Basques or Italians have already transformed the Argentine. They arrive as artisans, or labourers, or clerks and traders; they form agricultural colonies and become landowners. They soon break their fetters; their sons become merchants, financial agents, or wealthy plutocrats. Of 1,000 inhabitants there are 128 Italians and only 99 Argentines who own land. These Latins are prolific; in 1904 1,000 Argentine women gave life to 80 infants; 1,000 Spanish women to 123, and 1,000 Italian women to 175.[3] These immigrants thus increase the national wealth and people the desert.[4] Moreover, their descendants figure in politics and letters. Let us mention only a few Argentine names remarkable on one count or another: Groussac, Magnasco, Becher, Bunge, Ingegnieros, Chiappori, Banchs, and Gerchunoff. [1] The _Indianista_ Society in Mexico and the _Pro Indigena_ in Peru were founded for the protection and rehabilitation of the Indians. [2] The Bolivian sociologist, A. Argüedas, writes of the Aymara Indians: "They are hard, rancorous, egotistic, and cruel. The Indian herdsmen have no ambition other than to increase the number of the heads of cattle which they pasture." [3] V. Gonnard, _L'Emigration européenne au XIXe siècle_, Paris, 1906, p. 220 _et seq_. [4] To understand the significance of immigration, it is enough to remark that there are in Mexico 7 inhabitants per square kilometre, in Brazil 1.7, in the Argentine 1.6, while there are 72 in France, 105 in Germany, no in Italy, 120 in England, and 248 in Belgium. {365} CHAPTER III THE POLITICAL PROBLEM The _caudillos_: their action--Revolutions--Divorce between written Constitutions and political life--The future parties--The bureaucracy. The development of the Ibero-American democracies differs considerably from the admirable spirit of their political charters. The latter include all the principles of government applied by the great European nations: the equilibrium of powers, natural rights, a liberal suffrage, and representative assemblies, but the reality contradicts the idealism of the statutes imported from Europe. The traditions of the prevailing race, in fact, have created simple and barbarous systems of government. The _caudillo_ is the pivot of this political system: leader of a party, of a social group, or a family whose important relations make it powerful, he enforces his tyrannical will upon the multitude. In him resides the power of government and the law. On his permanent action depends the internal order of the State, its economic development, and the national organisation. His authority is inviolable, superior to the Constitution and its laws.