286 ANNUAL REPORT OF TUB Off. Doc. 



tlie schemers had ever^'thing legally in their own favor. The farmers 

 had no disinterested evidence that they were to be exempt from taxes, 

 that their sons were not to be conscripted into the army nor their 

 danghters employed as household servants, or that the annual pay- 

 ments made by them were purchase installments and not rent. On 

 the other hand, the schemers had an array of documents signed by 

 the larmers themselves showing that everything done was done in 

 accordance with the agreements made by the farmers over their own 

 signatures. Appeals to the courts and consuls were therefore fruit- 

 less. Despoiled of numbers of their children, and robbed of the toil 

 of several years, the colonists were forced to remain practically as 

 serfs on the land they had developed, for there was almost no oppor- 

 Tunity to secure w^ork elsewhere, and there was nothing they could 

 convert into money with which to flee from the region and country 

 which had treated them so foully. Eventually some drifted off to 

 other parts of the country, and a very few succeeded in getting away 

 to other lands, but most of those who survived the calamitous end- 

 ing of their aspirations are to-day dragging out a miserable exis- 

 tence under conditions far worse than those of the gentry-ridden 

 lands of their nativity. 



It is only fair to say that during more recent years conditions in 

 most South American countries have improved to such a degree 

 that there are very few in which such brazen plundering schemes 

 as that outlined are likely to be tolerated now or in the future. 

 Many parts of the continent have come to recognize the desirability 

 of standing higher in the world's public opinion than they stood 

 in the past, an opinion which demands that foreigners of all classes 

 be given a "square deal" in any and every country. The Pampas 

 is in the forefront of this change towards immigrants, because this 

 region has the most extensive commercial relations of all South 

 America with lands across the ocean, and Pampas land owners are 

 beginning to see the great material advantages which they are likely 

 to derive from the development of their country through the invest- 

 ment of foreign capital in industrial pursuits. 



All through the centuries since its discovery, explorers and col- 

 onists have been taking domesticated plants and animals in small 

 numbers to South America. Until very recently the new environ- 

 ment, in most cases, was so different from the old that plants and 

 animals generally were unfavorably afTected by the change, selec- 

 tions having been made without regard to the peculiarities of the 

 regions to which they were transplanted. Thus, Old World varie- 

 ties and breeds were commonly disappointing, leading gradually to 

 the belief that the soil and climate of South America are unsuited 

 to very many of the plants and animals of the north temperate 

 zone, the plants and animals of greatest economic importance to 

 the world. 



For instance, wheat was tried in many parts of the continent, 

 always proving a failure for milling purposes until suitable seed 

 was "accidentally discovered" a few years ago. Corn, although 

 grown in small plots by the Indians for centuries, after almost in- 

 numerable attempts at field production in widely separated dis- 

 tricts, came to be looked upon as an impossible commercial crop. 

 Alfalfa, clover, timothy, blue grass, and other well known pasture 

 and meadow plants, seemed unable to get a hold on farm land. The 



