts consists in collecting
revenue, preserving order tant bien que mat, and checking
the exuberant activities of smugglers from across the
river Paraguay. Every now and then, His Excellence
makes a progress through the territory, to visit the sources
of revenue production, including the factory at Las Palmas.
He travels in state, with a considerable following of
retainers, cheerfully pleasant people to meet, but generally
so dirty and untidy in their habits that, on their passing,
nothing less than a vacuum cleaner can restore the situa-
tion. As permanent representative of the majesty of the
law, the State maintains a Comisario of Police at the
factory, in command of fourteen sword-bearing siesta
experts. The Company is not supposed to pay the police,
but in the Chaco, as in other parts of the Argentine and in
Uruguay, experience tends to confirm the belief that
cattle-lifting, larceny, removal of landmarks and other
forms of crime are more prevalent in districts where the
Comisario receives no douceur from the landowner or
emprensa, than in those which provide inducements for
the display of his professional activities. The Comisario
is a very important personage in " camp " life — often a
picturesque and gallant fellow, sometimes a sorry, scurvy
rogue — and the character of the man generally reflects,
in parvo, the tendencies and moral of the government
actually in power. Here, in the Chaco, any officer who
chooses to turn a blind eye to the boat traffic from the
Paraguayan bank of the river can amass a modest com-
petence without undue exertion. Even with the best of
intentions, it must be extremely difficult to devise any
effective check to the operations of the Paraguayan
bolicheras whose runners, in the guise of simple fisher-

IN SOUTH AMERICA 137

folk and orange-sellers, do a steady business in cana and
the black cigars which the women smoke. A good deal
of the smuggling is done by women, relying upon the sex
taboo to protect them from the hands of strange men :
they carry cana in sausage skins, artfully coiled in coigns
of vantage about their persons. For such cases, suspicion
being justified by the size or shape of the alleged orange
vendor, an ingenious protector of the revenue once devised
the simple though risky expedient of deftly pricking the
protuberance with a bare bodkin, whereupon, so to speak,
the lady's spirit forsook her. But in these sparsely
inhabited regions of immense distances, the smuggler's
opportunities are poor at best, and the cost of the pre-
ventive service must be far greater than the utmost
figure of the revenue it can save ; so that, apart from the
pleasurable excitement which it affords, the whole business,
economically speaking, is foolish and futile. On the
morning that I left Las Palmas for Asuncion, after a night
of howling tormento and torrential rain, I saw in the
damp and dismal dawn, a pitiful group of five of these
contrabandists, making their mate over a spluttering fire
by the edge of a little wood, where they had probably
slept. Two of them were women, by no means ill-favoured
but wretchedly clad and shivering (the temperature had
fallen in a few hours from 95 to 78 degrees, with the south
wind), and I wondered, as I watched them preparing their
scanty meal, what possible compensation can existence
offer for all its vexations to poor devils like these ? Their
boat, a ramshackle thing, lay moored close by, and, as a
guarantee of good faith, no doubt, they had spread a few
hundred oranges — three or four shillings' worth — to dry
upon the bank. One of them, a mere lad, was listlessly
casting a long single-hook line into the stream, more from
force of habit, it seemed, than in the hope of catching

138 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

anything but a cold. The trade of the gallant bandillero
seemed a poor business.

Though wild and often desolate in its swampier parts
the Chaco region is very beautiful, with an insidious
beauty that grips and holds you. There is magic in the
loneliness, the untamed virginity of the silent places.
Even in the clearings of man's handiwork, Nature com-
mands respect; you feel that his intrusion is a piece of
presumption. Let him but cease to toil for a brief season
and all his landmarks are swiftly submerged. The water-
logged condition of the country, unpleasantly conspicuous
in the rainy season, is due to the presence of a thick layer
of hard clay just below the surface; the least heavy
rain means more water on the surface than the rivers can
readily carry off. Mother Earth hereabouts consists, in
fact, of non-porous clay, with a top dressing of vegetable
matter; you will not see a stone in a day's march. It is
an ideal breeding-ground for mosquitoes; nowhere on
earth, not even in Siberia, does this malignant little
beast attain to such fierce energy, size and voracity. In
the higher and drier patches of country, where the cattle
are bred (large herds, used almost exclusively for home
consumption) , the grass grows so thick and high that the
biggest pointer dog gets lost in it. There is fair shooting
to be had on these pasto lands — the smaller partridge of
the country and the martinetta (Rhynchotus rufescus),
about the size of a hen pheasant. This latter bird, being
hopelessly stupid and good to eat, is bound to disappear
completely from the cultivated districts (as most of the
Italian labourers have a gun for pot hunting purposes),
just as it has disappeared elsewhere. The best way to
shoot them in the Chaco is from the back of a well-broken
horse, with mounted peons on either side to serve as
beaters. The birds are easily flushed and as a rule do not

IN SOUTH AMERICA 139

fly far, but it is not easy to find and get them up a second
time. Nor is it easy to hold your reins in one hand and a
gun in the other when mosquitoes, with a proboscis like
a small needle, are making holes in your face and drawing
blood all the time.

The variety of bird life is astonishing, reminding one
of the descriptions which old rancheros give of the wild
birds that used to make the lagoons melodious and beauti-
ful in Uruguay, before the damnable devices of the feather
hunters slew them to make a shopgirl's holiday. Even
here in the Chaco the milliners' murderers and their
agents are not unknown, but, heaven be praised ! there
are still impenetrable fastnesses, at the heart of the great
rivers and lakes, where egrets, flamingoes and herons
may live undisturbed and dance in the sun. Nearer to
the haunts of men the toucan may be seen in top-heavy
flight; in a day's walk I saw three beautiful kinds of
shrike, including the ubiquitous bien-te-veo, kingfishers,
humming-birds, parrots, oven-birds, hawks, eagles and
caranchos (Polyborus Tharus), in great numbers. Song
birds are many and tuneful; to hear the choir invisible
that comes from a gathering of warblers in some tala
thicket, or close-leafed flowering tree, is a joy for ever.
The complaining note of the restless teru-teru (lapwing) ,
though somewhat less strident here than farther south,
becomes a weariness to the flesh, because of its unceasing
reiteration. This enfant gate among birds, protected by
colonists and natives alike because of a superstition which
defies time and civilisation, has waxed exceedingly bold
in South America by reason of his immunity from the
risks that beset other edible fowl; if it were not for the
fortunate fact that plovers' eggs are as popular with
peons as they are with plutocrats, their numbers would
long since have darkened the heavens. As it is, giving

140 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

him all the benefit of his reputation as a watch-dog, I find
the teru-teru something of a nuisance, and his peevish
cry an irritant, as I take my walks abroad and he darts
screaming within a few feet of my head.

From Las Palmas, past the mouth of the river Bermejo,
that flows through vast wildernesses unexplored, past
Formosa, capital of the " territory," through endless
shoals and sandbanks, the river-boat will bring you in a
day to Asungion, chief city of the Republic of Paraguay.

CHAPTER VIII

THE DELECTABLE CITY OF ASUNCION

A FEW days in Asuncion will serve as an excellent
corrective to the feverish delusions of the West, if indeed
any of them should have clung to us thus far. Unless
one is a buyer or a seller, or (worse still) a debt collector,
body and soul become quickly attuned to the languidly
contemplative atmosphere of the place. Life is short, you
say ? Alas, Senor, how true ! But why make it also
uncomfortable? So few things are worth the trouble of
haste; love and war, perhaps, but certainly neither
business, nor religion, nor the pomps and vanities of polite
society. Here, in Asungion, as far as the male population
is concerned, it is nearly always afternoon, and the dis-
cussion of politics is ever their chief occupation. Here,
as in Lisbon, Constantinople or Peking, and for precisely
similar reasons, every enfranchised citizen is first and
foremost the henchman of one or other of the ever-warring
political factions; leaders and led conspiring together to
prey upon productive industry of every kind. The bureau-
crat is all in all, revelling amidst the chaos of national
bankruptcy, in the make-believe world of his own bom-
bastic rhetoric, thumping his empty tub, and loudly
proclaiming the ultimate triumph of that creed which,
on our own side of the world, offers to every citizen
" ninepence for fourpence " in return for his vote.

Between 1881 and 1909 Asun$ion has achieved and
enjoyed six separate revolutions, each of which was elo-
quently proclaimed at its birth as an epoch-making crisis

141

142 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

in the history of civilisation. Truly, as a sober Spanish
chronicler declared long ago, " the people of Asun$ion
only cease from political strife when a breathing space
becomes absolutely necessary." Mr. Cunninghame Gra-
hame puts it even more forcibly when he says : " Even the
over-praised citizens of Athens, at the time of Pericles,
were not more instant in the Agora, than the noisy mob
of half-bred patriots, who in the sandy streets of Asuncion
were ever agitating, always assembling, and doing every-
thing within their power to show to the world the perfect
picture of a democratic State." Alas for the Jesuits and
their splendid dream of an Arcadia governed by benevolent
wisdom for the peaceful welfare of the commonwealth !

As the ship comes slowly to her moorings at the Asuncion
Customs Wharf, all the sights and sounds of the harbour
and its approaches combine to produce the impression of
time hanging gracefully on listless hands. Over yonder,
across the river, stands the unconquered wilderness of the
Chaco, a perpetual reminder of the futility of struggling
against destiny. On this side, many of the buildings
that straggle down the foothills to the water-side bear
witness to the relentless ravages of tropical vegetation.
Here a mill is gradually crumbling to picturesque decay,
forlornly patched and propped; there in a deserted
clearing, a few orange trees stand like derelicts above the
tangled undergrowth. The Customs Wharf itself is far
gone in dilapidation, one of its main beams swinging
limply 'twixt wind and water. In the harbour, old hulks,
tugs and strange obsolete craft lie intermingled with the
able-bodied ships in various stages of raggedness.

The navy of the Republic, consisting chiefly of an ancient
collier, converted to purposes of war by means of a conning-
tower and sundry guns, lies over against the dilapidated
House of Congress. There being no revolution in progress

n

0

IN SOUTH AMERICA 143

at the moment, her customary business of bombarding, or
preparing to bombard, the city's public buildings is
happily in abeyance; one of her boat's crews, gaily
apparelled, is conveying a party of ladies to the shore.
In the shallows beneath the barracks a troop of cavalry
horses are being bathed ; their riders greet the rowers of
the ladies' boat with ribaldries of a raciness at which
Sancho Panza would have blushed.

The wharf is thronged; apparently all the friends of
all the passengers and crew are there, every lace vendor and
fruit pedlar in the town, every idle citizen in search of
diversion or down-river news, not to mention the usual
noisy crowd of chanqadores and cab-drivers, intent on
their legitimate business of transport. These begin
bargaining with the passengers at long range ; the tumult
and the shouting remind one of a landing at Port Said or
Canton. The stranger, marked down as rich and easy
prey, becomes the suffering centre of a cyclonic turmoil
of words. The chanqador class prides itself professionally
on its eloquence, diverted in these its rare moments of
labour from the serious business of politics. Was not
the Seiior Presidente of the Republic a Customs runner
in his youth ? The man who carries your trunk from the
wharf to the picturesque ruin of a cab, and consigns you
to the hotel of his selection, may very possibly confront
you next year as a dignitary of the State.

The sturdy vociferous rogue who secured my unresisting
person was known to his friends and fellow-politicians as
El Gordo (Anglice, Fatty). He subsequently proved to
be not only a man of weight in the community, but
possessed of a fund of information, and a lively sense of
humour. His manner in levying tribute was such an
effective combination of the hidalgo and the highwayman,
that remonstrance would have been absurd ; but he atoned

144 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

for this by firmly insisting that, appearances to the con-
trary notwithstanding, the only proper abiding-place for
a caballero in Asuncion is the Hotel St. Pierre. For this,
O Gordo, may you attain to your heart's desire and
become a Comisario of Police at the next revolution !

In June (which is her winter) Asuncion, city of gardens
and orange groves set upon a little hill, usually welcomes
the traveller with genial sunshine; but when the wind
blows from the south, there is a little nipping in the air,
which makes the peon to shiver in his cotton shirt and the
market women to tuck their manias more closely about
them. There is an elusive, elemental charm about the
place, which grows upon you irresistibly, despite all
prejudices and premonitions; a subtle influence, born of
the visions of old Moorish Spain, that greet you fleetingly
at every street corner, struggling against the flamboyant
democracy of ultra modernity on the one hand, and the
tutelary spirits of a primordial race on the other. Even
in the picturesque ruins that mark the tracks of recent
revolutions, in the perverse poverty of these dwellers in
a land which Nature meant to flow with milk and honey,
there is something that instinctively evokes the philosophic
contemplative mood.

Green grows the grass in the streets of Asungion, even
unto the ballast of the tram lines. Their pavement is
of unhewn stones, loosely embedded in the loess mud, so
that in wet weather the mules go stolidly splashing
through ruts and holes, where the pea-soup water will lie
for days. The city boasts neither drainage system nor
waterworks. If you would study its main artery of
commerce and methods of business, go down to the Calle
Montevideo, hard by the Custom House, where at the
water front ships and lighters discharge their cargoes
into loud-creaking carts that look as if they had seen

IN SOUTH AMERICA 145

service under De Soils. A narrow way this, cut by the
heavy traffic to a chaos of deep ruts and mounds, where
the mules (six or seven to a cart) flounder and strain at
the traces and their drivers call heaven and hell to witness
their affliction, in seas of mud or clouds of dust, as the
sorry case may be. In the absence of pontoons, the
carts must perforce go far out into the river, where the
water comes up to the mules' shoulders. Even thus,
no doubt, they handled the city's commerce two hundred
years ago.

Go next to the House of Congress, where a battered
shield, inscribed with the Republic's motto, " Paz y
Justicia," looks down on mildewed walls all bespattered
b^ revolutionary shot and shell. The building stands
open to the winds of heaven ; inside, the bureaucracy is
represented by a couple of weary warders and a slouchy
youth, guardian of a mouldy collection of blue-books,
which calls itself the Biblioteca l^acional. A door has
been removed bodily from one of the side entrances,
revealing a winding stairway within, which leads to the
upper floor, where, on occasions, the Conscript Fathers
forgather. At its foot, an emaciated dog lies sleeping
on a tattered fragment of matting. Over the way, across
the Plaza, stands the Theatre, also partially destroyed
by gun-fire in the sacred cause of Paz y Justicia. The
square is nearly deserted this afternoon, because of the
cold wind; but the town band, evidently trained by
German methods, is discoursing Puccini for the benefit
of a few children at play amongst the ragged flower-beds.
A cavalry officer, in war-paint imported from the Father-
land, stands killing time at the entrance to the barracks.
In a little while he will go, clanking his spurs, up Florida
Street to the Club, where the elite forgather to talk
politics after the siesta.

146 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

At the end of the Plaza, near to the Cathedral, there
stands a monument, of the curiously ineffective kind that
one finds occasionally in the Plazas Independencia and
Avenidas de Mayo from Panama to Paraguay, with a
nondescript angel on top and electric lights festooned all
over it. Tis a sermon in stone for the moralist and
philosopher; for on this pillar, amidst the record of the
proudest dates in the career of " Paz y Justicia," you will
find the recent marks of rifle fire and light artillery.
The city, it tells you, was founded in 1536 ; it heard the
first small voice (grito) of Liberty in 1811 ; the Constitution
was proclaimed in 1870, etc., etc. But it makes no
mention of the crowning achievement of Liberty, as
understood by the Francia-Lopez breed of politicians.
It does not tell you that in the Homeric struggle of
Paraguay against Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil (1865-
70) every male capable of bearing arms was driven to the
slaughter; that the country went to war with a popula-
tion of 1,340,000 and came out of it with 220,000, of whom
only 28,746 were men. Yet this is the overpowering fact
in the history of Paraguay, the results of which confront
us to-day in every phase and aspect of her social, economic
and political life.

The present condition of the Republic is fairly reflected
in its currency, which consists entirely of greasy paper.
The Paraguayan dollar (peso fuerte) is worth, as I have
said, between three and four cents gold, as times go;
the average peon labourer earns ten of these dollars (say
eighteenpence) a day. The bare necessities of life, in-
cluding house-rent, are fairly cheap, but everything in
the way of imported or manufactured goods is extremely
dear. Boots, for example, are beyond the means of the
working class; so that men, women and children, every
one except politicians and policemen, go barefoot. Eggs

IN SOUTH AMERICA 147

cost fifteen dollars a dozen, a ride in a tram one dollar.
Even largesse to a beggar or a bootblack must take the
form of a bank-note. Every Indian market woman, in
exchange for her fowls and fish and fruit, goes home with
a thick wad of this paper-money, to which each day's
use adds increase of ragged greasiness. The lowest note
value is fifty centavos — roughly three farthings; and
for the printing of these, mark you, the Government has
gone to the American Bank-note Company of New York
and acquired a very creditable specimen of steel engraving.
It has certainly never occurred to any market-women
(and probably not to the Conscript Fathers) to inquire
what proportion the cost of printing bears to the face value
of these scraps of paper, or to trace the connection between
this sort of frenzied finance and the chronic insolvency of
the Treasury. Such things are nobody's business. The
little groups of gesticulating citizens that discuss politics
with such eloquent fervour on the side-walks, allot their
praise or blame to public men entirely by results, measured
in terms of loaves and fishes. The lower the nation's
credit, the more prolific the Treasury with its paper, a
phenomenon by no means confined to Paraguay.

In a community where the " emerged tenth " looks
frankly to the State to be maintained in dignified ease
from the public funds, it were churlish to reproach the
general body of citizens either for their habits of cheerful
indolence and improvidence, or for their destructive
methods of remonstrating with Providence and the
politicians, when there are not loaves and fishes to go
round. But, to give him his due, your Paraguayan,
even when, wrathful against the words and works of public
men, he sets out to wreck public buildings, retains the
manners of a gentleman and a certain philosophic quality
of urbanity. I think it is chiefly this quality of the peon

148 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

class, together with his complete lack of snobbery, which
gradually compels you to a sneaking sympathy with his
primordial point of view, even though he may treat his
women as beasts of burden and pawn his thirsty soul for
cana. As you saunter through the silent streets of the
sleeping town at midday (it takes its siesta from n to
2.30, be the weather hot or cold), insensibly the earnestness
of all our hustling, bustling civilisation, our cult of
machinery and Mammon, fade to their proper insignifi-
cance, and this people is almost justified, if only because
its individual soul (for what it may be worth) is still its
own. In such an atmosphere it is impossible to maintain
firmly protestant moods of moral superiority. Easier
far, and possibly wiser, to let oneself drift unprotesting,
on the placid tide of manana and mas 6 menos.

This facile descent, this process of adaptation to
environment, is generally rapid, but it is rarely complete.
New Yorkers never attain to it, and Frenchmen seldom.
Irishmen achieve it best, especially in the life of the
" camp/' because there is something imperturbably human
in the philosophy of the Celt, which enables him to
sympathise with his primordial Paraguayan brother, and
also because he himself has never wittingly yielded to the
tyranny of the Time machine.

My French host of the Hotel St. Pierre, whither El
Gordo conducted me, has chosen a profession in which
even the most tolerant of men must find it hard to accept
the manners and customs of Paraguay. Monsieur St.
Pierre has certainly not accepted them, though he came
here thirty years ago. You get an inkling of his views
from the fact that the front door of the hotel is kept
constantly locked, and every guest provided with a latch-
key— " a cause des mouches, des voleurs et des crachats,"
as he is careful to explain. What with the war, and the

IN SOUTH AMERICA 149

depreciation of currency in this country, and the increasing
price of commodities, no wonder if mine host and his wife
long for the Normandy of their youth, and have but little
good to say of a land where a bottle of good Medoc is
reckoned at 112 pesos fuertes. In his little bureau,
lavishly decorated with the " Illustration's " portraits of
French Generals, " Monsieur 1'Empereur " (as his local
title goes) will hold forth by the hour against the bribery
and corruption, the drunkenness and dishonesty and dirt
of Asungion, the incorrigible laziness and promiscuous
morals of its people. Philosophy is clearly beyond the
reach of a hotel-keeper in this land, unless he and his
guests are willing to abolish clocks and all other devices
for defeating the leisurely instincts of the Paraguayan.
For a Frenchman who believes in savoury meals, cooked
and eaten d point, the mas 6 menos attitude towards life
is bound to generate deadly wrath-matter in the system.
And yet, for all his denunciations, mine host and his staff
are the best of friends; evidently his dislike of Para-
guayan institutions descends not from the general to the
particular in the case of the hi jo del pais, as it does in the
case of the German.

Here no German need apply. At no time welcomed,
they have been firmly and finally excluded from the Hotel
St. Pierre since the war. There are plenty of them in
Asuncion and at Lake San Bernadino close by, but
Madame's cuisine recherche is not for them, even as
transients. If, being an Englishman, you should happen
also to be corpulent and guttural and goggled (which
Heaven forbid), you must prove to mine host's satisfaction
that you are not of the abhorred race. Similarly, if
you come as a single lady, you must satisfy him of
your respectability, and in the absence of evidence,
be is apt to judge swiftly by appearances, Tlaese little

150 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

ways of his have, no doubt, a good deal to do with the
phenomenon of the locked front door. " Better an
empty room than an undesirable guest," says 1'Empereur.
As a moral sentiment, unimpeachable, but as a maxim
for hotel management, hard to carry into lucrative
practice.

In the third year of the war, the German in these parts
walked delicately, a very different creature from the
boastful bully that strutted and gave himself all-conquering
airs in the bad days before the battle of the Marne, and
again, for a little while, before the battle of the Falklands.
Now, from Pernambuco to Patagonia, even in places
where German Kultur and the credit system have planted
the Pickelhaube : even where local governments and Press
unite to assure the Teuton of a neutrality that is nothing
if not prudent, Hans and Fritz move humbly and wear a
chastened mien. For, let diplomacy and high finance
do what they will, the German has become painfully
aware of the fact that France is the spiritual home of the
Latin Republics of South America, and that, in the day of
France triumphant, the sons of the Fatherland do well
to keep quiet. Even in south-eastern Brazil they are
bidding a long farewell to all their dreams of a new
Fatherland overseas, that should stretch southwards to
the River Plate. Not as rulers, but as strangers, must
they continue to dwell in these lands; and as strangers
for many years to come, they will have to live down the
infamies that have disgraced their nation in the eyes of
every self-respecting peon. Indeed, as matters stand
since Germany's defeat, it looks as if the only sympathy
and support that Messrs. Meyer and Schultz will get in the
future, is likely to come (as it came steadily, all through
the war) from their good and faithful friends in England—
from Manchester and Bradford and the Union of Demo-

IN SOUTH AMERICA 151

cratic Control, from sentimental fools in government offices
and rogues of the sleek cosmopolitan breed.

Here, in Paraguay, as late as June 1916, a large propor-
tion of the trade in Manchester and other British goods
was still handled by Germans. It seems incredible that,
after two years of war, British goods, carried in British
ships, should have been consigned to Germans over-
seas ; but the fact remains, and this despite the repeated
warnings and protests of British Ministers and merchants
on the spot. It seems incredible, I say, that having driven
the German from the seas and having thus secured the
means of ousting him from his snug place in the trade of
South America, we should have kept that place warm for
him and comforted him, in the face of all our Orders in
Council and Black Lists and Board of Trade flapdoodle
about " Trading with the Enemy." It is incontestable
that some " unseen hand," working for the protection and
maintenance of German trade interests, triumphed over
all the avowed policies of Great Britain in these parts,
so that even the heathen blasphemed. Shall we ever
know, I wonder, whether it was an enemy hand of perfidy,
or only the clumsy paw of dogged British conservatism
and red tape, guided to foolishness by the persuasiveness
of Israelite finance in high places?

On the road to Villa Morra, Asunsion's fashionable
suburb, there are many unmistakable signs of the presence
of the prosperous Hun, in the shape of pretentious villas
that shriek of Hamburg and Old Heidelberg. Coloured
glass balls, terra-cotta dachshunds and porcelain gnomes,
all suffering more or less from the climate, stand out
pathetically incongruous against the stately background
of orange trees, bananas and palms. Hans brings his
fantastic Lares with him to the New World, and, through
good or evil report, remains faithful to them, to his

152 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

Gretchen and to his sentimental traditions. Which things
may perhaps be accounted unto him for righteousness of
a kind.

Lest my truthful description of the delectable city of
Asuncion should cause the reader to wonder by what
stratagems this Republic has continued to exist to this
day as an independent State, let it be explained that, in
the forests and cattle-ranches of the interior, the Para-
guayans, male as well as female, are by no means in-
capable of productive industry. It is only when they
come under the combined influence of demagogues and
drink in the cities, that the idea of labour becomes utterly
unworthy of a freeborn citizen. The mainstay of the
country's finances is the yerba mate industry (Paraguayan
tea), and the backbone of that industry is a Company
called the " Industrial Paraguaya," now controlled from
London and locally managed by a Scotchman. If it were
not for the inveterate tendency of the politicians to kill
every goose that shows signs of laying golden eggs, the
yerba trade might yet become the financial salvation of
the country. The " Industrial " owns 1200 leagues of
land, that is to say, about a ninth part of the territory of
Paraguay Oriental; its product is greatly superior to
Brazilian yerba, and might be laid down more cheaply
than coffee in the markets of Argentina and Uruguay.
But the trail of the politician lies heavy on the enter-
prise ; want of roads and light railways, corrupt adminis-
tration, illicit picking by roving bands of smugglers —
small wonder if, contending with all these, the Company
has paid no dividends for several years. Yet the land
possesses great natural resources, and if ever the day
comes when capital can safely be invested in its develop-
ment, the wilderness may yet be made to blossom as the
rpse,

IN SOUTH AMERICA 153

At the packing warehouse in Asungion, where the crop
from the up-country yerbales is dried and pressed into
sacks, the peons work hard enough, considering their
reputation for laziness and their pitiful wage of ten dollars
a day. The Company produced four and a half million
kilos of yerba in 1915, worth roughly a shilling per kilo.
At the Corrientes mill, hydraulic machinery is used for
packing the leaf, but the manager at Asuncion finds that
man-power (using wooden pestles) works out cheaper in
the long run. I remember once meeting with certain
exponents of scientific agriculture, who had come on a
sort of semi-benevolent, semi-practical mission from
America to China, whose plans for rice planting by
machinery were knocked out in one round when they
came up against the pitiful price of Chinese coolie labour.
Where labour and time are alike futile, since they cannot
be made to supply the human animal's irreducible wants,
your only effective machine is a quick-firing gun. And
of this remedy for the world's elemental ills, the present
generation in Paraguay has surely had enough.

In attempting to forecast the future of a country like
this, and the destiny of its people, there is little guidance
to be had from studying trade returns, or comfort in the
clauses of a Constitution ; also (remembering the Jesuits)
we cannot pin our faith to the efforts of the most Christian
Missions. Here, even more than in Mexico, the immediate
question that confronts us is that of the possibility of race
survival, of the capacity of this ancient Guarany stock to
adapt itself, successfully and in time, to the conditions
which our economic pressure is steadily forcing upon it.
It is therefore the soul of the people that concerns us, the
structural character of the race ; does it show any signs
of intelligent national consciousness, of collective capacity
to emerge, through peace pr war, from the category of

154 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

beasts of burden ? Of course, if one could bring oneself
to believe the pompous poppy-cock of professional
politicians, or the sorry stuff written for European con-
sumption by subsidised oracles, there would be no need
to worry about the body and soul of the native-born :
all will be for the best in the best of all possible worlds,
and Utopia just round the corner. But for those of us
who, with glimmerings of understanding, watch the
struggle of inefficient primitive peoples against the modern
forces of Mammon (as we have seen it in Turkey or in
China, in Portugal, Mexico and the Central Latin Re-
publics of South America), it is the soul of the man in the
field that finally matters. After all, the fiercely " re-
volving " inhabitants of Asuncion are only a tenth of the
people of Paraguay, and here, as in other turbulent
Republics, when the politicians create strife . it is the
common people that fights and pays. What prospect is
there, that the man in the field of Paraguay will learn
when to fight, and wherefore ?

Looking dispassionately ahead, there does not seem
to be much chance of survival either for the Guarany
race or for the Republic of Paraguay. The mestizo's
primitive ancestors dwelt too long in the twilight of their
slumbering gods. From a planetary point of view, and
remembering that the whole population of Paraguay is
about the same as that of the Borough of Kensington,
you may say that it does not really matter; and yet, as
Ireland proves, and Poland, this question of nationality
is not so much a matter of numbers as of national ideals.
The sacred rights of smaller nations, emphasised in the
recent Titanic struggle of the larger, are not so simple as
many of our leader-writers appeat to think. The abstract
right appeals, no doubt, to that sentimental abstraction
known as the conscience of the world, but in practice no

IN SOUTH AMERICA 155

small nation ever remains independent unless it be
geographically protected against invasion or useful as
a buffer state l to other and stronger Powers. As far as
Paraguay is concerned, it has retained its independence
since 1870 simply because Brazil and the Argentine
allowed it to remain a bankrupt buffer state, neither
wishing to fight for it at the moment. To this fact only
the Paraguayans owe the continuance of their proud
privilege of sending thirteen Senators and twenty-six
Deputies to the House of Paz y Justicia and of paying
them each $36,000 (£300) a year for misgoverning the
country.

It is difficult for the foreigner in South America to form
any permanently satisfactory idea as to the opinions of
I'homme du peuple concerning his country and himself,
and in Paraguay it is particularly difficult to obtain
intimate and reliable information as to the real relations
that exist between governors and governed, and between
employers and employed. As in Mexico, the Indian race
has here developed, by process of interbreeding, many
characteristics of the Spaniard, while retaining un-
fathomable depths of primitive childishness. If it were
not for the record of fanatical patriotism displayed in the
wars of Lopez, the general attributes of the peon class,
as one sees it at labour in the yerbales, might lead one to
the conclusion that national consciousness exists only in
the fervid imagination of the official mind. The actual
conditions under which the peon consents to exist, are
suggestive rather of mediaeval serfdom than of an en-
lightened Republican system, whilst the attitude of the

1 Moreover, the most ardent champions of the rights of
humanity, even at Washington, seem disposed to view with
complacency the absorption by peaceful penetration of a passive
people such as the Koreans, or (pace the Monroe doctrine) the
gradual Japanning of Peru.

156 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

average patron suggests that, for him, the labourer is only
a little higher than his cattle, and a good deal lower than
a free and independent voter. The Indian nature persists
in the peon in a strange admixture of dog-like devotion
(of which the Church has ever been ready to take advan-
tage for purposes of State) and unreasoning suspicion of
things new and strange. It persists also in the tempera-
mental lack of energy, as distinct from industry, in labour.
The peon works here, as elsewhere in South America, much
in the same way as Chinese coolies labour for hire :
doggedly, with a stolid, even cheerful acceptance of toil
as part of the inevitable destiny of man, but without the
craftsman's joy in achievement and certainly without
the spiritual satisfaction of " something accomplished,
something done/' which frequently stimulates the Anglo-
Saxon to his labour of days. Upon him, as upon the sons
of Ham, lies still the ancient curse of Eden, " thorns also
and thistles shall the ground bring forth to thee, in the
sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread, till thou return
unto the ground." Upon this native stock the grafting
of the virtues and vices of the Spaniard, followed, since
the passing of Lopez, by fantastic modern supergrowths
of hybrid Democracy, have produced a very complex
type, in which the old copper-coloured Adam struggles
fitfully with fragments of the gospel of modernity according
to Liebknecht and Lloyd George.

Dean Funes, of whose work I have already made
mention, describes the character of the Guaran^ Indians,
before the days of steam and factories and Constitutions,
in a passage which remains full of interest and more than
local value : " These natives," he observes, " are of a pale
colour, of good figure, and well-proportioned. Both in
talent and intelligence they are capable of good develop-
ment. Lacking in natural faculty for invention, they

IN SOUTH AMERICA 157

excel in imitation. Idleness appears to be natural to
them, though it may be more the result of habit than of
temperament; their capacity for acquiring knowledge is
marked, and novelty appeals powerfully to their minds.
They are eager to command, and acquit themselves
honourably in any position to which they may attain.
Eloquence commands the highest respect among them,
and avarice has no degrading hold upon their minds.
Quick to resent an insult, they would rather submit to
punishment than bear an injurious word. Unchastity
in their women they regard with indifference, even
husbands making light of infidelity in their wives," and
so on.

During the Golden Age — two centuries long — of the
Jesuits' benevolent despotism in Greater Paraguay, the
peaceful industry of these Indians made them probably
the most contentedly-happy people on the American
continent, and the Mission territories the most productive
possessions of the Spanish Crown. It is necessary to
bear in mind this fact, and the character of a people which
lent itself so readily to an Arcadian type of religious
communism, in order to appreciate the tragedy of their
history since the introduction of Paz y Justicia, modern
style. Even if the material benefits continually promised
in the name of Democracy were, by some miracle, forth-
coming, all the history of Latin America goes to prove
that the Indian needs something more than loaves and
fishes, some spiritual nourishment and direction. It
explains also the reverence which was felt, even by the
victims of his tyranny, for Francia, a Dictator who, with
all his faults (like Diaz in Mexico), at least maintained
order and a rough-and-ready sort of communism. The
Indians mourned Francia, after his death, because, with
all his faults, and what Carlyle calls his " grim unspeak-

158 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

abilities," this ruler had in him that quality which
satisfied the spiritual side of their nature. Indeed, as
compared with their present lot under the spasmodic garru-
lous rule of political adventurers, Francia's Dictatorship
appears almost beneficent and certainly dignified. For
this Dominican, ripe for canonisation, this " excellent
superior of Jesuits/' knew at least the saving grace of
authoritative silence.

In considering the present characteristics of the Para-
guayans and their probable destinies, a temporary factor
resultant from the campaigns of Lopez must not be over-
looked— namely, the numerical preponderance of women.
At the close of that magnificent and perfectly futile
struggle, there were five women to every man throughout
the decimated Republic, and this although women had
been slain by thousands. In a charming description of
a festival held at the old Jesuit Reduction of Santa Maria
la Mayor, when peace had been restored to the wilderness,
Mr. Cunninghame Grahame touches lightly on this matter :
" Bands of boys," he writes, " for in those days most of
the men had been killed off in the past wars, came trooping
in, accompanied by crowds of women and of girls, who
carried all their belongings ; for there were thirteen women
to a man, and the youngest boy was at a premium amongst
the Indian women, who in the villages, where hardly any
men were left, fought for male stragglers like unchained
tigresses." The social and economic results of this
parlous dislocation of the balance of nature are just as
unmistakable here in Paraguay to-day as they were,
mutatis mutandis, in California in the days when there
were five men to every woman. From the moral and
social point of view, it is not good for either men or
women to be at a premium, either for purposes of matri-
mony or bread-winning. If the Paraguay peon's treat-

IN SOUTH AMERICA 159

ment of his women-folk is something less than cavalier;
if his wives and his sisters and his cousins and his aunts
are wont to play before him their humble part as beasts
of burden, let us not ascribe this to him as original sin,
but rather to the brutal force of imposed circumstances.
No doubt but that, in process of time, nature and immigra-
tion will adjust the sex balance and the Paraguayan
women will then cease to compete for the favour of their
faineant swains by supporting them in idleness and
abetting them in the consumption of cafia. As matters
stand, the peon undoubtedly has things very much his
own way, within the limits of his resources, in the matter
of wine, women and song. Without a doubt, he gets more
of all three than his grandfather did in Francia's day,
and often more than is good for him. He takes the gifts
of the gods with something very suggestive of hidalgo
nonchalance, being (as Father Funes observed) of a keenly
imitative nature. His fondness for cana is probably the
worst feature of his disposition, and if common report
speaks truly, it is a growing evil. In every enterprise
where foreign capital is involved, and aboriginal morals
supervised in the interests of dividends, strict rules are
made excluding all liquor from the premises. At the
factory of the " Industrial " all the windows are wired,
so that yerba may not be passed out to the peons' ladies-
in-waiting, or cana passed in. On the ground floor the
lower half of the window is boarded up, for it was found
that wire netting did not prevent the men from getting
their liquor ; their faithful wives held the cana up to the
windows in a mate bowl, and their lords sucked it through
the wire by means of the bombilla. In the sugar and
quebracho (tannin) factories, where Indians are em-
ployed, here and in the Argentine, precautions against
pilfering require constant vigilance. " Personne n'est

160 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

ires ladrone," is a Swiss manager's verdict of Paraguayan
honesty, " mais tout le monde est un peu ladrone."

In his relations with women the Paraguayan is primitive,
passionate and promiscuous. Released from the dis-
cipline and moral restraints that made him, according
to the chroniclers, a fairly decent member of society under
the Jesuits' dispensation, and encouraged in his poly-
gamous instincts by the fact that he is an object of matri-
monial (or morganatic) competition, his love affairs are
frequent and free. As a result, Society and the law
recognise three classes of offspring — legitimate children,
illegitimate and natural. The " naturals " are those born
of the liaison of unmarried parents ; they are often taken
into the man's subsequently-acquired and legitimate
family, and brought up as part of it, the mother being
provided for. Illegitimate children are those born of a
man's irregular connections after marriage ; these by the
laws of the land are entitled to claim a share of their
father's estate upon his death, a condition of affairs which
provides much scandalous material for the gossips and
profitable work for lawyers. Philoprogenitiveness is
strongly marked in both sexes, so that (as in the East)
sterility in a woman is commonly regarded as justifying
her husband in contracting irregular relations. For the
same reason home life is seen at its best in Paraguayan
families during the period when the children are young.

