284 ANNUAL RErOllT OF THE Off. Doc. 



becoming great land owners and slock raisers. They bought land 

 at a fraction of a cent an acre, a few score cattle were purchased 

 for hardly more dollars than there were animals, the necessary 

 horses were procured for the proverbial song, and the road to wealth 

 lay before them — if all went well. They shrewdly managed to make 

 friends of the few people, especially the government officials, in the 

 wilds about them, thus escaping much of the open plundering gen- 

 (;rally meeted out to foreigners living as they did. 



From a lifteen-by-lifteen hut their dwelling gradually grew into 

 a cheerless, uncouth, rambling, low structure of half a dozen scantily 

 furnished rooms; children were born to them; livestock multiplied; 

 and their acres broadened. Here we have practically the sum of 

 their existence; not a friend nor an influence to help lift them above 

 the loAvest plane of a white man's life. They have an abundance of 

 lands and stock ; they have gluttonously fed bodies; they have dwarfed 

 intellects; and they are destitute of all the tiner things of modern, 

 civilized life. T leave you to say how desirable is such success. 



Down on the Pampas, not far from the fair city of Buenos Ayres, 

 in much the best district of all South America for the farmer of any 

 degree of refinement, is a family which was established there almost 

 a hundred years ago. The first of this Argentine line was also from 

 The north of Europe. Without money, he began to work his way 

 upwards by herding sheep "on shares." He "knew sheep," he was 

 ambitious, and he believed the Pampas was destined to have a bright, 

 if not a brilliant, future. Every dollar earned was put into sheep 

 at first, then cattle, which were for some years grazed on the public 

 lands without any payment for rent. Later on, with the accumula- 

 tion of tens of thousands of head of stock, land was bought in large 

 tracts at only a few dollars per hundred acres, until a property in ex- 

 cess of two million acres was in hand. In the meantime a Avife 

 had been brought out from the home land, a comfortable dwelling 

 was erected, teachers were employed at home for the children, inter- 

 course was nmintained with congenial friends, and a touch, although 

 rather loose, was kept on the progress of the world through books 

 and periodicals. Occasional visits were made to Europe, and when 

 the b(jys were ready to go to college they were sent to the best in- 

 stitutions in the Old World. They in turn made provision for their 

 children to advance a little farther on the road of progress than 

 ihey themselves had gone, so that to-day, the families of this line, 

 although not in the inner circle of the aristocracy of the country, 

 are persons of intelligence as well as of means. Their notions of 

 life show the taint of the people among whom they dwell, yet they 

 are very much superior intellectually and morally to the family re- 

 ferred to above. 



But for every instance of success on the part of foreign farmers, 

 there are scores, aye, hundreds, of instances of heartbreaking failure, 

 failure not due to any lack of etforl or spirit on the part of the im- 

 migrants, but to the tricking of the "natives" about them. It Avould 

 be possible to tell you the pathetic stories of hundreds of individuals, 

 and even of numerous colonies numbering dozens of families each, 

 who Avere lured into one country or another in South America in 

 the not very distant past under promises of special government aid, 

 and wnth apparently golden prospects, only to discover eventually 

 that they were the" "game" of men scarcely less diabolical than 



