The docks of Buenos Aires, like those of our great lake city, are most impressive; they represent an outlay of $50,000,000. Only fifteen years ago the visitor was bundled ashore in a rowboat and deposited on a marshy beach. Now his vessel enters one of the numerous basins of the vast dock system and confronts row upon row of massive masonry and cement wharves, behind which spreads a network of railway lines. In the background are public gardens with flowering bushes and statuary to beautify the approach to the city. For mile after mile, flanked by a seemingly endless procession of great trans-Atlantic ships and up-river produce boats, these docks stretch their length, not in a series of slips, as along the congested waterfront in New York, but so arranged that the vessels can moor broadside to them and have their cargoes loaded or unloaded by enormous traveling cranes; and, without, lying at anchor in the river awaiting their turn for a berth, are many more—for this giant enterprise, with towering grain elevators and a veritable forest of powerful cranes, already fails entirely to satisfy present needs. They are not only to be extended but so enlarged that they will accommodate vessels of the heaviest draft. Not even the New York wharves with their vast commerce give such a picture of vivid bustle. The big German “Cap” boats—_Cap Ortegal_, _Cap Frio_, and the rest; French, Spanish, and Italian liners with champagne, aperitives, opera companies, automobiles and immigrants—always immigrants; Newcastle freighters unloading bolted sections of steel bridges; up-river boats laden with _yerba maté_ or fragrant oranges from Paraguay, and the aristocrats of these seas, the Royal Mails from England—all contribute to the pell-mell, reminding one of the blurred babel of tongues that whispers across the decks of the world’s ships in the drowsy passage through the Suez Canal. And, parenthetically, a most telling commentary on our indifference to Argentine possibilities lies in the fact that of the many thousand vessels that transferred cargoes at these docks in 1910, only four bore the stars and stripes; whereas, prior to our Civil War (which, of course, absorbed our merchant marine)—in 1852—there were in the harbor of Buenos Aires six hundred vessels flying our flag, or more than double the number from all other nations combined. In those days the influence of our people over the commerce of the southern half of South America was predominant. A Pennsylvanian, William Wheelright, was looked upon as its father.