In the meantime the Argentine National Ministry of Agriculture has done much good work towards stimulating interest in the undoubtedly great possibilities of cotton, tobacco and rice cultivation. The cultivation of cotton is no new idea on the River Plate. It could hardly be so when there are large districts so evidently and admirably adapted for this crop. The reasons why several former well-meant attempts at cotton growing in Argentina were unsuccessful were the difficulties of obtaining and keeping adequate labour, and a too great reliance on the bounty of nature unaided by much human science. Selection and just appreciation of the time for gathering were matters which did not receive sufficient attention, and a great obstacle certainly was the difficulty of obtaining labour in sparsely populated districts, in which the necessities of life are procurable by all with a minimum of effort. The natives fancied they were being exploited if they did not get commercially impossible rates of wages for what appeared to them extremely arduous and unwontedly continuous and careful work. Work of the satisfactory execution of which, moreover, their primitive mentality was not really capable. Even now River Plate cotton growing will need to be largely aided by imported or colonist labour. Given that and due scientific management and care, applied in the first place to the selection of the seed most suitable to the soil and climate, there is no sort of reason why River Plate cotton should not occupy a highly remunerative place in the world’s markets, where cotton is always in increasingly large demand. Many districts in the Argentine Provinces of Corrientes, Santa Fé, Salta, Tucumán, Catamarca and La Rioja and in the National Territories of Misiones, Formosa and the Chaco are eminently suited for cotton cultivation. It will be observed that Argentina alone is almost always here referred to in connection with these secondary (as they still are) products of the River Plate countries. The reason for this is that, while many parts of Uruguay are equally well suited for their growth, the latter Republic is, owing to her later continuance of civil disturbance, in a less advanced condition than Argentina in regard to extensive development of the great primary industries of cereal cultivation and stock breeding. Tentative and apparently successful cultivation of better classes of tobacco has already been commenced in the Province of Buenos Aires and official drying sheds have been erected in each of the Provinces of Tucumán, Salta and Corrientes and the National Territory of Misiones. These facilities should greatly stimulate the increase of production and improvement of quality of the leaf in those, the most climatically appropriate, districts. Even if they should not confer on the growers the “moral and intellectual” benefits explicitly expected from them by the aforementioned translator.