The word “progress” is one of those which is much misused in Europe. I had no sooner landed in Argentina, however, than I recognised that the word had quite a different sound and significance on that side of the water from what it has in Europe. The standard by which my new transatlantic friends were unanimous in measuring progress was the rapidity of transformation and the magnitude of the results. New, modern, larger, were to them synonyms of progress and of improvement. Consequently, they had only to cast their eyes round their own country to find reasons for self-satisfaction. But this conception of progress at first somewhat amused and somewhat irritated me, just as the naïve touches of vanity in the young often amuse and irritate grown men. Many a time, when we were discussing the progress of Argentina and the comparisons, tacit or explicit, which were made with Europe, have I said to my Argentine friends: “Undoubtedly the effort which you are making is a noble one, and a paying one. In thirty years, you have increased your wealth ten-, twenty-, even thirty-fold. You have been wonderfully quick in extending cultivation, railways, and population over the vast territory which Fortune has given you. You are now flooding the world with riches, and, profiting by the experience of others, you can transform, reshape, and make perfect your public services, your institutions, and your whole mode of living in the smallest number of years. “You make a great mistake, however, if you think that the contrast between the rapidity of your growth and your changes and the slowness and immutability of Europe is any proof of your own nearer approach to perfection. That rapidity is a phenomenon of youth. A child’s weight and height double themselves every six months, year, two years, or three years in the first years of its life; while an adult stops growing or grows so slowly as to be hardly aware that he is doing so. Would you deduce from this that a boy of six years of age is superior to a man of forty? No. Childhood and manhood are two phases of life. Each has its own necessity, its own function, its own advantages and disadvantages. It is no more possible to compare them than it is to compare day and night, dawn and twilight, winter and summer; I can see no essential difference between the countries of Europe and your own. We are all children of the same civilisation; we have been nursed at the same breast. We are all like one to the other, though we may differ one from the other as brothers, or, if you prefer it, as cousins do. So an American progress, different from European progress, does not exist, though there are countries whose transformation, owing to external circumstances, may be retarded or accelerated. You have political institutions and social orders of less antiquity, and, therefore, of less rigidity and less strength than those of Europe. You also have a territory to exploit which is vaster, very much vaster, and much more