In a scheme of agriculture that was to take no heed of the
permanent thrift of the land and the man who tilled it we
have failed; as we deserved to fail, most miserably. We have
built upon this most uncertain apex as a base, an inverted
pyramid by which ocean and land carriers, merchants, brokers,
speculators, and every branch of parasite commerce were to
wax lustily. We may devise as we will rural credits, schools
of agriculture, prophets of agrarian science, bellowing from
the tail-end of peripatetic railway coaches, grants of seed,
warrants, elevators, labour-saving machinery, and every other
panacea to nurse the sick field labourer. Until we give him
fixity of tenure he will continue to be a sick man. There has
been no other solution to agricultural problems of the past.
There can be no other solution. Our present rural population,
concentrated on less than the present area they are engaged in
cultivating, with continuity of usufruct or compensation for
improvements secured to them, would produce a larger cereal
harvest than they now do, and add to the wealth of our animal
produce, and still more to the accumulation of our national
thrift.
In Uruguay progress is still possible to the existing population; since
the consequences of the civil disturbances which until recently paralysed
the production of this country, by the constant commandeering of men,
horses and supplies by one or other of the combatant parties, have not
yet been overcome by the existing settlers who, therefore, still have
work ready to their hands. Nevertheless, for Uruguay also it is a case
of the more the merrier; more available labour, more rapidly increased
agricultural output. Once means are found for an appreciable and constant
increase of the population of these countries, immediate results of such
increase may be expected not only from their production of Cereals,
Live Stock and the “Secondary” products already enumerated, but also
from coffee, chicory, tea, arrowroot, sugar-beet, sweet sorghum, hops,
cinnamon, vanilla and very many others, for the cultivation of all of
which favourable conditions are to be found in one or other of the
various climates found between the many degrees of latitude traversed by
the length of Argentina and the various altitudes between the Argentine
Andine frontier line and the sea.
At the same time much could be done for their own comfort and prosperity
by farmers, in the ample time which their chief occupations necessarily
leave them, by the cultivation of some of these secondary products for
their and their neighbours’ use. At present their almost unaccountable
neglect to do so justifies an _obiter dictum_ of the great Argentine
statistician, Dr. Francisco Latzina, in a Monograph by him attached to
the last Argentine agricultural Census.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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