The Republic lives by its exports of meat and agricultural produce. Ninety-five per cent. of this trade is carried to the ports by the railways. From the railroad cars one beholds productiveness; yet fifteen or twenty miles away lies land just as productive but as yet untouched by the plough, because there is neither sufficient population to cultivate nor railways to carry. Within the next dozen years there must inevitably be a further spurt in the making of feeding or auxiliary lines. Something like £20,000,000 a year is crossing the ocean for fresh railway enterprises in Argentina. Nearly 40,000,000 tons of goods are carried over the lines each year, and the receipts are something like £25,000,000 annually. And yet but a fragment of the harvest of this new land is being garnered. Its untrodden millions of acres await new railways to open up the country. CHAPTER V SETTLEMENT ON THE LAND Prolific though Argentina is, and though its agricultural wealth has only been scratched, it cannot be described as an ideal country for the poor immigrant. The eyes of the land have been well picked, and there are rich personal estates covering one hundred and fifty square miles. There is little disposition to voluntary splitting up of estates, but rather to hold whilst annually the value increases with the coming of people and the advancement of railways. The Government is doing something to assist the small man with limited capital to settle on distant Government lands. But the poor immigrant, with nothing but his muscle and his industry, has a long and rough road to travel before he reaches independence as a landed proprietor. It is a hard land in which to start making a fortune; but the man of money who can step into the Republic, say, with £25,000 to play with, and who invests judiciously, can double his capital in three years. Whilst the old Argentines, those of Spanish descent, have waxed wealthy simply by sitting still and letting the foreigner develop their property, there are British Argentine families whose estates, if realised, would produce double-figured millions, and whose proprietors landed as labourers less than fifty years ago. Money has come to lots of these people, shrewd and lucky, as though they held the key to a cave of jewels. Some have remained modest in spite of possessions; others look upon gold as the only god, and their blatant display at Mar del Plata, and on the steamers of the Royal Mail Company, is something which would make the conduct of the new rich of Chicago Quakerish by comparison.