Everyone born on Argentine or Uruguayan soil is Argentine or Uruguayan of his own very decided will as well as legally; furiously so with the exclusive fervour of the convert. He cannot or will not speak English, French, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish or Flemish as the case may be; nothing but Spanish, River Plate Spanish, that is to say, is worthy of his tongue, and he has a truly Galician contempt for the lisping Spanish of Castile. Contrarily to a generally accepted but quite superficial view, an Uruguayan differs from an Argentine almost if not quite as much as a Portuguese does from a Spaniard; the reason being that the early immigration to the two countries was drawn from different parts of Spain. The first settlement of what is now Uruguay was chiefly drawn from the Canary Islands and the Basque Provinces; the latter origin being easily perceptible from a glance at any list of the names of prominent Uruguayans, past or present. To this fact of early settlement and because Uruguay has, until quite recently, offered much less attraction to the stream of European Emigration which flowed past Montevideo to Buenos Aires, is due the possession of the high degree of many sterling qualities which distinguishes Uruguayans from their cousins of the other shore of the River Plate. These qualities have sustained the National and individual financial credit of Uruguay throughout all troubles and political vicissitudes. She as a Nation and her individual traders have always paid 100 cents gold to each dollar and her commercial community has successfully negatived any attempt on the part of her Governments to depart from the strictly gold basis of her monetary system. The Uruguayan dollar is worth slightly more than that of the United States. This significant fact is due to the uncontaminated preservation of racial qualities derived through the old Colonists from the Northern parts of Spain; especially from the Basques, than whom no honester, nor perhaps more obstinate, people exist. LANGUAGE Everyone knows that Spanish is the language of the River Plate Republics; but, while the written Spanish of South America is one with literary Spanish all the world over, the spoken language of Argentina and Uruguay differs from Castilian in many respects. The first of these, and probably the most interesting, is the survival in South America of words in common use in the days of the early _conquistadores_ and colonists but which have long ago fallen into disuse in Spain. These words gave a deal of trouble a few years ago to certain Argentine amateur philologists who made more or less ingenious endeavours to derive them from the aboriginal Quichúa or Guaraní.