For a glance at some small ways that are dark and tricks that are vain, before these are entirely swept away, as they now are being, before the healthy wind of moral improvement (healthy even though, as some cynics assert, it has been raised only by perception of the fact that in the long run, honesty is the best policy) one must go to distant parts of Argentina and there grope amid the intricacies of Provincial and Municipal Administration. There, undoubtedly, we may come across semi-obscure corners from which a highly respectable chartered accountant would fly horror-stricken. But we should also recognize that the whole small fabric of intrigue and petty robbery is a Punchinello’s secret; well known to and sympathetically approved by the whole surrounding populace, whose attitude to the robber is that of “Good luck to him! I should do the same if I had his chance.” Of no use to endeavour to stir up public opinion to demand the prosecution or dismissal of Authorities or Officials who are perfectly well known to have been defrauding the public for years. Not a bit of it. You would only get for an answer, “What? get rid of him now that he’s fat and get a lean one in his place who would be far worse!” Meaning that a needy man would steal more than a rich one. Local opinion would hold that that way lay madness only; and the would-be reformer would be merely regarded with pitying scorn. No. The change is coming and coming rapidly with the spirit of the age, and cannot be hastened in its inevitable course; and this change will be thorough, for it will only encounter the ineffectual opposition of a quite infantile dishonesty which has never seriously tried to keep secret the practices which its vanity considered as so much evidence of its own admirable cleverness. Do you think the milk-can inspector did not delight in telling that he had never seen a standard measure? Of course he did; and a Municipal Intendente of a small country town gets just as much pleasure from the knowledge that, while ten men appear on his Municipality’s monthly wage-sheets as road-menders, there are in fact only two and the remaining eight receipts are signed, for a consideration, per signature, by independent persons. A proceeding which, of course, is perfectly well known to and indeed accepted as immemorial custom by the general public. In these cases no one ever gets caught; because those chiefly concerned have always a pull in Provincial politics—otherwise they would never have found themselves occupying the positions they are in. But, as the reader can see, all these are childish things; already vanishing and soon to be completely put away by the general and swift advance, moral as well as material, of the Republic. CHAPTER VI MONTEVIDEO AND BUENOS AIRES