Quite other surprises were, however, in store for me on my wanderings in America. Four days later, on June 27th, we reached Buenos Aires, where we were joyfully welcomed by a number of kind folk, who had spared neither trouble nor care to make our stay agreeable to us. Then began four months of really strenuous life, to borrow Theodore Roosevelt’s favourite expression. Conferences, receptions, banquets, visits to hospitals, schools, factories, workshops, and ranches; trips by boat, train, and motor-car. It was a real _moto perpetuo_. I passed the month of July at Buenos Aires. In August, I plunged into the interior, visiting successively Rosario, Mendoza, Cordova, Tucuman, Santiago, dell ’Estero, Santa Fé, Paraná, and penetrating right up to the foot of the Andes. I travelled about ten thousand kilometres in the railway train, observing, collecting documents, asking and answering questions, and discussing problems. All these, however, were labours less tiring than another, which became by degrees the principal preoccupation of my mind during those two months: the endeavour to put to flight a demon which kept obstinately springing up before my eyes, in conversations, on journeys, during visits, during dinner-parties, notwithstanding all the efforts I made to keep it at a distance; and which seemed determined to reappear at every moment and wound me in the inmost recesses of my European pride and in my most touchy European susceptibilities. What was this demon? It was American progress. Every day I had pointed out to me on my rapid journeys, immense and marvellous ranches, herds of many thousand head, markets overflowing with wealth, magnificent schools, and superb hospitals. I was given descriptions and demonstrations, in figures and in fact, of the rapid spread of cultivation, the increase of production, the bewildering prosperity of the banks, the expansion of Buenos Aires, now become the second city of the Latin world in wealth and population, after Paris. They were all interesting things to observe and study. Nevertheless, too many of those who showed them to me implicitly or explicitly established comparisons between this rapid increase and transformation in everything Argentine, and the more deliberate advance of the great nations of Europe, and deduced the conclusion that Argentina was a more progressive and advanced country.