Nevertheless, the Spanish blood in his veins often
invests the peon's love affairs with a touch of Quixotic
adventure and a romantic quality, in which chivalry and
insouciance are fitfully blended, as amongst the Gauchos.
Fierce homicidal jealousy in his blood, and black moods
of swift revenge when balked of his heart's desire ; most
of the tragedies that stand recorded in rude crosses by the
wayside are tales of passionate intrigue and vendettas, for

IN SOUTH AMERICA 161

life is cheap in the wilderness of the yerbales, and the arm
of the law as short as the memories of men. Often,
indeed, the law is so framed and administered, here as
elsewhere, in the Latin Republics, that it serves as a
direct incentive to lawlessness.

To cite a typical case in point : in 1916, at one of the
yerbales stations of the " Industrial," a mestizo carpenter
became enamoured of the major-domo's sister, and,
following the customary etiquette, asked permission to
pay court to the lady, pour le bon motif. The major-domo
not only refused his consent, but persuaded the manager
to have the man transferred to another station. The
carpenter begged and protested, promising to abandon
his suit, but the order was upheld — he must go. Con-
cealing the vengeful rage to which his passion now turned,
he feigned compliance, but on the day fixed for his de-
parture, he bribed a small Indian boy of the major-domo's
household to put arsenic into the family's midday food.
The major-domo died, and his sister, together with eleven
other persons, barely escaped with their lives. The
murderer went unpunished, in the absence of direct
evidence sufficient to impress the local Comisario, who
as it happened had his own grudge against the major-domo.
The avenging of the latter's death was thereupon under-
taken by one of the eleven, an Argentine of English
descent, who promptly set forth in dogged pursuit of the
poisoner. Both disappeared into the silent places of the
wilderness. The major-domo's brother took his place;
his sister resumed her innocent glad eye and killing smile,
and the tide of life flowed on, without a ripple of concern,
over the scene of her devastating conquest. Incidents
of this kind, that would furnish three days' headlines in
New England, scarcely attract editorial comment in the

news sheets of Asm^ion.
M

162 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

And yet, despite his sins of omission and commission,
the Paraguayan, like most of the descendants of Spanish-
Indian ancestors, is a lovable and interesting specimen of
humanity. The history of the race shows clearly that,
given good government administered by honest men, he
has in him the makings of a very decent and useful
citizen. Recognising this fact, and the obvious impossi-
bility of his ever achieving either civic decency or economic
utility under existing conditions, a sympathetic observer
can only ask himself, what reasonable prospect is there
of anything better being evolved from the political
elements at present active or latent in the State ?

According to the politicians themselves, peace and
prosperity await the nation at the cross-roads of the next
revolution; it is always the next. But experience has
repeatedly proved them to be lying prophets : the record
of the caudillos is one long-drawn tale of sordid ambition
and futile strife. There has been vitality and to spare,
and bloodshed, but neither discipline, unity nor organised
effort. All that has been evolved out of political chaos,
confusion and crime since 1870, is a parasitical bureau-
cracy, blind leaders of the blind. What then ? Dictator-
ship, in which South American writers like Garcia Calderon
see the best hopes of a stability, can only afford temporary
relief ; it may repress, but cannot eradicate the permanent
causes of disorganisation. Even the strongest of dictators
cannot hope to re-make the society which has made him ;
at best, he can but dominate it for a time.

Amalgamation with Argentina would probably solve
most of the country's pressing material problems, and if
it were not for the vested interests of demagogues and
politicians, the Paraguayans might be led to see that
such a solution would be all to their advantage. As
matters stand, however, the process of geographical and

IN SOUTH AMERICA 163

sympathetic gravitation tends rather towards Brazil, in
which direction there lies no possible hope of moral or
material salvation.

Finally, there is the prospect of gradual improvement
of the country's political and economic conditions by
means of European immigration. Already there are
some 15,000 Italian settlers of the industrious agricultural
class in the Republic, and the Government has had sense
enough to learn (as Brazil is learning) that their productive
industry is worth encouraging. But even for them (and
far more so for the Anglo-Saxon, as the pastoral experi-
ment of the " New Australia " Colony has proved) the
attractions of the country, as at present administered,
wane upon closer acquaintance. So long as Argentina
and Uruguay offer better security for life and property,
the fertile plains and rich forest lands of Paraguay are
likely to remain in their present rudimentary state of
development. But the increasing needs of this congested
planet in the matter of its daily bread, and the industrial
world's competition for raw materials, are such that,
pace the Monroe doctrine and all other artificial obstruc-
tions, it is impossible to conceive that a land like this
should continue much longer to be a barren stamping-
ground for the wild asses of politics. The day is coming
when they will have to get on or get out. The country
must be redeemed to purposes of economic usefulness.
Will the Guarany people perish in the process, by cafia
and competition, leaving no memorials of their race,
beyond the music of the names that cling to their rivers ?

The conscientious traveller who has come to Asm^ion
by the Parana and who wishes to see as much of Paraguay
as possible, may return to Buenos Aires by the railway
line (Paraguay's ewe lamb), on which a through train runs
weekly, with restaurant and sleeping-cars, via Encarnagion

164 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

on the Alto Parana. It is a journey which affords interest-
ing snap-shot glimpses of the unblossoming wilderness,
and, on the Argentine side, of cat tie -ranching in the
grand manner ; but the road is monotonous and decidedly
bumpy. Those who know it usually prefer the river.

On the day before my departure from Asuncion, being
by that time attuned to the leisurely moods of the people,
I sauntered into the telegraph office to despatch a message
to Buenos Aires. There had been a creciente this side
of Corrientes, and rumour had it that the Paraguayan
lines were not working. On this point no information
was forthcoming; the clerk, sucking thoughtfully at his
mate, finally accepted the telegram for transmission,
" without responsibility." From thence I proceeded to
the office of the Mihanovitch steamer line (latest of modern
Conquistadores) to book a berth for Corrientes. The
languid clerk looked up from his newspaper, and keeping
a careful finger on the line at which he was so unkindly
interrupted, observed, more in sorrow than in anger,
" We do not sell tickets until to-morrow." Whereupon
he resumed his reading. Next morning I returned to
find him feverishly making up arrears of work, for the
steamer which cleared at sunset. He was evidently not
accustomed to be disturbed in the fine frenzy of an effort
like this. " I am busy now, Senor," he said, without
looking up; " come again this afternoon." A week ago
this sort of thing might have stirred one to indite a futile
remonstrance; now, having achieved a philosophy
superior to the Time machine, you shrug your shoulders
gracefully and go your ways in peace.

As to your telegram, you discover in due course that
it was despatched by post, on the same steamer by which
you left, and was delivered at Buenos Aires two days
after your arrival. After all, what does it matter ? Tout

.

IN SOUTH AMERICA 165

s' arrange. Nevertheless, you wonder whether your foolish
dollars eventually found their way into the public funds
of " Paz y Justicia," or into the privy purse of the clerk
" without responsibility." Let us give him the benefit
of a " not-proven " doubt.

As the good ship Berna glides swiftly down the Chaco
shores, threading its way amongst little islands of floating
water- weeds and driftwood, we watch the evening mist,
like a garment " of white samite, mystic, wonderful/'
shrouding the waving Pampas grass and tola thickets in
its soft clinging folds. A pallid moon casts its sheen of
silver on the waters ; the chattering parliaments of parro-
quets are stilled, and all the ghostly wilderness flits past
in mysterious silence. At such an hour it is given to us
wayfarers to perceive something of the remote causes of
the manana philosophy, and to accept it for better or for
worse.

CHAPTER IX

ASUNCION TO MONTEVIDEO OVERLAND

FROM Asungion, returning to Corrientes, I took the
overland road to Montevideo, by railway first to Concordia
on the Rio Uruguay, and thence by boat to the mouth of
the Rio Negro, which is the jumping-off place for Mercedes.
From that drowsiest of " camp " towns, the Central
Uruguay Railway will take you, sooner or later, if the
fates are propitious, to Montevideo.

After the teeming wealth of flora and fauna in the Chaco,
to return to the almost unbroken monotony of pastoral
Argentina and Uruguay is apt to be somewhat depressing
at first. It is a change which produces a longing for the
wings of a dove, like that which seizes a man on the first
day he goes back to work in London (a foggy day, for
choice) after a holiday in France. Needless to say, London
and stern attention to business, with Upper Tooting and
Little Bethel in the background, are more profitable and
edifying than Paris in the long run, even as the flocks and
herds of the estancias, that run in endless succession from
Corrientes to Concordia, are more profitable than all the
magnificent extravagance of the Chaco. Granted that
all really good things and people are plain, one needs a
little time to get used to them, after the other kind. Of
course, every estanciero will tell you that no two estancias
are really alike, and that this impression of monotonous
sameness lies not in them, but in the undiscerning eye
of the uninitiated; just as sailors explain the subtle

differences which doubtless exist, but which the land-lubber

1 66

MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS 167

cannot see, between ships. I do not mean to say that
estancia life is monotonous — far from it — but I maintain
that the general aspect of the country, especially when
exhibited as a moving picture seen from the railway, is
about as exhilarating as that of the great wheat belt in
Canada or the steppes of the Ukraine, and should you
chance to pass this way at a time of serious drought, when
the land lies brown and parched and the cattle wander
miserably by the waterless canadas, seeking the last
patches of pasture, the scene is one that haunts the memory
like an evil dream.

But the chief cause of the inevitable impression of
flatness in the " camp " which is apt to depress sensitive
souls, lies in the scarcity of trees. A country may flow with
milk and honey, but if it lacks trees, it is like a woman who
lacks hair, deficient in something essential to our complete
satisfaction. If I were a ruler in Argentina or Uruguay,
I should make the planting of trees a matter not of exhorta-
tion, but of rigorous compulsion, and exempt all monies
from taxation for the next fifty years. Orchards and
vineyards are not to be demanded from districts subject
to devastating invasions of locusts, but tall poplars and
eucalyptus, planted with discrimination, make all the
difference to the landscape ; moreover, for trees that gather
to a shade, there are several natives immune from locusts,
such as the ancient mystic ombu, the paraiso, and the
hardwood nadabay, all well worth the trouble of planting
and fencing. Darwin endeavoured to explain the absence
of trees throughout the grassy pampean plain as the result
of the violence of the south-west pampero, which is
obviously absurd. Other puzzled observers have ascribed
it to the destruction of saplings by hares and other rodents,
but as rodents are not confined to the pampas, this theory is
equally untenable. My own tentative idea on the subject is,

168 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

that the son of the soil in general, and the lordly Gaucho
in particular, sees no particular virtue in trees except as
firewood ; that he prefers his native plains unencumbered
by obstacles which obstruct the view, or the lasso, of the
cattle-ranger, and that he regards tree-planting as a busi-
ness which Nature evidently intended the wind and the
birds to attend to, since it cannot be done by a man on
horseback. At every railway station you will see the
exhortatory advertisements of the scientific arboriculture
establishment at Toledo, offering over a hundred different
kinds of tree for sale, but it is rare to find more than
twenty species on any estancia, even where the property
includes a long stretch of wooded river bank.

Trees have increased in these parts of recent years, and
especially since the war sent the price of coal up to a figure
which gave the railways the alternative of using wood fuel
or going out of business. But even to-day you may see
wide stretches of country where the " camp " lies bare and
level to a featureless horizon, so that the sight of a solitary
ombu, or row of poplars, marking the approach to an
estancia, becomes a positive relief to the eye. Under
these conditions you get a vague impression of vast dis-
tances, but there is no grandeur in the outlook ; also you
know that even this impression of vastness is a delusion,
because, the more level the plain, the closer the limits
of your horizon. And if you should happen to be of a
speculative turn of mind, the question inevitably arises,
how far is the unbroken sameness of the scene, throughout
the pasture lands that run from the Atlantic half-way to
the Andes, responsible for the narrowness of outlook which
undoubtedly obtains among many of these dwellers of
the pampas ? To what extent is the mind of the resident
— native or colonist, padron or peon — oppressed, and
inclined to parochial smallness, by the nature of his en-

IN SOUTH AMERICA 169

vironment ? I confess that I find it difficult to account
in any other way for the kind of mental sleeping sickness
that one frequently observes, combined with complete
self-satisfaction, in individuals whose landed rights extend
over an area half the size of an English county, or for the
extraordinarily limited range of general conversation in
the " camp." The existence of these limitations is recog-
nised by the communities concerned, for extreme cases
are frequently described as suffering from " camp-rot," and
the remedy usually prescribed is a trip to Europe. In the
case of married couples, the effect of several continuous
years of unbroken " camp " life often amounts, humanly
speaking, to general atrophy of the thinking apparatus.

Railway travel in South America is not as luxurious a
business as people might infer from contemplating the
lavish lordliness of Argentines travelling in Europe. There
are one or two show lines, like the Sao Paulo line in Brazil
and the Central Argentine, but, generally speaking, a
train is constructed and regarded simply as a means of
transport, and, like the ordinary camp-town hotel, does
not indulge in any frills and fads. The line from Corrientes
to Concordia, on the Argentine North-Eastern, like all
railways in these parts, was badly hit by the war, and
compelled to adapt itself to the use of wood fuel when
English coal shipments ceased. At first they managed
to get coal from Natal at £4 a ton, but after three ship-
loads of this, the export was stopped, so the Company
bought up a tract of forest and built branch lines for hauling
the timber, eventually succeeding in producing the wood
equivalent of a ton of coal for about 385. with considerable
benefit to local labour. In this they were luckier than
other lines, such as the Central Uruguay, which could not
procure sufficient wood and was therefore compelled to
cut down the through passenger service to one or two

170 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

trains a week. But making every allowance for war-time
difficulties, the line to Concordia did not come up to modern
ideas of rational comfort in 1916. The way the cars jolted
and bumped, even when going at a modest pace, was
enough to justify any one in asking for a refund of the
price charged for a sleeper. It seems that the cost of
solid ballasting is prohibitive, so that the line is laid
lightly with 55-lb. rails. One gets the impression, beyond
the paying sections of passenger traffic, such as the
Cordova and Rosario lines, that the railway companies
take more thought for a stalled ox than for the sons of
men; and as the travelling public seems quite content
with things as they are, no doubt they are right.

Even before the North-East Argentine and the Entre
Rios Railways came to Concordia, this town was the chief
depot and port of shipment for the estancieros of Entre
Rios. Either because of its position and prospects, or
by some special dispensation of Providence, it appears
to have attracted a type of citizen more energetic and
wideawake than those of other towns which live by hand-
ling the produce of the interior. Its prosperity and
enterprise are indicated by many things that are conspic-
uous by their absence in most of the mouldy old towns that
lie scattered throughout the pampas region. Good streets,
well paved and decently lighted, handsome shops, plenty
of private motor-cars; and for public hire good clean
carriages, with first-rate horses, at moderate fares. But
even here, nobody seems to bother about drains or a
public water supply, and the hotels are of a kind to which
a traveller may bid a long farewell without undue repining.
Nevertheless, the place itself lingers in one's mind with a
subtle charm and fragrance of its own, making one of
those alluring pictures which every wanderer stores in his
treasure-house of memories and dreams. The people,

IN SOUTH AMERICA 171

as I took the air in the Plaza at the hour of the evening
aperitif, seemed not only more alive, but much more
human, than the typical hijo del pais ; not only did they
walk more alertly, but there was in their carriage, especially
that of the hatless women, something unusually vital,
suggestive of the slender graceful vivacity of old Spain.
As I watched the gilded youth of the place taking its
accustomed stroll round the square, young men and
maidens discreetly apart, as usual under the watchful
eye of plump and pleasing duennas, paterfamilias taking
his vermouth the while at the alfresco cafe which does a
brisk business on the sidewalk, it was borne in upon me
that, compared to us Anglo-Saxons, these people are an
extremely ornamental race, and graceful in all their ways.
Politically speaking, the results of the fusion of Spanish
blood with that of the aboriginal Indians may leave some-
thing to be desired, but the physical results are undeniably
pleasing. And these people are fond of the sunshine,
and of children, of music and dogs, all of which things
they enjoy here in cheerful profusion, when the day's
work is done and the Plaza becomes, in a sense, the town's
co-operative parlour, a social clearing-house.

Dogs figure conspicuously in the life of the community,
both at Corrientes and Concordia, dogs of all sizes and
breeds, together with curs of that low degree which results
from the untrammelled liberty and licence of an estancia
dog's life. Dog-fights are among the most notable occur-
rences in the social life of " camp " towns like Mercedes,
which, even at the Plaza hour, give one the impression of
being only partly awakened from a long siesta and on the
point of going to sleep again . I have often tried to discover,
but so far in vain, why dogs are so numerous, and their
society evidently appreciated, in towns like Corrientes,
Concordia and Mercedes, whilst in Buenos Aires they are

172 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

comparatively scarce, and in Montevideo still more so.
Some say that the explanation lies in the fact that in the
smaller towns a dog-owner can evade the licence tax ($10),
like other imposts, by making friends of the local mammon
of unrighteous officialdom ; but this ingenious suggestion
does not really explain why wealthy Montevideo should go
about dogless, why even the stoutest Senora's automobile
should lack its appropriate decoration of a Pom or Pekinese.

From Concordia I passed down the Rio Uruguay, first
(because the river was low) in a small light-draught vessel,
as far as the spot where the water deepens and the pucka
Buenos Aires river steamer, very palatial after the Ameri-
can manner, took us aboard. The small boat was very
dirty and crowded, but none the less interesting on that
account. The majority of its passengers were of the world
which lives by and for the slaughter of cattle. All along
the river, at Salto, Colon, Paysandu, and Fray Bentos,
there are huge saladeros, where all day long and every day,
poor beasts, terrified by the far-flung smell of blood, go
by thousands to their doom, in order that millions of men,
engaged in scientifically slaughtering each other on the
other side of the world, may go to their graves well fed.
I suggested this aspect of the matter to a saladero manager,
a naturalised Argentine of English descent. He was a
man of parts, not unversed in the humanities, but as
regards his business sternly utilitarian and cosmopolitan.
I gathered, incidentally, that the bulk of his buyers were
German.

At midnight, in a torrential downpour of rain, the pala-
tial river-boat dropped three miserable passengers and
some cargo for Mercedes at the mouth of the Rio Negro ;
thus we passed from Argentina to Uruguay. Apart from
the weather, Uruguay's transport arrangements at this
point are not of a kind to precipitate any riotous enthu-

IN SOUTH AMERICA 173

siasm for the Banda Oriental. We found ourselves upon a
mouldy old tug-boat, a noisome craft, full of cockroaches
and bilge -water, with three hours' journey between us and
Mercedes. The crew were clearly of opinion that no good
purpose would be served by reaching that bustling spot
before breakfast time, also that navigation by night is
perilous, for no sooner were we on board than they resumed,
somewhere in the bowels of the ship, the game of poker
which our arrival had interrupted. The steward, drunken
and semi-torpid, who did the honours of the murky cabin,
decorated with card chips and cigar ends and a strong smell
of cafia, declined to produce tea, coffee or any other kind of
refreshment, being evidently anxious to resume his hand in
the game as quickly as possible. The so-called cabins were
cupboards, just large enough to hold a bunk and several
thousand cockroaches ; their doors refused to shut and the
rain came through the upper decks ; so, in the intervals of
fitful sleep, we prayed for the dawn. It came, and the
bedraggled steward celebrated it by making some milk-
less coffee for which, as a very necessary precaution, he
collected payment in advance.

Mercedes loomed through a clammy fog at 7.30 a.m.;
the eye of faith and hope could discern three or four pre-
historic carriages of sorts gathered to a conversational
centre on a melancholy-looking wharf. An hour later, the
ship's leisurely preparations for discharge being completed,
a couple of languid Customs officers loomed up, and after
a cursory look at our baggage, and much ceremonious
exchange of courtesies between them and the other
passengers, who were natives of the town, we were made
free of the Republic of Uruguay and proceeded to seek
bath and breakfast at the Hotel de Paris. There we
found la Sefiora Padrona and her offspring tranquilly
busy with their morning mate in a patio curiously sugges-

174 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

tive of the Orient, with its palm and ferns and an aviary
filled with cardinals, toldos and other song-birds. The
hotel is built so that every one shall have the benefit of
the cheerful sights and sounds of this inner court, the bed-
rooms on the upper storey all opening on to the balcony
which overlooks it. The only light which penetrates
these rooms, and those on the ground floor, is the half-
light of the shaded patio, cool and pleasant, no doubt, in
summer, but on a rainy winter's day a trifle depressing.
One of the most unaccountable things about this country
in the way in which native architecture persists in the
Spanish tradition of ignoring provision against cold
weather. It is the same in the towns as in, the rural dis-
tricts; houses are always built on the principle that pro-
tection against the sun is the one thing needful. And
this in a land where for three months of the year at least
the south wind brings a very penetrating cold, and frosts
are quite common.

Of all the mildewed, moth-eaten holes that make one
wonder what Columbus redivivus would think of the
fruits of his labours, Mercedes has undeniable claims to
pre-eminence. In most ways the town is a fair type of
those which have grown up along the main waterways and
railways, to supply the wants and handle the produce
of the " camp," but it possesses a seven-sleeper quality of
torpor which so far as my limited observation goes, is
unrivalled by any of its peers. In outward appearance it
is, of course, like all other " camp " towns. Its houses are
nearly all of one pattern and height, painted stucco build-
ings, with little balconies to the windows of the upper
storey and heavy ironwork grilles securing the lower
ones against burglars and lordly wooers. Each has its
little flower and fern bedecked patio, of which you catch
cool and refreshing glimpses, through doorways that open

IN SOUTH AMERICA 175

to the street, all the more alluring because of the dreary
monotony of the street itself. In the Plaza, which always
typifies and reflects, so to speak, the civic life of a South
American town, there is a perfunctory statue of Liberty,
bearing on its pedestal all the memorable dates which
have set — or were meant to have set — the feet of the
Republic on the high-road to Utopia. But the formal
flower-beds, without which no self-respecting Plaza is
complete, have either proved too much for the energies of
the civic gardener or too great a strain on the exchequer,
for they are not ; only some rusty benches are there and
a weather-beaten band-stand. The Cathedral is undergoing
repairs. All cathedrals seem to require continual atten-
tion in this climate; anti-clericals will tell you that the
fact is closely connected with Church and State finance.
The few battered old carriages that ply for hire look as if
funerals were their speciality; occasionally the dogs and
the dignified drowsiness of the place are rudely disturbed for
a moment by some Ford car, coming in from the " camp."
It draws up at the confiteria by the corner of the Plaza,
where two or three of the railway staff are playing dominoes
(there are only three through passenger trains a week
nowadays), and for a few moments there are signs of life.
Men emerge leisurely from shops and cafe's and stroll
across the Square, to pass the time of day with Don
Felipe or Don Enrique, as the case may be.

They say that Mercedes is a hundred years old and that
it contains 15,000 inhabitants. If so, one can only wonder
where they are and what they do with themselves all the
day long, for both the Plaza and the Rambla (the broad
promenade which runs along the river bank) have a
curiously unfrequented appearance, even at the hour when
one would naturally expect to find all the world and his
wife taking the air. It may be — who knows ? — that both

176 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

the population and the promenade have purposely been
exaggerated, as the result of the strange competitive pride
of place from which the best of towns are not exempt ; but
whatever the explanation, Mercedes on a winter's morning
is about as lively as a mortuary chapel. Even when one
has made all possible allowance for one's own ignorance of
the real inwardness of things and of the true conditions of
life in this amazing sleepy hollow, when one has been told
that practically all the revenues of the City Fathers avail-
able for public works are drawn from a 3 per cent, tax on
rentals, there are some things about Mercedes that only
sleeping sickness can account for. The history of the
Rowing Club is a striking case in point. It was organised
as the result of an energetic crusade by an Englishman,
Professor of English and Instructor of Gymnastics at the
local College. The idea was welcomed with all the fervent
enthusiasm which distinguishes the South American on
such occasions, subscriptions rolled in, a fine list of mem-
bers was published, and four boats were ordered from
England. But when they came out, and the prospect of
serious physical exertion became dangerously imminent,
some of the members remembered important business, and
others that they had married a wife, and eventually the
list dwindled to eight stalwarts. And when it came to
picking crews, each and every one of the eight firmly
declined to be anything but cox. Eventually the boats
were sold, and the Rowing Club passed silently into
oblivion.

And again, what explanation other than cobwebbed
inertia can account for the fact that a town of this size is
content to depend chiefly upon Montevideo and Buenos
Aires for its supply of fresh vegetables, poultry and pork ?
There is evidently a fortune waiting here for an energetic
market gardener and dairy farmer, but so far as one can

IN SOUTH AMERICA 177

see, no sign of any one wanting to earn it. Scotchmen
please note. The price of apples — poor things at best —
was 80 cents (nearly four shillings) a dozen in May 1916,
and the cost of tomatoes, potatoes, milk, eggs and other
things equally high. Even if the physical and mental
initiative is lacking to make the community self-supporting
in the matter of these necessities, one would have thought
that here and there an energetic Italian might have seized
the opportunity to cultivate a lucrative quinta, for every
housewife in the place will call upon all the saints to witness
that the dealers of Buenos Aires are thieves and robbers.
And lastly, observe the Rambla, where the mystery
deepens and one wonders how a race so instinctively and
naturally graceful and artistic can tolerate so hideous a
defacement of a scene that might so easily be made a thing
of beauty. It would only require trees and shrubs in
the right place, a good stone facing and wrought ironwork
balustrade, to make a promenade in which the citizens
might take pleasure and pride. As it is, the place is a
monument in mud and monstrous decoration to the gods
of noontide slumber and insouciance. The City Fathers,
or whoever is supposed to attend to these things, have
permitted an Italian mecanico to carry out a scheme of
decoration framed on the Coney Island model, with hideous
biograph kiosks, coloured glass fountains, merry-go-rounds,
penny-in-the-slot machines, and other abominations.
And as all the water front is littered with the debris
cast up by the river in its last creciente, the general
effect is rather that of the approach to an Alaskan mining
camp than that of a respectable town with a cathedral
and a hundred years of corporate life. The most pictur-
esque object in Mercedes, typical too in its way, is the hull
of an Italian steamer, lying high and dry, twenty yards
above the river, where the floods left it years ago.

178 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

As a general rule, the traveller stranded for a day in a
town like this may get a considerable amount of human
interest and diversion by the simple process of sitting at
the sola window, or on the balcony overlooking the street,
and " making time," as they say, by watching men and
events. For even in the dullest of sleepy hollows, there
is always something doing, something that gives one gently
to think, some new sidelight thrown on the human
comedy. But here, not being the possessor of a sola or
street-commanding balcony, and having exhausted all
the resources of the town long before siesta time, I sought
and found refuge from boredom in watching la Senora
Padrona of the Hotel de Paris at the handling of her
business and her family, and the entertainment of numer-
ous friends and clients, who looked in apparently for no
particular purpose and remained for the same good reason.
A " clane, dacent woman" is the Senora; who speaks
cheerfully, yet as one having authority, to all men, takes
her leisurely mate at all hours, and yet brings up her family
like Christians and keeps her household in good order.
On further acquaintance she proved to be something
of a philosopher, which, in a woman, means one who has
reached the half-way house of Wisdom that stands between
the states of uncomfortable fussiness and unseemly sloth.

During the day, her own offspring being at school,
Madame's maternal, sociable and human instincts became
greatly concerned with a little family — father, mother and
three children — who had come from a neighbouring estancia
to take the next day's train for Montevideo. From a coign
of vantage on the balcony overlooking the patio, I also
found myself gradually taking a keen interest in this
family. The mother, it seems, was an invalid and going
to the capital to consult a specialist ; meanwhile the chil-
dren (two girls of four and six years and a baby of two)

IN SOUTH AMERICA 179

were being looked after and amused by their father, a
tall handsome man of about forty, who not only played
the role of nurse and governess to perfection, but seemed
thoroughly to enjoy it. To watch these four at dinner
was a lesson in good manners and the amenities of family
life ; the genuine camaraderie existing between them, the
children's complete freedom from awkward shyness or
pertness, and the father's evident pleasure in the success
of his talents as an entertainer, were very pleasant things
to see. Especially edifying was the dignity and savoir-faire
of the little lady who played hostess. After dinner they
all played games in the patio, and it was clear that father's
education in games was no mere surface polish.

When one notes the genuine, almost Oriental philo-
progenitiveness of the Latin- American peoples, the absence
of serious economic pressure, the South American woman's
maternal instincts and natural fecundity, and the laws
which recognise and regulate the result of her mate's
polygamous tendencies, one can only wonder that popula-
tion in this part of the world does not increase more
rapidly. Nowhere, not even in Japan, is more care and
kindness displayed towards children than here. The
culto del nino is almost a national religion and indeed
something of an obsession — no public ceremony is complete
without its parades and processions of school children.
I imagine that from the woman's point of view (and women
have much to do with education in South America)
children mean more to the stability of the marriage state
than they do in Anglo-Saxon communities; they stand
more emphatically for the permanence of hearth and home.
Even amongst the working classes in the towns, a man may
be lawless and wayward, yet his affection for his children
will hold the home together, as the Cinema is never weary
of showing. It is probably for this reason that the cult of

180 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

the child has assumed its present importance in the social
and civic life of South America. All sorts of philanthropic
societies work for it in many ways, and the Press waxes
very sentimental on the subject; the primary schools
are generally excellent, and their discipline surprisingly
good.

But there are drawbacks to the cult of d nino, as to most
good things in a world of wickedness. In a state of society
addicted to early marriages, it often happens that when
the children have grown up, family life becomes dull,
and the middle-aged husband, having few or none of the
social and sporting alleviations that an Anglo-Saxon
would take to in such case, is led to seek distractions
outside it. His polygamous and philoprogenitive in-
stincts then find satisfaction in an irregular liaison ; and
the law ordains that the offspring of such morganatic
connections are entitled to a share of their father's property
at his death. The farther you get from the seaboard
and the cities, the franker becomes society's acceptance
of irregular parentage. In most places there are a con-
siderable number of surplus women, all hungry for mater-
nity, so that the cult of el nino becomes a very complicated
business. In the interior, and most notably in Brazil
and Paraguay, one frequently hears of progenitors of
the patriarchal type, whose wild and tame oats have been
sown in such profusion as to give them more than local
celebrity. One case of the kind I noted at Asuncion,
where, at the death of one of these prolific grandsires,
the number of filial claims on the estate was close upon a
hundred. As in the East, barrenness in a woman affords
in itself moral justification for her husband to contract
new ties more or less sub rosa. If under these conditions
the population does not double itself in twenty-five years,
it must either be because the public health is imperfectly

IN SOUTH AMERICA 181

protected in many parts of the country, or because the
proportion of the male population which leads celibate
or sterile lives, especially among the " camp " peon class, is
larger than is commonly supposed.

The train for Montevideo leaves Mercedes at eight in the
morning, being of the kind which declined to be hurried
on its journeyings. It puts on no frills, this Ferro-Carril
Central, either in the matter of speed or equipment ; but
it is a nice easy-going, hail-fellow-well-met sort of line,
and when you travel on it you feel as if you had been
invited to join a pleasant family circle in a Sunday sociable.
Incidentally also you pick up a lot of miscellaneous infor-
mation in a day's journey, because everybody in the train
knows everybody else, and nearly every one has a thousand
things that he wishes to talk about to any one who will
listen, with much wealth of narrative and detail. At
every station there is generally somebody or something
worth seeing, estancieros of the neighbourhood coming
down to see a friend en passant or to collect a parcel, from
whose cheery conversation you gather that Don Enrique's
estimable wife has joyfully presented him with twins,
that Don Juan's cattle have been dying by the score,
through eating of thistles, and that there is trouble at the
estancia " Tres Montes " because of a little matter of a
boundary fence removed and a " point " of sheep missing.

There are generally a few picturesque Gauchos, lounging
about as gracefully as if they really had nothing to do,
though their horses, tied up at the station pulperia, tell
plainly of the long trail; the usual motley collection of
dogs, revealing possibilities hitherto unsuspected in the
matter of mesalliances and affaires de cceur ; a couple of
magisterial policemen — one hardly likes to speak of these
dignitaries by that modest title; and a little group of
peons, smoking eternal cigarettes — slender wiry fellows

182 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

in whose natural ease of bearing and good manners, a nice
blend of simplicity and punctilio, I find never-ending
pleasure, even when their clothes are horrible imported
reach-me-downs and when they wear their trousers
tucked into their socks (suspenders therefore in evidence)
with luxuriously inefficient zapatas that look like Japanese
shoes. These sons of the soil carry themselves like self-
respecting, self-reliant free men, autocrats with the saving
grace of courtesy. There are comparatively few women
to be seen either on the train or at the stations.

Amongst the estancieros in the dining-car the conversa-
tion is nearly all " shop/' yet, because of the multifarious
activities of life on the " camp," and because in a gathering
like this you get it reflected from several points of view, it
is seldom devoid of interest or wearisome. The movement
of locusts, the price of wool, the latest visitations of gara-
pata (tick) or foot-and-mouth disease, the manifold dis-
eases of sheep, droughts and floods, and, above all, as a
perpetual feast, the virtues and vices of horses, these are
the staples and stand-bys of conversation, wherever one
or two are gathered together. Some talk there is of
sport, of depredations by bichos, some local gossip and
tales of feuds and courtships; but remarkably little,
when you come to think of it, either of politics or the
world war, and very little philosophy. It is an elemental
world of simple things, worked out on a big scale, this
world of flocks and herds, and the talk of the men who
inhabit it is unsophisticated, racy of the soil, and therefore,
to the stranger, edifying. It is only when they elect to
talk of the horse by the hour and with appalling techni-
cality of endless detail, that I find myself frankly bored.

The distance between Mercedes and Montevideo is
roughly 150 miles, and the train takes between nine
and ten hours over it. As you approach the capital,

IN SOUTH AMERICA 183

the country becomes more plentifully dotted with
clumps and groves of trees — very seldom do they attain
to the dignity of little woods — and the estancias lose
something of the air of dignified seclusion which distin-
guishes them further afield. After passing Santa Lucia,
two or three stations from the capital, the journey ceases
to be of the peaceful family party complexion, for at this
point the train is invaded by an evil-smelling, raucous-
tongued crowd of hotel touts, cab and taxi runners, and
lottery ticket sellers, who jostle and hustle each other and
pester the passengers with amazing effrontery. No doubt
all these estimable cadgers are influential voters when
they are at home, and very possibly the powers that be
may consider it inexpedient to curtail their facilities for
this kind of joy-riding. The travelling public cannot
reasonably expect to receive treatment as favourable as
the great unwashed, in a democratic state where political
influence is all a question of numbers; but all the same,
there is a point at which the lowliest worm should turn,
and even a Railway Company has its dignity to preserve.
The average Uruguayan is content to take the railway
as he finds it, and only abuses the Company as a mono-
polistic obstructor of trade development, but an impartial
outsider would probably say that the public gets the service
it deserves. Even under normal conditions, the Company
does not make profits enough to encourage further appeals
for capital from abroad, and the war price of coal added
£50,000 a year to its working expenses. As a matter of
fact, making due allowance for the restrictions and im-
provements imposed on it by officialdom, the railway
management would appear to be doing its best to develop
traffic in agricultural produce, and to display a very
creditable amount of initiative, and the real source of its
troubles, strange as it may seem, lies with the agrarians.

184 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

One need not be a prophet or an augur to perceive that
the one thing needful for the development of the country
(and with it of the railway) is good roads, and plenty of
them, throughout the interior. I have met with estan-
cieros who recognised this fundamental truth and who
would be glad to contribute their fair share for a compre-
hensive scheme to make and maintain roads for motor
lorry traffic ; but as a general rule, they prefer to stick to
the good old hoary system which isolates the estancias
of any district when the rivers happen to be in flood,
and which means sending produce and bringing in mate-
rials, either by slow bullock-wagons or eight -horse team,
over the vilest of makeshift mud roads. One would
imagine that a government which proclaims the democratic
and progressive gospel according to Senor Battle would
perceive the futility of encouraging the immigration of
colonists and chacreros (agriculturists) without first
evolving a practical road-making policy. One would
even think that the agrarian might be led by an educative
campaign to perceive that good roads would not only bring
them greatly increased wealth, but would put an end to
many of the uncomfortable and unprofitable crudities of
" camp " life. They don't see it, or the roads would soon
be there.

Be this as it may, the Railway Station building at
Montevideo is almost magnificent enough, with its statues
and long marble corridors, to make one forget the slowness
of the train and the price of the ticket. From the non-
travelling citizen's point of view, all is surely for the best.

