But the cow-boy utility of the gaucho waned with the advent of scientific farming. He had no taste nor aptitude for such new-fangled ideas; and now his sons are mostly to be found in the army, the police, or that very useful body of firemen and soldiers too, the corps of “Bomberos,” men who can be relied on at any moment to quell a fire or a riot in their own very effective way. They fear neither flames nor turbulent strikers, and are only too ready, in the case of the latter, to shoot first and listen to orders afterwards. Another body of men drawn almost exclusively from gaucho sources is the “Squadron of Security”; a mounted corps of steel-cuirassed and helmeted semi-military police, also used to clear the streets of political or other disturbances. Three trumpet blasts sounded in quick succession are the signal for a charge in lines extending, for instance, over the whole breadth of the Avenida de Mayo. Such is the law and everyone, as in England, is presumed to know it. If he do not, and therefore fail to take prompt refuge down a side street or in a shop, so much the worse for him. The Avenida will be cleared even if he be taken to the Asistencia Publica as a consequence of the process, without any valid claim for damages. He heard the “Clarion” and is assumed to have contumaciously disregarded its warning. It might be thought that the vegetative increase of such a hardy nucleus of native population would suffice for the Labour needs of the country. There are, however, many reasons for the fact that it does not. The chief of these is the general refractoriness of the Indian to the process of education on the lines of the white races. You cannot by any means make a white man out of an Indian any more than you can of a Negro. And the gaucho has usually more Indian (and Negro, from the slave days) blood in him than he has white. Unrivalled in the days when vast hordes of semi-savage cattle needed rounding up and cutting out with his lazo and _boleadora_, the gaucho has not always the patience nor the regard for detail needed for the care of prize Durhams, Polled Angus or Herefords; nor is he at his best with modern agricultural machinery. Neither does his character lend itself to the dull discipline expected and necessary on a farm to-day. He can no longer with impunity stay the extra day or two at the canteen to which his savings entitle him; and on the farm he finds himself confined to the more subservient work. Against all this his native pride rebels, and he gradually drifts into the army or the police, where he is gradually being exterminated by the disintegrating effects of idleness and lack of the hard physical exercise which kept his ancestors in health. A greedy meat-eater, he succumbs as often to stomach as to lung trouble.