The need of this is now fully realized in both countries, but, strange
to say, it is in Uruguay where there are no fiscal lands that proposals
for probably useful legislation to this end have attained the greater
maturity. It is there proposed, in effect, that the Government should
purchase, at least portions of, the present holdings of the large
landowners and colonize the land so purchased on systems similar to that
obtaining in, for instance, Canada.
Argentina still has large tracts of fiscal land, but no doubt her
large landowners will also aid towards the colonization by granting to
colonists greater fixity of tenure and greater facilities for mixed
farming than the latter have been hitherto able to obtain.
With regard to Belgian emigration to the River Plate, the fact which
cannot be lost sight of is that the Belgian, especially the Fleming, is
a person deeply attached to his own land and his own ways of living.
It seems certain that if Belgians of the agricultural class are to be
colonized in South America, such colonization will have to be effected
by means of settlements like those of the Welsh colony in Chubut and the
Swiss colony in Colonia.
A Flemish family would view with vehement disgust the ramshackle home
of an Argentine or Uruguayan CHACRERO (small farmer); a disgust which,
communicated to their friends in Europe, would effectually stop further
Belgian immigration.
The Belgian is a good worker, but he is much more “insular” than the
British in his scorn of ways of living which differ from his own. He is
not adaptable enough, in any way, to be put to live or work among the
composite Spanish-Italian-American rural classes of the River Plate.
Probably both Argentine and Uruguayan will continue to work out his own
salvation in this vital matter of attracting agricultural colonists to
his land. Already the spirit of democratic unrest menaces privilege in
Argentina, privilege which has already been destroyed in Uruguay. And the
greatest political danger which now seems to threaten Argentina and has
for some time past been the bane of Uruguay is doctrinairism; a tendency
to pursue to most unpractically illogical consequences theories which
seem to their initiators and supporters to be destined to cure all the
social and economic ills to which man is prone.
State socialism from high places in Uruguay and socialism of all kinds
and varieties from lower social spheres in Argentina are each set on the
adoption of its own empiric policy.
Like all young things, these Republics must pick themselves up again when
they fall (and, in truth, they display great capability for doing so),
but it would be well if, just at the present moment, they were to adopt
and fully carry out some provedly sound colonizing policy. Afterwards
they might experiment with single-tax, rural Banks, state ownership of
land and all upon and within it, as much as they might find themselves
able to afford to do.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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