CHAPTER X

URUGUAY : SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE ART OF
GOVERNMENT

COMPARED with other cities of South America, Monte-
video possesses a peculiar and distinctive quality of
restfulness. There is something in the general appearance
and atmosphere of the place and its inhabitants that
suggests the influence of a pleasant, leisurely, contempla-
tive philosophy behind its material prosperity. The cult
of manana and mas 6 menos appears to be more
splendidly dignified here than elsewhere, and possibly
more justified by results. To my traveller's mind, which
is often pleased to think of cities as types of humanity
(like the tutelary figures in the Place de la Concorde, only
less classically solemn), Montevideo resembles a placid
and prosperous widow, buxom, yet comely, oblivious of
the past and hopeful for the future, with a fondness for
good victuals, an incurable penchant for gambling, and,
withal, a very fair idea of how to enjoy life. While
keeping a watchful eye on Mrs. Grundy, comfort and les
convenances are her watchwords ; and if, beside these, she
can contrive to keep a good conscience, all the better.

Comfort she certainly enjoys; there is probably no
country on earth so well off, actually and prospectively,
as Uruguay, and, on the whole, there is none in South
America that has made more intelligent use of its excep-
tionally favourable situation and rich resources. The
fact that it is only a very small country, with less
than half the population of Ireland, makes its record

185

186 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

and position all the more enviable. Your town-bred
Uruguayan is a keen politician, or, rather, a keen partisan,
but the small size of the country, and the idiosyncrasies
of its neighbours, have taught the Government to season
socialism with common sense and to temper Chauvinism
with discretion. Mutatis mutandis, narrow limits of
territory, encompassed by powerful neighbours, have
produced similar results in Switzerland, which, alone of all
the democracies of Europe, has shown that government
of the people, for the people, and by the people, is not an
absolutely impossible ideal.

Far be it from me to suggest that Uruguayan politicians,
as such, are different from or superior to those of other
countries, or that Sefiores Battle, Viera and Brum have
travelled any further on the road to the millennium than
our own leaders and misleaders of Demos. If one may
judge by the things which they themselves say and write
about each other, the world, the flesh and the devil are
likely to be made free for democracy in these parts at about
the same time as Mr. and Mrs. Wilson arrive at Utopia
by way of the League of Nations and the Monroe doctrine.
But there is this to be said of politics on a small scale, in
a country where everybody knows and watches everybody
else, that when a man becomes prominent, if he can't be
good, he must be careful, and this is a fact that makes
for decency and restraint. Where there is no possibility
of disappearing in a crowd, respect for outward appear-
ances is bound to play a big part in public life. Then,
too, experiments in the way of social and political reform
are much more satisfactory playthings here than in
Europe ; a dreamer of dreams, like Senor Battle, has a far
better chance of translating words into works than Briand
ever could have had in France, or Lloyd George in England,
for the simple reason that, in applying his theories, he is

IN SOUTH AMERICA 187

dealing with a prosperous community about the size of
London South-West, homogenous, intellectually active,
and patriotically pleased at anything which confers glory
on the Banda Oriental. With money and ideas to spare,
it is evidently easier for Uruguay than for China or Russia
to work out interesting reforms in education, public
health, or the treatment of lunatics, but this does not
make the processes and results of her administrative
activity any the less creditable.

On lofty heights of humanitarianism and romantic
idealism, remote from the realities and unconscious of the
fierceness of the struggle for life in other parts of the
world, your South-American Latin builds dream castles
of the most picturesque and attractive kind and fills them
with happy Arcadians. The only trouble about them is
that the splendid theories of government and social reform
represented by Uruguay's laws and projects of law make
little or no allowance for unregenerate human nature.
To put it plainly, they ignore the fact that there is a good
deal of the Old Adam even in the New World. The value
of a law depends less upon its wording than its working,
and in Uruguay the best -laid plans of earnest reformers
at the Ministry of Justice or Agriculture may be brought
to nought — and indeed they are — by the dishonesty of a
comisario or the ignorance of a juez.

The new House of Congress, which has been in process
of construction since 1906, presents an instructive object
lesson, a sermon in stones, on the lamentable difference
between the aspirations and the achievements of poli- '
ticians. When it is finished it will, no doubt, be a very
magnificent home for officialdom, but nobody seems to
know or care to what length of years the contractors are
going to spin out the job, which common report describes
as unusually lucrative. So far as outward appearances

188 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

go, the building was in much the same state when I saw it
last in June 1919, as it was in the summer of 1916. At
that date the cost had already run to considerably over a
million sterling. It is going to be marble-faced, all
glorious without, this Palacio Legislative, and a marvel
of modern decoration within, but if half that men say
about it is true, there is graft as well as art about the
building of the Uruguayan House of Parliament. In
this respect it would seem to be a fitting habitation for
the curious admixture of lofty idealism and Tammany
tricks which constitutes Uruguayan politics, for the
strange medley of dreamers and schemers who represent
the primitive pastoral communities of the Banda Oriental.
But despite the ultra modernity of its politicians and
learned professions, despite the pretensions typified in its
public buildings, Montevideo preserves far more than any
other city of South America the serenity and simplicity
of that life of flocks and herds which lies all around and
about it; nor is this remarkable when one remembers
that this is Uruguay's only city, and that its inhabitants —
representing about a quarter of the country's population —
live and have their being on, by, and because of, the
"' camp." Such " idle rich " as there are have generally
made their money directly or indirectly out of estancias ;
the bulk of the city's trade lies in handling the produce
of the rolling potreros, or in importing such things as
estancieros need. All industry and economics being
centred in the production of food in the grand patriarchal
manner, society, even when it gets its gowns from Paris
and pays $50 to hear Caruso, naturally retains a good
deal of the pastoral atmosphere, many of the qualities
and defects of the simple, tribal mind. Thus, men and
women in Montevideo know all about each other, just as
people do in Ireland; their conversation bristles with

IN SOUTH AMERICA 189

genealogical details and revels in a horribly accurate
memory for family skeletons. Strictly speaking, society
has not emerged beyond the stage of a conglomeration of
family parties, and this chiefly because of the position
imposed upon (and generally accepted by) woman under
the existing patriarchal system. Which subject is
entitled to a chapter to itself, infra.

The Plaza Matriz — Mother of all the Plazas, whose
plane trees and paraisos make oases of grateful shade
throughout the city — seems to me to illustrate and typify
the unsophisticated conservatism which counts for more
in the real life of the nation than the latest panaceas
extracted by Battle and his henchmen from the wisdom
of Mr. Wilson, Lloyd George, Liebknecht and Lenin. It
is only a little Plaza, devised by the Spaniards on the same
modest scale which made the streets just wide enough for
two caballeros or caches to pass each other comfortably;
it is not half the size of the Plaza Independencia, where
the band plays amidst waving palms. But it remains,
nevertheless, the centre of social and civic life, a pleasant
place of green grass, and flower-beds gathered about a
graceful fountain, where able-bodied loafers can take their
ease, and see the doings of the outside world recorded on
the Razoris news-boards without stirring from their
seats. There is a good deal of hustle and bustle about the
Plaza, besides the Razon's breezy bulletins; tramways
that seem to run on endless chains, with clamorous bells
that remind one of the nightmare chaos at Brooklyn
Bridge; hotels, clubs and fashionable shops, and a line
of taxi-cabs that might easily be mistaken for private
cars. But amidst and above them all, facing each other
across the square with the quiet dignity of reverend
seigneurs that have seen many a prelate and politician
strut and fret his little hour before passing to oblivion,

190 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

stand the Cathedral and the " Representacion National."
They have witnessed the decline and fall of the power of
Spain, these two, they have seen the birth and childhood
of the Republic, and both have known better days; but
they seem, nevertheless, to smile confidently at each
other above the clamour of the news-boys and lottery
ticket touts and to typify that fundamental and philo-
sophic quality of restfulness which is distinctive of
Montevideo. The Government in power may build
itself new palaces, it may ban the Church and abolish all
religious festivals, but these two old aristocrats look down
serenely on their native Plaza, where, whatever men may
do, the evening breezes sing softly as ever in the plane
trees and the blue of heaven is not dimmed by the warring
of sects and factions. No doubt they have their own
opinion as to the benefits which humanity is likely to
derive from party politics, as perfected in the twentieth
century.

Far be it from me to profess to understand the actual
differences which separate the " Colorados " from the
" Blancos " in this part of the world. I expect that, if
the truth were told, they would appear to be no more
fundamental or vital than the differences which distinguish
the advanced Liberalism of our Runcimans and McKennas
from the advanced Conservatism of our Birkenheads and
Bonar Laws. Stripped of all verbiage, the essential
differences between the parties seem to be that the Reds
are In and the Whites are Out. Since the last revolution
(1905) the Blancos have been palely loitering in the
wilderness; the Colorados have got control of the till,
and, to judge by their activity and organisation at the
capital, they are likely to keep it. From this it may be
inferred that party politics in the Banda Oriental have
not yet attained to that superior stage of evolution in

IN SOUTH AMERICA 191

which the leaders on both sides agree to keep up the game
of befooling the electorate and to divide the proceeds on
the Rotatavist, or " Front Benches, Limited/' principle.
Despite the undoubted ability and imitative talents of
Senor Battle and his chief adherents, the policy of the
Colorado party appears to be based upon the rudimentary
plan of getting your opponent down and sitting on his
stomach.

Outside of Montevideo, amongst the healthy-minded
workers, by and upon whose labour the talkers thrive,
you will generally hear men speak of politicians as they
speak of lawyers, as necessary evils, crafty animals,
without whom the complicated affairs of city-dwellers
could not be regulated; but their plans and stratagems
are usually considered unworthy of attention or discussion
by honest open-air men. In many of the provinces the
Blancos are numerically stronger than the Colorados, but
possession is nine parts of the electoral law, and the " Ins "
have got a very firm hold on the machinery of representa-
tion. In these regions one hears vague talk of the revolu-
tion that is always coming, but, as times go, there are not
enough sufficiently discontented people in Montevideo to
organise one ; the Colorados are shrewd enough to realise
the virtues of a panem et circenses policy and to cast their
bread upon waters that will return it in the form of votes.
From the point of view of productive industry and of
peace-loving citizens, it may be a good thing that the
" Ins " should dominate the " Outs " by a considerable
margin of effective force, but, pace all earnest democrats,
this state of affairs can only be maintained by virtue of
the preponderance of one man's authority — visible or in-
visible ; in other words, by something akin to a dictator-
ship, and by relegating all the essentials of representative
government to the limbo of the unattainable. Senor

192 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

Battle may be all the evil personages rolled into one of
whom his enemies speak, but he certainly seems entitled to
considerable credit for the leadership which has kept the
Colorados in the saddle so long and the country free from
civil strife.

Battle is a new species of political ruler, very different
from dictators of the Rosas and Lopez, or even the Porfirio
Diaz, type, yet a very effective ruler for all that, and all
the more remarkable because of the fact that the control
which he exercises over the Colorado party is ostensibly
that of a private citizen. His is the ascendancy of an
extremely astute politician, who combines great organising
ability with a forty- Wilson power of fanatical idealism,
and both with the primordial cunning of his Indian
ancestry. The Uruguayan Constitution, aiming to pre-
vent any citizen of the Republic from enjoying too long
a period of power, does not permit Battle to become
President again, but there is nothing, either in the Con-
stitution or in the present evolution of the nation's
political consciousness, to prevent his personality from
continuing to dominate, as it does, the whole policy of
the Government. The last two Presidents — Viera and
Brum — have held office by his good pleasure, and, if report
speaks truly, carried out at his bidding the experiments
in socialistic legislation which are the breath of his nostrils.
In private life a hard-working, domesticated person of
retiring habit, bon pere de famille ; a dreamer of dreams,
and yet a very forceful character. Judging by results,
he shares with many of the forceful characters conspicuous
in our modern world of politics a hasty intolerance of
detail and the contempt for all previous human experience
in sociology, which eagerly proclaims the advent of the
new era and leaves to others the task of estimating its
cost and probable consequences. Speaking as an out-

IN SOUTH AMERICA 193

sider, and without means of knowing for certain how
much of Battle is sincere idealist and how much predatory
politician, the moral basis of his schemes, the source of
his authority, and the general tenor of his ordinances
appear to be just as unimpeachable as (shall we say)
those of Mr. Lloyd George, and indeed to bear a curious
family likeness thereto ; but the trouble is, that the laws
which he has made, and those which he continues to make
by proxy, are based on the erroneous assumption that the
bureaucracy is sufficiently educated to apply, and the
nation to observe, them. A marble-faced Palace of
Justice and the most elaborate of judicial codes will not
serve to protect industrious citizens, either from unjust
judges or from grafters in high places.

If you ask a Blanco what are his grievances against
the Colorados, he will tell you that they are greedy and
godless schemers, who secure the votes of the industrial
town-bred workers, and especially of the aliens among
them, by shameless sops and bribes and by legislation
which is the epitome of class jealousy and malice. If
you ask a Colorado what he thinks of the Blancos, he
will tell you that they are a priest-ridden lot of mediaeval
money-grubbers, and that their policy is simply the
maintenance of the capitalist class in its unjust privileges.
But contemplate the whole business in a spirit of philo-
sophical detachment, and you perceive that the real
struggle is precisely the same as that which industrialism,
so-called democracy, and the defective education of the
masses have produced in Europe, a blind struggle between
the Haves and the Have-nots, in which civilisation is
cast into the melting-pot and sends a good deal of its
scum to the top. You perceive in Uruguay, and all the
more clearly because causes and results are worked out
on a small scale, that the real trouble of modern democracy

194 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

lies in the fact that its godfathers, in their haste, omitted
to provide for its education in discipline and the duties
of citizenship, not to speak of elementary economics. So
that the mob, in choosing its rulers, is unable to distinguish
between wise men and windbags, between earnest patriots
and fanatical dreamers.

Uruguay's representative at the Versailles conference,
Dr. Varela Acevedo, an earnest patriot and a thinker,
took pride in reminding the European Powers that many
of the reforms which the League of Nations is to bring
about, in the way of international legislation for Labour,
have already been introduced in Uruguay. And it was
with no small satisfaction that Uruguayans of all parties
read in their morning papers, that President Wilson and
Mr. Lloyd George were good enough to congratulate Dr.
Acevedo and the Republic on the progressive nature of
its social legislation. Now, there is no doubt at all as to
the laudable motives of the worthy gentlemen who frame
these reform laws, or as to the lofty sentiments which
they embody. But even those who look upon Republican
Constitutions as milestones on the road to the millennium,
must admit that the value of a law depends upon the
possibility of its just and general application. (Young
China, you may remember, drew up a perfectly splendid
constitution, providing against original sin and all other
human ills, before it proceeded to embark upon its career
of chaos, corruption and crime.) And every Uruguayan
(unless he be a politician on the " In " side) will tell you
that, between the law as framed and the law as applied,
there is wide gulf fixed, which only the blind eye of
political prejudice can fail to discern. Any one with an
inclination and time to spare to study in extenso the
latest developments of the Uruguayan Constitution, will
find them in a book published by a Professor of Consti-.

I

IN SOUTH AMERICA 195

tutional Law at Buenos Aires this year (El gubierno del
Uruguay-— a. study of the Reform of the Constitution in
1917, by Professor de Vedia y Mitre).

If I deal at this length with the political aspect of
affairs in Uruguay, it is because, when we come to leave
the capital, and return, so to speak, to our muttons, out
yonder in the " camp," amongst the simple-minded men
who live and move in large clean spaces, the fact confronts
us at every turn (though these herdsmen and tillers of the
soil perceive it not, or only very dimly) that for all the
Government's boasts of progressive legislation, the vital
interests of the country's essential business of cattle-
raising and agriculture are recognised in theory, but
generally neglected in practice. While the Legislature,
with its noble head in the clouds and its hands (some of
them, at all events) in the public till, produces model
statutes concerning the eight -hours day, old age pensions,
the repos hebdomodaire, compulsory education, and benefits
of all kinds for organised labour, the fundamental business
of stimulating agricultural production, and of protecting
the peon and chacreros, producers of the nation's wealth,
advances but seldom beyond the region of sterile academics
and the appointment of ever-increasing inspectors, com-
missions and battening bureaucrats. Two facts stand out
in Uruguay so that he who runs may read. First, that
the value of large sections of grazing land has been, and
is being, seriously reduced by the growth of espartillo
grass and noxious weeds, and that only by ploughing and
sowing can its proper productivity be restored. Second,
that until adequate means of transport are provided,
beginning with good roads, agriculture, beyond a range
of, say, fifteen miles from a railway, can never pay. It
is evident that the more people there are who expect to
make a living out of politics, the less public money there

196 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

will be to be spent on improvements beneficial to the
community. For this reason, and others to which we
shall come in due course, all the progressive social legis-
lation, with which Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Wilson have
been so pleased, dies away, in faint echoes of sonorous
platitudes, long before it reaches the son of the soil. And
yet it is the latter's labour, when all is said and done,
which pays for the motor-car and the top-hat of the
legislator when he goes a-racing to Maronas on Sundays.
And even of the statutes and ordinances devised for the
benefit of the town-bred proletariat, some, such as Dr.
Varela's boasted female labour law, exist, so far, only as
pious aspirations, the airy nothings of professional word-
spinners; others, like the eight-hours day, were neve*r
intended to apply beyond the borders of industrial labour,
and, even there, their interpretation is often extremely
elastic.

Of course, it is all a matter of degree. All over the
world, as it stands to-day, the question for governments
to decide is how many of the people can be fooled with
impunity, and for how long; and the answer depends
chiefly on the kind of education provided by the last
generation. Then, too, the nature of the flapdoodle, with
which masses of foolish electors are fed, requires careful
selection; wherein lies the craft and subtlety of the
politician. The stuff that Sun-Yat-Sen ladles out to
Young China, for example, would not suit the digestion
of the cultured millions who swallow the sophistries of
Mr. Wilson. But no matter which road we travel, the
further we go towards that distant goal where the remnants
of civilisation are going to be safe for democracy, the more
apparent it becomes that Demos does not ask consistency
of his leaders. Most South American politicians have
learned this lesson; nevertheless, as a simple stranger

IN SOUTH AMERICA 197

and a student of human affairs, I often find myself amazed,
here as in England, at the cynicism with which they
display their contempt for the intelligence of the public,
and traffic on the lamentable shortness of its memory.

Take, for instance, the question of public gambling —
of which matter Dr. Varela said nothing at Versailles.
In the sacred name of charity, the Government owns and
runs a fashionable seaside hotel at the Parque Urbano,
with a roulette casino attached thereto, which rakes in a
profit of anything between 100,000 and 200,000 pesos
(gold) every month ; a second establishment of the same
kind, only more magnificent, is about to be opened at
Carrasco. Now, speaking for myself, I regard these
palatial gambling houses as benevolent institutions,
because they provide a means of recovering money from
the idle rich and redistributing it quickly for the benefit
of the community. I like to watch the pompous Porteno,
the Basque estanciero, and the Spanish money-lender,
succumbing to their ruling passion, and to see their money
going swiftly back into circulation. The little white
ball, spinning merrily, when they have dined well to light
sounds of music, is probably the only instrument of
retributive justice that will meet their case. I like to
see it doing its good and useful work, just as I like to see
the plethoric wealth of our Jewish financiers and impre-
sarios diminished by an almost human devotion to some
capricious star of the musical comedy world. As a matter
of morals, there is all the difference in the world between
a roulette table run for the public benefit and one, like
that of Monte Carlo, run for the benefit of private share-
holders. The Uruguayan authorities have practically
put roulette on the same footing as the Gothenberg sys-
tem has put drinking in Scandinavia; incidentally, by
so doing, they attract a good deal of Argentine money

198 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

into the Uruguayan till. So far, so good ; to take money
from the wealthy for public purposes is meritorious. But
their systematic cultivation of the gambling instinct
amongst the poorer classes by means of ubiquitous and
never-ceasing public lotteries is a very different matter;
and the offence is greatly aggravated by all these continual
boasts about social reform and by the Government's
professions of solicitude for the moral welfare of the
people.

When you buy a box of matches — on which the Govern-
ment levies a tax of five milesimos— you find yourself
confronted by a moral maxim of unimpeachable virtue
printed on the inner flap; some pious exhortation to
honesty, or kindness to animals, or sober thrift. And in
the same shop, you will observe a placard reminding you
that to-morrow's lottery places a fortune within the
reach of every man's hand. There is a lottery every
week ; the price of the tickets varies (being nicely calcu-
lated on the public's probable margin of savings) and the
first prize may be anything between 20,000 pesos and the
big New Year prize of 300,000 pesos — a little matter of
£70,000 at the present rate of exchange. The sale of
lottery tickets is pushed with a good deal more energy
than is usual in government business. Ragged children
and cripples thrust them at you, with raucous cries, at
every street corner; hawkers shout the value of the first
prize and the date of drawing on trains and trams and
wharves. The number of shops that apparently make a
living by selling them on a 4 per cent, commission, and
by changing money, is as mysteriously great as the number
of public-houses in Belfast or Glasgow — one feels that
there cannot possibly be enough customers to go round.
But the business goes steadily on, and as neither the
match-box maxims nor the eloquence of professional

IN SOUTH AMERICA 199

moralists have ever affected it in the slightest degree,
they may fairly be regarded as a harmless concession to
the theory of political virtue, an inexpensive kind of
eyewash.

Or, since we are in the way with professions of progress
and social reform, take the case of the unmarried mother
and her offspring. It is a subject which Dr. Varela
might well have discussed at Versailles, rather than that
of the regulating of female labour. The latter is never
likely to become practical politics (woman having no
vote, and little chance of ever getting one), whereas since
the Government decided to treat the Church as an obsolete
institution, the marriage rate has gone down, and the
percentage of illegitimate children has gone steadily up.
Now, amongst the executive's most eloquent claims to
public virtue, solicitude for the welfare of children takes
a prominent place. El culto del nino, as I have remarked
before, is almost an obsession in this land. Nevertheless,
the fact remains that where the marriage ceremony is
more honoured in the breach than the observance —
this is particularly the case in many parts of the interior —
and where the children of unmarried mothers are in-
creasingly numerous, there can never be a fair chance
for either mother or child, until the law provides some
effective means for securing to the woman either sufficient
alimony from the father or a regular bounty from the
State. And such a law, if and when it is made, will have
to be administered and enforced by new men and new
means, very different from those which now obtain in
the " camp." Meanwhile, in official circles the subject
is steeped in absent-minded silence, like that which over-
comes profiteering patriots and the syndicated Press in
England when some one talks of the sale of public honours
and titles.

200 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

If I mention these little flies in the amber, it is not in
any spirit of destructive criticism, but merely to prevent
the uninitiated reader from assuming, as otherwise he
might, that the Garden of Eden is being reconstructed,
with modern improvements, in Uruguay, or anywhere
else in South America. Take it all round, the Banda
Oriental is probably governed with more educated in-
telligence than any country south of Panama, and with
just as much honesty; the stability of its finances and
the maintenance of public order are certainly superior to
those of her neighbours. It remains nevertheless true
that party politics here are essentially the old sordid
struggle of the Haves and the Have-nots, and that, pace
the Monroe doctrine, the words and works of South
America's republican politicians bear an unpleasant
family likeness to those of party government men in
monarchical Europe. It is because this is so, I think,
that one objects to their assumption of superior virtue
more than to any actual defects in their system of govern-
ment, in the same way that one resents Mr. Wilson's
doctrinaire claim to act as the universal umpire and
exponent of International morality.

From the Press and from the placards on street hoardings
it is safe to conclude that the industrial workers and
Government employes of Montevideo take a lively interest
in the progress of socialistic ideas. On the ist of May,
1917, for example, the walls were covered with appeals
to all good socialists to oppose the Government's proposals
for compulsory military service. On another occasion,
there was considerable excitement and a movement to
secure official representations to Germany, with regard to
the imprisonment of Liebknecht. But these activities are
evidently stimulated by class bias and economic aims,
rather than by any definite political consciousness. As

IN SOUTH AMERICA 201

for polite society, it knows and cares very little about
politics, local or foreign, for the simple reason that polite
society, outside the family circle, consists entirely of
women, at present unfitted by their education, and by the
conventions which surround them on every side, to take
any intelligent interest in public affairs.

For obvious reasons, which require no elaboration, one
recognises and makes allowances for the peculiar con-
ditions, racial and economic, which determine the humili-
ating social position of women, and explain the lack of
civilised social intercourse between the two sexes, in most
of the South American Republics, from Paraguay at the
bottom of the scale, upwards. One makes allowance for
the negro strain in Brazil and generally for the effect of
climate and of interbreeding with aboriginal natives of
higher or lower types. But it is not easy to reconcile
Montevideo's outward and visible signs of material and
cultural progress and the high physical and intellectual
standard of the Uruguayan people, with the mediaeval
position assigned to, and apparently accepted by, their
women. In this respect, " Oriental " civilisation is still
inferior to that of the Argentine.

Place aux dames ; they must have a chapter to them-
selves. But we shall have to be very, very careful.

CHAPTER XI

CHIEFLY ABOUT WOMAN

POLITE society in Montevideo — which, as I have said
before, consists almost entirely of women — is quite
willing to admit in private conversation that the con-
ditions which govern the relations of the sexes in Uruguay
are unsatisfactory and unwholesome, not to say mediaeval.
But they say it without conviction, and neither in the
Press nor in the literature of the country will you dis-
cover anything to indicate that they resent, individually
or collectively, the persistence of these conditions, or
that they are really conscious of humiliation in remaining
subject to the Moorish tradition of female virtue, defined
by cast-iron conventions and confined behind iron-barred
windows. They will tell you that things are slowly but
surely changing, and that women enjoy far more liberty
now than they did twenty-five years ago, but there is
seldom any enthusiasm about these admissions. On the
contrary, they are generally flavoured with a delicate
melancholy, laudator temporis acti — and sometimes with
the same gentle sort of deprecation with which one's
grandmother used to speak of " votes for women/' and
the bold bad suffragettes. There is no such conservative
as your " good " woman, and it is probably true that no
other animal thrives so well in captivity. Nevertheless,
remembering that educated women in South America
frequently read books, and occasionally travel in Europe,
one cannot but marvel at the nature and results of the
barbed-wire conventions with which they are here sur-

202

MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS 203

rounded, and apparently well content. Also one wonders
whether, in a society so outwardly cultured and dis-
ciplined as this, the male sex can really be such rampant
profligates and sensualists as the maintenance of these
conventions would imply. Personally, I do not believe
it; for, to put the matter plainly, the basic convention
upon which society proceeds in these countries, is that
freedom of social intercourse between men and women
must inevitably lead to promiscuous sexual intercourse.
Again, I do not believe it. The male youth of Uruguay
is certainly undisciplined, chiefly because he is spoiled
by his women-folk, and because there is nothing in the
curriculum of the secondary schools or universities to
inculcate a code of honour and self-control ; but there is
nothing to show that a proper system of education,
beginning on Boy Scout lines, would not give as good
results here as in most European countries.1 At all events
the City Fathers of Montevideo have never thought it
necessary to pass a law, such as that which runs in
Buenos Aires (or that made by good Queen Wilhelmina
for Holland), to protect women from being accosted by
men in the streets during the daytime. The young
women of Montevideo can certainly go about their
shopping and social business unescorted and unmolested.
No, the more closely one examines the subject, the
more reason is there to believe that the semi-Asiatic
position of woman in the subtropical and temperate parts
of South America is not necessitated either by racial or
climatic conditions, but is simply the tyranny of social
customs, fortified in their persistence by the Hispano-
Moorish traditions of " the best families," and by the

1 The Boy Scout movement in Montevideo, extremely active
and promising in 1915-16, appears to have since dried up at the
source. But for this the youth of Uruguay is not to blame.

204 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

influence of the Roman Catholic Church, a tyranny as
petrified and ubiquitous as the Moorish tradition in
architecture all over the continent. For observe, it is
not only the unmarried girl who needs to be protected
by the insuperable barriers which society has agreed to
erect between the sexes : the married woman is just as
rigorously cut off from reasonable social intercourse with
men, except those of her immediate family circle — and so
rigorous is the censorship created by the ostracisms and
defamations of polite society for any breach of its con-
ventional code, that age cannot wither nor custom stale
the infinite variety of its uncharitable gossip. I remem-
ber an old lady, a grandmother and a sexagenarian,
telling me that she could not offer me a seat in her motor-
car after the opera because " people would talk." And
I remember, as another typical instance of Montevidean
manners, that the wife of a distinguished member of the
diplomatic body had thoughtlessly accepted the offer of
a lift home from a dinner-party from one of her husband's
colleagues, when a horrified native lady intervened and
begged her to save appearances by having another guest
drive with them, at least to the first corner. Ah, ces
langues f And the application of the code is not limited
to the native born; the stranger within the gates of
Uruguay is expected to conform to it. You may be
English or French, society will pick up its sanctimonious
skirts and consign you to outer darkness if you venture
to act in all good faith upon the assumption that a man
may be clean-minded and a woman virtuous. At
the fashionable afternoon tea place in the Calle Rincon
para familias, gentlemen unaccompanied by ladies
are not admitted. Ex pede Herculem. English families
in the Argentine and Uruguay, and especially those of
the second generation of residents, usually conform to

IN SOUTH AMERICA 205

these local shibboleths and make a virtue of necessity.
I have even known more than one English parent of
native-born children to defend the barrier system,
maintaining that the sex passions of these people are not
controllable without it, and that, the coup de foudre
being a phenomenon of frequent occurrence, parents
and husbands do well to guard against it. They there-
fore support a code which, while precluding rational
social intercourse, professes to confer a measure of
protection against the call of the blood. But the very
fact of foreigners being expected to conform to the
ancient Iberian formulae and fashions of deportment is
in itself evidence that the survival of the code is solely
due to the tyranny of hidebound custom and that the
remedy lies in decent education.

As things are, polite society in Uruguay resembles the
congregations of the Lutheran Church; the ewe lambs
and wethers carefully fenced off from the wild he-goats.
Outside of the family circle, which therefore assumes
enormous size and importance, the average man's social
activities are confined to his club, to racing, or politics,
or the theatre, and for the rest, to the cultivation of such
wild oats as his needs, means and opportunities may
allow. On the morganatic attachments of the married
men, on the benevolent activities of imported French
and Italian artistes, and of the " China " of the lesser
demi-monde, society looks with something very like
complacency.1 The manage d trois is not sanctioned by
the Mussulman code, but the Pasha, when bored by his

1 The term " China " (origin doubtful) is applied in the
Argentine and the Banda Oriental to native-born women bred
from Indian or half-Indian stock. They are generally of pleasant
manners and good physique; in the matter of morals, unbiassed
and somewhat miscellaneous; and in their disposition, simple,
affectionate and philoprogenitive.

206 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

own menage, may visit the secret orchards of his choice.
In that circle of society where politicians and plutocrats
meet, the maintenance of a mistress is almost de rigueur,
as in Paris, if one would be in the fashion. Married men
are not supposed to pay visits with their wives; and
society does not usually indulge in such promiscuous
entertainments as dinner-parties. There are dances, of
course, for matrimonial ends, but mother's lamb remains
very discreetly within range of mother's eye, and cosy
corners, except for engaged couples, are unknown. In
fact, the only legitimate capacities in which a member
of the male sex can appear at a social function are those
of a watch-dog or an aspirant to matrimony. Outside
of the family circle, his relations with women in society
are marked by rigid formality, and hedged about with
the chevaux de frise of inviolable conventions.

I recall to mind a certain tea-party given by a much-
travelled, and therefore liberal-minded, lady of the best
" Oriental " society, at which, in addition to the usual
large gathering of women, there were present no less
than four men — to wit, three husbands and a brother.1
It was an instructive entertainment, though from the
European social standard a dull and uncomfortable
business. After the tea, at which the ladies sat down
to table, while the men stood around and passed cakes
and polite remarks, the women retired in a body to the
drawing-room, where they sat in a circle, talking chiffons,

1 At inter-family dinners, or convivial gatherings of intimate
friends, it is not considered good form to separate husband and
wife at table. Host and hostess sit side by side, and the rest,
two by two, round the festive board. These entertainments
may not be wildly exciting, but they serve to stimulate the
tribal instinct, a very powerful factor in Montevidean life, and
they are eminently respectable. To achieve respectability is
the be-all and end-all of existence.

IN SOUTH AMERICA 207

babies and the servant problem, for the best part of an
hour. During this time the men remained in another
room, smoking and telling each other stories about the
joys of life in Paris and about ladies of the undomes-
ticated kind, muy verde. In search of knowledge I
ventured into the drawing-room, and, greatly daring,
engaged one of the ladies in conversation — one who had
spent several seasons in Paris and likely, therefore, to
concede that a travelling stranger might speak to a lady
without wishing either to marry or to compromise her.
I asked her if she could, and would, explain to me why
all the very pleasant gentlemen in the other room
remained so unsociably distant? Why, also, was it
that according to the laws and customs of Montevideo,
a woman might not be seen walking and talking in public
with any male friend or acquaintance, no matter how
notoriously respectable ? " Sefior," she replied, " you
are quite right; it is all very stupid. But when men
talk to women in this country, it is always about the
same thing, and it is not suitable conversation for the
drawing-room/' While there is good ground, no doubt
for this young woman's indictment, I see no reason to
believe that there is more original sin in a well-bred
native of Uruguay than, shall we say, in a Spaniard or
a Russian. And, after all, whose fault is it if the average
male product of Uruguayan education disports himself
like the oiled and curled Assyrian bull, and regards la
chasse aux femmes as the chief purpose of existence?
Does not the barbed-wire system and all this artificial
separation of the sexes inevitably tend to produce in
both a permanent and unhealthy condition of sexual
excitement ? Beyond all question, it does ; the whole
life of the community throbs with the pulsations of
natural human instincts, all the stronger for being arti-

208 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

ficially restrained, and society thus becomes a network
of intrigue, of secret rebellions against its Draconian
laws. There can be no doubt, as was proved long ago
by the ancient civilisation of Greece, and more recently
during the golden age in Japan, that the healthy, natural
treatment of natural things provides the best safeguard
against morbid sexual excitement and all its unpleasant
consequences. Under the South American system, and
particularly in the more highly civilised Republics, one
sees this sexual excitement at its worst reflected in
private life, in literature, and on the stage, in manners
and in morals, because here you have the traditions of
the Moorish harem struggling with the instinctive
aspirations of the Latin towards freedom.

The artificial state of society, produced by the tyranny
of creeds and customs long outworn, is undeniable;
one of its inevitable and immediate consequences is to
make the outward appearances of propriety the be-all
and end-all of social virtue. On the moral and physical
disadvantages resulting therefrom, especially for women,
I prefer to make no comment. Amongst the lower
classes they are sufficiently obvious; incest of all kinds
is notoriously common. As regards the middle class,
the position of affairs has recently been described with
brutal frankness by a Montevidean writer, in a novel
entitled La Familia Gutierrez. No stronger indictment
could be penned of the arbitrary code of deportment
imposed upon young women during the period in which
they are expected to win and retain the affections of a
suitor, pour le bon motif.

It is a feature of the damnable system, and one which
tends to intensify the prevailing atmosphere of sexual
excitement, that whereas polite society, armed with all
the terrors of the Holy Inquisition, places woman on a

IN SOUTH AMERICA 209

pedestal of virtuous inaccessibility, it allows and en-
courages her to make herself as attractive as possible to
the other sex. To see a mother and her marriageable
daughter taking the air at Pocitos, or shopping on Sarandi
at the fashionable hour, is to learn something of the gentle
art of serving forbidden fruit in the most alluring style.
Mother's whole heart is set, no doubt, on protecting her
poor child from the crafts and assaults of the ravening
male, but they both take good care that everything
possible shall be done to attract his roving eye. The
young lady's clothes, especially in summer, leave but
little of her figure to the imagination, and I gather that
in the arts of seductive fascination she has not much to
learn. Of course, Mother's defence, on a charge of
illogical procedure, would be that competition in the
marriage market is extremely brisk, and that it is the
business of every good woman to find husbands for her
daughters at all costs. But even granting this debatable
point, if there be any sincerity in this arbitrary segrega-
tion of women, or anything in it of vital necessity to the
preservation of society, one might at least expect that,
having married, women should protect themselves effec-
tively from all further attentions of the ravening male by
a mouse-like modesty of raiment and by discarding all
her feminine wiles of allurement. Knowing the sensi-
tive jealousy of her lawful lord and the polygamous
instincts of his friends, one might reasonably expect her
to follow the logical example of her fellow-women of the
Far East and either blacken her teeth with betel-nut,
or adopt some similar device for escaping the glad eye.
She might cut her eyelashes, give up the rouge-pot, and
eschew the flapper style in skirts. But noblesse oblige ;
she evidently prefers to run her risks.

The present state of affairs, conceived in the mind

210 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

of mediaeval Spain, is only maintained because of the
defective education, and the inherent conservatism of
South American women. It is simply a matter of slavish
adherence to fetishes, combined with a morbid fear of
public opinion, in a community greatly addicted to
malicious gossip. That it is dictated by tyrannous
custom, and not by any creed, is sufficiently proved by
the fact that, when Argentines and Orientals find them-
selves in London or Paris they behave like ordinary
civilised people, and the heavens do not fall.

