Commercial activity, the development of communication by sea, the fertility of the soil, the climate——all contributed from the early days of emancipation to attract European immigration. This immigration, like that which peopled the America of the north, was composed of families who came to settle, to form new homes, to labour. These families, following the example of their predecessors in the United States and for the same causes, did not mingle with the native tribes, but struggled against them, and forced them to abandon their lands and fly to the south, until at last, after a long and cruel struggle, they almost completely disappeared. This immigration increased year by year, and to-day the great majority of the population of the Argentine Republic——a population now exceeding 5 millions——is of European origin. That this immigration, which flows from all the nations of Europe, has been the chief agent of the present prosperity of the Argentine, and is the condition of its future greatness, is an incontestable fact. One of our leading statesmen has declared, of America, that “to govern is to people”; and this aphorism has remained a fundamental principle of government. To recognise the full force of this assertion, we must reflect that these unusually fertile prairies, situated in a privileged climate, near the sea-coast or on the banks of enormous rivers, navigable even by transatlantic steamers, need nothing but human labour to transform them, with less effort and at less expense than anywhere else in the world, into immense fields of wheat or maize, or pastures of lucerne, covered with herds, able to produce bread and meat enough to feed all Europe. Accordingly the agricultural production of the Argentine Republic is limited only by the number of hands which lend themselves to its exploitation; in which we have a repetition of the very phenomenon which has served as the foundation of the development of the United States. Under these conditions the progress of the Argentine Republic is a necessary and inevitable fact, which extraordinary circumstances might for a time retard, but which nothing could finally arrest; except, indeed, one could restrain the daily exodus of fresh swarms from the human hive, which abandon the old soils, exhausted by production, to seek out the fertile, virgin, and unpeopled areas of the globe. Hitherto this exodus has been directed principally to the United States; attracted thither by a host of special and favouring circumstances. But the time is rapidly approaching when North America in turn will find herself populated to the saturation point, and will no longer be able to receive the hosts which benefited her formerly. The laws of the United States are already beginning to impose conditions upon immigration which are constantly becoming more severe; and these laws are imposed by the two great political forces——the superior social classes and the lower classes of the people.