easy to exploit, because civilisation supplies you, ready to hand, with almost perfect instruments for such exploitation. There you have the real difference between us.” Though these arguments were listened to with courteous attention, they made but a slight impression on my hearers. I very soon realised that American progress, the rapid increase, that is to say, of the wealth of Argentina and the incessant modernisation of the customs and institutions of the country, were a sort of national religion, which was accepted by most people with a blind credence. So in the end, I was persuaded that this ardent faith in progress must be attributed to the preponderating influence of Buenos Aires, that immense city, almost half the population of which is composed of European immigrants in search of wealth. For it is the largest port, the principal emporium, and the financial centre of the Republic, through which passes most of the export and import trade, nearly all the great stream of wealth which flows out from the vast territory over the world, and from the world ebbs back to it again: a rich American city, after the European picture of such. It is only natural that a city whose wealth and size are being multiplied by the rapid development of the country should have adopted American progress as its religion, and should, through its influence, have imposed that religion on the whole country. The conclusion of the matter was, however, that the Argentine conception of progress was not and could not be anything but the passing exaltation of a fortunate country which, profiting by circumstances unusually favourable, could watch its wealth growing round it with bewildering rapidity. That, at any rate, was the conclusion I came to, and I thought it both reasonable and justifiable. With this idea in my head, after a laborious, agreeable, and instructive stay of two months in Argentina, I sailed for Rio, making on my way thither a brief halt at Montevideo. I expected to find in Rio another American city like Buenos Aires. I was, however, mistaken. Brazil is not, like Argentina, a single body with one enormous head. Its economic activity is more diffuse and centres in different cities,—for coffee, in São Paulo; for rubber, in Manaos; for each one of the other great articles of production, in other cities scattered over the vast territory. Rio de Janeiro, though the chief political and intellectual centre of the Confederation, cannot, therefore, be called either the emporium or the port, or the economic capital _par excellence_. Consequently, it differs widely from Buenos Aires. It is less crowded, noisy, and busy. It lives, I might almost say, in the shade of its gardens and between the forest and the sea, quietly and reposedly. It is the only great American city I have visited in which people walk at a leisurely pace and not at headlong speed; and it not only lives reposedly, but it thinks, and even dreams a little.