You perceive this same tyranny of an artificial respecta-
bility in polite society's observance of its intolerable code
of mourning. In this matter, the Draconian, severity of
the older generation has been somewhat modified of
late, but the unwritten ordinances of Montevideo's
respectability are still sufficient to fill the streets with
the garments and trappings of conventional grief and to
take half the joy out of life for every one. Not so long
ago, society expected that the death of a parent should
be mourned for three years, and mourning meant not
only weeds and flowing crape, but complete isolation,
close confinement in the house of woe. Women in such
case were expected never to be seen abroad except to
go to Mass, and amongst the unco guid it was bad form
to go to Mass at midday — they crept there before break-
fast. For an uncle, aunt, brother or sister, the code
imposed a year's abstinence from the pomps and vanities
of this wicked world. So that in the case of large families
it frequently happened — and it happens still — that the
younger generation spent all its best years beneath the
weeping-willow tree, marooned in the odour of sanctity,
cut off from all rational enjoyment of life. (Is it not
told of an ingenious iconoclast of Paraguay that he
invited all his relations to his wedding and burnt the

IN SOUTH AMERICA 211

house down in order, as he said, to have all his mourning
at once, and be done with it?) The unwritten law
enforced with inquisitorial malignity in a community
where every one is afraid of his neighbour's definitions of
les convenances imposes mourning even for the lesser
degrees of kinship, so that to be on the safe side an
Uruguayan family rushes into black on the slightest
provocation. (The line of safety appears to be drawn
with, but after, the cook's parrot.) No doubt the
Church, for its own ends, had something to do with the
devising of this lugubrious business, and the patriarchal
social system would naturally tend to perpetuate it, but
with the last decade ideas have become less parochial,
and it is gradually losing some of its barbarous rigidity.

There seems to be good reason to hope that the sack-
cloth and ashes business is in process of suppression, but
as matters stand in this year of grace, it is no exaggeration
to say that half the well-to-do class goes clad in funereal
black. For man, passe encore — he may wear decent
mourning without necessarily reminding one of the
undertaker — but that women, whose proper business it
should be to gladden the eye and rejoice the heart,
should thus convert themselves into walking monuments
of Old Mortality, this is an offence against reason and a
reproach to the cheerful blue of heaven.

Beyond all doubt it is the slavish conservatism of
women, and not the wicked will of man, which imposes
these senseless fetishes upon the community; for here,
more so than with us, woman is the maker, controller
and permanent inmate of the home. Only conservatism
of the atavistic unreasoning kind can account for their
persistence in adhering as they do to the Moorish style
of architecture, with its prison-like windowless walls,
the single entrance to its caravanserai patio, and the

212 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

sala on the street front, with its balconies and the little
slits of peep-holes in the shutters, that are for ever shut.
Apart from its obvious suitability to the seraglio system,
and its consequent impropriety in a modern civilised
state, it is a style of building entirely unsuited to a
climate which, for several months in the year, is decidedly
cold. The cheerless discomfort of a typical Uruguayan
establishment in winter is one of many sacrifices which
these people unconsciously pay to the Moorish tradition ;
but the lady of the house, as she sits shivering over a
smelly kerosene stove, seems, like its builder, to cherish
the delusion that winter is an accident which will probably
not occur again.

It is this same good old tawny conservatism, no doubt,
which leads her to defend and perpetuate for her offspring
the semi-barbarous conditions which govern the relations
of the sexes, and the egregious rights of courtship and
betrothal requisite and necessary for maidens within the
pale of El Mundo Uruguayo.

After dark, in all the less-frequented calles of Monte-
video's middle-class suburbia, Carmen and Juana, Benita
and Dolores stand nightly at their dim casements, either
exchanging sweet nothings with a shadowy young man
on the sidewalk, or leaning over the balcony patiently
awaiting destiny in the form of a " Dragon/' I never
see them at this stage of love's young dream but that my
mind, riding its hobby-horse of comparative sociology,
conjures up irrelevant and irreverent memories of mating
marts in other lands— notably those of the ancient East.
The unclaimed wares are so frankly, sometimes so
pathetically, eloquent of window-dressing. And then La
Familia Gutierrez comes to mind, with its surgical analysis
of the life of these young women, these children in their
teens, for whom all thoughts, all passions, all delights,

A MODEL ESTANCIA : HORSES AT PASTURE, CANTA FIERO

A MODEL ESTANCIA I A RIVERSIDE POTRERO, " CANTA FIERO "

[To face p. 212.

IN SOUTH AMERICA 213

are fiercely concentrated in the winning and holding of
a novio, for whom the fear of spinsterhood is an
abiding shadow of shame, and philoprogenitiveness the
strongest of all instincts.

The normal love-affair, especially in the middle class,
begins when a roving eye, on the sidewalk, meets the
glad eye, unblushingly expectant, at the sala window;
sometimes the glad eye has been tracked to its lair by
the bold poursuivant, as the result of signs of gladness
at the cathedral parade or in the crowd on Sarandi.
For a day or two the young man expresses his admiration
and good intentions by hanging about in the vicinity of
the seiiorita's house and by following her at a respectful
distance in her walks abroad. Eventually, if the young
woman does not dislike his appearance, she appears
casually on the balcony and becomes aware of Romeo
sighing and making sheep's eyes from over the way;
and the performance begins. If, after the preliminary
conversational skirmishes, both parties desire each other's
better acquaintance, the young man's novitiate on the
sidewalk begins, and he is known as the fair one's
" Dragon." The term is roughly equivalent to our
" walking out " or " keeping company." It is, however,
non-committal and probationary ; except with the tail of
a watchful eye, the family does not recognise the Dragon's
proceedings, while the cold barrier of the balcony railing
stands between him and rapturous wooing. The Dragon
stage may continue over a considerable period, should
the young man waver between love and liberty; from
personal observation I venture to assert that the Dragon
period of probation is probably the only time of a South
American man's life during which the superiority of the
masterful male yields to symptoms of deferential cour-
tesy. When he takes the final plunge of being introduced

214 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

to the girl's parents and paying his formal respects to
the family, he becomes, if accepted, her novio, or
fiance. His matrimonial goose is then cooked. Society
expects that his intimate relationship and proprietary
rights, tempered though they be by maternal vigilance,
shall end in marriage — it is significant that when he
becomes a bridegroom he is still called a 'novio. Public
opinion is very severe on faithless swains who back out
of the formal engagement; and rightly so, for the girl
who is jilted by her novio is not likely to get another.
Her virgin bloom is gone, and her gentle sisters speak of
her with the sympathy due to one who is neither a widow
nor a divorcee. From the woman's point of 'view, this
is the worst feature of the system, for engagements
frequently last for years, and the atmosphere of sexual
excitement in which these youths and maidens are
brought up is unhealthy. A girl who has been engaged
for a year or two is compelled to keep her novio at all
costs, a Condition of affairs scarcely conducive to self-
respect. And when she has achieved her ambition of
marriage the Uruguayan woman is generally very little
better than a head servant in her own house; even in
the richest families, she frequently has no money or
regular allowance of her own. She is content to be the
mother of an unlimited number of children and to con-
sult her husband's pleasure in all things; to live in
economic dependence and intellectual inferiority; to be
grateful for small mercies, and to look the other way
when her lord thinks fit to stray in paths of dalliance.

But they hug their chains, these women. Every one
of them would rather be Lothario's married drudge than
perish on the virgin thorn and die in single blessedness.
They will tell you that woman's highest aspiration, her
only role in life, is to bear children and keep house ; and

IN SOUTH AMERICA 215

they seem to resent the idea that she should ever do, or
be, anything more. This, their normal state of mind,
is pathetically reflected in the conversation of the average
" Oriental " drawing-room — there are exceptions, heaven
be praised ! — and in the attitude of hostility which
Uruguayan society (with a big S) displays towards
those women who display any tendency to call their
souls their own, and to disregard the least of all their
shibboleths.

If this were Costa Rica, or even Southern Mexico, one
would bow to the inevitable; but these women belong
physically and intellectually to the higher type of civilised
humanity. If their minds are undeveloped, it is not
because the soil is unfertile, but simply for lack of proper
education; from their ordinary conversation you might
infer that they had passed straightway from the kinder-
garten, by way of the market-place, to the seclusion
of the seraglio. Marriage and giving in marriage; the
breeding and feeding of babies; the delinquencies of
husbands and the dreadful doings of the demi-monde;
the buying and making of clothes ; the servant problem ;
and the latest thing in spicy scandals — with these things
do the senoras entertain each other unceasingly at their
" five o'clocks." Their manners are graceful and
pleasant, and they have usually been taught something
of music and what Victorians called polite accomplish-
ments, but of art, literature, politics, even of history and
geography they generally know nothing. I recall to
mind, as a typical instance of Uruguay's female education,
the remark made by a leader of Montevideo society to
a distinguished member of the diplomatic body, who
had given a lecture on the subject of Marie Antoinette :
" Ah," she said, " I did enjoy it so much— but I hoped
all the time, you know, that the poor dear Queen was

216 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

going to escape." And one of the worst features of the
deplorable limitation of their education is that, confined
chiefly to the society of their own kith and kin, and
lacking a healthy interest in political, social and intel-
lectual activities of the world at large, they naturally
develop an abnormal appetite for petty gossip of a rather
spiteful kind. I really believe that there is more specu-
lative philosophy and more breadth of views in the
conversation of the peons' quarters out in the "camp"
than at most gatherings of the beauty and fashion of
Montevideo's bourgeoisie.

They dress well, here as in Buenos Aires and Santiago
de Chile. Yet a mere man may perhaps be permitted
to express the opinion that the use of extremely high
heels, combined with short skirts, is not to be commended
where trim ankles and neat calves are strangely few and
far between.

For the rest, they eat well, sleep well, dress well, and
look well; grow stout at the appointed season and spoil
their children unmercifully. But they have this satis-
faction to their credit, though perhaps they do not realise
it, that when they appear in public in the company of
their male belongings — be it husband, father or brother
—these masterful creatures, compared with them, look
like poor and untidy relations. You notice the same
thing in New York and Chicago, but here the contrast is
even more markedly noticeable throughout all grades of
society.

CHAPTER XII

MONTEVIDEO

ONE of the results of the prevailing Moorish tradition
in architecture, with its one-storey houses all built around
their little patios, is to spread the city out over an area
enormous in proportion to the number of its inhabitants.
Looking at its depth and distances from the mole-hill
eminence of the Cerro (which is the name of the " Monte "
that the Spanish navigators video'd), you would put its
population at three or four times the actual number, just
as one does when seeing the great enclosure of Peking
from the city walls, or Constantinople from the forum of
Theodosius, and for the same reason. The patio habit
requires a lot of room, but experiments in the two- or
three-storied house with a common central court are
unsatisfactory as regards privacy, and evidently unpopu-
lar; while from the " Dragon's " point of view there are
obvious objections to courtship from the sidewalk with a
lady on a third-floor balcony, even though there be a
complete Morse code with fan and handkerchief. There-
fore, the one-storey house is likely to remain a national
institution for some time to come, and the great cities of
South America in the future will be extensive affairs.
Montevideo, they say, has about 350,000 inhabitants —
nobody seems quite sure of the figure — but you can ride
for hours through its suburbs, each exactly like all the
others, and all well served with two tramways. Only
here and there, on the Artigas boulevard and in certain

fashionable districts where plutocrats have built themselves

217

218 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

the latest thing in modern mansions and gardens, will
you find social departures from the orthodox suburban
calle, with its rows of plane trees, all of the same height,
and its unending succession of houses with their sola win-
dows all eternally shuttered, and their balconies all in a
row about the height of a man's head. A street of this
kind is no more monotonous, in reality, and is in many
ways better, than a street in the suburbs of London or New
York; but the point is that, whereas Twickenham speaks
with one note and Hampstead with another, both differing
from Tooting Bee, here in Montevideo when you have
seen one street you have practically seen them all. This
absence of invidious distinctions is evidence, no doubt,
of a satisfactorily democratic division of wealth, as far as
the middle class is concerned. There is very little here of
the ostentatious plutocratic element which flaunts itself
in Buenos Aires, and on the other hand, while the great
unwashed is well represented, there are few paupers and
no foul slums.

No matter where one goes in South America, one had
the feeling that its democracies have become very restless
of late years because they realise that their New World is
not necessarily safe, in spite of having abolished crowns,
thrones and sceptres. Buenos Aires, for instance, has
become more intolerant of plutocrats and capitalistas
than Barcelona itself. Catalan agitators, bursting with
the gospel of Trotsky and Lenin, are busy wherever
industrial activity has produced conspicuous divisions
between the Haves and Have-nots. But the problem is
complicated here by the fact that where every one considers
himself to be middle class at least, there is no bloated
bourgeoisie — to go for — only the foreign capitalist, the
banker and the manufacturer. The restlessness is there,
widespread, manifest, also the desire of the manual labourer

IN SOUTH AMERICA 219

to work only on his own terms ; but its manifestations are
indiscriminate, and, if Buenos Aires strike leadership is
to be taken as typical, conceived in ignorance and con-
ducted in foolishness. When one sees the leading Republic
of the South American continent rivalling young China
in the folly of its misconceptions of liberty — even strikes
of school-children being seriously discussed by the authori-
ties— one perceives that ample resources and elbow-
room are not in themselves sufficient to make a contented
people. One perceives also that those who would govern
Demos wisely and well must be leaders, not followers, of
public opinion; thinkers as well as talkers; and, when it
comes to dealing with collective folly, men of action. The
difference between Demos in Buenos Aires and Demos in
Montevideo is racially small— though the former is out-
wardly more cosmopolitan — so that their very different
conceptions of law and order and the good of the common-
wealth may fairly be ascribed to the fact that Sefior Battle
and his party have shown more sense and more courage in
dealing with the anarchist element than Papa Irigoyen of
Buenos Aires. Montevideo, at all events, gives one the
impression of being too sensible, and possibly too com-
fortable, to allow the Syndicalist and the Communist to
make life unbearable with all the stinks of their political
laboratory. The social reformer is a conspicuous figure
in the land, and (unless he happens to combine the role
with that of a politician) usually honest and sincere ; but
sooner or later he comes up against the great Twin Sopori-
fics, Manana and Mas 6 Menos, and they lull him to
acquiescence, or to sleep. And so, in spite of all the
alarms and excursions on her borders, and the fiery elo-
quence within them, Montevideo contrives to preserve a
temperate and sensible state of society.
The family-party spirit of the thing, with manana and

220 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

mas 6 menos as tutelary spirits in the background, is
fairly manifested in Uruguay's public services. The
army, which seems, in spite of all principles of equality,
to be largely recruited from the coloured element of the
population, is certainly not a militarist force, though
useful for the executive's purposes of law and order, and
for the discouraging of revolutions. The police, as a body,
inspire sympathy rather than awe; they give one the
impression of having been recently discharged from an
infirmary. They are certainly the smallest and feeblest
set of bobbies in existence. It is a phenomenon capable
of being interpreted in several ways, but local experts are
probably correct in their assertion that the selection of men
for the force is made on the principle that a small and
infirm policeman costs less than a large one. Anyhow,
they look as dignified as possible with their white batons
and white spats, and their courtesy is worthy of Old Castile.
It is of the kindly, thoughtful brand which, rather than
turn you empty away, will give you the wrong number of
a tram without the slightest hesitation.

The tramway service, being absolutely essential to the
business and pleasure of the people, as distinct from that
of the capitalist*, is wonderfully good and cheap. Indeed,
it is so good and so efficiently handled that one asks oneself
what can be the reason for the incredible rottenness of the
railway, telegraph, telephone and postal services? Are
these of so little importance to the majority of the com-
munity that the bureaucracy can afford to let them go
to pieces? They have two telephone companies com-
peting for public disfavour in Montevideo, the idea
presumably being that when the Sefiorita tells you the line
is muerta on one, you may hope to extract signs of life
from the other.

As for the railway, making all due allowances for the

IN SOUTH AMERICA 221

war's curtailment of its coal supply, words fail to describe
its dolce far niente methods of handling passengers and
freight — especially freight. It reminds one of the line
built by the Chinese from Peking to Kalgan, alongside of
which, by stony mountain tracts, most of the country's
traffic is carried on by mules and camels, as being cheaper
and more reliable. If Uruguay possessed roads capable of
carrying heavy motor traffic, the " Central Uruguay "
would either have to get on or get out ; as things are, it
continues to inculcate forty-parson patience in a com-
munity already far too disposed to the cultivation of that
virtue.

Personally, having passed most of my days amongst
bona fide Orientals and learned something of the wisdom
of their contemplative philosophy, I have a sneaking
sympathy for a people which sincerely believes that it
doesn't really matter whether you do a thing, or hear of
a thing, to-day or to-morrow. Therefore, out in the
" camp," amongst peons who hold this faith in the unity of
spirit, I find myself acquiescing in the state of mind which
is quite satisfied to receive its letters and telegrams once
a week (if the state of the roads permit) by sending a
messenger to fetch them from the pulperia where the
Government's " diligence " is supposed to drop them.1
Out yonder, where the peace of God has time to brood, I
shrug my shoulders at transport and communication
arrangements that would be severely criticised even by
the Chinese ; but here, in the city, where the light of heaven
is dimmed by clustering cobwebs of electric wires, and
Chambers of Commerce talk loudly of their enterprise, I

1 The rural postmaster or mistress, generally located at a
pulperia, receives, as a rule, no salary, but is supposed to get a
percentage on the sale of stamps. But as they seldom have
stamps to sell, except in the larger towns, their interest in postal
business is not absorbing.

222 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

confess to being vexed with a system which transmits
telegrams at about normal letter speed, and doesn't seem
to mind whether the outlying parts of the country get its
mails this week or next.

From 12 noon to 1.30 p.m. Montevideo takes its midday
meal and siesta. All the shops are shut, and the clamour
of the lottery ticket and newspaper sellers * dies away upon
the noontide, for the law ordains that every man is to
have an hour and a half (or more) for his lunch.

It is interesting to observe how this forty-eight-hours-a-
week law works out, both in the breach and the observance ;
significant here, as elsewhere, the politician's concern for
the comfort and ease of organised city labour, as contrasted
with his willingness to allow agricultural workers to toil
from dawn to dusk. One wonders what would become
of this country — and others — if the husbandman and the
sailor were to insist on their right never to work more than
four hours at a stretch ? In practice, of course, the thing
works itself out into reasonable compromises, except
where Government and public servants are concerned;
amongst these no self-respecting postal clerk or tram con-
ductor but must seek repose after four hours of toil, come
what may. The result in many cases means a frightful
waste of the public's time and money, but what of that ?
When, for example, the crew of the ferry which runs be-
tween the harbour and the Cerro has completed a four-

1 The number of newspapers published, and apparently ab-
sorbed, by Montevideo is mysteriously great. Of the dozen
or so represented at all hours of the day by swarms of shouting
boys, three or four are commonly reported to be self-supporting,
even remunerative, enterprises, though their price remains as
before the war, two cents. For the rest, the various political
parties and the Church are said to be financially responsible.
If so, their object must be to provide harmless employment for
poor journalists; for either as polemics or propaganda these
sheets must be a shocking waste of money.

IN SOUTH AMERICA 223

hours shift, they may not stay aboard the boat, for that
would count as work. So they make the boat fast to the
wharf at the Cerro and stroll about on shore for an hour,
to the satisfaction of Satan. It would really seem as if,
in this complicated world, it is impossible to make any one
set of people comfortable without disturbing hosts of
others; and our sagacious rulers, having discovered this
truth, prefer to sacrifice the comfort of the minority who
work with their heads to the satisfaction of those who toil
with their hands.

Montevideo boasts of few sights, in the tourist sense of
the word ; no historical monuments or mouldy collections
of relics, and nothing to compare with Buenos Aires in the
matter of architecture. Nevertheless, it is more interesting
and instructive, to my mind, than either Buenos Aires or
Rio. For here you come nearer to the heart of things,
nearer to perception of the forces at work on the continent ;
because of the country's smallness and social aloofness,
you perceive more clearly the great problems on which
all its future depends; the economic servitude of the Old
World to the New ; the rapid filling up of the earth's last
vacant fertile spaces ; the infiltration from Europe of the
corrosive gospel of discontent; the storming of the last
stronghold of the Catholic faith, planted here by the stout
Jesuits three centuries ago.

Walking at evening through these quiet streets and
pleasant places, I find myself wishing that this land at
least might be spared the painful process of further civili-
sation; that it might rigorously exclude the alien and
continue, untouched and untroubled by the senseless
bustle and bloodshed beyond its borders, the pleasant
pastoral life of the " Purple Land." I find myself, in fact,
sympathising with President Irigoyen who, it seems, would
now fain rid Argentina of all capitalists and foreigners

224 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

and exhort his people, abjuring commerce, to dwell hence-
forth in Arcadian simplicity, consuming each the kindly
fruits of his own rustic labour. In all truth, I like not to
think of what the state of the Pampas is likely to be, say
fifty years hence, when the last of the Gauchos has disap-
peared before the invading hosts of base mechanics and
all the land has been parcelled out in small holdings to the
flotsam and jetsam of famine-haunted Europe.

Though there be little for a tourist's guide to show you,
there is plenty of food for thought in the highways and
by-ways of the city. Begin, for instance, as a devout
Britisher, by contemplating the lamentable spectacle
presented by the scurvy premises where hangs the
escutcheon of His Majesty's Legation and Consulate. One
of the quietest and prettiest of Montevideo's plazas lies
over against this sorry monument of Foreign Office — or is
it Treasury ? — parsimony. You may sit here, in the shade
of the giant palms, and reflect at leisure on the miraculous
fact that the Empire has hitherto survived the crass
bungling of its bureaucrats. It is, indeed, an extraordinary
thing that in those countries where the most rudimentary
common sense should indicate the necessity for keeping
up a dignified appearance, you will find Great Britain's
representatives tucked away in mean back streets, lodged
with far less distinction than their colleagues of China or
Peru. Like the Consulate General at Rio, our local
habitation here bears eloquent testimony to the penny wise,
pound foolish, policy, which has apparently survived the
monstrous waste of the past five years; both serve to
impress modesty upon the gentlemen who serve therein,
by reminding them that, for the Foreign Office, South
America has always been, so to speak, a kind of dustbin.
Sitting in this peaceful Plaza, one wonders whether the war
and its economic results may perchance disturb the com-

IN SOUTH AMERICA 225

placency of this tradition, whether new light will ever
percolate into the innermost fastnesses of Downing Street ?
If so, it should not be long before steps are taken to have
Great Britain represented on this continent in such a
manner as to indicate our perception of its coming role
in world politics. In matters of this kind, essentially
matters of discrimination and tactful intuition, our French
friends never make the mistake of attempting to combine
official dignity with shirt-sleeve simplicity in a back street.

If you would seek another subject for profitable medita-
tion, take the road that runs northwards by the sea and
visit the Campo Santo. There, between high walls, in
narrow cypress-shrouded ways, bedecked with artificial
flowers, 'neath monumental stones and effigies, Monte video-
that-was rests from its labour, and Monte video -that-is
comes here, with almost Oriental piety, to remember
and reverence its dead.1

It is said that the last thing which a self-respecting
family will part with, when in financial need, is its burial
vault in this honoured site, though the competition of the
nouveaux riches for admission to the society of the well-born
and well-dead is very keen. The keynote of these effigies
and epitaphs is undoubtedly domestic and filial affection,
very simple and sincere ; some of the art which attempts
to express it is curiously artless and primitive, reminding
one of the home-made obituary verses which one sees

1 The oldest monuments and memorial tablets in this cemetery
date back no further than the beginning of the nineteenth
century, and nobody seems to know (or care) what has become
of the monuments — there must have been some — of their ancestors
of the eighteenth. All Montevideo's history seems to date from
the year 1808; as far as outward and visible signs are con-
cerned, Colonial Spain and the Conquistadores might never
have set foot in the Banda Oriental. The Cathedral boasts
but one monument, viz. that of an archbishop of the nineteenth
century.
Q

226 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

published with the announcement of bereavements in
Scotch and Irish provincial papers. Sometimes these
monuments are pompous and vulgar; here and there you
will find the pitiful solecism of a framed photograph of
the deceased, generally in his dress suit, horribly con-
flicting with one's conceptions of decent immortality ; but
on the whole, the atmosphere of this city of the dead is
restful, dignified, and of good hope, and there is evidence
at every step that the departed are held in kindly remem-
brance by the living. And further northwards, looking out
to sea, beyond Pocitos, lies the British cemetery, a very
beautiful burial-ground.

The Cerro — Montevideo's landmark from the sea — should
be the city's finest public park and recreation place, but
the fashionable world has moved in the other direction,
towards Pocitos and Carrasco, and the little hill, with its
old Spanish fort and lighthouse, is a melancholy spot.
Its approaches and vicinity are squalid in the extreme;
squatters' huts, corrugated iron shanties, broken-down
fences, rubbish heaps and wandering goats, all remind one
of the outskirts of some unkempt new town of the woolly
west in Canada or the United States. But for me, as I sat
on a wall of the fort and viewed the landscape o'er, the
melancholy destiny of the spot was emphasised, not so
much by its unattractive appearance as by consciousness
of the immediate vicinity of the saladero, that hideous
place of slaughter where, all day long and every day,
great herds of doomed beasts stand on the bleak hill-
side, with mounted men that stand guard over them,
awaiting their turn to walk the narrow inclined way, that
leads to the upper floor of the building, a sledge-hammer,
and swift death. I never see the " Monte " now without
thinking of those poor patient beasts, as I saw them one
rainy day in August 1916, all huddled up, mournfully

IN SOUTH AMERICA 227

lowing, in that grim vestibule of the canning factory.
There had been a slackening of the sledge-hammer —
shortage of freight, or something — during the past week,
and so it happened that several troops of cattle had waited
here for more than a day, unwatered and unfed. One
longed to speed up the machinery, to hasten the progress of
that sad procession. The Irishman who showed us over
the factory, where the suspended carcases circulate
between cutters and flayers from the killing-pen to the
freezing-room, told us that all this meat was going to
France for the troops. Say what you will, there is some-
thing wrong with a system of creation which compels
intelligent human beings to supply themselves with
energy, wherewith to slay their fellowmen, by killing and
eating the beasts of the field. The system is probably
tentative and provisional only, but there is no denying
in the meanwhile, that this planet would have been made
a far pleasanter place of residence for man and beast had
these things been arranged differently. I confess a
sympathy with the Buddhists' attitude in this matter.
It offers no solution as to the disposal of swiftly multiplying
animal life, but as a humane creed I prefer it to " Rise,
Peter, kill and eat."

The worthy couple who devised and made the zoological
garden and raree-show at the Villa Dolores (lately be-
queathed to the city) must have been original characters,
possessed of a very lively sympathy for animals and
children. Their ideas on the subject of architecture, art,
and landscape gardening, as here displayed, are hardly
calculated to teach the young idea how to shoot, but
seldom have I seen birds and beasts display such evidence
of health and cheerful resignation under captivity. And
then, the animals' cemetery, all set about with roses, each
little grave with its appropriate monument. This, and the

228 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

fearful and wonderful collection of waxworks and mechani-
cal toys, and the sleek glossiness of the birds and beasts,
proclaim the simple virtues of the departed. The whole
place is interesting as the work of rugged, kindly, unedu-
cated minds, carrying out their own whimsical ideas,
regardless of cost and quite indifferent to public opinion.
It is a peculiarly complex benevolence which condemns
a couple of polar bears to pass their lives in a subtropical
garden, and adorns their cage with an inscription begging
the public to be kind to animals.

Close to the Villa Dolores lies the fashionable bathing
beach of Pocitos. To reach it you pass through a well-to-
do suburban district which, with the eye of faith, you can
see in years to come growing to the opulence and splendour
of Palermo, rivalling the seats of the mighty cattle kings of
Argentina. But for the present, generally speaking, there
is an unfinished, transient look about these environs, a
curious admixture of prosperous bourgeois comfort and
shirt-sleeve sans-gene, often reminiscent of the back lots
of Canadian towns or the datchas of Southern Russia. The
public gardens and the sea-front promenade, which runs
from Pocitos to the Parque Urbano, are all very modern
and imposing, but cheek by jowl with the ornate quintets of
the rich you find ragged little fenced-in lots with tin-pot
shanties, homes of the popcorn vendors and the humble
washerwoman. The owner of a Rolls-Royce car marches
with the plebeian proprietor of an alfresco skittle alley. It
is all very cheerfully democratic, no doubt, but the scenic
effects are disappointing.1

At the Parque Hotel, or Casino Municipal, the nimble

1 One sees the same democratic sans-gene in the heart of the
city — private mansions and Government offices sandwiched in
between the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker.
The Ministry for Foreign Affairs, for example, in the Calle Rincon
has a druggist and a draper on its borders.

IN SOUTH AMERICA 229

ball rolls round the roulette wheel every afternoon and
evening for the benefit of a Government which is nothing
if not moral and benevolent. Here in the summer months
(October to April) society foregathers to disport itself —
mothers with daughters to marry, mothers with children
to bathe, estancieros with money to burn — and the State
Hotel does them very well indeed at $8 gold per diem.
The cuisine is up to the best Ritz-Carlton standard, and the
service unusually good. As at Monte Carlo, the canny
visitor who does not gamble gets many benefits at the
punter's expense. So does the hotel staff; and it shows
no signs of following the path of Bolshevism, which has
made the hotels of Buenos Aires uncomfortable places of
wrath. A waiter at the Parque draws $50 a month (£12
at 1919 exchange) with everything found and tips on a
liberal scale; he is therefore better off than a British
captain on retired pay, and seems to have grasped the fact
that he has not much to gain by listening to the greasy
Poles and ranting Catalans who come over from the Argen-
tine to proclaim the doom of the bloated bourgeois. The
Casino staff have got a soft thing, and they know it. There-
fore the travelling Argentine finds here a pleasant haven
of refuge from the slings and arrows of his Republic's out-
rageous socialism, a spot where efficient service and civility
are not considered to be beneath the dignity of waiters,
porters and housemaids. All the same, even here the
traveller is gently reminded of the simple dignity of South
American independence, for if he wants his boots blacked he
must go into the city and spend ten minutes, coram populo,
on the perch of the lustrador. Also, if he wants his clothes
pressed, they must go to a planchador, who holds by right
prescriptive the lucrative monopoly of that business.

Music and the drama flourish in Montevideo, particularly
music. It is not only that the people are naturally musical :

230 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

the theatre affords much-needed relief from the monotony
of their unsocial state, besides providing the fashionable
world with an opportunity for a competitive display.
To be in the smart set, one must be a subscriber for the
opera season at all costs : families afflicted with social
ambition will stint themselves for the rest of the year,
may even go hungry and pawn their valuables, to be seen of
men in a box or the stalls of the " Solis " during August,
when the stars of the operatic firmament shine here for a
while, on their way back from Buenos Aires to New York.
As no really self-respecting woman can be seen in the same
gown twice at the opera, and as a stall costs $12, and a box
$80, the struggle for social distinction becomes.an expensive
business. The prices paid for seats at the opera are higher
in Montevideo than anywhere in the world, but the
performances are usually inferior to those given in Buenos
Aires. The stars are of the first magnitude, but the ballet
and chorus are greatly reduced, for the troupe which plays
in the Argentine capital from May to July generally divides
itself on its way back to New York, part going to Monte-
video and the rest to Santiago de Chile. Also, after their
heavy work in Buenos Aires, the touring singers are
inclined to be stale and a trifle careless, and as the gods of
Uruguay are nothing if not frankly critical, and expect
value for their money, differences have been known to
arise between the stage and the gallery. The great Caruso
himself was painfully surprised on one occasion — a per-
formance of Manon in 1916 — when his singing was greeted
with derisive whistlings.

The standard of music and drama provided by other
travelling companies, chiefly Italian and Spanish, in South
America is surprisingly low ; it is certainly dear at the price
of a stall — $1.50. The Italian opera companies are often
so shockingly bad that the stoic endurance of the audience

IN SOUTH AMERICA 231

becomes a mystery. One marvels that the inferior quality
of the majority of imported artists should not have
stimulated home production on a larger scale, especially
as some " Oriental " play -writers and artists have shown
no little talent and achieved considerable success. Gener-
ally speaking, however, the taste of the theatre-going
public here, as in England, is demoralised by the pernicious
activities of the modern commercial impresario. The
legitimate drama has become caviare to the general public
because Demos has so long been fed on legs and laughter
that he has no stomach for a more wholesome diet. " El
estado debe vigilar por la salud publica," sagely observes
the Government's match-box moralist; a little vigilance
exercised by the State over the appalling slush served out
to the public by music-halls and picture-palaces would be
more convincing than all the eloquence of politicians
about progress, liberty and justice.

At the best theatres in Montevideo — the " Solis " and
the " Uriquiza " — the unwritten law which requires the
separation of the sexes is observed by the provision of a
gallery for women only, known as the Casuela, or saucepan.
The men's gallery is called El Paraiso — Paradise — possibly
on account of the infernal noises which proceed from it.
Above the women are the gods, all male. The appear-
ances of virtue are thus preserved; but the absurd result
of this arrangement is that unless a man can afford the more
expensive seats, he cannot see a play in company with his
women-folk. The same shibboleth of respectability pre-
cludes decent women from being seen at the evening
performances of the music-halls; here the male audience,
for some inscrutable reason, keeps its hat on, while the
boxes are graced by the presence of the demi-monde.
Most of the entertainers are French, either of the elderly
forlorn hope or the youthful try-it-on-the-dog kind, and

232 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

their performances make one wonder why this paternal
and progressive Government does not impose a high tariff
on these imported articles for the protection of native
taste and talent. Poor things, it is little enough they get
for tickling the palate of the noisy casino audience; the
price of a stall is two shillings.

But for the masses, and, indeed, for a good many of the
classes, the legitimate drama has been ousted by the
" movies." The number of picture-palaces in Montevideo
and Buenos Aires and Rio is simply amazing ; every vacant
hoarding is dedaubed with the unsightly advertisements
of their distorted horrors, their tales of blood and thunder,
and their awful angel child. I have an idea, indeed, I
hope, that a good many " society " young ladies frequent
these fearful entertainments not because they like them,
but because they provide young Strephon with opportu-
nities for toying with Amaryllis in the shade — not to say
the darkness — under her chaperon's very nose. I know
that in many of these popular resorts the management
rings a warning bell when it is going to turn the lights up.
Now, if all the audience were breathlessly following the
horrible history of the poor white slave, or the contortions
of Charlie Chaplin, that bell would be superfluous, wouldn't
it ? Somehow, I cannot bring myself to believe that the
picture-palace attracts only by its pictures ; but if it does,
what on earth is the good of all our talk about uplift, the
progress of humanity, and the culto del nino ? I prefer to
believe that people go to these places just as they go to
museums, either for purposes of flirtation, or for shelter
from wind and rain.

Speaking of rain, your average Oriental seems to regard
it much as he, or she, does cold weather, as an uncomfort-
able sort of accident, probably the result of thoughtless-
ness somewhere and not likely to occur again. There are

IN SOUTH AMERICA 233

shops in Montevideo that display umbrellas and water-
proofs— Burberrys themselves have an agency — but this
seems to be one of the lines in which the Oriental practises
economy. Out in the " camp " one rarely sees an umbrella,
and even in the city, most of the women one meets — there
are not many on a wet day — seem to have made up their
minds to put off buying one for another year or two. You
see them out shopping, clad in light garments that are
anything but waterproof, hurrying along on their absurdly
high heels, dodging the downpour from one place of
shelter to another, and all with a worried, aggrieved expres-
sion, as if rain were the sort of thing that a proper system
of government would confine to the country, where the
animals need it. It is rather strange, seeing how they
feel about it, that the city has not evolved shopping centres
of colonnades like those of the Plaza Independencia, or
arcades after the manner of old Berne or the Rue de Rivoli
in Paris. Not having any such protection, the entire
population lives and moves in helpless, patient discomfort
under the affliction of a wet day. All outdoor work comes
to a standstill; steamers cease loading and unloading
cargo ; the goods depots of the railway become congested
with tarpaulin-covered wagons. A fortnight's continuous
rain would paralyse the country's industries, quite apart
from the fact that it would cut off all internal communi-
cations. Your South American working man has all the
Asiatic's horror of getting wet, and none of his affection
for an umbrella. But long spells of rainy weather are
very unusual, even in winter, and the sunshine is of so
reassuring a quality that these people are justified, no doubt,
in waiting till the clouds roll by; and the philosophy of
manana serves them in good stead on these and on all
other occasions.

CHAPTER XIII

ESTANCIA LIFE IN URUGUAY

AND so, at last, we come to our muttons and to the
estancia which rears them. It lies in the Department of
Soriano, about 120 miles inland from Montevideo, between
the western extension of the Central Uruguay Railway
and the River Uruguay, in a bend of the Rio Maciel.
Its nearest station on the railway is Palmitas, a matter
of nine leagues away. When the roads are navigable,
that is to say, when the intervening rivulets are not in
flood and the mud not over your axles, you may expect
to reach it from Montevideo in one and the same day.
You leave the city by a train which starts at 8 a.m. and
meanders leisurely through San Jose", Santa Catalina,
and other slumbering places in the sun, all absurdly
alike, passing through country which to the uninitiated
eye appears to be chiefly devoted to the production of
thistles; unless the engine-driver or guard has found
business or pleasure of absorbing interest somewhere en
route, you should reach Palmitas somewhere about 4 p.m.
There is a restaurant car on the train where you get a
very vile lunch, combined with very excellent oppor-
tunities for studying types, manners and customs, and
there is generally a good deal of useful local colour to be
derived from the conversations of loquacious compadres
by the way, so that one forgets the deliberate sluggishness
of the train. After a while, indeed, it seems to fit in with
the family-party atmosphere of the entire proceedings,

234

A MODEL ESTANCIA I HEREFORD CATTLE AT " CANTA FIERO "

THE ESTANCIA UP-TO-DATE I " JLOS CORALES," RAFAELO,
SANTA FE, ARGENTINA

T To face p. 234.

MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS 235

just as it does in other lands where time is of no particular
value.

There are two rivers, or rather two big streams, to be
crossed between Palmitas and our estancia. If there has
been no rain for some days, you can generally cross them
at the road fords in a motor-car; in that case, the nine
leagues are only a matter of some two hours' compara-
tively swift and luxurious journey. This may sound bad
going for a distance of less than thirty miles ; but in the
interior of Uruguay the calle is a road only by courtesy.
As a matter of fact it is a strip of land, twenty-two metres
wide, fenced off from the adjoining " camp," but dis-
tinguishable from it only by the fact that the thistles,
burr plants and other weeds grow thereon more luxuri-
ously, and that the part of it over which carts and cattle
pass is an everlasting tangle of ruts and gulleys and small
chasms at the best of times.

By the laws of Uruguay it is decreed that the calle
must be twenty-two metres wide, wherever the necessity
for a highway has been recognised as part of the scheme
of things; also somewhere at the back of this scheme,
there exist, I believe, surveyors and inspectors of high-
ways— unseen, remote, elusive — whose business it is to
levy and expend sums for the construction and mainte-
nance of the public thoroughfares; but official energy in
this matter of construction begins and ends in the neigh-
bourhood of the capital. There has been a beginning of
good roadmaking of recent years — one from Montevideo
to Florida and another to San Jose; but beyond these
efforts the Government's activities have so far been
limited to earnest and eloquent confession of the nation's
needs and the appointment of the officials aforesaid.
Meanwhile, beyond the vicinity of the Metropolitan
Department, all the country's internal communications

236 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

remain at the mercy of the weather. In the case of our
estancia, for example — and it is typical — a few inches
of rain mean that communication with the railway becomes
impossible for anything except a peon on horseback ; the
rivers become raging torrents and the roads morasses of
glutinous mud, through which eight-horse teams can
scarcely draw a laden cart. There are often days, and
sometimes weeks, together in the rainy season when
even the postman (a private individual paid by half a
dozen neighbouring estancias to fetch mails and parcels
from the railway twice a week) is unable to go his
rounds.

There are a good many things in Uruguay which the
stranger within its gates finds hard to reconcile with the
Government's fervent protestations of progressive virtue,
but of them all none is so utterly inexplicable as this
indifference to the provision of reliable means of com-
munication and transport, in a country whose whole
existence centres in the production of food products for
export. The first thing which strikes a traveller in the
interior is the lack of roads for wheeled traffic; the
second, is the absence of a national telephone service,
obviously a matter of vital necessity in a country like this.
Officials in Montevideo will tell you that the blame lies
with the estancieros, who are quite content with the
existing state of affairs, who desire neither macadamised
roads nor telephones, especially if they are expected to
contribute anything towards their cost. It is true enough
that a great many landowners, Basques and natives,
and even native-born sons of Englishmen, are good,
stubborn passive resisters in the matter of any change
in their fixed ways of living and doing business. They
regard with indifference, if not with active dislike, all the
machinery and scientific devices with which practical and

IN SOUTH AMERICA 237

progressive estancieros have replaced the happy-go-lucky
methods of the good old days. If left to themselves,
exempt from laws and the fastidious stipulations of buyers,
they would prefer to continue in the picturesque ways
and traditions of the Gaucho, using the lasso rather than
the brete,1 letting their cattle die of garapata and their
sheep of fluke and lumbriz, rather than be bothered with
cattle baths and windmills; despising agriculture as an
occupation only suitable for Italian immigrants. All
over the country, and especially in the north, you may
still see estancias conducted on these lines, and large
estates belonging to men of wealth, where the owner
pigs it out in patriarchal fashion in a tumble-down house,
where the flocks and herds are left to struggle with their
environment as best they may and the fences take care
of themselves. Estancieros of this type are not unlike
Irish farmers in many ways — cheerful fatalists, much
given to the accumulation of money for its own sake,
quite incapable of getting any satisfaction out of their
wealth other than that of adding field to field; shrewd
as a rule, and keen at a bargain, yet ignorantly wasteful
and doggedly conservative. The unseen forces of economic
pressure are slowly but surely compelling landowners of
this type to change many of their ways. The days of
the Gaucho are numbered ; the Ford car and the motor
plough loom large on his horizon. Fertile soil and its
food products have become too valuable on this hungry
planet for a land like this to continue in the archaic
simplicity of mediaeval conditions. One of the first
results of the war in Europe will surely be to precipitate

1 The brete is an enclosure of cattle-pens connected with a
stout wooden rail, passing through which, the animals are easily
and rapidly sorted, dehorned, branded, etc. The peons much
prefer the old method of lassoing each beast and dealing with
it in the open.

238 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

a flood of hungry emigrants to the subtropical and
temperate regions of South America, and with it a rapid
development of agriculture in countries such as Uruguay,
Paraguay and Southern Brazil. But before agriculture
must come roads.

The powers that be in Montevideo — educational, fiscal
and economic authorities — are all very eloquent in im-
pressing upon the estanciero the benefits which he and the
country would derive from making agriculture and
forestry a part of his business. Officials — their name is
legion — are for ever distributing pamphlets, giving lec-
tures, and offering to provide expert tuition, seeds, sap-
lings and what not. There are special travelling inspectors
and veterinary surgeons appointed to give instruction
and advice for dealing with locusts, ticks, microbes and
insect pests, for the selection of seeds and the .scientific
rotation of crops. There are, moreover, a small number
of " model " estancias, mostly owned by Englishmen,
in which these things are done to the satisfaction of all
concerned and the mild amusement of their unconverted
neighbours — places which afford a very fair indication
of what might be done, not only to improve the pro-
duction of the country, but the conditions of existence
for the peon and the chacrero. But all these activities of
officials and of individual estanciero s are obviously and
hopelessly useless, so long as it remains economically
impossible for landowners to sell any crops that are grown
at more than ten or twelve miles distance from the rail-
way. The official mind perceives this simple truth (I have
discussed it with many, from the President downwards,
and never found it questioned), yet it continues to dis-
tribute good advice and to leave the roads in their abysmal
sloughs. The thing is inexplicable — officialdom offers no
solution of the mystery — for Uruguay has obviously

IN SOUTH AMERICA 239

everything to gain in creating facilities for road transport
throughout the country, if only because it would give her
an immediate advantage over the Argentine. A large
portion of Argentina is incapable of providing itself with
good roads because of its total lack of stone ; in Uruguay
there is an unlimited supply of surface outcrop granite
ready to the roadmaker's hand.

Consider the existing condition of affairs as it affects
the estanciero living ten or twelve leagues from Palmitas.
Assume that he or his wife has gone to Montevideo and is
now returning to the " camp. " The delivery of letters and
telegrams being a matter beyond all prevision, he must
have made arrangements, which can by no means be
changed, to have a carriage or motor-car at the station
to meet the train on a certain day. He has no means of
knowing whether, in the interval, the rivers may not have
become impassable as the result of local storms; they
may even become so while he is on the journey from
Montevideo. If, through any accident or misunder-
standing, there is no conveyance to meet him on arrival,
he is practically marooned, and Palmitas is hardly the
spot that one would choose to wait in till the clouds roll
by. Like most of the smaller wayside stations, the place
consists of the railway buildings, the pulperia opposite,
and a roofed shed for horses ; beyond these, the prospect
consists of a vast untenanted expanse of " camp," oppressive
in the monotony of its unbroken horizons, and a highway
of liquid mud, stretching away into the distance from the
railway, up and down over the slopes of a landscape that
runs in rolling lines, like waves. At a pinch you can put
up for the night at the pulperia (I did it once in company
with a wandering barber and an apparently innocent
Japanese hawker of soapstone ornaments), but the sleep-
ing accommodation, consisting of a billiard-table and the

240 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

floor, is primitive, and the general atmosphere of the
place somewhat depressing, especially on the days when
no train is due. A native, thus cut off from his own place,
having generally little or no baggage to worry about,
may borrow a horse and ride home ; but if burdened with
his family or other impedimenta, he must either go on
by the train to Mercedes, and make his way back from
thence when circumstances permit, or hire a conveyance
of sorts, with the aid of the pulpero, and risk the perils
of the road. An estancia connected by telephone (at its
own risk and expense) with the nearest railway station
escapes many of these vicissitudes, for the railway com-
pany transmits telephone messages, by telegram, to and
from Montevideo, and one can thus be kept informed of
local weather conditions. For the marooned traveller,
the telephone of neighbouring estancias affords a very
present help in time of trouble, provided always that you
can get it, and the station-master, to work. The hospi-
tality of the camp is an open-handed and genuine thing,
a matter of time-honoured tradition; not only is the
wayfarer sure of a welcome, but all the resources of the
establishment are placed ungrudgingly at his disposal, in
the hidalgo manner. So when you cannot reach your
own place, you explain your plight to the nearest tele-
phone-owning neighbour, confident in the certainty that
he will deliver you out of your affliction.

An estancia without a telephone is like a ship at sea
without wireless ; but, as a rule, the trouble and expense
of installing and maintaining a private line is too much
for the native landowner, who prefers to remain cut off
from all contact with the outside world, except such as
he may get by means of mounted peons. It seems almost
incredible that men whose success in business must
depend largely on keeping in touch with the Montevideo

IN SOUTH AMERICA 241

markets, should be content to remain in this sort of
isolation, yet so it is. The telephone is instinctively
resented, as a destroyer of that peace of body and mind
which the native derives from the manana philosophy.
In sudden emergencies, when he needs a doctor from
Mercedes to attend to his wife, or wants to know if the
cattle sale at Palmitas has been postponed, he will ride
over to his English or German neighbour and ask to be
allowed to send a message, expatiating eloquently the
while on the advantages of these modern improvements.
In the same way, when there is a visitation of the garapata
tick, he will come and ask you for the loan of your cattle-
bath to bathe his beasts at ten cents a head, but the
idea of providing his own estancia with these new-fangled
devices appeals to him not at all.

Some day, no doubt, these people will awaken to the
fact that what the country chiefly requires, pending better
communications and the subdivision of large properties,
is an efficient national telephone service, installed and
controlled by the State, and supplied to all estancieros at
a reasonable cost. I do not suppose that any member
of the Government has ever travelled in Sweden and
Norway, but it would certainly pay them to send an
intelligent young man to report on the use of the tele-
phone in the more remote agricultural districts of these
countries. Meanwhile, and for some time to come, Don
Diego and Don Antonio, Don Cesario and Don Jose will
continue in their easy-going mas 6 menos ways. They
will ask the postman to find out next time he goes to the
station, whether the sheep dip (ordered a month ago)
has arrived, whether there has been any reply to the tele-
gram sent last week about the missing plough, what is
the price of petrol at the pulperia, and when the Juez
de Paz will be able to come out and look into the little

R

242 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

matter of fence-breaking and missing sheep, reported to
him by the Comisario goodness knows how long ago.
And while the postman executes these commissions in
his own leisurely way (or forgets them altogether, which
is just as probable), the sheep go undipped and the land
unploughed ; the motor-car stands idle in the galpon, and
the mystery of the missing sheep — every one knows where
they are, of course — will remain unsolved by the author-
ities. And every day Don Diego and Don Antonio, Don
Cesario and Don Jose, thinking of these things as they
suck their evening mate and contemplate the glories of
sunset, will turn each to his wife, or major-domo, or
capataz, as the case may be, and breathe the magic
word — the dreamer's comfort and the sluggard's joy —
manana. After all, why worry? There is always a
to-morrow.

We will suppose, ne vous dtylaise, that, roads and
weather permitting, we are on our way from Palmitas
station to the estancia. There being doubts as to the
depth of water at the Maciel ford, the major-domo — a
camp-bred man of British parentage — has come to meet
us with a high-wheeled cart, something after the style of
a Normandy diligence, drawn by six horses. The sun is
fast dropping to the skyline, in splendour of gold and
rose, and all the land lies as if gently breathing before
sleep, in a purple glow which deepened into darkness on the
eastern horizon. Here and there, clear-cut against the sky,
a clump of trees stands out, poplars or eucalyptus or the
gnarled ombu — generally speaking, the site of an estancia
or other human habitation. These monies are the way-
farer's landmarks on the uncharted highways of solitudes
that are eternally the same ; the only distinctive features
in league after league of gently swelling hillocks, of winding
river-beds, for ever lined with thickets of willow, tala

IN SOUTH AMERICA 243

and nandabay. Your peon knows every monte or single
tree miles and miles away, knows how long they have
been there, and who planted them. Yonder avenue of
olives and paraisos, for instance, was planted thirty years
ago by old Wallingford, the man who built the church
by the roadside, that still awaits a parson. Those five
great poplars on the skyline mark the boundary of a
famous German estancia, the property of a man who
knew the value of trees and how to make them grow.
And over there in the far distance, dark against the last
crimson and orange glow of sunset, on the rising ground
beyond the river, is the goodly company of trees that
gather to a shade around and about the quinta of our
estancia.

Very silent are these solitudes of the purple land at
evening. There is scarcely any traffic on the highway;
a Syrian pedlar on foot with his pack upon his back, a
peon or two on horseback, a cart laden with wool on its
way to the railway. But generally the road lies empty
ahead, and the wire-fenced fields that stretch away on
every side as far as the eye can see, are peopled only by
grazing beasts. Our cart, jolting over the ruts half
hidden by the rank growth of espartillo grass, sends
frightened partridges scurrying through the fences ; great
horned owls come noiselessly out of the gathering dusk,
beating the ground like harriers; the little burrowing
owls, dainty Lechusa, flit from one fence post to another,
gravely interested in your proceedings. A brace of duck
rise from a swampy hollow of the road; from overhead,
rising and falling like the note of an aeolian harp, comes
the drumming of snipe in the evening light. Now and
again a skunk, very busy and quite indifferent to public
opinion, shows up amongst the thistles, a bustling bundle
of black and white with tail erect, that stops to look at

244 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

you impertinently as you go by. But for the most part
there is nothing to disturb the brooding silence and
solitude of the camp. As for human habitations, there
is the half-way pulperia, where half a dozen peons are
finishing a game of bowls in the dusk; a blacksmith's
shop, from whence comes the faint thrumming of a guitar
with snatches of most melancholy song; a school -house
with a drooping flagstaff — the children come to it on
horseback from miles around ; one or two roadside houses
of small landowners, and here and there the squalid huts
of agricultural squatters — the despised chacreros — just
enough evidence of human activity to disturb the illusion
of complete isolation. For the estancias, to whom these
endless acres of pasture land belong, with all their flocks
and herds, each with its staff of resident peons, lie usually
at a distance from the highway, hidden amidst their
surrounding trees.

" La Britanica " — our destination — stands on a little
hill, some eighty feet above the river. Like most estancia
houses in these parts, it is architecturally without pre-
tensions or distinction, merely an elaboration of the native
adobe style of building, curiously primitive and lacking
in adaptability. Its long low structure, facing east and
west, contains dining-room, sitting-room and half a dozen
bedrooms — all opening on both sides upon a verandah
roofed at such an angle as to exclude as much light as
possible. The Orientals' dislike of sunshine and fresh air
is just as manifest in the " camp "as it is in the city ; the
windows of these rooms are small, iron-barred and provided
with heavy green blinds, so that on a cloudy day it is
difficult to read anywhere indoors, and even when the
sun is shining one moves in a sepulchral twilight all the
day long. Often, in order to attain to the depths of
murkiness congenial to native ideas, the verandah is

LOADING THE WOOL CLIP

[To face p. 244.

IN SOUTH AMERICA 245

shaded by a vine-covered trellis, a very favourite gather-
ing place for ants and mosquitoes. At each end of the
building there is an outflanking wing, one containing the
office and the other the kitchen, bath-room and store-room.
The bath-room is a new feature, a concession to European
standards of cleanliness and comfort. The old-fashioned
estanciero's sentiments on the subject of sanitary arrange-
ments and domestic hygiene conform, like his dwelling,
to the simplicity of native ideas. The lighting arrange-
ments as a whole are equally primitive, consisting of
kerosene lamps ; here and there, a few English landowners
or managers who have not entirely succumbed to the
seductions of mas 6 menos, have introduced acetylene or
small electric light plants, but these things are only
suitable and safe in establishments where discipline and
method have overcome the natives' aversion to things
which require regular attention. Good drinking water
is pumped by hand from an artesian well; for other
purposes and for the drinking troughs of the horses and
cows that are fed about the house, there is an American
windmill with a large tank. It is the duty of the quintero
— euphemism for gardener — to oil this windmill every
Saturday; he regards it accordingly with hatred and
loathing.

There are men and places in Uruguay which have
demonstrated the fact that there is nothing in the soil
or climate of the country to prevent a garden being
made a thing of beauty and a regular producer of the
kindly fruits of the earth. There is an estancia close to
us, for example, managed by a wideawake Irishman
with a treasure of a wife, where the garden blooms like
an oasis in the wilderness. All kinds of trees grow there,
olives and mimosa, plane and poplar, acacia, firs, and the
Australian wattle — and all about it is a neat trimmed

246 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

privet hedge. There are orchards of peach trees and
pears, oranges, quinces and lemons ; and in the kitchen
garden all manner of English fruit and vegetables. Roses,
dahlias, heliotrope flourish, alongside of the gardenia
and the tuberose. Nevertheless, all over the country,
estancieros of the good old school conducting you over
the melancholy quintas, where a few mouldy peach trees
rear their heads amidst a tangle of tomatoes and invalid
cabbages, will solemnly assure you that, what with
droughts and locusts, cultivating a garden is so much
labour lost. In the same way, they will not trouble them-
selves to plant trees that the locusts will eat, or such as
require much care in the sapling stage. About their
houses you rarely find any but the paraiso, the ombu,
and the eucalyptus. Of course, the grasshopper is a
burden, and when the invasion occurs on the grand scale,
the results are heart-breaking, both for the agriculturist
and the gardener. But there are years in which neither
drought nor locust plague afflicts us, when the son of the
soil, were he so minded, might eat of the fruit of his own
fig tree and vine, and good fresh vegetables. But he is
not so minded. Tilling the soil he regards as a menial
business, only fit for Italians; as for vegetables, give
him a sweet potato, or an occasional cabbage and sapallo 1
with his puchero (all of which, he will tell you, can be
brought from Dolores by the postal diligence), and he is
satisfied. One would think that as these people are
ravenous meat-eaters they would need fruit and vege-
tables in mitigation of their flesh diet; but the mate
which they take at all times and seasons seems to fulfil
that purpose, for the average peon is undeniably strong

1 The sapallo is a pumpkin resembling our vegetable marrow,
but of more coherent fibre. It will grow anywhere, can be kept
for months, and is therefore generally obtainable.

IN SOUTH AMERICA 247

and healthy. He sucks mate, impelled by the same
instinct that teaches a dog to eat grass, and the medicinal
value of the brew is undeniable. Of the ceremonial rites
and observances that have grown up about the drinking
of the yerba, and of their effect upon character and social
conditions, more anon.

Beyond the enclosed quinta are the out-buildings.
First, low-lying in the deep shade of a paraiso grove,
are the peons' quarters, with their kitchen attached.
Beyond them is a long galpon, or shed, which contains
the sheep-shearing machinery, a wool press, a pile of hides
and sheepskins, and a Ford car. There are other sheds
for stacking oats and alfalfa and maize, and for the carts
and ploughs and tools. Around and about all these, an
unnumbered host of turkeys, ducks and hens pick up a
fat living. They congregate every morning, in horrid
expectancy, about the place where the house-peon kills
the daily sheep; every evening they invade the house
enclosure, what time the horses and milch cows get their
oats and corn. It is the business and pleasure of a mixed
pack of dogs to keep all fowls out of the compound, so
that, if noise and movement make life, we have it. All
these birds, even the turkeys, have thus acquired remark-
able powers of flight. They roost at night in the big
ombu trees near the gate, and during the day roam far
out into the " camp." Estancicros of the good old school
will assure you that this is the only way to keep hens
healthy; the fact that it produces no eggs is of little or
no importance, the carnivorous habits of the true Oriental
disdain such effeminate food as butter and eggs.

The peons' quarters are usually dark, dismal and dirty,
meagrely furnished with beds and wooden boxes; brick
walls and floors, no drainage, no privacy and no attempt
at comfort or sanitation. Yet the men who eat and sleep

248 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

in these hovels are a very decent, self-respecting lot, men
whose conversation and manners are generally more
polished, more imbued with native dignity, than those of
most workmen at the centres of our civilisation. Beneath
the simplicity and swaggering indifference to domesticity
oi the Gaucho stock, there lies not only a deep vein of
romantic sentimentality, but a great deal of natural good
breeding, kindly philosophy and instinctive good taste;
so that the humblest peon bears himself with unaffected
ease and dignity wherever he may be. I never see the
quarters assigned to these men without wondering whether,
as most landowners assert, they really would not thank
you for better accommodation or appreciate some con-
veniences and comforts of civilised existence. I cannot
quite convince myself that, because their philosophy is
ever cheerful, and their tastes unfastidious, one is justified
in housing them less decently than pedigree cattle. And
I never see Pedro and Sancho and Pantaleon, all got up
in their Sunday best, ponchos and silk neckcloths and
silver-mounted harness, without wondering how they
reconcile all this brave finery with the squalor of their
sleeping and eating places.

The permanent staff which dwells in our quarters
consists of seven men, who are paid by the month. These
include the house-peon, whose business it is to keep the
compound tidy, kill and prepare the daily meat, feed the
pigs and milch cows and do odd jobs, the peon's cook
who attends also to the curing and drying of hides and
skins, and the quintero, or gardener, always ready to
volunteer for any and every job that will take him away
from the garden. The other four men attend to the
routine work of the estancia — bathing and dosing sheep,
going the daily round of the camp, looking after the
cattle, repairing fences, and so on. In addition to these,

IN SOUTH AMERICA 249

there are generally a number of day men, engaged for
special jobs; fence-makers, who work on mileage con-
tracts, ploughmen, mechanics, masons, horse-tamers,
sheep-shearers, nomads of various kinds, paid by the
day or by the job, whose visible worldly wealth consists
of a horse and a small bundle of clothes. Some of the
permanent staff have been years on the place, but as a
rule the peon is a capricious wanderer, moving from one
place to another merely for the sake of change. Their
wages vary from ten to fifteen dollars — £2, to £3 a month,
with food provided by the estancia.

The female staff consists of a cook — frequently the wife
of one of the peons — and a housemaid; these share a
bedroom in the kitchen wing. As a rule the women
engaged for work of this kind in the " camp " are the better
for being either old or ugly. If physically attractive,
the performance of their duties is bound to suffer, sooner
or later, from sentimental complications, the end of
which is to add one more to the long list of Uruguay's
illegitimate children. Our cook, who rejoices in the
name of Nicasia, is no longer young or beautiful; she
shows no signs of a romantic or even flighty disposition,
but perseveres nevertheless in a sort of routine habit of
maternity. Her latest offspring, aged six months, spends
its days and develops its lungs in a wool-lined box in the
kitchen, and rumour says that she has left five other
little pledges of her promiscuous infatuations with
relatives or charitable institutions in various parts of the
country. These native women of the humbler classes
conform outwardly to the national code of circumspection
and are as careful of appearances as any fine lady of the
capital; but, under the rose, their domestic morality is
entirely a matter of primitive instincts and opportunity.
It is one of many inexplicable things in this part of the

250 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

world that a democratic State which professes deep
concern for the well-being of the people and devotion to
high ideals, should have gone out of its way to discourage
the religious ceremony of matrimony and should fail
to protect the unmarried mother by compelling the father
to pay for the maintenance of his child. What on earth
is the good of all these solemn conferences of professors
and politicians about child welfare, while the law allows
men to escape the fundamental obligations of a parent
and nothing is done, as far as the bulk of the population
is concerned, to establish society on a basis of decent
homes ?

Our housemaid answers to the name of Benita. I
often wonder how and where these illiterate people find
the preposterous names which they inflict upon their
defenceless offspring, especially as for most of them there
is neither priest nor dominie to consult in the matter.
Of course the saints and festivals of the Church supply
a great many, and these are to be found in every cheap
almanac, but who assists these fond mothers to extract
names for their infants from the depths of the Old Testa-
ment, the muster rolls of ancient mythology, and the
chronicles of Roman history ? Natividad and Concepcion
are awful but explicable ; but whence came Claudia,Lucretia
and Aurelia to the "camp"; who invented Penelope
of the Pampas, and who first thought of calling a female
child Generosa? And the men stagger under burdens
just as grievous. Cesario and Jesus go a sheep-dipping
together. Macedonio and Baltasar, Romeo and Fausto
round up the cattle on a thousand hills.

But to return to our housemaid. Benita is engaged
to be married next year to an honest mecanico in Dolores
(the marriage may have to come off sooner, of course, in
anticipation of an interesting event), and she is working

THE CAPATAZ

BENITA

[To face p. 250.

IN SOUTH AMERICA 251

to earn the cost of a combined trousseau and layette. A
good girl is Benita, steady, honest and cheerful, essentially
native in all her ways, and speaking no language but
Spanish; yet she has the face and features of a typical
English country lass. Hers is a history not uncommon
in these parts; she is the daughter of an English sailor,
one of the many wanderers who, deserting from ships in
the River Plate, drifted up country, working their way
as peons from one estancia to another, and finally settling
down as married men in some small rancho. There is
a world of unperceived romance, and something of tragedy,
for me in this purely English type, blooming here in an
alien land, all unconscious of its birthright. Sometimes;
when there are guests and she stands silently waiting
to refill the mate, in the typically patient attitude of the
" Oriental " serving- woman, there comes a look upon
her face as if she heard, afar off and mysterious, the
voices of her own people. She doesn't, I know ; probably
she knows nothing about England, for her father died
when she was a baby. But it pleases me to think so,
all the same.

A good deal of English blood has made its way into
these backwaters and by-ways of the Pampas and then
lost itself. Amongst the peons who go racing on a Sunday
afternoon you will find good old English, Scotch and
Irish names, pronounced d I'espagnole, attached to
swaggering native blades, all poncho, knife and jingling
spurs. There is a curly-headed, blue-eyed lad who comes
over with messages from the estancia, " Los Cardos," an
untameable and vagabond imp, known as Murfe at every
pulperia and racing-ground for miles around ; but of the
romantic history of Murphy -p&re, neither he nor any of
his compadres know anything. I know one heir to an
ancient English baronetcy, who with his mother and

252 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

brothers live the easy-going life of the " camp," and,
speaking no English, refuses to concern himself in any
way with his ancestral acres and hereditary dignities.

All around the estancia enclosure, over wave upon
wave of gently rolling hillocks, down to the River Maciel
on the north and east, and up to the public highway on
the south, stretches our little territory of " Britanica
camp." It is a small territory, as things go in this land
of huge estates, a matter of two thousand five hundred
hectarios, or about seven thousand acres. Most of the
properties owned by foreign-born estancieros and com-
panies are much larger. Here in Soriano, the size of the
average estancia is probably not more than five or six
thousand hectarios. But the further north you go,
towards Artigas and the borders of Brazil, the greater
become the tracts of land owned by private individuals.
Properties of twenty and thirty thousand hectarios are
not uncommon in those parts, and despite all the politi-
cians' professed anxiety to limit the growth of these
mammoth estates and to provide land for immigrants,
the rich man's mania for adding field to field is unchecked.
The number of British-owned estancias in this part of the
world is comparatively small, and it is becoming smaller ;
certainly it is less than it was forty years ago. The
majority of present-day landowners are either natives
born, or naturalised Basques, Italians, Swiss, Brazilians,
Spaniards and Portuguese. Most of the early English
estancieros, whose names and words linger, as kindly
memories, in the wayside annals of the "camp," came here
and bought their land when it was to be had for a song,
when a man could stock and equip his place with a couple
of thousand pounds, and run it for next to nothing. I
have an old stock book of "La Britanica," dated 1872,
which shows that, in those comparatively recent days, sheep

IN SOUTH AMERICA 253

were worth thirty cents apiece (say, one and fourpence),
horses two dollars, and cattle between five and nine
dollars. Many of these pioneers having made their for-
tunes, as the result of the rapidly increased value of land
and stock, left Uruguay for England, and their properties
were either sold or leased to natives. The Government's
lately adopted (and perfectly justifiable) policy of taxing
absentee landlords has naturally led to a further reduction
in the number of English estancias. Under existing con-
ditions, and at the present price of land and cattle, no
new-comer can hope to make money by buying property
in this part of Uruguay, unless he has a large amount
of capital to invest and is prepared to live on the place
and manage it himself. There is no doubt but that the
value of land will continue to increase, partly as the
result of Europe's increasing need of food supplies, and
partly because of the rich Uruguayan's or Brazilian's
insatiable appetite and jealous competition for property;
but the field is no longer open to the small investor, as
in former days. Up in the north, in Artigas and Tacua-
rembo, the value of land — when any owner can be induced
to sell — is generally between $30 and $40 per hectario,
and until quite recently it could be rented (for a maximum
lease of ten years) at $2 a " square," l but prices are
rising and before long will no doubt reach the level of
Soriano, where good average " camp " sells for $90 to $100
per hectario and commands a rent of $4 to $5 per square.
Old estancieros will tell you that thirty or forty years
ago all this land of Soriano was good grazing " camp "
land that would not only feed but fatten cattle. They did

1 In land measurement the " square " has been abolished for
all legal and official purposes, but natives continue, nevertheless,
to reckon and describe properties in squares. Like the League,
it is a variable quantity in various districts; but it is roughly
two-thirds of a hectario.

254 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

not know even by name the coarse espartillo, which now
covers the country like an ever-spreading garment. They
will also tell you (unless they are passive resisters, of the
good, old-crusted laisser-aller school) that the quality of
the pasture has steadily deteriorated since then, chiefly
because of the improvidence and ignorance and greed
which overstocked it with sheep, and refused to improve
it by ploughing when the rank growth of espartillo had
smothered the good grasses. On many estancias the
native's procrastinating conservatism still declines to
recognise the obvious fact, that persistence in these time-
honoured methods of farming must greatly reduce the
productivity of the soil. Overstocking is not so prevalent
as it was, especially since the decimating drought of 1916,
but failure to improve the land by agriculture is general.
There are thousands upon thousands of acres where the
dank espartillo, thistles and the poison weed mio-mio
flourish luxuriantly, smothering a small struggling under-
growth of good grass. Estancieros of the hard-baked
mas 6 menos persuasion, will point with pride to their
mio-mio and thistles, as proof of the richness of the land,
and they will tell you complacently that in time of drought,
when all the good grass has gone, the espartillo serves to
keep cattle alive. There is no doubt as to the richness
of the good black soil that nourishes all this futile fruitless
growth, nor any doubt as to its infinite capacity of pro-
duction, if properly treated; but it is curiously typical
of the " Oriental " mind to allow its quality to remain
proved by the vigour of its weed-crop, year after year.
Sooner or later, of course, even the most dogged of these
conservatives must be led by their own experience, and
by the profitable examples of more enlightened methods
in their midst, to give the soil a chance ; they must learn
in time that alfalfa and oats, wheat and maize, pay better

IN SOUTH AMERICA 255

than coarse grass and thistles. But for the time being
Soriano is content to see most of its fertile land produce
a grass that sheep cannot eat and cattle refuse so long
as they can find better pasture.

The Government's ideas and admonitions concerning
the necessity for agriculture and the rotation of crops
to restore the productivity of the soil are, as usual, admir-
able. Cultivated land is relieved of 50 per cent, of taxa-
tion, and the Ministry of Agriculture is prepared to
distribute good seeds and much good advice to all comers.
On most British-owned estancias the ploughing of bad
land proceeds as a matter of course, but it is evident
that the country as a whole must remain infected with
bad grass and weeds until all landowners are compelled
by law to clean a certain proportion of their " camp " every
year, and until the local authorities take steps to prevent
the public highways disseminating weeds and animal
disease germs as they do at present. In certain districts,
where the benefits of ploughing have been realised, and
where the railway lies near enough for the crops to be
marketed at Montevideo, the land is sometimes let out
to agricultural settlers — Italians, Basques or transient
immigrants from the Canary Islands — who farm it for
two or three years, surrendering one-third of their harvest
as rent. Most of these horny-handed colonists bring
their families with them, and live in hovels little better
than those of Paraguay Indians. When the farmers'
luck is good, their progeny increases and overflows with
extraordinary rapidity, but a visitation of locusts or a
drought means heavy infant mortality amongst the
chacreros. They can insure against hail-storms, but
against a serious invasion of locusts there is no remedy,
and many a poor devil has seen all his year's work destroyed
in a few hours. Each squatter generally farms about

256 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

150 " squares/' and in a good year he may make $40
a square from wheat and linseed. The landowner feeds
him and his family on credit till the first harvest is reaped.
Farming under these conditions practically amounts to
laying odds against the locust — it is a gamble which seems
to have a peculiar attraction for the Italians, who like
their labour seasoned with speculation. There is another
humble type of chacrero, the hireling who takes no risks
and asks no favours of fortune, who sells his labour to the
landowner for seven or eight dollars a month and his
food, and spends all his dreary days following the oxen
or driving the motor plough up and down the deadly
monotony of these half-mile furrows. These men live in
tents, moving camp as their ploughing advances, for the
land on which they work is often several miles distant
from the estancia quarters. Since the war, and because
of the scarcity of petrol and oil, ploughing with oxen
has become cheaper than with the motor. The chacrero
teams are yoked and handled here just as they are in the
Piedmont; it needs powerful cattle to haul the blade,
even of a light Russian plough, through the heavy black
earth, especially when it carries a load of coarse hummocky
grass.

The stock of cattle at the " Britanica " generally con-
sists of about 1200 Herefords, chiefly breeding cows, and
some 5000 Lincoln sheep ; there are also a troop of semi-
wild horses and the small remnant of a herd of ostriches.
In former days, before the " camp " pasture deteriorated,
Durham cattle and Merino sheep were the breeds generally
preferred by estancieros, but experience has shown that
these species have not the stamina of the Hereford and
Lincoln breeds in times of drought or when the locusts
have devoured all the fine grass ; nor have they the same
capacity of resistance to the ticks, worms and other pests

IN SOUTH AMERICA 257

that lie in wait for them on every side. What with the
foot-and-mouth disease, carbuncle, maggots and gampata
to plague the cattle; with fluke, scab, lumbriz, birds
of prey, and the panic of sudden cold rains to destroy the
sheep, it is always a mystery to me how these animals,
left largely to their own devices, manage to survive
and multiply as they do. On properly managed estancias
the wretched beasts are continually being dosed, bathed
and inoculated against one disease or another; if the
Republic's multitudinous laws were strictly enforced on
all the others, no doubt but that foot-and-mouth disease,
scab and other infectious ailments would be far less
prevalent than they are. But manana is stronger than
the official Veterinary Inspector; indeed the veterinary
himself is usually a worshipper at the shrine of that
lotus-eating deity. The only laws which are generally
effective are those which refer to the registration of sales
and purchases of stock and the movements of beasts
from one department to another.

CHAPTER XIV

THE SON OF THE SOIL

BY the law of the land, in Uruguay, as in the Argentine,
every child born in the country is entitled to citizenship
as a son of the soil — hi jo del pais. Hence, by the way,
the existence and official recognition of the dual nation-
ality of Anglo-Argentines and Anglo-Orientals, a very
delicate and complicated business in time of war. The
son of an Englishman may, if he so desire and declare,
retain his undivided nationality; but as a general rule,
unless educated in England, the tendency of the native-
born is to become Spanish-speaking, Spanish-thinking
South Americans, and to take life as the natives take it.
Indeed, a man need not be born in the country to become
so imbued with the comfortable philosophy of manana
and mas 6 menos that the strenuous qualities of the Anglo-
Saxon, all his painstaking energies, fall gently from him
like a creed outworn. Swiftly insidious is the creed
which makes a man the lord of time, who was his bustling
slave ! I have seen Englishmen in these parts, estancieros,
camp-managers and " poor white " wanderers, who for
easy-going, siesta-loving slackness can hold their own with
any son of the soil — men who will suck their mate" and
talk solemnly of all irrelevant things under heaven, leaving
undone the things that should be done, for sheer love of
procrastination; men who, in their domestic and social
relations, have assimilated and often intensified the
" Oriental " point of view. The tribes on our estancia
frontiers will be discussed in the following chapter; for

258

MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS 259

the present we are concerned with the peon, the labouring
man of the " camp."

