And could we explain the fact that certain countries of South America, which also, thanks to their natural wealth, have all the elements of rapid development, have remained stationary, and hardly count as nations, if the question of race did not throw light on the mystery, showing us that with the most favourable factors of the soil, a ferment is essential to start the growth of the seed? Concerning the Argentine, this then is the problem which we have to consider, if we wish to see further than the present moment, and to judge in what measure its progress may be consolidated and even accelerated. In other terms, we must understand whether the Argentine must depend upon a fortuitous grouping of individuals brought together by the various streams of immigration, and having no common tie but the desire to enrich themselves, or whether these various elements are destined to become fused, and in time to form a true nationality, with its own traditions, its own ideal. This latter is naturally the end to be pursued by the Argentine Government, if it wishes to prepare for the future by making moral and material progress go hand in hand. Its _role_ is not to manage the country like a directing syndicate, but to direct all individual efforts, all initiative, and all other available forces, to the same national and patriotic end. It was this idea that a President of the Republic, Señor Quintana, felt it his duty to enunciate, when, upon assuming the Presidential authority, he stated, in his inaugural message: “I am the head of a nation which has in America an ideal”; and he added: “There is one common characteristic among us that was discovered as early as the colonial period, in the magnitude of plans of campaign, in the clamour of intestine conflict, in the government of the constitutional period; it is, that we all bear in our hearts the sense of our future greatness.” How far can these aspirations be translated into facts? That is a question we must examine seriously and with an absolutely unbiassed judgment. We cannot study this question of the Argentine nationality in books; for a country which has been so rapidly carried away on the tide of material progress has but little time to examine itself. Neither has it been able to form a literature or a sociology which might reflect the dominant characteristics of the generation; it is only by an inquiry and an analysis of the facts that we can isolate this element of nationality from the various foreign elements which have contributed to its formation.