[Footnote 111: As the _Annuaire statistique_ declares, in the course of the year 1908 no less than £8,160,000 changed hands over the sale and purchase of lottery tickets and betting on racehorses. This is an evil that may grow into a national calamity if nothing is done to arrest it; and we see with pleasure that the Government has stated its intention of presenting to Congress the draft of a law prohibiting lotteries.] This law also provided for the formation of a Conversion Fund, which was a powerful factor——_si vis pacem para bellum_——in the pacific solution of the old frontier dispute with Chili. This fund amounts to-day to £5,100,000 deposited in the Bank of the Nation, and would, without this far-sighted law, have been swallowed up in the whirlpool of administrative expenses. Lastly, the law of monetary conversion has been the salvation of agriculture and stock-raising, the two chief sources of national wealth, by preventing the too rapid change in the value of paper, which is a result that deserves to be considered with attention. The law was promulgated at a time when a large harvest was expected, and when, from that very cause, the depreciation of paper violently increased, the value falling from 278 in August 1898 to 206 in December of the same year. It is certain that at this rate the depreciation would finally have touched 150, to the greater profit of the speculators. What would have happened had the monetary situation altered so rapidly? The Argentine agriculturalist or stock-raiser, having paid all the expenses of production with gold at about 300 per cent., would have been forced, by reason of the rapid depreciation of paper, to sell his products at a price which would no longer compensate him for his increased expenditure. This would inevitably have ruined the producer——that is, the principal artisan of the national fortune. Far from opening up new lands with his ploughshare, as hitherto had always been the case, he would have abandoned the land already under cultivation. We need not describe the disaster which would have overcome the country under such conditions as these: the loss of credit both at home and abroad. The stream of immigration would have been suspended; emigration, on the contrary, would have increased, taking the form of a veritable exodus, even of a flight; and each impoverished and disillusioned emigrant, as he left the Argentine, would have proclaimed that the country was ruined. As a result the Argentine would have been for years partially depopulated, or at least deprived of the new recruits which immigration brings in, and of whom it has such need in order to realise the value of more virgin territory.