It is daybreak of a cloudless morning in July. There
has been a sharp frost overnight, and a pale white mist,
like a soft robe of gossamer, floats gently in the clefts and
undulations of the land. From the trees about the house
comes a sleepy twittering, which rapidly grows into a
noisy parliament of birds. First to awake is the bien-
te-veo, perkiest and prettiest of shrikes, and next the
oven-bird, that seems to be always looking for something,
as fussily as a starling. From farther off, in the tree-tops,
comes the slumbrous note of the big wood-pigeon, and the
shrill chatter of green parrots ; and then, as the day breaks,
a great choir invisible of fervent little singers. Nowhere
on earth is there more wealth of bird life than in the South
American "camp."

As the dawn comes up, to gild the outline of the low
purple hill which rises above the bed of the Maciel, our
English major-domo emerges from his room, and, crossing
over to the big galpon, rings the bell which says that the
day's work has begun. The peons have been up for the
last hour, bringing in their horses, getting their breakfast
and their mate* ; at the sound of the bell, four men saunter
leisurely from the kitchen, saddle up, and ride out in the
direction of the river, to round up and bring to the sheep-
bath one of the flocks that has shown symptoms of scab.
A mongrel sheep-dog and a nondescript sort of lurcher
follow them, ready to assist in rounding up the sheep
when the time comes, and meanwhile keeping a sharp
look-out for hares, molitos,1 and other edible prey. As

1 The molito is one of the four species of armadillo found in
the "camp." It is a clean feeder and, like the tatu, makes an
excellent dish, greatly appreciated by the natives. The peludo
is a carrion-eater and unpleasant.

260 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

they pass out of the home potrero,1 another man is harness-
ing six horses to one of the big farm carts, to fetch sheep
dip and other stores from Palmitas. Pedro, the house-
peon, lolls across to the kitchen, with a mate in his hand,
which, for the next half-hour, Nicasia will keep refilling
with hot water and supplementing with sundry titbits,
in return for a full narrative of everything and every one
at yesterday's races. An engaging individual is Pedro;
tall, dark and slender, for all his fifty years, with a come-
hither look in his eye where the ladies are concerned, and,
if report speaks truly, no laggard either in love or war.
A person of polished manners, too, and easy conversation;
and, like most of his class, an honest fellow as this world
goes; yet, for all that, like the Chinese house-servant, a
very expert absorber of unconsidered trifles. You may
trust the average peon with the uncounted money in your
purse, you may send him across country in charge of a
troop of cattle for sale, but you cannot trust him not to
make away with food and drink or tobacco, whenever
occasion offers.

To a city -dweller and a tenderfoot of vegetarian habits,
there is something fearful and wonderful in the carnivorous
capacity of these people, without distinction of classes.
The amount of meat which a peon consumes is simply
prodigious, and the marvel of it is that he seems perfectly
content to go on devouring it, three times a day, all the
year round, without asking for variety either in its cooking
or concomitants. At the " Britanica," for an average
total of fourteen consumers, a sheep is slaughtered every
day, except when they kill a steer or cow; the latter will

1 All the I' camp " is fenced off into potreros, fields' that in this
part of the country may vary in size between 100 and 1000
squares. The better managed the estancia, the more regular the
size of its potreros, which for good working should be between
100 and 200 squares — say 250 acres.

LUNCHEON TIME AT THE BRETE

PLOUGHING UP " ESPARTJLLO " CAMP

[To face p. 260.

IN SOUTH AMERICA 261

last them from four to six days, according to its weight
and the weather. The peon's dinner allowance of meat
is usually one kilo — 2\ Ibs. ; he eats it either boiled as a
puchero, with sapallo and sweet potatoes, or as a guiso
(stew) with rice, or as a plain roast (asado) ; the last being
the favourite method of cooking. In addition to meat,
the estancia provides rations of biscuits — (a mighty hard
tack, like ship's biscuit, which the pulperos sell) — fideos,
and a porridgy cereal substance called farina. But these
are kickshaws; your true hi jo del pais lives for, and by,
meat. If you would give him a meal according to his
heart's desire, and see him do justice to his victuals, then
let him slay a young steer or calf, and cook it, gridiron
fashion, in the open. The meat is roasted in the skin, a
.few hours after killing, over a wood-fire; it is therefore
abominably tough, and, to the uninitiated, a gruesome and
sanguinary sight; but to the native mind, came con
cuerro is the last word in gastronomic satisfaction, and
they devour it with a rapidity and ease which suggests
the possession of a forty-ostrich-power type of digestive
apparatus. Also they mildly despise the gringo who
declines to partake freely of this gargantuan roast, and
follow it up with huge chunks of stodgy pastry.

In the old days, when a sheep was worth two or three
shillings, or even before the war when it was worth ten
or twelve, the workers' consumo of meat was economic-
ally justifiable. But with wool soaring to prices hitherto
undreamt of, and full-grown sheep worth 305. to 405.
apiece, the cost of feeding a peon in the good old-fashioned
wasteful way becomes a very serious item in the estan-
ciero's budget. It is certainly a good deal higher than the
cost of feeding the average working man in Europe. On
many English-owned estancias, therefore, meat has been
cut out of the breakfast bill of fare and replaced by coffee,

262 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

farina and biscuits. The innovation, though undeniably
healthy, is not popular; many a peon will work for
smaller wages when the padron allows him full scope for
his carnivorous habits. And as padrons* instincts, most
even though they be stingy in other ways, are identical
with his own in this matter, he can usually find a man
and a place to satisfy them. Making every allowance for
the fact that their lives are spent in the open and in healthy
exercise, one might expect men fed on such a diet to
become bilious, scorbutic, unhealthy. As a matter of
fact, they are not; on the contrary, they are strong,
healthy, clear of eye and clean of skin. And the secret of
their health lies, no doubt, in the beneficent qualities of
the yerba mate", with which they wash down these other-
wise intolerable quantities of meat.

The practice of mat6 drinking is not only an. antidote
to the excessive flesh diet of the South American, but as a
national institution it responds and adapts itself admir-
ably to the cult of manana and mas 6 menos. Certain
superficial observers have been led to confound cause
and effect, to attribute the " Oriental's " habits of light-
hearted procrastination to the insidious influences of the
yerba, to the languid ceremonial of its preparation and
serving, and the sociable etiquette of discursive conversa-
tion which attends its consumption. One might as well
suggest that the Chinese have acquired their aristocratic
inertia and stoic fatalism by the smoking of their water
pipes, a time-killing device very similar to the mat£ bowl
in its mechanism and usage. No, the roots of the South
American's sedative philosophy lie deep in the distant
past, in the cradle-lands of the Moors, who moulded the
race mind of conquering, dreaming Spain; they lie, too,
in the tutelary spirits of this land, in the voices of winds
and waters, that haunt the ancient places of vanished

IN SOUTH AMERICA 263

Indian tribes. The cult of manana here is an heritage
from Moorish Spain, with a certain distinctive quality
of gentleness derived, I like to think, from the Guarany,
tempering the haughty punctilio of the hidalgo with
something of the spirit of one of the most lovable of races
that our civilisation has doomed to extinction. The
descendants of the Conquistadores acquired the habit of
mate" drinking from the Indians, and gradually they evolved
around and about the drinking of it a ritual and code of
etiquette, making it a very corner-stone of the Temple
of Graceful Indolence.

The mat6 bowl is a natural-grown calabash or gourdlet
(either Crescentia or Lagenarid), about the size of a large
orange, scooped out and fitted with a thin pipe, either of
reed or metal, called the bombilla. The yerba matt, the
dried leaf of an Ilex indigenous to Paraguay, was known in
former days as " Jesuits' Tea," because it was the good
priests who first taught the Indians of their Utopia in
partibus to cultivate it for trade purposes. The infusion
of the leaf is made like ordinary tea : but here the like-
ness ends. The mate* bowl, according to native etiquette,
is the cup of welcome, and of speeding; it is an offence
against the unwritten law not to offer it, like the pipe of
peace, to every visitor and stranger, to the capataz when
he comes to make his evening report, or the wool-buyer
on his rounds. The bowl passes from hand to hand, each
person taking his turn to suck it dry, and hand it back to
the servant, who proceeds to the kitchen — generally some
distance away — to refill it. If there are two or three
visitors, and conversation meanders as usual down count-
less paths of dalliance, the mucama may spend most
of the morning, or afternoon, going to and fro with the
sociable bowl. It would never occur to any of the parties
concerned to have a spirit lamp and a kettle of water

264 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

handy and to refill the mate* on the spot as required.
Such a proceeding would savour of vulgar haste, and
interrupt the even flow of conversation. The attitude of
the padron taking his mate, either alone or in company,
combines a survival of the old Castilian grand seigneur
attitude towards Los Indios, with an assertion of his
patriarchal and tribal authority. The woman who bears
the bowl, and there stands silently waiting to refill it, is
not necessarily a servant ; she may be your host's wife or
daughter.

As a social institution, the mate" bowl combines the
business of time-killing (or time-making, as we prefer to
call it in South America) with the promotion of demo-
cratic principles of equality and fraternity. Medical men
in Montevideo, distracted from wisdom by much learning,
assert that it is also an extremely active and effective
disseminator of infectious diseases of the throat. One
eminent enthusiast went so far as to give lectures on the
subject, horribly illustrating, by means of a glass bombilla,
the amount of saliva which each person sucking at the
tube leaves for the next. Frightened by these shadows,
some ultra-modern persons, especially those who dwell in
the towns, have taken to carrying about their own bom-
billas, whilst polite society at the capital and elsewhere
has firmly established the habit of afternoon tea a Van-
glaise, leaving mate* to dignified bedroom privacy in the
early morning; but out in the "camp," to refuse to suck
at the common pipe is regarded either as bad breeding or
the ignorance of a gringo.

As a deterrent from any kind of physical or mental
activity, the mate bowl is a triumph of human ingenuity.
For being a natural gourd, and therefore round at the base,
it must be held continually in the hand ; and it is obvious
that a hand thus employed (the other is busy with a

IN SOUTH AMERICA 265

cigarette) cannot hold a pen. True, the idea of having a
portable stand made to hold the bowl has been mooted
by iconoclasts, but it has made no headway ; a mate that
would permit you to attend to other things is an incon-
ceivably foolish suggestion. The bowl not being meant
to leave the hand, you must go on sucking at it until it is
empty ; then, as it only holds a few mouthfuls, there can
be no sense in attempting to begin any work before the
servant returns with another brew. Your estanciero of the
good old school very properly regards it as proof of the
decadence of city life and of the rottenness of the bureau-
cracy that the Government has forbidden mate drinking
by public servants in office hours. Before they did this,
the average Government office was a triumph of mate
'over mind, and the supreme contempt for time and place
displayed by the bondsmen of the bombilla had become a
public scandal. It was Whitehall at tea-time, all day
long, without the excuse of flappers.

Sometimes, as I have sat and watched these people at
one of their interminable mate sessions, and followed them
through hours of aimless and digressive talk, I have been
obsessed by the hallucination that I was back again
amongst genuine Orientals. Like Kalmuks, Chinese or
Koreans, they will talk, literally for days, around and about
a question which, on its merits, an Anglo-Saxon would
dispose of in half an hour. I have known a buyer of
sheepskins, making his round of our neighbourhood from
Mercedes, turn up at the estancia at midday in a great
hurry. Towards evening, after consuming some quarts
of mate and discussing the war, the weather and the ways
of women, he went to look at the pile of skins in the galpon.
Then, seeing two of the men going down to fish in the
river, he borrowed a horse and went off with them. A bed
(on which he slept in his boots) had been prepared for

266 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

him in one of the guest-rooms as a matter of course. At
dinner and afterwards he regaled us with all the latest
gossip of the countryside — some of it, deep azure — but
the subject of sheepskins was delicately avoided. Then,
under the gibbous moon, he played to us on the guitar,
and there was cafia and melody till midnight. Next day,
being Sunday, he gladly joined in a neighbour's picnic
with came con cuerro, on the wooded banks of the San
Salvador. On Monday there was some desultory inspec-
tion and discussion of sheepskins (the value of the whole
lot was not more than five hundred dollars), but at lunch
time the Juez de Paz happened to drop in en passant.
Now the Juez is famed for an inexhaustible fund of
reminiscent anecdotes, most of which date from his trip
to Paris twenty years ago; therefore, the mate* session
lasted well on into the afternoon, and the conversation
had no place for sheepskins. The Juez stayed for dinner,
and once more the moon looked down upon a scene of
ambrosial conviviality untainted by sordid considerations.
Next day the sheepskins were bought, and our friend
departed in his tilbury, but this, I believe, was more
because the Juez invited him to join in a little game of
cards at a fiulperia near Dolores than because he was in any
real hurry to conclude the business. In the same way I
have known our worthy neighbour Don Mario, a buyer of
cattle, bustle up the road from the ford in such a hurry
to leave a message, on his way to the railway, that he
vowed and protested he had not even time to dismount.
Finally persuaded to do so and to take a pull at the mate,
incontinently all thoughts of time fell from him like a
garment. After dinner, and before going to bed, he
begged that he might be called at 3 a.m., which would give
him time to catch the train at Palmitas. At 9 a.m. he
was cheerfully smoking and chatting with the Sefior

A LACUNA ON THE SAN SALVADOR

[To face p. 266.

IN SOUTH AMERICA 267

Gerente, all his business happily forgotten, and the face
of Benita, as she stood gracefully leaning against a pillar
of the verandah was a study in long-suffering patience.
He departed at midday of the fourth day.

And this genial disregard of time and order, this con-
tempt for business methods and husbandry, runs like a
siren song through all their lives, laborious though they
may be. A wandering tinsmith, riding a sorry nag, and
leading another laden with pots and pans, will unsaddle
at the estancia gate and offer his services for general
repairs. One of the drinking troughs happens to be leak-
ing, so you offer him the job. He thanks you with gentle
courtesy, but explains that, his horse being thin and
soldering tools heavy, he has not brought any with him
this time. He nevertheless remains for two days, appar-
ently for the sole purpose of admiring the view, and feeds
with the peons. He would stay longer, but that the
major-domo, whose soul is as yet unattuned to the wisdom
and virtue of vagrancy, asks him to depart.

The race mind, imbued with this manana philosophy,
is naturally fatalist, and therefore passionately addicted
to gambling. As far as one can judge by the outward and
visible signs of his affections, the peon's love of gambling
is generally far deeper than his love of women. He will
gamble anywhere, about anything — at cards, racing, dice,
or throwing the knuckle-bone. This amiable weakness
makes him the natural prey of the pulpero, whose premises
provide him with the only convenient meeting-place.
The pulperias are generally run by Spaniards, Basques or
Italians; shrewd rogues, these, vendors of strong drink,
money-lenders and usurers, and speculators in land and
stock. They grow rich, not only upon the squandered
earnings of the peon, but upon the gambling propensities
and slack improvidence of native estancieros. As a class

268 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

they are despised and yet feared by the hijo del pais, in
much the same way that the Jew is despised and feared
by Russia's peasantry. The surprising thing about them,
to my mind, is that so few of them, comparatively speaking,
die violent deaths.

For the peon, though at heart bon enfant, and usually
of a reasonable and tractable disposition, is still primitive
in his propensity to swift moods of wrath and sudden lust
of revenge, especially when under the influence of the vile
liquor which many of these pulperos sell. The law of the
land, recognising the danger of his passions when aroused
in love or war, forbids the carrying of revolvers and other
lethal weapons; but this is one of many well-meant
statutes which never has been, and apparently never will
be, observed in the " camp." Every peon carries a cuchillo
in his belt, a formidable blade which he uses in his daily
work for every conceivable purpose — for cutting of his
meat, skinning dead beasts, and cutting wood. Drawn in
anger, it is a murderous weapon and responsible for more
casualties than firearms. Revolvers, too, are plentiful;
it is safe to say that every man has one, who does not wear
the belt and knife. Police pomisarios and rurales carry
them, and are as quick at the draw as any Texas sheriff ;
postmen, pulperos, and men whose business involves the
carrying of money, all go armed. So that at races, and
remates, at ferias and places where they drink, there is
always the possibility of a sudden fusillade and funerals
to follow.

The peon's holidays are few and far between. From
Monday morning till Saturday night, all his hours of day-
light are spent in strenuous labour; and his choice of
Sunday amusements is generally limited to those of a
celibate community — horse-racing and cards and drink —
none of which is calculated to ease the strain of existence

IN SOUTH AMERICA 269

or to bring balm of relaxation to his restless soul. In the
spring, what time the lapwing gets himself another crest
and we live luxuriously on plovers' eggs, the young
Oriental's fancy turns lightly enough to thoughts of love,
but here his opportunities for toying with Amaryllis in
the shade are lamentably few and unsatisfactory. In the
life of the " camp," things being as they are, Amaryllis is
either vexatiously unapproachable, or so easy of access
as to be undesirable, pour le bon motif. Somewhere in the
neighbourhood of every estancia's community of celibate
and sentimental peons, there are fiuestos of dubious, if
not ribald, reputation, inhabited by daughters of the
horse-leech x without visible means of subsistence, who
nevertheless do live and thrive, and this without much
scandal. These, the female servants of the neighbour-
hood, and the marriageable virtuous daughters of a few
families — generally colonists — are the stars on the peon's
horizon of romance. Marriage is unpopular amongst
them, and generally regarded as superfluous, for reasons
to which I have already referred; often, therefore, the
physical and moral state of the peon suffers inevitably
from his enforced celibacy, tempered by draughts of the
Circean cup. Not so much, probably, as in the case of
sailors and soldiers, or other groups of young men com-
pelled to live under unnatural conditions, but manifestly
so, nevertheless. Small wonder if, every now and then,
Pedro, having borrowed or saved a few dollars, throws up
his job and rides away, seized by a wanderlust of sharp-set
desires, in search of romantic adventure and the fulfilment
of dreams. His quest may end, with his money, at the
first pulperia ; but it may lead him as far as Mercedes, to
revel in the fearful joys of picture-palaces and bailes in

1 The generic term applied to this class — its origin is doubtful
—is " Chinas."

270 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

that bewitching spot, to strut his little hour on a stage,
not wholly hopeless of Romance, and to return in due
season to his compadres with tales of love and war, that
surely shall nothing lack of imagination in the telling.

A picturesque figure, jaunty and ddbonnaire, is Pedro,
when he rides forth in all his finery, either to court Dulcinea
or in light-hearted quest of pleasure. There is silver,
brightly shining, on his saddle-bow, stirrups and whip;
his saddle-cloth is of worked leather on black sheepskin ;
the spurs on his crinkly Wellingtons are an inch long,
making a brave clatter when he walks. In hot weather
he wears baggy trousers (bombachos), a white waistcoat
and a neckcloth of spotless white silk, tied in a graceful
negligb that is the very pink of gay-dog-dom in the
" camp." In winter he sports a poncho of ample folds and
fringed edge, with the white neckcloth floating to the
breeze ; and a very fine gentleman of the road he looks,
when thus arrayed. His sombrero, a black hat of the
soft felt description, very like that which the Chinese
invariably wear in California, lends a quaintly sober, almost
a Puritanical, note to his appearance.

The neckcloth is not only the high note exponent of
dandyism, but serves also to proclaim its wearer's political
inclinations, a 'panache of party. For in the " camp,"
as elsewhere —

" Every boy and every gal
That comes into this world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative."

Ask a son of the soil, outside of the capital, what he
thinks about politics, and he will generally tell you, with
a shrug of the shoulders, that he cares for none of these
things; that he "inscribes himself" as a voter because

IN SOUTH AMERICA 271

of the fine imposed if he neglects that civic duty, but that
the elections concern him not. Nevertheless, every one
is either a " Blanco " or a " Colorado/' a Conservative
or a Radical, as a matter of course, either as a matter
of inherited conviction, of religious opinion, or business
principles. Very few peons can give you any political
reason for being either White or Red ; they were born
white, or had whiteness thrust upon them, and there the
matter ends. But the great majority are apparently
quite prepared to accept the prescriptive obligations of
inveterate party strife, and if needs be, to " come out "
and fight for the glory and benefit of politicians, to kill
each other, brother against brother, and father against
son, in quarrels of which they know neither the beginning
nor the end. In the past, whenever the political leaders
decided on a revolution, or in other words, on a struggle
of the " Outs " with the " Ins," the peons knew that
every able-bodied man would be rounded up and impressed
for military service by the first troop of armed men,
Red or White, that passed their way ; just as every estan-
ciero knew that his horses and cattle were at the mercy
of wandering bands of self-appointed " liberators " or
" defenders " of La Banda Oriental. As fourteen years
have passed since the last revolution, which drove the
" Whites " headlong into the wilderness and cut them
off from the sweets and perquisites of office, the younger
generation of "camp" men knows nothing of civil strife
except what they learn from their elders. Also, they
certainly know of nothing in the country's affairs, no
profound cause of public discontent, to justify an out-
break of armed strife against the powers that be; yet
all seem to take it for granted that, sooner or later, the
Whites will endeavour to redress with bullets the imper-
fections of ballots, and that, when that day comes, there

272 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

will be no room for able-bodied neutrals or conscientious
objectors.

Like the peon, I do not profess to understand the
differences of principles and policy that distinguish a
White from a Red ; both profess the same exalted devotion
to the welfare of the masses. But it is evident that the
Colorados, being in possession of the till, are also in
control of the army, police and other important strategic
forces, and therefore, as a party, are much better organised
and equipped than the Whites, even though the latter are
the more numerous, and include in their ranks the big
business elements (including estancieros) and the Church.
There is no doubt that, in most parts of the country,
the " camp " is far more White than Red, for the average
peon feels that the Government at Montevideo is unduly
given to conciliating and pampering los obreros of the
city, at the expense of the real and genuine working man
himself. His attitude of mind, in fact, closely resembles
that of the Russian peasantry towards the industrial
workers of the cities, an attitude of suspicion blended
with contempt. Moreover, though he may not be religious,
he is conservative and superstitious enough to dislike
Sefior Battle's rudely irreverent treatment of the Church.
So the white neckcloth is fashionable in our midst, and
in seasons of drought and discontent — such as that which
occurred in 1916 — the man who seeks may find Caves of
Adullam wherein the coming revolution is eagerly dis-
cussed. But the older and wiser men will tell you that
the storm when it comes will arise from the capital, not
from the " camp," and that there will be ample warning
of its coming for those who use their eyes and ears ; for
many politicians are also estancieros, and these will be in
a hurry to sell their stock when serious trouble is in sight.

Generally speaking, the attitude of the " camp " man

IN SOUTH AMERICA 273

towards politicians is like that of Confucius towards the
immortal gods ; he declines to discuss them. His habitual
conversation is chiefly concerned with his daily work, his
daily bread, and horses — above all, with horses. Where-
soever two or three peons are gathered together in their
hours of ease, it is safe to wager that they will either
get out the guitars and make music, or that they will
suck mate and talk horses. Their music is invariably
sentimental and often of the deeply melancholy variety;
it is impossible to imagine the hi jo del pais singing a comic
song after the Anglo-Saxon or French manner. I never
listen to their singing without hearing in the distance,
beyond the hills of Time, dim voices of Arabia and the
East, echoes of Moorish melodies in Spanish streets, and,
beyond these, the songs of Europe's wandering trouba-
dors. I am sure that these last must have been very
closely akin to the songs of our peon singers, and especially
of the improvisatore minstrels of the camp

Conversation about horses comes as naturally to the
Gaucho and the peon as conversation about price lists
to the Jew. There are some thirty different words in
common " camp " use to describe the various colours, breeds
and peculiarities of horses; the man who cannot ride,
recognise and discuss them all, is only by courtesy a
member of polite society. The marking and branding
of horses, and the precautions taken for the official
registration of all sales, are even more stringent than in
the case of cattle — for the horse is to the Gaucho as the
ship to the sailor. On Sundays there are carreras all
over the country, races consisting of short-spurt matches
for two horses at a time, usually owners up, wherein the
peon finds not only excitement and occasion for gambling,
but matter for conversation and new bets for a week to

come.
T

274 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

It is strange that a people as devoted to horses as the
" Oriental " should display quite unnecessary cruelty in
breaking them in to saddle and harness, but such is the
lamentable fact. The match-box moralists have good
reason to preach kindness to, animals, because in their
treatment of the beasts of the field most South Americans
are systematically and yet carelessly cruel. For instance,
they habitually postpone the dehorning of calves until
they are ten months or a year old, making a very painful
and bloodthirsty business of an operation which, if per-
formed before the horn hardens in its socket, is simple
and almost painless. And similarly with castration,
generally performed at the same time as the removal of
horns. Left to himself, the hi jo del pais would prefer
to perform these and other operations with the aid of the
lasso, which, in unskilful or careless hands, often means
the breaking of an animal's leg, and under the best
of conditions inflicts needless pain upon the terrified
victim.

Horse-breaking is a special profession in the "camp"
and the domador one of its most picturesque figures;
but his usual methods, combining sheer brutality with
terrorism, are a disgrace to a people that professes to
love and admire horses. In most estancias the colts are
allowed to run practically wild with their dams until
they are four, or even five, years old (natives declare that
horses continue to grow for six years). When animals
are wanted for riding or cart work, a mob is brought
in to the home corral, and the services of a domador
engaged to break them in, at about $5 a head. His
first step, having selected his victim, is to lasso him round
the neck ; this being done, three or four men pull on the
rope until the wretched beast, at the point of strangula-
tion, with bulging eyes and loudly groaning, falls to the

IN SOUTH AMERICA 275

ground. His legs are then tied and they put a halter
on him; after which he is tied to a tree by the head
and left there to pull and strain at the rope, nearly dis-
locating his neck and always hurting himself in the
process. When he is sufficiently exhausted and cowed
by this form of torture, another is applied to " make
his mouth." They tie up his tongue by means of a heavy
bit fastened round the lower jaw; to this a long rope is
fixed and passed over his back. A mounted peon next
takes the slack of the rope; and, riding off, jerks it violently,
so that the victim has either to give way and follow
backwards, or have his jaw dislocated. After this the
animal, trembling in every limb, is saddled, and the
domador mounts him; with a mounted man on each
side to " mother " the new recruit, they then gallop
him until the taming process is concluded, the domador
pulling savagely at his tender mouth all the time. Estan-
cieros will complacently tell you that in this way a horse
can be completely tamed in a day !

In former days it was considered beneath the dignity
of the noblessa gaucha to ride a mare ; even now no self-
respecting domador of the old school will condescend to
tame one. The prejudice, like many others, is passing
away by reason of economic pressure, and the leavening
of the hidalgo tradition by each new generation of immi-
grants, but a mare is still less valuable than a horse.
Being thus held in small esteem, her part in the scheme
of estancia life is not an unhappy one, as this world goes ;
it is certainly more blessed than that of the cattle and
sheep whose pasture she shares. For years she may
roam the wide potreros undisturbed by man, without
labour or care, save that which comes with her first
offspring; and when, in course of time, they put her to
cart work, her long-legged suckling colt is not taken from

276 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

her, but runs alongside the team all day long and snuggles
up to mother to be fed at every halt. The carters of the
" camp " are a remarkably knowledgable set of men,
resourceful and careful of their beasts.

The peon's cruelty to animals is, I think, chiefly due
to a lack of intelligent sympathy, in other words, to
spiritual laziness and carelessness — a natural outcome
of his way of living and thinking. In this, as in many
other matters, he resembles the Chinese peasant, whose
lack of mental activity, of sympathetic imagination,
prevents him from realising that his buffalo's blindfold
penance at the water-wheel, or the pitiful condition of
his pariah dogs, represent violations of the Buddhist law
of gentle kindliness. Talk to Ramon or Sancho of these
things, and they will readily endorse your views; they
will agree that it is shameful to inflict needless suffering
on los pobres animates, and profess to deplore the apathetic
conservatism which permits it. These things, says
Ramon, " are costumbres del pais, customs that have
grown up by long usage and thoughtlessness, and they
are very hard to change. To these poor beasts, that
only come into the world to be harried and worried until
the time comes for them to be killed and eaten, one
should be muy compasivo, Senor. But one sees them
every day and thus one grows callous and forgets."

Ramon, the ploughman, and his peers were wont at
times to discuss the news of the outside world, and par-
ticularly the war, as set forth in some Montevideo paper
that had found its way to the peons' quarters. The pro-
portion of illiterates is high in the camp, in spite of the
Government's educational laws and professed satisfaction
on the subject ; and Ramon happens to be the only one
of our seven who can read fluently enough to hold the
general attention. And yet, for all their distance from

IN SOUTH AMERICA 277

the sources of learning and culture, these men seem to
me to have partaken more of the fruit of the Tree of
Knowledge than the superficially educated humanity of
our Vanity Fairs. They seldom see a book or a play,
have never been to a museum or picture-gallery, have
had none to lead them even a little way towards the
City Beautiful; yet I find amongst them an instinctive
perception of beauty, less vulgarity, and a more natural
urbanity, than amongst the peasantry of other lands.
There is nothing in them of the bumpkin or the boor,
hewers of wood and drawers of water though they be,
nothing mean or menial about the veriest vagabond
among them ; but, on the contrary, much inborn refine-
ment and natural dignity. And these things being so,
what becomes of our fixed belief in the civilising value of
a Board School education and a Ministry of Arts and
Graces for the Masses?

When I said that most peons had never seen a play, I
meant a performance of legitimate drama. The picture-
palace, of course, is theirs to command, even in the
smallest and sleepiest of " camp " towns, and the enterprise
of Los Angeles has provided, amidst the usual muck-heap
of maudlin slush, some interesting films which give the
picturesque side of the Gaucho'slife and satisfy his dramatic
instincts; moving tales in which chivalry (with a lasso
and a guitar) and virtue (Carmen of the discreetly glad
eye, with a chaperon in constant attendance) triumph,
after many pitfalls and perils, over the purse-proud
profligate (with diamond studs, hired ruffians and a
Rolls-Royce). Sometimes an enterprising owner of
back-number films will make a progress through the
"camp," stopping two or three days at convenient pulperias
and circulating handbills of his performances to the
neighbouring estancias by word of mouth or hand of

278 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

peon. Now and again, also, there come travelling shows,
of the variety prescribed by immemorial custom for rustic
audiences ; mountebanks, mummers and marionettes, who
know from long experience just what kind of fare will
tickle the peon's palate. These wandering Bohemians
are ever welcome in the " camp " ; their coming affords a
pleasurable sensation like to that which one feels on a
dark night in mid-ocean at sighting a gaily lighted
passenger-ship ; for the women, in particular, they afford
rare and grateful occasions for social gatherings, for the
display of Sunday clothes and company manners, and
the possible allurement of a novio.

I remember one such entertainment, given in a tent
hard by a prosperous pulperia, where three roads meet.
It was in the month of July, when darkness comes at
about five o'clock, and as the performance began at
eight, most of the audience had to ride or drive several
miles in the dark, over shocking roads. But they rolled
up in good numbers with all the decorous solemnity of a
Chautauqua meeting and all their best clothes. As
usual, the sheep were divided from the goats — one side
of the tent being for the men and the other for the women,
for all the world as if it were a Lutheran church. There
was one family of a father, mother and five daughters;
father showed the women to their seats, and then took
his on the other side of the gangway. Some of the men,
in their black hats and immaculate neckcloths, seemed a
trifle uneasy; somewhat conscious of their embellishment
by soap,. and of the presence of so many demurely glad
eyes.

The entertainers consisted of a singer or two, a boy
and girl who did tumbling and acrobatic tricks, and a
clown, whose ancient quips and saws, flavoured with some
local seasoning and sauce piquante d la Rabelais, met

IN SOUTH AMERICA 279

with much favour. But the piece of resistance was a
performance of marionettes, descriptive of the shocking
life and horrid end of the tyrant Dictator — Don Manoel
de Rosas — a stirring tale told, not without skill of stage-
craft, in the simple Homeric manner of the legendary
epic, and at the same time plentifully sprinkled with
splendid sentiments concerning the sacred cause of liberty
and much fervent patriotism. These pronounciamentos
were apparently to the taste of the audience, but whether
the applause was inspired by the artistic merits of the
performance or by their lofty sentiments, deponent
remaineth in some doubt. Looking at the world of things
as they are, I find it difficult to persuade myself that
these peons are in reality deeply concerned about the
sacred cause of liberty or the political aspirations of the
Banda Oriental. On the other hand, remembering what
actually happened in Paraguay, how the entire male
population of that country, akin to this, allowed itself
to be led to the slaughter in defence of political idealism
of the maddest kind, one is bound to confess that there
may be slumbering fires of fanaticism beneath the peon's
inarticulate insouciance, for all his pose of unconcern.

The family with five daughters had driven two leagues
to this entertainment, and it was their first outing since
a wedding baile, six months before. Beneath their
clinging and curbing conventions of genteel respectability
there was pathos in their hungry enjoyment of this little
outing, of the rare occasion of seeing and being seen.
Laborious lives they lead, these daughters of the " camp " ;
few and far between are their opportunities of fun and
frolic, few and fleeting their glimpses of the great world
that lies beyond their confined horizon. A newspaper or
two, a gramophone, the wandering pedlar's pack — of
these poor fabrics must they build their castles in the

280 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

Never-Never-Land, and give some habitation to their
dreams. Yet, if one may judge by appearance and
hearsay, a capacity for romantic sentiment lurks beneath
their demure and well-disciplined deportment; as wives,
they are generally of gentle disposition and faithful ; and,
as individuals, of good manners, and by no means lacking
in intelligence.

Because of their disposition, and the narrow limits of
their lives, religion of some sort appeals naturally to the
women of the " camp/' easing their heartaches and satisfy-
ing their instincts of devotion, especially when their swift-
fading youth has passed, and crowding cares of maternity
no longer absorb their energies. But the Church has
long since ceased to be militant in these parts, and the
crude superstitions which linger here under the name of
religion are more the outcome of oral tradition, than of
pious instruction. Where births, marriages and deaths
are concerned, these women cling as closely to the forms
and ceremonies of the Church as their knowledge and
circumstances permit. But visitant priests are rare in
most districts, and the cost of a christening, which may
involve a forty-mile journey, is an item for which the
peon's budget does not provide. Marriage also can be
consummated without benefit of clergy, in case of need.
But death is a different matter; here, as always and
wherever men live close to Nature, the survivors' sorrow
must find expression in pomp and circumstances of
sacerdotal ceremony; man, for all that he may have
lived unknowing and unasking anything of the gods,
must go to his long home in the odour of theological
sanctity. Herein, indeed, is a touch of human nature
that makes the whole world kin. A funeral procession
from the " camp " to the burial-ground of the nearest town
is precisely the same in its inspiration and much the

GAUCHOS AT DRABBLE STATION, CENTRAL URUGUAY

" PANTALEON " A PEON

[To face p. 280.

IN SOUTH AMERICA 281

same in its proceedings as a funeral in Russia, in Central
China, or among primitive peoples; the instinct which
appeals for priestly intervention on behalf of the dead is
universal. The " camp " woman's instinctive desire to
have her children baptised — especially the first-born — as a
reasonable precautionary measure against the powers of
darkness, is entirely free from theological bias. If a
clergyman of the Church of England should be making a
progress through the "camp " (the irreverent call it arodeo)
from one group of estancias to another, a peon's wife will
not hesitate to ask him en passant to baptise her child
or. children, and will heartily congratulate herself upon
combining orthodoxy with economy. There was one
case of the sort, I remember, where, after a dignified
canon had baptised Juanna's latest (illegitimate) off-
spring, the delighted mother pressed a dollar into his
hand, and, when he feebly demurred, exclaimed, " Oh;
tome por la copa." 1

Dancing is very popular in the ' ' camp. ' ' Nearly always
on Sunday evenings, and often on other days, the men
dance amongst themselves, to the music of guitar or
concertina, with much punctilio and nice observance of
ballroom etiquette. Chiefly they trip it in the tango
and the maxixe, but they pride themselves on a good
catholic taste, and have not yet reached the fashionable
modern style which eliminates all rhythm and graceful
movement. Like sailors, or Irish jig dancers, they take
their pleasure with portentous solemnity and strict
attention to scrupulous precision, especially in the tango.
Ramon, dancing with Diego the fenceman, is a model
of courtly dignity, and when, in movements that recall
the stately minuet, they gravely bow or make a leg,
they do it with all the high seriousness of artists. Some-
1 " Take it to get yourself a drink/'

282 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

times in bad weather they dance, half a dozen couples
at a time, in the confined and murky space of the peon's
kitchen, with a small naphtha lamp giving just enough
light to let one distinguish their faces, moving in the
gloom, and to enable the dancers to avoid collision with
each other or the stove ; but generally their revelries take
place in an open space amongst the trees. They dance
for the sheer love of music and movement, these sons of
the soil, and I never watch them without wishing that
the Sunday evenings of our stall-fed town-bred citizens
might be as wholesomely employed.

It is on a wet Sunday that one learns to appreciate the
native's talent for finding continual pleasure in such
things, and to admire his immunity from that moral
dyspepsia which the over-civilised call ennui or " nerves."

