The population was greater than it is at the present day. While the political solidity of the Inca Empire is doubtless exaggerated, it is certain that the same civilisation extended from Ecuador to Mendoza and Santiago de Chile, and that the Cordilleran region was the home of twenty millions of people, organised into vigorous, progressive, and expanding communities.
The Andean civilisation never showed any tendency to expand over the tropical plains of the great central depressions. The Incas themselves never cared to penetrate far down the wooded and steaming slopes of the Andes lying directly to the east of their own capital. Their dependent states bordering on the Argentine pampa did not cross the desert plains, where irrigating ditches could not reach. So far as we now know, the Andean Indians had never penetrated to the Atlantic.
East of the pampas, in the hilly woods of Paraguay and Brazil, tribes vastly inferior in intelligence, political organisation, and civilisation, maintained a precarious existence. Many of those who belonged to the great Guarany family lived in palisaded villages and cultivated the soil, but none had advanced far on the road toward a reasonably efficient social and military organisation. The procuring of food for their daily wants was their chief occupation; the tribes were too small to make effective warfare on a large scale; there was no prospect of any development into a higher culture. Certain tribes, inferior to the Guaranies, had spread from the wooded regions over the mesopotamian provinces and into the adjacent pampa, and the districts on both sides of the estuary, but they never ventured far from the water-supply. Though brave and intractable, these people showed no real fighting capacity until after white men had taught them the use of horses. With this knowledge, however, they were able to offer a very effective resistance, which was not completely overcome until twenty years ago.
The area of the whole Republic is 1,212,600 square miles. The mesopotamian region contains 81,000 square miles, being larger than England and even more uniformly fertile. The pampa suitable for grain production, including the semi-forested Chaco plain in the north, has an area of not less than 350,000 square miles. The Andean provinces contain nearly 300,000, and Patagonia 316,000. The grazing pampa is partly included in the Andean provinces; its boundaries to the south and toward the Atlantic are not capable of exact definition, but it includes perhaps half the territory of the Republic. Except the higher mountains, and the so-called deserts of the centre, the whole territory is productive.
The description of the white man's spread over this immense country—the largest, except Brazil, of the South American states, and of all these the most immediately and unquestionably suitable for maintaining a large population of European blood—is tedious when told in detail. But it is a story fraught with significance for the future of the world. On the plains of Argentina the descendants of the Spanish conquerors have fought out among themselves all the perplexing questions arising from the adaptation of Spanish absolutism and ancient burgh law to a new country and to personal freedom. After more than half a century of civil war, constitutional equilibrium has been attained. The country ought to be interesting where there has grown up within a few decades the largest city in the Southern Hemisphere, and the largest Latin city, except Paris, in the world. The growth of Buenos Aires has been as dizzying as that of Chicago, and the world has never seen a more rapid and easy multiplication of wealth than that which took place in Argentina between the years of 1870 and 1890. Interesting, too, is Argentina as the scene of the most extensive experiment in the mixture of races now going on anywhere in the world except in the United States. In forty years more than two millions of immigrants have made their homes in Argentina. The majority are from Southern Europe, but the proportion of British, Germans, French, Belgians, and Swiss is a fifth of the whole. Will the Northerners be assimilated and disappear in the mass of Southerners, or will they succeed in impressing their characteristics on the latter? Will a mixed race be evolved especially suited to success in subtropical America? Will the system of administration painfully evolved out of the old Spanish laws prove permanently suited to the great industrial and commercial state that is growing up on the Argentine pampa? Will the municipal and bureaucratic system prove adaptable and elastic enough to furnish a political framework for the tremendous economic development which has already made such strides, but which really has only begun? Will the intellectual and social ideals of the coming Argentine nation be military, bureaucratic, leisurely, or will they be purely commercial? Certain answers to these questions cannot yet be deduced from the data furnished by the history of Argentina. Their solution, however, inheres in the past of its people. The future of Argentina will have a profound influence on the rest of the continent. It has the largest territory except Brazil, the greatest per capita wealth, its population is increasing most rapidly, and it has received the greatest amount of foreign capital. Immigration and investment in the other countries may be expected soon to begin on a large scale. The experience of Argentina promises to prove invaluable to all of South America.
CHAPTER II
THE SPANISH COLONIAL SYSTEM
Spain, as a world-power, reached her apogee in the year 1580, when Juan de Garay founded Buenos Aires. In that year Portugal was united to the Spanish Crown, and the East Indies and Brazil doubled Spain's colonial dominions. But at the very same moment the first symptom of her decline appeared. For the first time it was proved to the world that she could not hold the seas against her young rivals from Northern Europe. Sir Francis Drake, the earliest harbinger of Britain's dominance on the seas, appeared off the Plate on his way to the Pacific. Spain had trusted that the difficulty of threading the Straits of Magellan would protect the South Sea, but Drake slipped through in a spell of favourable weather and found few Spanish ships which were fit to fight him along all the coast to Panama. Drake's wonderful raid humbled Spanish pride where Spain was thought strongest, and encouraged Englishmen to fight with a good heart, a few years later, the overwhelming Invincible Armada.
In 1616 a great Dutchman, Schouten, found the passage into the Pacific around Cape Horn. This discovery revolutionised the navigation routes of the world. Heretofore the only practicable commercial route to the Pacific had been across the Atlantic to the north shore of the Isthmus. Nombre de Dios was the metropolis and the market where all the goods for South America were landed. Those intended to be sold on the shore of the Caribbean were sent along its coast, and those intended for the Pacific were carried overland to Panama to be shipped on coasters down to their destination. Direct communication across the Atlantic to Buenos Aires was forbidden by the Spanish government.
Schouten's epoch-making discovery opened up the way for countless Dutch and English ships to ply a contraband trade with the towns of the Pacific coast, but did not induce the Spanish government to change its time-honoured policy or vary its trade routes. America was treated as the private property of the sovereign of Castile, and its commerce was to be exploited for his sole benefit. No Spaniard was allowed to freight a ship for the colonies, or to buy a pound of goods thence, without obtaining a special permission and paying for that privilege. Cadiz was the only port in Spain from which ships were permitted to sail for America, and the whole trade was farmed out to a ring of Cadiz merchants. To protect this monopoly and to prevent the export of gold and silver were the chief purposes of the Spanish colonial policy. Every port on the seaboard of Spanish South America was closed to trans-oceanic traffic, except Nombre de Dios on the north shore of the Isthmus. The towns on the Pacific and Caribbean coasts might admit coasting vessels properly identified as coming from the Isthmus and loaded with the consignments of the Cadiz monopolists, but the South Atlantic ports were absolutely closed so far as law could close them. Legally,
