In any other country, if you had a warm-blooded young scion of a sunny land who had grown up under the almost constantly approving smiles of an indulgent father and mother, possessed of great wealth and traditions of spending freely on amusement and outward display and, lastly, a native police which would almost as soon dare to rebel openly against the Government as to lock up for anything short of serious and unconcealable crime any son of a great ruling family, it appears to me more than possible that you would have much more trouble with such a gilded youth, who, moreover, would probably succumb to early physical and financial ruin instead of developing, as has been said, into a grave and reverend señor, capable in either Chamber of Congress or in a ministerial or diplomatic capacity, as the Argentine _fils de famille_ eventually does. That he does so develop and does not succumb, I attribute to his underlying quality of common sense, coupled with his mainly open-air upbringing in the _Camp_. Also, the young Argentine may be and often is, exceedingly fond of sowing a vast quantity of wild oats, but he is very seldom ill-natured or fundamentally bad. His very vices are strongly tempered with redeemingly generous qualities. As good a comparison as any I can hit on between the upper-class Argentine and his Uruguayan cousin is that of the smart Londoner and the resident in a provincial Cathedral town. The latter is less given to display of such wealth as he may have and much less likely to make any pretence of greater. The Uruguayan is usually unpretentious in his way of living and at the same time gives an impression of greater solidity if more modest dimensions of fortune. Among both there is the same aristocratic assuredness of social position; but whereas each better-class Argentine seeks to outvie his immediate associates in luxurious outward appearance, the Uruguayan is content with a more solid if less showy all-round level of comfort. If one may use so discredited a term, the Uruguayan is the much more “eminently respectable” of the two, a man who derives his greatest pride from the fact that his word always has been and is every bit as good as his bond. He has some contempt for Argentine showiness; while on the other side of the River Plate estuary he himself is considered as too slow-going to be very interesting. The Argentine is certainly jealous of the sounder general credit enjoyed by Uruguay, a jealousy not soothed by a certain quiet assumption of superiority of a nation which has always turned a deaf ear to any suggestions of convenient financial juggling, however critical or difficult the times. There can be no doubt but that while the Uruguayan is possessed of common sense in much the same degree as is the Argentine, this quality is in the former tempered by a large quantum of Quixotic obstinacy.