As I have said elsewhere, the son of the soil hates
getting wet as much as a Chinaman, or a cat ; therefore,
when it rains on a Sunday, he keeps doggedly under
cover. On a wet week-day the peon who is on day wages
and not of the regular staff, will usually knock off work,
no matter what his job or how badly he may need the
pay, and wait till the clouds roll by, whiling away the
hours with sleep and mate, cooking his torta frita and
playing cards. This he will do, if needs be, for days
together, and from his proud eminence of dryness pity
the few regular men whose duty takes them perforce
afield ; that is to say, the recorrer peon who does the daily
inspection round of the " camp," and the house-peon, who
attends to the horses, milch cows and rams. The other
regular staff men are usually put to indoor work in wet
weather, husking maize, mending harness and other
gear. The domador sits all day long in the doorway of
the peon's kitchen, making lasso ropes and halters with
strips of raw cowhide, or fashioning a saddle-cloth from

IN SOUTH AMERICA 283

the skin of a carpincho (river hog). Even on Sunday
this picturesque, sternly conservative old Gaucho is for
ever busy with the trappings of his trade; a taciturn
fellow, with grizzly hair and the long supple body of a
youth, he is at no pains to conceal his scorn for all trades
and traffics that concern not horseflesh, and for those
gringos (including me) who travel in motor-cars. All
the other peons treat the domador with the respect due
to an aristocratic esprit fort, a dandy and an oracle (his
claim to distinction under the last heading being based
on a great gift of silence), so that on a wet Sunday they
sit, so to speak, at his feet. From the interior of the
kitchen comes a faint thrumming of guitars, and a mixed
odour of asado and fritters. Every now and then a sleepy-
looking figure will appear framed against the dark portal
of the peon's sleeping-room, stretch himself, yawn, and
return once more to slumber. Pedro, of course, is com-
fortably established in the kitchen, regaling Nicasia with
the latest spicy stories from the pulperia. They all miss
the pulperia on a wet Sunday, the gossip, pelota and con-
vivial caiia, especially as no spirits are allowed in the
peons' quarters; but a man must be unusually fond of
his liquor to face a ride in the rain, and the number of
habitual soakers in the " camp " is small.

I was talking to Pedro one evening on the subject of
drink and congratulating him on his virtuous preference
for mate. Pedro, I have reason to believe, has a weakness
for imparting to me as solemn facts all sorts of pleasant
and edifying fictions — pulling my leg, in fact. Maybe
that, in the kindness of his heart, he is trying to supply
me with interesting copy. At all events, on this occasion
he informed me that in bygone days he had been fond of
his liquor, but that he was completely cured of it by the
horrible fate of his cousin Enrique. Had I heard of it ?

284 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

No? Well, he and the unfortunate Enrique were then
working together — this was ten years ago — at an estancia
up Salto way, and c-ne Sunday they had gone with two
other companeros to a carrera. After winning a good deal
of money, they had got mixed up in a pulperia carouse
with a couple of pot-valiant Porthenos, and there was
much consumption of cana. At midnight, when it came
to going home, he, Pedro, refused to move, and slept
till dawn under the friendly stars. But Enrique and the
other two men, all very drunk, insisted on mounting
their horses and starting homewards. The cool night
air soon made them more unsteady than ever, and in a
little while Enrique's horse stumbled at a ditch in the
roadway, and off he fell. His two companeros (gallant
fellows both), but extremely unsteady as to their legs)
managed to dismount, but all their efforts to put Enrique
into the saddle again were of no avail. " What is to be
done? " says companero Mateo; " he can't get up." To
Marco, drowsily thinking it over, there comes suddenly,
in the confusion of his mind's darkness, a brilliant inspira-
tion, born of the association of ideas, wherein man became
fatally confused with sheep. " If he can't get up, nothing
for it," says he, " but to cut his throat." Whereupon
Mateo, unconsciously acting upon a suggestion which
accorded with everyday usage in similar cases, cuts poor
Enrique's throat, and the two companeros, feeling that
everything possible had been done to prevent needless
suffering, struggled home to bed.

For professional reasons I decline to believe most of
Pedro's local yarns, but the Comisario, to whom I ventured
to repeat this one, assures me that it is true.

CHAPTER XV

TRIBES ON OUR FRONTIERS

OUR nearest English neighbours live between three and
four leagues away, so that, even in these days of motor-
cars, any little differences that may arise between us are
seldom the result of excessive familiarity. As a matter
of fact there is not as much sociability between the
scattered British estancieros in this country as a stranger
might be led to expect ; what he does notice among them
is their remarkable proclivity to commonplace, and often
malicious, gossip, and with it a tendency to make
mountains of grievance out of molehill offences and to
nurse a trifling grudge until it becomes a bitter feud.
These amenities of estancia life are, no doubt, directly due
to narrowness of outlook, to lack of intellectual stimulus
and distraction ; they are particularly conspicuous where
people have become infected with that " camp-rot " of
which I have already spoken. Hospitality to the way-
farer, spontaneous and open-handed, is the unwritten
law and proud tradition of the " camp " ; every stranger
coming within the estanciero's gates may count upon
receiving courtesy and kindness as a matter of course.
But between neighbours the exhibition of these virtues
is curiously infrequent; indeed, the first thing which
strikes a new-comer to these parts is the pettily malicious
nature of the local gossip and the incredible triviality of
the causes of the disputes which disturb and divide
estanciero society. The same good hospitable man who
will open his doors and, if need be, his purse, to an

285

286 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

uninvited guest, will quarrel with his nearest neighbour
for years over the veriest wind-blown straws of pulperia
gossip, and thereafter behave with all the obstinate
fatuity of a spoiled child. And woman, especially the
imported article with pretensions to social superiority,
often appears upon the scene as a very prolific sower of
strife in " camp " communities which, until her coming, had
lived without discord. I have known one bellicose Irish
woman, lacking children, family rows, shopping, or other
safety-valves, to divide all the countryside within the
radius of her fierce activity into hostile camps, and keep
them at loggerheads for years. In her case, strife, after
the manner of Tipperary, afforded an obvious antidote to
homesickness and ennui of the kind that kills. But I
have known others, even women born and bred in the
country, who generally know better, to sow and reap
trouble from sheer wantonness of naughtiness, setting all
their neighbourhood by the ears and incidentally bringing
their menfolk into contempt. In the ' ' camp," as elsewhere,
many a man learns to appreciate the hoary wisdom of
the Preacher who said that it is better to dwell alone
upon the housetop than to abide with a contentious woman
in a large room; and many a wayfarer learns to steer
clear of local habitations where Xantippe rules the roost.
" Camp-rot " in women sometimes takes the form of a
morbid distemper of suspiciousness ; I have known, moi qui
vous parle, of one who, after dispensing hearty hospitality to
a stranger for several days, and seeing him depart in peace,
sent a peon riding after him in hot haste with a note from
her husband politely requesting him to examine his
baggage and see whether he had not inadvertently taken
some unconsidered trifles which she had suddenly missed.
Such acute systems of moral dyspepsia are fortunately
rare; nevertheless the general social atmosphere of the

IN SOUTH AMERICA 287

" camp " justifies the conclusion that for the good of their
souls and neighbourly amenities, estancieros and their
wives should take a change of air as often as possible.
There is such a thing as gathering too much moss, not to
mention cobwebs. One of the results of the prickly
porcupine perversity which length of residence in the
" camp " may breed in the best of men, is that co-operative
initiative and united counsels amongst estancieros are
extremely rare, a remark which applies to the Argentine
as well as to Uruguay.

But to return to the tribes on our frontiers. Our
nearest native neighbour is the pulpero, a shrewd and
thrifty Boniface of Italian descent, whose house of enter-
tainment and refreshment stands a little way off from the
high-road, hard by the shed and pens of the Local, where,
weather and circumstances permitting, an enterprising
auctioneer conducts periodical sales of sheep and cattle.
The parochial business done at these ferias somewhat
resembles that of the fortunate islanders who lived by
taking in each other's washing. The man who has more
grass than cattle buys from the man who has more cattle
than grass. Estancias, bent on improving the classifica-
tion and quality of their stock, send hither their unfits
and weaklings, to be bought by speculating rancheros to
fatten for consumo. When there are rumours of fluke or
foot-and-mouth disease in our vicinity, business becomes
brisk at the remate. Caveat emptor is the recognised rule
of the game ; the vendor who can successfully dispossess
himself of a " point " of infected sheep, or of hopelessly
barren cows, gains the respectful admiration of his peers.
Muy vivo, they call him — a live man — vitality in matters
of cattle-dealing being estimated on principles similar to
those which obtain in horse-dealing all the world over.
On these occasions, the spirit of competition is judiciously

288 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

fortified with cafia, to the advantage of the canny and
cool-headed.

The pulperia, like the auctioneer, treats all concerned
with genial neutrality, beaming equally on the just and
the unjust. Its business is more catholic and extensive
than might be inferred from a casual inspection of the
mouldy and meagre stock in trade, of its shelves half
filled with saddle-cloths and cheap shirts, biscuits and
tinned food, petrol and kerosene, cooking and farm
utensils, soaps and scents, and a miscellaneous jumble of
women's dress materials and dusty ullage. These things
are in truth no more than outward and visible signs of
the pulperia's commercial activities; ground-bait, so to
speak, or the gilt upon the gingerbread. The peon who
comes to buy a pair of canvas shoes, the chacrero who has
run short of coffee, the estanciero dropping in for a tin of
naphtha, not only support the pulpero's essential and most
profitable business of selling cana, but all of them provide
him with fragments of that local intelligence upon which
his success as a money-lender and trader in local produce
eventually depends. Not that he despises the day of
small things, or the 200 per cent, profit which he exacts
from the improvident native estanciero, who deals with him
in lordly thriftless style rather than have the trouble of
keeping his own store-room and filling it by consignments
from Montevideo. Far from it; but the dry goods
business is very often a stalking-horse rather than a
hobby. There is in our district a Boniface who does a
lucrative trade in sheepskins and hides, bought here and
there from all the neighbourhood, and rumour has it that
some of his customers supply him with curiously mixed
lots of brands and earmarks.

The main business of the pulperia, however, is to provide
a social gathering-place, a gossip exchange and news-

A GAME OF PELOTA

[To face p. 288.

IN SOUTH AMERICA 289

distributing centre for the district, a spot to which the
peon may repair on Sundays and holidays for recreation
and refreshment. In order to stimulate his craving for
the latter, mine host thoughtfully provides a pelota court
built on to the southern wall of the pulperia. Here, on
warm days, a man can raise a very expensive thirst ; but
'tis a good game, and healthy, and far less conducive to
drunkenness and blood-letting quarrels than racing or
gambling.1 The modern pulperia, with its estaminet open
to all comers, affords proof that either the number of
black sheep in the " camp " has greatly diminished of late
years or that the shepherds have grown wiser in dealing
with them. For in the old days — and not so long ago,
either — mine host of the wayside inn was wont to serve
liquor to his customers through a barred window, his door
being rigorously closed to all but a few intimates. It
may be that, following our wartime example, the distillers
and brewers of cafia have taken occasion to adulterate and
dilute the soul-warming quality of the stuff the vintners
sell, for the good of the community and their own great
profit. Connoisseurs of the juice of the cane certainly
aver that it is not what it used to be, a fact which may
account for the increased sobriety of the peon. Be this
as it may, it is certainly true that in these parts the good
old days of light-hearted lawlessness and playfully pro-
miscuous manslaughter are gradually fading into the
limbo of the legendary.

Let me not be misunderstood. I do not mean to assert
that the son of the soil is becoming either a conscientious
objector to violence or a total abstainer. Neither would
I have you believe that the average man's chance of

1 Nowadays most wayside public-houses have pelota grounds,
and so popular is the pastime that many estancieros have come
to provide courts of their own adjoining the peons' quarters.
U

290 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

longevity has been very materially improved by the result
of increased efficiency or zeal on the part of legislation,
education or police. All I mean to say is that a variety
of causes — no single one of them perhaps very definite or
direct — have contributed to make life and limb a good
deal safer than they were, let us say, in the days when the
Falcon came a-cruising up the Parana. The fencing in
of all the country conduced, no doubt, in the first place to
chasten the old-time Gaucho's soaring soul and to instil
into his mind a momentary respect for the machinery of
law and order ; since then the steady infiltration of a new
type of settler, humble tillers of the soil who own neither
horses nor lethal weapons, has given him furiously to
think; and finally the debasement of cana has played
its part in diminishing his opportunities for hot-blooded
and scapegrace encounters. The old domador, and Ruffo
the sheep-shearer, hotspurs both of the old regime,
maintain that commercialism and the love of money have
killed the soul of the Gaucho, the spirit of gallant adventure
and romance, even as a Japanese of the Satsuma clan will
tell you that trade has slain bushido.

But despite the creeping dullness of an all-too-respectable
world, the " camp " still retains a good deal of the rollicking
joie de vivre which culminates in the joie de tuer, and a man
may yet put an end to his enemy or rival, either by sudden
brawl or premeditated vengeance, and escape the penalty
of justice as easily as if he lived in Long Island or Chicago.
The existence of a self-respecting man must necessarily
be fraught with peril, in a land of fierce passions and swift
revenges, so long as every peon goes about with a jealous
spitfire conception of his own dignity and a lethal weapon
ready to enforce it. Out of the " camp," where the hours
of work are hard, women scarce, and politics no more than
the rumble of a distant drum, vendettas and tragedies

IN SOUTH AMERICA 291

are perhaps not more frequent to-day than in any other
country where the value of the law for protective purposes
depends upon the individual who happens to administer
it ; but in the small towns, where gambling dens, " China "
girls, politicians and newspapers combine to lure them
into paths of strife, there is quite sufficient liveliness and
hazard of adventure to satisfy any gentleman in search
of excitement. Dolores, our nearest town, for instance,
until quite lately kept up a very imposing average of
citizens slain by night and day in her streets, either in the
settlement of private feuds or the adjustment of political
differences. Not long ago there were three newspapers
in the town, all very frank and free in their comments on
men and affairs, a fact which tended to excite and promote
frequent breaches of the peace. But since the editor of
the " White " paper shot and killed one of the two " Red "
editors in the main street and (being of the " Out " party)
went to gaol for it, public opinion reflected only by one
surviving journal has lost its sauce piquante and the
undertakers' business in Dolores is not what it used to be
On the other side of the River Maciel, our nearest
neighbour is Don Feliz, the Teniente Alcalde. I have
never seen this official's functions and responsibilities as
magistrate, registrar or shrieve definitely laid down in any
public document. In practice, his activities appear to
vary inversely with the square of the distance involved,
and his actions to be largely based on his own past and
present relations with the parties. A worthy and a
pleasant fellow is the Teniente, who asks nothing better
than to sit for hours in the shade of his vine-covered porch
and to entertain you with mate" and small talk; but his
conception of the duties of his position is necessarily
affected by the needs of a rapidly increasing family. It
is also complicated by the fact that, in many cases, he is

292 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

unable to predict to which side will incline the sympathies
of those higher authorities upon whose knees lie the
ultimate secrets of justice — to wit, the Juez de Paz and the
Jefe Politico at Mercedes.

In matters of elemental simplicity, such as sheep-
stealing or fence-cutting, where (as I have already ex-
plained) the law of the " camp " is explicit and generally
effective, the position of the Comisario de Policia and of
the Teniente is simple and the ends of justice are sufficiently
well met; but not so where a man is done to sudden
death in a love-affair or gambling row. For in this country,
and indeed throughout South America, persons with
homicidal tendencies are encouraged by the fact that they
incur no risk of capital punishment, and that, as the
authorities usually object to spending money on feeding
prisoners, they have, if convicted, a good chance of being
speedily released. On the other hand, the sentimental
leniency of the law, as well as the uncertainty of its appli-
cation in many districts, naturally tends to perpetuate
blood feuds and family vendettas. Even in cases of theft
or malicious damage to property, the injured party
frequently prefers either to take the law into his own
hands, or to persuade the police Comisario to deal
summarily with the offender by giving him a sound
thrashing and a warning, rather than to have recourse to
the devious and expensive processes of judicial procedure.
Justice in the " camp," like kissing, goes often by favour.
Therefore most estancieros, unless they happen to be of
the muy vivo type and confident of the protection of
friends at court, fight very shy of litigation, only invoking
the assistance of the Juez de Paz as a last resource. Against
the minor alarms and incursions of evil-doers they generally
contrive to protect themselves, tant bien que mal, by
ecuring the active good-will of the local Comisario in return

IN SOUTH AMERICA 293

for a monthly retaining fee. Subsidised in this way by
half a dozen estancias, the Comisario becomes a semi-
private functionary with a regular beat, on which, for his
own sake, he keeps a sharp eye open for suspicious or
disorderly characters. The system works well in districts
like that of Mercedes, where the Jefe Politico happens to
be a " White " man and public opinion definitely on the
side of law and order. But there are districts in which
the fine flower of corrupt politics may blossom in the
person of a Juez whose sympathies and interests lie with
the dissolute and disreputable elements of society, the sort
of political swashbuckler who does not mind being seen
gambling with a crowd of loafers and miscreants at some
low-class pulperia, and who probably gets the lion's share
of its cagnotte. Under such auspices an honest or zealous
Comisario is rare, but if such there be, he must needs go
warily to keep his job. With wandering outlaws or notori-
ous criminals he can deal promptly, but where local
offenders are concerned, he has to reckon with the possi-
bility that they may be his Honour's good and faithful
friends, and with the further fact that the rogue and rascal
element in the " camp " is by no means exclusively confined
to the peon class. I know a hard-headed forty-year-in-
the-country Scotchman whose motto is " Count your
stock and watch your fences. If your neighbour is honest
you won't want law, and if he isn't the law won't help
you."

Cases have often occurred (and not so long ago either)
of Police Comisarios coming directly to their place of
power from gaol, a cynical and thrifty Juez declaring that
in thus appointing them he not only saved money for the
State (I'Etat c'est moi) but secured the services of local
experts in criminology. Some of these experiments were
quite successful, I believe, the converted sinners becoming

294 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

a terror to evil-doers ; but there was one, at all events, who
fell short of one's ideal of a policeman in that he habitually
acted as a receiver of goods, systematically stolen from
estancias other than those which paid him to be honest.
On one occasion a neighbour of ours happening to catch one
of his peons red-handed with a cartload of stolen property
on the way to the Comisario's shanty, took the case in
wrath to Mercedes and appealed for justice. As he dis-
covered, it would have been cheaper to ask the Comisario
how many cartloads would satisfy him, for justice, stern
and unwinking, compelled him to come and give evidence
at Mercedes at least a dozen times, and eventually fined
him eighty dollars for defamation of character.

The Juez de Paz of our district is a somewhat remarkable,
but by no means typical, specimen of his class. He
combines in a very curious manner (he has been to England
and France) surface polish of a travelled citizen of the
world with the rugged sans-gene of the true hijo del pais ;
and a certain jaunty sociability with sudden spasms of
professional dignity. He dresses, not after the manner
of the " camp," but rather after the fashion of a boulevardier,
bowler and all ; yet when he visits us, either for business
purposes or pleasure, he carries no kit — not even a razor
or tooth-brush — sleeps in his boots, and has never been
known to ask for a bath. His reve eternel (he is fond of
airing his French) is to make enough money to be able to
live as a private gentleman in Paris; he would far rather
talk of that gay city, and his own amazing adventures of
gallantry with Aspasia, Delilah and Lalage, than discuss
with you the politics and prospects of the Banda Oriental.
One must be stony-hearted not to sympathise with a man,
politician though he be, whose job is in Mercedes and
whose heart lies in Montmartre. After all, this Lothario
in the wilderness is the natural product of an artificial

IN SOUTH AMERICA 295

state of society, differing only from his compeers by a
ribald frankness of lubricity, which, like his clothes, he
acquired by the banks of the Seine. Pedro, Ramon
and the peon fraternity generally regard him and his
affectations with unconcealed contempt.

Our two nearest estanciero neighbours are a native and
a Basque; small estancias both, of about four thousand
acres. Of good sturdy peasant stock is the Basque, hard
bitten and thrifty ; he began life, they say, as a chacrero in
a small way, and is now believed to be worth half a million
dollars. A brother and his old mother share his untidy,
unpretentious house ; they keep no indoor servants (mother
does the washing), mind their own business, and have
evidently no desire to cut a figure in any kind of society.
The Oriental, his neighbour, is a prodigal son, who, after
eating the fatted calf, has gambled away the cow and the
rest of his patrimony at the roulette wheel ; his estancia is
heavily mortgaged, they say, and foreclosure only a matter
of time. His house is as untidy as an Irish farm, his fences
all awry, and the air of the place is heavy with melancholy
forebodings of impending dissolution. Yet Don Antonio
keeps a stiff upper lip, entertains his friends with as near
an approach to the grand manner as larder and cellar will
permit, and talks cheeriully of importing a prize pedigree
bull next season. Before long, no doubt, the thrifty
Basque will absorb his foolish neighbour's estate and the
prodigal's place will know him no more.

When last I saw Don Antonio the countryside was
slowly recovering from a severe visitation of locusts, and
he himself was suffering, with philosophic fortitude, the
visitation of an official locust Inspector. A curious
specimen of the bureaucracy, this Inspector, like most of
his species of Italian origin, a pale and pimply youth with
a pince-nez, very tight trousers and a fanciful taste in neck-

296 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

ties. A benevolent government appoints these function-
aries for the ostensible purpose of advising and assisting
landowners in the scientific destruction of locusts ; certifi-
cates are issued to those who have duly carried out the
ordinances ad hoc. So far as practical results are con-
cerned, the activities of these Inspectors appear to aggra-
vate rather than relieve the estancieros' burdens of affliction.
Don Antonio's visitant, who frankly confessed that he
had never seen a locust in the flesh, possessed nevertheless
a businesslike conception of the market value of official
certificates, remarkable in one so young, a marked dislike
of any kind of physical exertion, and considerable skill
at truco and poker. He spent a fortnight under Don
Antonio's dilapidated but hospitable roof, arid borrowed
twenty dollars from the major-domo before moving on to
pastures new.

Further beyond our frontiers, the nearer places recog-
nisable by their scattered groups of trees clear-cut against
the skyline, other estancias great and small stretch out
in unbroken continuity up to, and beyond, the borders of
Brazil. Several of the larger British-owned estates here,
as in the Argentine, are the property of private companies ;
more than one in Soriano has been recognised by the
Government as a " model " establishment, and therefore
exempted from the double land-tax imposed on absentee
landowners. These, naturally, give themselves airs —
especially those which make a business of breeding pedigree
cattle — letting their light so shine before men that the
glare is occasionally painful. In the case of native-owned
properties, the wealth or prosperity of the padron is seldom
indicated by the size or dignity of his estancia house.
Many rich " Orientals " own estates in different parts of
the country, which they leave to be managed by a trust-
worthy gerente and only visit occasionally ; as a rule, such

IN SOUTH AMERICA 297

places are regarded as money-making propositions pure
and simple, attractive to the native mind because of the
speculative element in their business, and rarely under-
taken upon a modern scientific basis or with large expendi-
ture of capital. Therefore their quintas and human
habitations are usually lacking in dignity and the con-
veniences which make for comfort; they impress the
stranger within their gates with a sense of impermanence,
not theirs is the abiding and comfortable restfulness which
comes from fixity of tenure in ancestral acres.

This sense of impermanence of a vague and pleasantly
aimless unrest, grips you in these regions of the Pampas.
Your true son of the soil, always something of a dreamer,
is bred with a gentle wanderlust in his bones ; for him the
abiding city has no attractions, the gathering of moss no
charms. And many an Englishman has succumbed to the
call of the wild and become an incurable wanderer, a
genial horseback tramp. The " poor white " nomad is
a familiar type in Uruguay; sometimes you will come
across him doing odd jobs of usefulness in the unmistakable
manner of the naval handyman, much addicted to con-
templative fishing and tales of the sea; and again you will
find him teaching English in an estanciero's family, with
remnants of the Oxford manner visible in moments of
expansion beneath his acquired virtuosity d I'espagnole.

One I have known, who travels the length and breadth
of the land, with no possessions other than a horse, a spare
shirt, a tooth-brush and a pipe ; a very dignified and esti-
mable man, his mind well-stocked with folk-lore and legend,
who will ride up to the quinta at sunset, coming quite
naturally out of the Ewigkeit, unsaddle and turn loose his
horse, and take up his abode with you, as a matter of
course, for so long as it may please him to do so. When
the spirit moveth him, he moves; and when he goes, as

298 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

casually as he came, you feel that you have been privileged
to entertain a very wise type of super-tramp, an Autolycus
with the heart of a child. A useless life, you say ? Quien
sabe P A few years hence, and the record of its utilities
will be much the same as that of yours or mine. And is it
nothing that a man should be able to live in this struggling
twentieth century in perfect freedom of body and soul,
taking no thought for the morrow ; that, having given no
hostages to outrageous Fortune, he should not fear her
slings and arrows any more than the breath of the pampero?
Old Darrow's name is a household word from the Brazilian
border to Paraguay, and many a man's slender stock of
wisdom has been increased from his rich garnered store.
He wants nothing in this world that money can buy,
except tobacco, and this he is prepared to earn, if you so
wish it, by posting the estancia's books, or, if needs be, by
other clerkly work. But he is equally prepared to allow
you to " lend " him the money — entre amigos.

At a remote, or feria, where people come together from
all the estancias of the neighbourhood, you will generally
find one or two of these cheerful philosophers. The
atmosphere of a remate naturally attracts them, with its
gargantuan feasting, its merry meetings of old friends,
its bustle and gossip and music of guitars. There are
features about an estancia stock-and-plant auction that
remind one of Ireland; the jumble sale feeling that per-
meates the proceedings, combined with a very shrewd
perception of the main chance by all concerned; the
happy-go-lucky nature of the proceedings; their utter
disregard of time and copious consumption of cana; the
strange prehistoric vehicles in which family parties drive
to the scene from miles around ; gay blades on horseback
and demure senoritas in their Sunday best. A remate, as
a rule, is advertised to commence at 10 a.m., but the

IN SOUTH AMERICA 299

crowd considers that it is doing very well if it rolls up by
midday, and the time passes pleasantly, till lunch is served
at one, with mate and cafia, gossip, flirtation, and intermin-
able talk. No Barmecide affair is the meal when served ;
to the gringo in their midst the cubic capacity of these
" camp-bred " stomachs is nothing short of miraculous.
But the rematador knows that a buyer bids generously when
well filled with meat and drink, and as its quantity is more
notable than its quality the cost of this his ground-bait is
money well spent.

From April to September, when the killing of partridges
and other game is lawful, estancieros of sporting proclivities
organise shooting picnics, whereat friends and neighbours
foregather. Here, again, the nature of the accommodation
and the hospitality dispensed remind one of the rough-
and-ready, happy-go-lucky ways to which one is accus-
tomed in the wilder parts of Ireland — men and women
take things just as they come, and the best is as the worst.
These shooting parties are chiefly confined to the Anglo-
Saxon element. Occasionally a Basque or Italian neigh-
bour will join in and do his bit, but as a rule these people
only keep a gun for desultory pot-hunting or for the
destruction of vermin, and prefer to shoot their game
sitting. Your pukka " Oriental " does not believe in
wasting expensive cartridges on birds in flight, and as
the native partridge is generally plentiful and a foolishly
noisy and conspicuous runner in the open, the pot-hunter
can make a good bag without much trouble. Ducks also
he can secure by stalking their feeding-grounds in the
reed-girt river beds or narrow lagunas. I knew one
sporting young native who owned a pair of Purdeys and
boasted that he never missed a bird; he once joined a
shooting-party of ours but firmly declined to fire at any-
thing on the wing for fear of spoiling his established

300 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

reputation as a crack shot. The same young man told
me that he hoped some day to see some fox-hunting in
England; he thought he could show our old-fashioned
huntsmen a thing or two. He would take his revolver
and wait for the fox at likely places.

The so-called partridge of the Pampas is, in fact, no
partridge, but a species of francolin (Nothura maculosa).
Even allowing for the scarcity of population over vast
tracts of country, and the lack of transport from these
districts to the town markets, it is a mystery how this
very edible bird continues to exist in such numbers as he
does. For the species is less prolific than our partridge,
and seems to be completely lacking in the most elementary
instincts of self-preservation. When disturbed they will
run, uttering a shrill piping note, and allow the gun to
come within easy range before taking to flight, which
seldom carries them more than three or four hundred
yards. After being flushed for the second time they
refuse to rise again, hiding in the long grass until pushed
out or even seized by the dog. A common device of the
natives is to ride them down and catch them, thus crouch-
ing in the grass, with a noose at the end of a long pole.
In times of drought they perish, like all the beasts of the
field, for lack of food ; at all seasons, they have countless
enemies to fear — hawks, owls and other birds of prey,
foxes, weasels and skunks — they survive, nevertheless,
in great numbers, and apparently acquire nothing of new
craft or cunning from experience and a world full of
perils of change. I have seen a party of five guns, with-
out dogs, kill over a hundred brace in a morning, and only
stop shooting because the bag was already more than
could be consumed in the neighbourhood. In the vicinity
of the railway, whence game can be sent in cool weather
to the Montevideo market, birds are generally scarcer;

IN SOUTH AMERICA 301

but even near the capital you meet Italians and French
sportsmen returning by train from their Sunday outings
with a pointer and a big game-bag full of partridges.

There is another bird, larger, more succulent eating
and even more stupid than Nothura maculosa, which was
once common in many parts of Uruguay, but which now
is only to be found in the districts where thick reed-beds
(paja bravo) or large tracts of maize and oats afford good
cover. This is the martinetta (Rhynchotus rufescus),
generally called a partridge in the Chaco and other parts
of the Argentine; a big lumbering bird about the size,
and something of the shape, of a hen pheasant. In the
wilderness of the Chaco this toothsome fowl may yet avert
its doom, but it is quite incapable of escaping extinction
in any region where man pursues it with a keen-nosed
dog, for its only resource after being flushed is to lie perdu
in the nearest cover.

Sporting estancieros have tried more than once to
introduce pheasants into this country, but without suc-
cess. After one season there remained no sign of them.
Why one imported bird should increase and multiply,
while another is unable to survive, is a mystery; but
game birds are particularly capricious in the matter of
acclimatisation. It is certainly not for lack of cover
that the pheasant perishes in these parts — there may be
less of it than in England, but there is more than in China,
his original habitat. Nor can it be because of foxes and
other bird-eating beasts, for the pheasant is a tree-roosting
bird and has thus an advantage over the partridge. The
climate also is more like that of his Oriental birthplace
than that of Europe, and there is food in plenty of the
kind that pheasants need. Yet he refuses to live here,
just as the American " Bob Winte " quail refuses to live
in China, and the Bamboo partridge — as hardy a bird as

302 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

ever broke shell — refuses to live in England. The English
sparrow, of comparatively recent importation, is making
himself very much at home here, and, like a good Anglo-
Saxon colonist, rapidly ousting the pacifist aborigine,
the dainty little crested sparrow of Uruguay. The first
English sparrows were brought to Montevideo, they say,
by an Italian emigrant as pets; as the Customs insisted
on levying duty upon them, he opened the cage and let
them fly.

There is good snipe shooting throughout the winter in
the " camp," wherever low-banked canadas make marsh
lands in the little valleys. When flushed, the birds
usually fly circling round and about their feeding-grounds,
making their curious drumming sound as they come up
against the wind. In addition to the migratory birds,
there are a number of snipe that breed in the country;
two or three species of duck are also permanent residents.1

Wild-fowl shooting is good, wherever there is marshy
ground with reed-beds, throughout the winter, and very
pleasant sport it is, in the bright sunshine of a June day
with the air crisp and nipping after the morning frost,
and the south wind blowing fresh and clean from the
Pole. Teal and spoonbill are the commonest species, and
the mallard is fairly plentiful. The only drawback to
the sportsman's pleasure in the chase lies in the lack of
consumers for his game. The peons, ever faithful to
their mutton and beef, have little or no use for wild-fowl,
though they will condescend to partridges. As to hares,
with which the " camp " abounds, they regard them as unfit

1 The local-breeding snipe rear two or more broods each year.
They commence nesting as early as the end of July (equivalent
to January with us) ; I have shot egg-bearing females early in
August. The teru-teru (lapwing) begin pairing towards the end
of June (midwinter) and are well forward with their nesting by
the first week in August.

IN SOUTH AMERICA 303

for human food. Hares must be shot, or coursed with
hounds (a favourite sport at many estancias) because of
the damage they do to the crops and to young trees;
nevertheless, it goes against the grain to kill a dozen
splendid big fellows in a morning and leave their carcases
to be devoured of ants and peludos and carrion-eating
birds. With the fine enthusiasm of a gringo, how often
have I tramped home with a hare and visions of soup or
savoury meat, only to find my quarry next day ignomini-
ously reposing in the ash-pit, and to hear Nicasia (or
any other cook) declare that the cats had got at it in the
night. On the rare occasions when, by sheer pertinacity,
I succeeded in getting the hare as far as the kitchen, the
resultant soup was a very effective remonstrance against
any further attempts to reform the dietary of the sons of
the soil.

Old residents will tell you that there were no hares in
Uruguay thirty years ago, that they were introduced
as an experiment by a German named Lahusen, and
multiplied with great rapidity, but that none have so far
made their way to the north of the Rio Negro. For these
statements I vouch not; but from personal observation
I should say that only the country's periodical droughts
have prevented the hare becoming in Uruguay a pest
and a scourge like the rabbit in Australia. Hares need
green food ; even after a comparatively short seca, I have
known them to become so weak that the estancia dogs
could outrun them in the open, but after two or three
days' rain and sprouting green grass they rapidly recovered
condition.

The four-footed wild tribes on our frontiers are an
interesting, but generally elusive, lot. The Pampas deer
of Hudson's early days have disappeared since the intro-
duction of wire fencing, but wherever there is timber or

304 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

thick cover on the river banks, the amphibious carpincho
(Hydrochcerus capyraba) may be seen or heard, if you have
woodcraft and patience. A strangely uncouth beast is
this river hog ; he looks as if he had started life with the
intention of becoming a deer and then given it up and
taken to the water and rooting. Very quick of hearing
and fleet of foot, at the first alarm he makes straight for
the water, where he remains with the tip of his snout
periscoping from safe cover. All you learn of his presence
is a scurrying in the undergrowth and a splash.

The lagunas and deep pools of the river teem with animal
and bird life. Otters (lobo) are fairly plentiful, in spite of
the value of their skins in the Montevideo market, for
trappers are scarce in the " camp " (thank goodness !), and
shooting at them in the water is useless killing, for the
body sinks. Along the untimbered canadas, where the
stream runs between high shelving banks of loess and there
is good grass in the open, there are colonies of nutrias
(Myopotamus coypu),busy beaver families, harmless small
deer that make their homes by the river's edge — warrens
(with bolt-holes under water) — and at even play like
rabbits on the greensward. Happy little beasts these,
and until recent years generally unmolested; but now,
since the number of fur-bearing beasts has become much
less than the number of fur-wearing women, and because
coats of nutria skins are advertised in the autumn
catalogues of the Brompton Road at figures sufficient to
stimulate the cupidity of our pulperos, and even of our
peons, the slaying of these innocents has become a regular
business in many parts of the country.

The native method of killing nutrias is singularly lack-
ing in business foresight and finesse ; it amounts practi-
cally to direct action, conceived in hasty greed and con-
ducted in ignorance, of the kind which slays the goose

IN SOUTH AMERICA 305

with the golden eggs. Instead of trapping the full-grown
animals in the winter season, when their fur is long and the
dams have weaned their young, the skin-hunter of these
regions will dig out an entire colony of nutrias with dogs
and spades whenever and wherever he can do so, extermin-
ating the lot, regardless of age and sex, and probably
spoiling half their skins in the process. The nutria at
bay in his warren is a game fighter and a match for most
terriers ; many a good dog has been badly mauled in these
subterranean fights, and some have never returned to
tell the tale. The female nutria carries her young on her
back, where Nature, all provident, has also placed her
teats.

The skunk, like most of our fauna, suffered much diminu-
tion of numbers during the drought of 1916 throughout
the Department of Soriano, so that to-day the estancia
sees and smells a good deal less than it used to do of this
interesting tribe on its frontiers. Also the fur-hunter is
on his trail far more actively than before the war, so
that his midnight raids on our ducks and poultry, once
frequent, have become rare visitations; one may ride
half a day without catching a glimpse of his bushy tail
waving like a banner as he shuffles between the tufts of
espartillo, or digs for the isoka grub. A strangely fearless
and attractive little beast is the skunk of South America.
Science, thinking only of the offensive nature of his
defensive weapon, has named him suffocans, and it
may be that his fearlessness is merely the courage of his
concoction, that, like some people we know, he expects
to get his own way through sheer offensiveness. Never-
theless, I have known of a skunk kept as a pet by a lady,
that always slept on her bed, had the run of the house,
and allowed itself to be freely handled, without ever
emitting the slightest hint of its pestiferous secretion,

306 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

and from what I have seen of him at large, I think his
courage comes, not from his gall bladder but from the
heart, and that despite the odour of unpleasantness which
clings to his name, 'tis a genial and lovable little beast.
When you come upon one suddenly in the " camp," either
rooting for food or asleep in the long grass, he displays
no panic signs of fear; on the contrary, he looks you
straight in the face, as man to man, and if you and your
dogs molest him not, trots off unconcernedly about his
own business. But if you annoy or pursue him, he will
turn and advance upon you, coming straight at you with
little nervous jumps and stamping angrily with his fore-
feet, his tail stiff with menace. Most dogs, knowing from
bitter experience the blinding power of the abominable
spray which he can eject to a range of seven or eight feet,
keep a respectable distance from that waving tail; those
whose valour is greater than their discretion may cover
themselves with glory, but not all the perfumes of Arabia
can then make them fit to mix in polite society for several
days. The skin of the South American skunk is not so
dark and glossy as that of the northern continent, and
in the summer months he often presents a skimpy and
disreputable pelt, but a skin's a skin for all that in the
eyes of those who collect them for the Montevideo market.
Foxes are plentiful and do a good deal of damage in
the lambing season. They have their habitation amongst
the holes of the rocks down by the river, and are seldom
seen by day. Hares, partridges, molitos and other
groundlings provide them with fair sustenance ; but they
seldom invade our quinta because, with the exception
of the ducks, all our poultry — even the turkeys — roost
out of reach in the high branches of the ombu trees.
Ducks, poor things, are encompassed by many and great
dangers in the " camp " especially in the days of their youth,

IN SOUTH AMERICA 307

for a night-errant skunk will cheerfully slay half a dozen
of them in one silent session, and the comodreja (opossum),
who loves to frequent the haunts of men and likes to
make his home somewhere in the caves, is just as blood-
thirsty a killer. I have noticed that our mother ducks
shepherd their broods at night close to the spot where
the dogs are accustomed to sleep, hard by the peons'
quarters.

