Taking even a more elevated standpoint, we may add that in order to amalgamate all the elements of immigration and to attach them to the country, through good and evil fortune, we need another solvent than personal interest or profit. To create a people it may suffice to give it a body, but to make it live it must also be given a soul, at whose breath the collectivity of individuals will be transformed into that moral unity which we call the nation. This is a question of prime importance in a country such as the Argentine, where the struggle for existence has taken a particularly keen form, which scarcely favours the development of disinterested sentiments. It is for the State to develop among its people this national idea, and to turn all individual efforts to its profit. Its duty is to raise its authority above the medley of interest, to restrain ambition within a just limit by the influence of moral and patriotic ideas, and so to ensure the reign of justice and social peace, without which national prosperity will never be more than ephemeral. In imagining, from this aspect, the formation of a nationality, we have no intention of criticising the country; still less do we deny the process of evolution which has gradually transformed its organisation. A nation is not created in a day, especially when it is a question of a country so young as the Argentine, which in less than a century has issued from the struggle for independence, and even to-day has hardly rid itself of the revolutionary spirit. For a nation to become self-conscious, centuries must pass; traditions must be formed, and the great moral or intellectual forces of humanity——religion, science, literature, even poetry——must develop the sense of a collective life other than the life of business. And hitherto the Argentine has had no time to produce generations of thinkers, philosophers, and historians; still less poets. The most it has are statisticians, who give it the precise figures of her commercial balance. We do not doubt, however, that, thanks to material progress, this slow elaboration of a new race will eventually be completed. In the first phase of her existence as a nation Argentina, according to the spirit of her Constitution, fraternally opened her doors to all who wished to inhabit her soil. No restriction was placed upon the entry nor on the permanent immigration of foreigners; on the contrary, legislation and social customs combined to favour immigration. The result is, that the new arrivals have regarded themselves as alien, in matters of economics and politics, to the nationality with which they have become incorporated; believing that their mission consisted solely in creating and circulating wealth, while regarding the solution of the great national problems with indifference.