Grants of fiscal lands were made in the past with scandalous liberality for political services, but to Argentines. Mighty little of such lands, none of any, then, apparent value, went to foreigners; whatever they might have done for the country’s development and good. Now, few grants of such lands are made to anyone; the National and Provincial Governments appreciating too fully the advantages of their retention as aids to power and wealth. In all this the Argentine is right from his natural point of view; but his obstinate maintenance of it is gradually bringing certain economic problems of vital importance to a stage when some way will have to be found out of the dilemmas which they already present. The chief of these problems is that of agricultural labour. What inducement does Argentina offer to the class of colonist she needs most, the man with a wife and family to aid him in his work and with, perhaps, a small amount of Capital? He will find plenty of work and people to employ his labour at a liberal wage as soon as he lands. He will be taken, if he so wish, free of all cost to himself, to one or other of the more or less distant parts of the Republic, where he may be set to work on virgin soil at a wage, or, may be, on a half share of profits for a period of three years. On the scene of his industry he will find an Italian or Galician storekeeper who will supply his every reasonable want on credit, taking as security the share to come to him of the profits from the land to be worked. The storekeeper will also charge a high rate of interest on prices of his own fixing, unembarrassed by any competitors within a radius of very many miles; or, if there be such, he and they will know well enough how to preserve a rate of profit which would astonish an European shopkeeper. At the end of three years the landlord will have his land in good working order,[2] and the storekeeper will have most, if not all, of the new colonist’s share of profits. The latter can then, if he likes, have some more virgin land on similar terms. He is a mere labourer, a worker for others, with no betterment on his own horizon. There is as yet no real practically working official machinery by which he can obtain a direct grant of land in freehold to himself; such as exists, with other added facilities, in each of our own great agricultural dependencies such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand. For this reason alone, the rural population of Argentina has almost ceased to show much more than a vegetative increase. The population of the whole Republic is that of greater London spread over an area only a very little less than that of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, France, Holland, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland put together.