The birds of prey are a formidable crew — eagles and
harriers, kites and owls, carrion-feeding carancho (Poly-
borus tharus) and murdering cuervos (Cathartes aura).
The bird of prey that hunts and kills its quarry clean,
one may denounce but must admire; for, say what you
will, he is a very graceful and efficient product of the
sorry scheme which condemns us all to eat or be eaten,
and in fulfilling his destiny he contrives to be a thing
of beauty, which is more than all of us can say. On the
principle that somebody must do the world's dirty work,
the caranchos and cuervos may doubtless be justified, even
as a rag-picker or a scavenger may claim to be a very
worthy member of society; but their appearance is
offensive, and if every man's hand is against them, they
have only themselves to thank, for they combine the
profession of scavenging with that of cold-blooded murder-
ing of the defenceless. One of the carancho' s favourite
devices is to pick the eyes out of a sick or wounded sheep.
In the lambing season they do great execution in this
way; mother sheep being thus disposed of, her lamb
becomes an easy prey. And the reputation of the cuervo
is as evil as his vulture-like appearance.

There are neither crows nor rooks in all this country,
which, when you come to think of it, is a strange omission
in a land teeming with grubs and ticks and bugs. If it
were not for a very wholesome fear of disturbing the

308 MEN, MANNERS AND MORALS

established balance of things, I should like to let loose a
few pairs of English crows on the ploughed lands of the
"camp " and watch the results. Here, when the plough is
at work, gulls come in great flocks to follow it, and gorge
themselves to a state of helpless and undignified repletion
on the juicy isoka grub. Here again is a mystery, for
these birds come as if summoned by wireless, when the
plough's banquet is spread for them, even as storks
come suddenly from the blue to devour locusts in Egypt.
Who carries the glad tidings to the river and the sea,
and how is it done? And what would happen to our
ploughed land if no sea-birds came to thin the ranks of
the isoka? I have seen a flock of several hundreds of
gulls stuffed so full after an hour's following of a ten-
blade motor plough that they could scarcely move and
stood stock still, like aldermen after a feast, rolling beady
eyes of plethoric contentment.

Of the many and pleasant feathered tribes on our
frontier, song birds and others, it would take too long
to tell, and Hudson has done it well enough. Their
melodious voices and cheerful presence are not the least
of the joys of estancia life. Of those that frequent the
quinta our most familiar friends are the oven-bird, the
cardinal, the bien-te-veo and the little burrowing owl
(Lechusa). Never was any bird so chronically busy as
the oven-bird; mud-house building seems to find him
occupation and recreation all the year round. Natives
will tell you, and believe, that the " hornero " (to give
him his Spanish name) is a strict Sabbatarian and resteth
the seventh day. On the first Sunday that I tested the
truth of this pretty legend there seemed to be something
in it, for no work was done to any of the three nests
selected for observation; but a week later all three
couples were busily adding new layers of soft mud to their

IN SOUTH AMERICA 309

homes, the sabbath and the presence of an Anglican
Bishop visitant notwithstanding. The story probably
arose from the fact that each fresh layer of mud is allowed
to dry before a new layer is added.

Very brilliant of plumage is the bien-te-veo — one of the
very noisiest members of the Tyrannida family — and
very closely his incessant call, like that of the teru-teru,
becomes associated in one's mind with the daily life of the
" camp." Grateful, too, is the murmur of wood-pigeons
at dawn in the eucalyptus trees. We have four species
of pigeons. Paloma grande, the biggest, affords good
flight shooting towards sunset, when the birds make for
their roosting-places along the timbered course of the
river ; 'tis a fowl of excellent flavour. The smaller species,
varying from the size of an Antwerp carrier to something
little larger than a robin, are to be found in vast numbers
wherever cultivation provides them with food; when
the thistle seed ripens they descend upon it in such great
flocks that one wonders wherewithal so many crops can
be filled at other seasons. In the quint a enclosure there
are generally one or two humming-birds hovering around
the belle de nuit ; great green woodpeckers are always
busy among the paraisos, and there are vagabond bands
of green parrots, swift-moving jewels of emerald and gold,
that know to a nicety the range of a gun and seem to
love marauding mischief for its own sake. Amongst the
birds there is always something doing and life is never
dull. As I sit at evening in the verandah that looks
towards the sunset, and the curving wooded line of the
San Salvador, the swelling vespers in the birds' dormitories
on every side make very grateful, restful music, and as
the last twitterings sink to silence in the dusk, I give
thanks for these, the happiest of all the tribes on our
frontiers.

INDEX

ACEVEDO, Dr. Varela, at Ver-
sailles, 194, 196-97; and the
position of woman in Uruguay,
199-200

Agassiz, 4

Agriculture, attempts to develop,
in Uruguay, 237-39; despised
by South Americans, 246 ;
necessity for, in Uruguay, 255

Ailments, native cures for, 133-34

Albuquerque, 16

Allies' Black List, the, 38, 66, 98, 99

Alto Parana, the, 164

Alvar Nunez, 119

American Bank-note Company of
New York, 147

American Chamber of Commerce,
61

Anglo-Argentinos, 258

Anglo-Orientals, 258

Antonio, Don, 295

Apparecida, 82, 85, 87

Araguaya, the ship, 8, 23, 26, 32,
33. 36, 38

Argentine, the, route to, 13, 14;
neutrality of, 37 ; politics in,
63-65, 102; Republic cen-
tenary, 65-67, 103-8 ; rivalry
with Brazil, 66; migratory
labourers, 69; social life in,
72, 1 80 ; cattle of the, 85 ; cost
of land in, 88; resources of,
95, 96; attitude towards the
Allies, 99-100 ; Presidential
election 1916, 102-3; value of
the silver peso, 115-16; colonists
of, 129-30 ; relations with
Paraguay, 146, 155, 162-63;
coffee trade of, 152; relations
between the sexes in, 204-5;
presidency of Irigoyen, 223;
need for roads in, 239; laws
concerning the child, 258 ; com-
pany-owned estancias, 296-97

Argentine Central Railway, 169

Argentine North-Eastern Railway,
169, 170

Army, the Brazilian, 83

Artigas, 252-53

Asuncion, routes to, 117-18, 140;
the Italian tongue in, 125;
politics in, 141-42 ; the Customs
wharf, 142-43; House of Con-
gress, 142-43, 145 ; Calle Monte-
video, 144-45 ; Hotel St. Pierre,
144, 148-50; the Biblioteca
Nacional, 145 ; the Club, 145-
46 ; Florida Street, 145 ; anti-
German feeling in, 149-50;
Villa Morra, 151; the mat6
trade of, 153; overland route
to Montevideo, 163-64, 166-84
Auctions of stock, 287-88
Australians in the Argentine, 129
Avenida Palace Hotel, Lisbon, 19
Avon, the ship, 8, 21

BAHIA, 32, 36; shipments to
Germany, 37-38 ; health of, 55

Ballymena, 128, 129

Bamboo hedges, 85, 86

partridge, the, 301-2

Banda Oriental, parties of the,
190-1 ; use of the term " China,"
205 note 1

Barbados, 39

Barber, the, on shipboard, 25-27

Barcelona, 218

Barrett, Mr. John, 64

Basque, the, in South Africa, 267,

295, 299
Battle, Senor, 109, 184, 186, 189,

191-93, 219, 272
Benita, maid, 250-51, 267
Bermejo river, the, 119, 140
Berna, the, 121, 123, 125, 127, 165
Bernadino, Lake San, 149
Berne, old, arcades of, 233
Bernstorff, 112
Biarritz, 59
Bird life in the South American

"camp," 259
Birds of the Chaco, 138-40 ; game

birds of South America, 299-

302 ; birds of prey, 307-8 ;

birds of song, 308-9

312

INDEX

Black List. See Allies.

Black Prince, the, 101

" Blancos," the, in Montevideo,
190, igi-93, 271-73, 291

Bolivia, 14, 70; cattle trade, 84;
currency of, 121

Bolshevik, 15

Bombilla, the, 263-64

Bombs, German, on ships, 38-39

Boy Scout Movement in Monte-
video, 203 and note

Bradford, trade with Germany,

150-51

Brazil, characteristics, 14, 15, 16;
coast of, 35; relations with
Germany, 37-38 ; prosperous
condition of Rio, 44 ; Negro
influence in, 50; politics in,
63, 64 ; declaration of war, 65 ;
rivalry with the Argentine, 66 ;
influence of Italian strain, 68-
71; the social code, 72-77;
methods of Dr. Vital, 77-79;
railways of, 79-83 ; cattle trade
of, 83-87 ; insect pests, 84, 85 ;
war increase in expenditure,
88; and Paraguay, 146, 155,
163; anti-German feeling, 150 ;
yerba of, 152 ; Sao Paulo Rail-
way, 169; social life, 180;
estancias of, 252

Brazil Land, Cattle and Packing
Company, 84

Brazileros, characteristics, love of
scent, 36-37; the craving for
stimulants, 53-54 ; Negro strain,
201

Brazilian Dreadnought, 42

Brazil-Indian blood in Portugal,
effect, 17

Brete, use of the, 237 and note

Briand, M., 186

Britanica (La), 244, 252; stock
at, 256-57 ; food at, 260

British-owned estancias, 285-87,
296

Brooklyn Bridge, 189

Brum, Senor, 186, 192

Bryce, Lord, 3

Buckle, Mr. (of The Times), 59

Buddhist laws, 227, 276

Buenos Aires, Pan-American Con-
gress in, 47, 60, 62 ; anti-German
sentiment in, 47-48 ; centenary
celebrations, 65-67, 106-8; ex-
peditions from, 91-92 ; position
and resources, 93-96; people
of, 96-97, 218-19; enemy

trading with, 97-99 ; sympathy
with the Allies, 99; Plaza San
Martin, 104 ; naming of streets
in, 105-6; beggars of, 107;
the Jockey Club, 107, 108, 109,
no; Count Luxburg, 108;
Plaza Hotel, 108, 112; neu-
trality of the Press in, 113-14;
Florida, 114; Harrod's, 114;
women of, 114-15, 216; cost
of living in, 115; route to
Parana, 117-18; the social
code, 122, 203; the railways,
163-64; dogs of, 171-72 ; trade
with Mercedes, 176-77; archi-
tecture in, 223; Bolshevism in,
229; the opera, 230; picture-
palaces of, 232
Bullrich & Co., in
Burberry in Montevideo, 233
Butantan, Institute at, 77-79

Caciques, the, 15

Cadeau de Noel performance, 113

Calderon, Garcia, 162

California, preponderance of men
over women, 158 ; Chinese head-
gear, 270

Calle, the, of Uruguay, 235

" Camp-rot," 169, 285-87

Cana, consumption of, 159-60,
283, 284, 288-89

Canada, wheat belt in, 167

Canadian towns, characteristics
of, 228

Canary Islands, immigrants from,

255

Cancer, tropic of, 30
Canton, 143
Cape Verde Islands, 30
Caracu stock for breeding, 84,

85
Caribbean Sea, pestilence of the,

Carlyle on Francia, quoted, 157-58

Carrasco, 197, 226

Carreras, 273

Caruso in Montevideo, 230

Catalan, 218, 229

Cattle dealing, methods, 287-88

ranching in Brazil, 83-87

Central do Brazil, 79

Chaco, Italians of, 125; life in,
12 7-35J government of, 135—
36; police of, 136-37; birds of,
138-40, 301; wilderness of,
142, 165, 166

Chaco Austral, the, 119, 165

INDEX

313

Chacreros, types, 255-56

" Che," use of the term, 124

Cheese of Petropolis, 58

Chicago, possibilities of, 83-84;
society in, 216

Children in South Africa, classes
of offspring, 160, 180-81 ; cult
of the child, 179-80, 199-200;
irregular offspring, right to in-
herit, i 80-8 i

Chile, politics of, 63, 64, 65; state
of society in, 120

China and Paraguay, similarities,
118; coolie labour, 153; con-
ditions in, 187; the Consulates,
224; game in, 301-2

China, Central, feudal customs,
281

China, Southern, horseshoe grave-
yards, 77

.China, Young, 219; constitution,
194. !96

" Chinas," meaning of the term,
205 note *, 269-70, 291

Chinese, habits of the, 265 ; head-
gear in California, 270; treat-
ment of animals, 276

Church, the, influence in South
Africa, 135, 280-81

Chusenji, Tokyo, 56

Cinema, the, 52-53, 134-35, 232,
277-78

Clemenceau, M., 3

Colon, 55, 172

Colon Theatre, Buenos Aires, 113

Colonists of the Argentine, 129,
130

" Colorados," the, in Montevideo,
190, 191-93. 271-73

Company-owned estancias, 296-

97

Concordia, 93, 125, 166, 169-72
Conscript Fathers, the, 105, 145,

147

Constantinople, 217
Contrabandists of the Paraguay,

136-38

Cordova railway line, 170
Corrientes, 119, 123, 125-27, 164,

166, 169; dogs of , 171-72
Corrientes mate mill, 153
Costa Rica, 215
Cruz, Dr., 55
Cuchillo, the, 268
Cuervo, the, 307

DANCING in the " camp," 281-82
Darrow, 298

Darwin on the scarcity of trees, 167
Decauville line, the, 127, 128, 132
Deer, pampas, 303
Delane, Mr. (of The Times), 59
Democratic Control, Union of,

150-51

Diaz, President, 157, 192
Diego, the fenceman, 281
Dobrixhoffer, Father, History of

the Abipones, 118
Dogs of Corrientes, 171-72
Dolores, 8, 246, 291
Domador, the, 282-83
Douro, peasantry of the, 15
Drabble, Senor, no
" Dragon," use of the term, 212,

213
Dublin, insurrection of June 1916,

IOO-I

EL GORDO, 143-44, 148

Encarna^ion, 163

English, attitude of South
America towards the, 60 ; in-
fluence in the Argentine, 97;
types in South America, 251-
52 ; estancieros, 252-53

Enrique, fate of, 283-84

Entre Rios Railway, 170

Espartillo grass, 195, 243, 254

Estancia, the, route to, 234-37;
methods on the, 237-38; need
for better means oi transport,
238-40 ; a journey to the, 242-
44 ; the house, 244 ; the quinta,
245-47 ; the outbuildings, 247 ;
the peons' quarters, 247-48;
the potreros, 260 and note

Estancias, average size, 252-53;
value of land, 253-54; the
picture-palaces, 277-78; the
Church in the " camp," 280-81 ;
dancing in the, 281-82 ; justice in
the " camp," 292-93 ; " model "
establishments, 296; company-
owned, 296-97; sense of im-
permanence, 297-98

Estancieros, politics, 272-73 ; rela-
tions between neighbours, 285-
87 ; sporting opportunities,

299-301

Eu, Comte d', 58
Excelsior at the Colon, Buenos

Aires, 113

FALCON, 290
Falkland, 150
Farquahar, 80-8 1

314

INDEX

Feliz, Don, the Teniente Alcalde,

291-92

Ferias, 287, 298-99
Ferro-Carril Central Railway, 181-

83

Finns in the Argentine, 129
Firearms, carrying of, forbidden,

268
Florida, English element, 97 ; road

from Montevideo, 235
Ford cars, 247
Formosa, 125, 140
Forty-eight-hour week, the, 222
Foxes in South America, 306-7
Francia, 120, 157-58
Franco, Juan, 59
Fray Ben to s, 172
Free- trading on ships, 25-26
French influence in South America,

97, 129, 150

French Legation, Lisbon, 19, 21
Frontain, Senhor, 82
Funchal, 27-30

Funerals in South America, 280-81
Funes, Dean, on the Guaranjf

Indians, quoted, 156-57, 159
Fur trade in South America, 304-7

Gallegos, the, 15

Gama, Vasco da, 16

Gambling, public, prevalence of,
108—9, 197, 267-68; in Monte-
video, 228-29

Game in South America, 299-302

Garapata, the, 84

Gardens, estancia, 245-46

Gaucho, the, 160, 224; methods,
237-38; treatment of horses,

273-74

George, Mr. Lloyd, 186-87, 189;
and Dr. Acevedo, 194, 196

Gerente, Sefior, 266-67

German influence in Brazil, 37-38 ;
stock in Petropolis, 56-57; in
Sao Paulo, 70; influence at
Santos, 89; element in the
Argentine, 129; evidences in
Asm^ion, 151-52

German ships disabled by their
crews, 27

Germany, declaration of war on
Portugal, 22 ; anti-German feel-
ing in Rio, 61-62 ; in the Argen-
tine, 97 ; maintenance of trade
with South America, 97-98 ;
pro-German element in Cor-
rientes, 126-27; anti-German
feeling in Asun9ion, 149-50

Gobernador Civil, methods at the,
19-21

Graham, Mr. Cunninghame, on
South America, quoted, 2, 118,
142, 158

Grass, overgrowth of, 195

Grasshopper pest, 246

Greece, civilization in, 208

Greeks in the Argentine, 129

Guarany Indians, under the
Jesuits, 119, 120, 157-58; de-
scendants of the, 121, 125, 153,
154; Dean Funes on the, 156-
57; influence on the South
American character, 263

Guaratingueta, 86, 87

Guam j a, 80, 91-92

Gulls, 308

HAMBURG-AMERIKA Line, the, 48
Hardy of Ballymena, 127, 128
Hare, disregard of the, in South

America, 302-3
Hendaye, 19

" Hidden Hand," the, 151
Holland, laws governing public

morals in, 203

Horse-breaking, 274-75 v
Horses, the peon's treatment of,

273-76
Houses, estancia, description,

244-45

Hudson, cited, 2, 93, 303, 308
Humboldt, 4
Humming-birds of Petropolis, 58

ILLITERATES, proportion of , 276-77

Inchcape, Lord, 8

Indefatigable, the, 101

Indian natives of the Argentine,
130, 132-33; in Paraguay, 155-
56 ; blood, fusion with Spanish,
171 ; mate drinking, 263

" Industrial Paraguaya," the, 152

Interbreeding.influencc on Society,

44-45

Invincible, the, 101

Irala, 120

Ireland, comparison with South
America, 66, 185, 188, 237, 298-
99 ; Sinn Fein in SouthAmerica,
100-1 ; national ideals, 154

Irigoyen, President, policy, 66,
100, 103-4, 113, 219, 223

Irish Monthly of Buenos Aires, 101

Irun, 19

Isabella, Princess, 58

Isoka grub, the, 308

INDEX

315

Italian opera in South America,
230-31

Italians in South America, in-
fluence in Rio, 44-45 1 *n Sao
Paulo, 68, 69, 71 ; influence of
the Italian tongue, 125 ; in the
Argentine, 129, 130; settlers
in Paraguay, 163; agricultur-
ists, 246, 255, 256; owners of
pulperias, 267 ; sportsmen, 299-
301

JAPAN, civilisation in, 20 8; bushido,

2 go

Japan, seas of, 28
Jefe Politico, 292, 293
Jesuits, influence in Sao Paulo, 72 ;

mission towns of the, 119, 142,

153, 160, 223 ; rule in Greater

Paraguay, 157-58
" Jesuits' Tea," 263
•Jew, the, in Russia, 268
Jockey Club, Buenos Aires, 107-9 ;

no"

Johannesburg, Jews of, 96
Jornal de Comercio, the. 58, 59
Juez de Paz, visits of the, 266;

corrupt practices, 292-95

KALGAN, 221

Kalmuks, 265

Kensington, 154

Kitchener, Lord, 101

Knight, Cruise of the Falcon, 2, 136

Kohler, Julius, 56

Korea, 155 note *

Koreans, habits, 265

La Familia Gutierrez, 208, 212
Lahusen, the hare introduced by,

303
Lamport & Holt Line, boats of the,

39

Lancaster, James, 35-6

Land in Uruguay, value, 253-54

Las Palmas, the factory at, 127-
35, 136; birds, 138-40

Lasso, use of the, 237

Laundry work in the Argentine,
116

Law, "camp," 292

" League to Enforce Peace " of
President Wilson, 63

Lenin, 189

Leopoldina Railway, Rio, 43

Levantine Jews, trading conces-
sions to, 99

Libraries, ships', criticised, 5-8

Liebknecht, 189

Ligapelos Alliades, the, 46-7
Lisbon, 15, 16, 19, 22 ; revolution

of June 1915, 21-22; the

Avenida, 23 ; market, 55
Living, war cost of, 88-89
Locust inspectors, 295-96

pest, the, 255-56, 295

London, Jews of, 96; enemy

trading, 98
Lopez, wars of, 120, 121, I55~56,

158, 192

Los Angeles, 277
Lotteries, public, 53~54> 19^-99
Lusitania, sinking of the, 48, 99;

feeling in Rio, 60-1
Lutheran Church, rules of the, 205
Luxburg, Count, 48, 65, 98, 108, in

McADOO, Mr., in Rio, 60, 61, 62
Macdonald, Ramsay, 28
Maciel River, 234, 242, 252, 259
Mackenzie, Mr. Murdo, 84
Madeira, 23, 25-30
Mahan, Admiral, on the Monroe

doctrine, 63
Mamelucos, the, 69, 70
Maftana, cult of, 262-63, 267-68
Manchester, enemy trading with,

97-99, 15°, I5i

Mangoes of Pernambuco, 36

Manila, mangoes of, 36

Manoel, King, 21

Mario, Don, 266—67

Marne, 150

Maronas, 196

Marriage, disregard for, in South
America, 269

Martinetta, the, 301

Mat6 bowls, 263-65

drinking, 246-47, 260-65

industry in Paraguay, 152

Matto Grosso, 83

Maurice of Nassau, 35

Meat trade in Brazil, 83-87;
amount consumed by the peon,
260-62

Medina del Campo, 19

" Menage a trois," 205

Mendoza, 120

Mercedes, camp town, 8, 166, 240,
241; dogs of, 171-72; journey
to, 172-73; Hotel de Paris,
173-74, 178; description of the
town, 174-76 ; the Rowing Club,
176; food supply, 176-77; the
Rambla, 177 ; railway to Monte-
video, 181-83; amusement in,
269-70 ; camp justice in, 293-95

316

INDEX

Mexico, state of society in, 120 ;
Indian race in, 155; rule of
Diaz, 157

Mexico, Southern, 215

Mihano vitch Steamer line, 164

Minas, Geraes, 83

Mitre, Sefior, 113

Molito, the, 259 and note

Monroe doctrine, maintenance of
the, 62, 63, 64, 65

Montaigne, Lord of, on " com-
pany," quoted, 1-2

Monte Carlo system, 197, 229

Montenegrins in the Argentine,
129

Monies as landmarks, 242-43

Montevideo, expeditions from, 91 ;
characteristics, 94, 185, 188-89;
gambling in, 108-9; cost of
living, 115-16; the social code
in, 122 ; overland route from
Asun9ion, 166-84; dogs of,
172; trade with Mercedes, 176-
77, 178; rail from Mercedes,
181-84; the new House of
Congress, 187-88; Plaza Inde-
pendencia, 189; Plaza Matriz,
189 ; the Cathedral, 1 90 ,22 5 note ;
the Representacion Nacional,
190 ; politics, 190-93, 200-1 ;
position of woman in, 201;
relations between the sexes in,
202; Boy Scout movement in,
203 and note; architecture, 217,
223; police* 220; tramway
service, 220; railway service,
220-21 ; the siesta, 222 ; British
Legation and Consulate, 224-
25; the Campo Santo, 225-26;
the British cemetery, 226; the
Cerro, 226; Villa Dolores, 227-
28; the Zoological Gardens,
227-28 ; Parque Hotel or Casino
Municipal, 228; the Parque
Urbano, 228; Pocitos, 228;
music and drama in, 229-32 ;
thft " Solis," 230 ; picture-palaces
in, 232; roads from, 235;
telephone arrangements, 240-
41 ; markets, 255 ; condemnation
of mat6 drinking, 264; the
Government at, 272; food
supply, 300 ; English sparrows
in, 302 ; fur market, 304, 306-7
Moorish style of architecture in

South America, 217
Moors, influence on the South
American character, 262-63

Morny freres, 30

Morongaba, 84

Mosquito, the fever-bearing, 55;

of the Chaco, 138
Moulin Rouge, 32
Mourning in South America, social

customs governing, 210
Muller, Senhor Lauro, 61
Murphy, 251
Murray, Father, 101
Mussulman code, the, 205

Nation, the, 113

Natal, coal from, 169

Nations, League of, principles,

194

Nazear, Dr., 55
Negro, the, assimilation of, in the

Brazilian population, 50, 68;

element in Sao Paulo, 68-9
" New Australia " Colony, 163
New York, 94, 95, 96; society in,

216; opera troupes, 230
Newspapers, nuniber of, in

Montevideo, 222 and note
Nicasia, the cook, 249, 260, 283,

3°3
Norway, use of the telephone in,

241

Novio, the term, 213, 214
Nutrias, killing of, 304-5

OLINDA, hill of, 35

Opera in Montevideo, 229-32

Oporto, 15

Orange trade, 125

Otter hunting, 304

Oxen, ploughing with, 256

PALERMO, 228; cattle show, 108,

no-ii; races, 109-10
Palmitas, 234, 235, 239-40, 242,

266
Pampas, scarcity of trees on the,

167-68
Pampero, the south-west, influence

of, 167
Panama, 105
Pan-American Bureau, 64
Pan-American Congress, 47, 60,

61
Paraguay, Jesuit mission, 70, 119,

157-58; cattle ranching in, 83;

routes to, 117-18; China and,

similarities, 118; state of society

in, 120; colonists of, 129;

smugglers, 136-38; history, 146;

currency, 146-48; trade with

INDEX

317

Germany, 151 ; industries of,
152-53; people of, 154-55,
158-60 ; government of, 154-56 ;
dictatorship of Francia, 157-
58 ; numerical preponderance of
women, 158—59; prevalence of
vendetta, 160-61 ; future of,
162-63 ; European immigration,
163; social life, 180; position of
the woman, 201; Indians of,

255

Parana, Jesuit mission, 70 ; cattle
ranching in, 83-84; partridge
shooting in the Pampas, 299-
301

Parana River, 69, 118, 163;
navigation on the, 122-24, I27

Paris, Rue de Rivoli, 233

Parque Urbano, 197

Passports, stamping of, in Lisbon,
19, 20, 21

Pasteurising, 85, 86

Patagonia, 105 ; anti-German feel-
ing, 150

Patio, the, in architecture, 217

Paulista, 70

Paysandu, 172

Pedro II, 55, 56, 58

Pedro, house peon, 260, 283-84,

295

Pei-taiho, Peking, 56

Peking, 13, 56, 217; German
Legation, 1 1 1 ; railway to
Kalgan, 221

Pelota courts, 289 and note

Peludo, the, 259 note

Peon, the, quarters in the estancia,
247-49; work of, 259; feeding
of, 260-62 ; gambling propensi-
ties, 267-68; use of firearms,
268 ; amusements, 268-70 ; dress
of the, 270-71 ; politics, 270—73 ;
treatment of horses, 273-76;
disregard for game as food, 302

Pernambuco, 33-36, 58; anti-
German feeling in, 150

Peni, 14, 70, 155 note, 224

Petrograd, Yalta, 56

Petropolis, 32-33, position, 55-56 ;
the German element in, 56-57;
Palace Hotel, 57

Pheasants, inability to acclimatise,
301

Piedmont, settlers from, 125 ;
ploughing in, 256

Pigeon, the, 309

Place de la Concorde, 185

Pocitos, 209, 226, 228

Poles in the Argentine, 129;
national ideals, 154; in Monte-
video, 229

Policemen of Rio, 51-52 ; in the
Chaco, 136-37; of Montevideo,
220

Policia, Comisario de, subsidising
the, 292-94

Politics on the estancias, 271-73

Polygamy, 74-77

" Poor whites, 297-98

Port Said, 143

Portugal, effect of Brazil's pros-
perity on, 15-17; war declared
by Germany, 22 ; influence in
Rio, 44-45; cattle imported
from, 85

Postal arrangements in Monte-
video, 221 ; in Uruguay, 239

Postal Union, the, in Rio, 46

Potreros, meaning of term, 260
and note

" Pozzi," 31-33

Prado, Senhor, 84

Princess Royal, the, 101

Puget Sound, 28

Pulperias, 267-68, 277-78, 283-84,
287-89

QUAIL, the American, 301
Queen Mary, the, 101

RAEMAKER, Cartoons, 46-48, 113

Railway travel in South America,
169-70

Railways, the Funchal funicular,
29; Brazilian 79-83

Rain, attitude of the South
American regarding, 232-33;
effect on means of communi-
cation, 235-36; the peon's
hatred of, 282

Ramon, 295; philosophy of, 276-
77; dancing of, 281

" Rapide," the, 19

" Recife." See Pernambuco.

Reconquista, 119

Remote s, 298-99

Reuter, 15

Rio de Janeiro, Avenida Branco,
33. 49» 5T; attitude of the
Government towards the war,
37; ships calling at, 39; official-
dom in, 41-47; Club Central,
42, 48, 60 ; Raemaker's cartoons,
46-48 ; cash system of payment
in, 46; anti-German sentiment
in, 47-49, 61-62 ; Moderne Hotel,

318

INDEX

49-50 ; Central Hotel, 49; Inter-
national, 49; Santa Theresa,
49; policemen of, 51-52;
Engineers' Club, 52 ; shops and
cinemas, 5 2-5 3, 232 ; the Lottery,
53-54 ; Largo da Carioca, 54-55 ;
health of, 55; United States
Embassy, 61 ; railways, 79-83 ;
expeditions from, 91 ; archi-
tecture, 223 ; Consulate General,
224

Rio dela Plata, 118

Rio Grande do Sul, 49, 70, 83,
119

Rio Maciel, 234, 242, 252, 259

Rio Negro, 166, 172, 303

Rio Uruguay, 172, 234

Roads, need for, in Uruguay,
235-38

Rodrigues, Carlo, 58-59

Roman Catholics, 100-1

Roosevelt, Mr., 64

Root, Mr., 63

Rosa, General, 93

Rosario, 93, 100

Rosario Railway line, 170

Rosas, Don Manoel de, 192, 279

Roulette in Uruguay, 197-98

Royal Mail Service, the, 23

Ruffo, sheep-shearer, 290

Ruiz Montoza, 119

Russia, conditions in, 187; datchas
of Southern, 228; the Jew in,
268; funeral customs, 281

SAHARA, the, 30

St. Patrick's Society, 101

St. Vincent, 26, 31

Saladeros, 172, 226-27

Salto, 172, 284

San Francisco, 13

San Jose, 234-35

" San Martino " model farm, 84

San Raphael, fazenda, 86-87

San Salvador river, 266

Santa Catalina, 234

Santa Catharina, German colony,

49, 7°

Santa Lucia, 183
Santa Maria la Mayor, 158
Santa Theresa, heights of, 41
Santiago de Chile, 216, 230
Santos, customs, 26; German

influence, 89 ; the " Sportsman "

restaurant, 89-90 ; position, 90 ;

expeditions from, 92
Santos Railway, 79
Santos Trawler Coy., 89

Sao Paulo, 33; people of, 68-71;
Avenida Paulista, 69 ; the social
code in, 72-74 ; Theatre Munici-
pal, 76 ; public institutions, 76-
79 ; the Butantan Institute, 77 ;
" San Martino," 84 ; cost of land
in, 87-88; war expenditure in,
88; the " Rotisserie Sports-
man," 89; at Santos, 90

Sao Paulo Railway, 169

Sarandi, 209, 213

Scandinavia, the Gothenberg
system, 197

Scent, the Brazilian's love for,

36-37

Schools, primary, 179-80

Sexes, relations between the,
121-22, 131-32, 159-60

Shanghai, 13 ; the model settle-
ment at, 93 note x

Sheep, farming of, 88; increased
price of, 261-62 ; buying sheep-
skins, a transaction, 265-66;
sheep-selling, 287-88

Sierra do Mar, 68-69

Sinn Fein, 100-1

Skunk, the, 305-6

Smillie, 28

Snipe, 302

" Solis " Theatre, Montevideo,
230-31

" Son of the Soil," laws guarding
the, 258

Soriano, 8, 234, 252 ; value of
land in, 253-55; fur trade of,

3°5
Spain, feeling in the Argentine

towards, 106; yoke of, thrown

off, 108 ; conquest of Paraguay,

120
Spanish blood in South America,

129, 155-56, 160, 171, 258, 267
Spanish language, modification in

South America, 125
Sparrows, English, 302
" Spurlos versenkt " incident, the,

112

Squatters, 225-56
Stechy, Father, 101
Stegomyia Calopus, the, 55
Streets, naming of, 105-6
Sun-Yat-Sen, 196
Sweden, the telephone in, 241
Switzerland, government of, 186
Syrians, trading concessions to, 99

TACUAREMBO, 253
Tatu, the, 259 note

INDEX

319

Taxes in Brazil, 45-46

Taxis in Rio, 51

Telephone, need for the, on the
estancias, 238-42; arrange-
ments in Uruguay, 240

Tennessee, U.S.S., 42

Tennyson, S.S., 38-39

Theatre customs in Montevideo,
229-32

Times (The), issue in Rio, 46;
Senhor Rodrigues and, 58-59;
the Buenos Aires correspondent
on enemy trading, 98-99

Tirpitz, von, 65

Tokyo, Chusenji, 56

Toledo, 168

Trans-Siberian Railway, 13

Trees, scarcity of, 167-69

" Turcos," the, 96-97

" Turkish importers," trading con-
cessions to, 99

Twickenham, 21

UKRAINE, steppes of the, 167
United States, declaration of war,
37, 48 ; attitude towards the war,
60-6 1 ; meat trade, 84 ; effect
of declaration of war on Ger-
man trade, 98 ; Irish politics in
the, 10 1 ; use of the cinema in,

135

" Uriquiza " Theatre, the, 231
Uruguay, the social code, 72 ;
cattle ranching, 83; value of
land in, 88, 253-54; politics,
102, 190-94, 200 ; value of the
dollar, 115-16; the fight against
Paraguay, 146; coffee trade of,
152; immigration into, 163;
transport arrangements, 172-
73; prosperity of, 185; the new
House of Congress, 187-88; law
and government in, 187-88;
represented at Versailles, 194;
constitution, 194-95 ; need for
better transport, 195-96, 236-
42; public gambling, 197-99;
relations between the sexes in,
201-2; the calle of, 235; laws
concerning children, 258; hares
in, 302-3

Uruguay Central Railway, 166,

169-70, 221, 234
Uruguay River, 172, 234

" V " BOATS, route to South

America, 39

Varela, Dr. See Acevedo.
Vedia y Mitre, Professor de, 195
Vendetta, 160-61, 290-92
Versailles Conference, 194, 197
Vestris, ship, 40
Viera, Senor, 186, 192
Vigo, 55

Villa Formosa, 19
Villeta, 123, 125
Vital Brazil, Dr., 77-79

WALLINGFORD, 243

Warrior, the, 101

Washington, politics, 64

Water, stagnant, rules concerning,

55

Waterton, on Pernambuco, 2, 35

Wellington in Portugal, 17

Welt-politik in Petropolis, 57

White ensign, the, 25

White Slave traffic, 75

Wild-fowl, 302-3

Wilhelmina, Queen, 203

Wille, Herr, 48-49

Wilson, President, 62, 63, 189; and
Dr. Acevedo, 194, 196; the
Monroe doctrine, 186, 200

Woman, social position of the
Brazilian, 72-74 ; numerical pre-
ponderance in Uruguay, 158-
60; her position in South
America, 1 89, 202 ; the unmarried
mother in Uruguay, 199-200;
in Montevideo, 231-32 ; the
native woman and the moral
code, 249-50; sufferers from
"camp rot," 286—87

Wood fuel for railways, 168-70

YALTA, Petrograd, 56
Yangtsze-kiang, the, 118
Yerba. See Mate.
Yokohama, 13

ZEBU stock of cattle, 85

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