SEVENTEENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART II 103 



While Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo are good cities, they are not, 

 in the same ranlv in importance with Buenos Aires. Sao Paulo is a great 

 city an|^ is spoken of as tlie coffee market of the world. And it is more 

 than likely that w^e will always be dependent upon those people for 

 our coffee. We are dependent upon the Argentine Republic for aoout 

 all our wool now. They have something over $50,000,000 a year output, 

 and on the basis of present prices it would be w'orth about $70,000,000 

 a year. That wool goes almost entirely to the United States and to 

 Great Britain where it is manufactured and then goes back into that 

 country in its fabricated form, for they are dependent almost entirely 

 upon this country, Great Britain and other European countries for 

 their manufactured supplies. Most of their agricultural machinery 

 comes from the United States, most all their cement is imported from 

 this country and Europe, and Buenos Aires is the great mercantile 

 center and residence city in the country. People who own these great 

 ranches do not live on them, they live in the city, and the same condi- 

 tion also prevails in Brazil with reference to Sao Paulo and Rio de 

 Janeiro. There are a great many old mansions similar to the plantation 

 mansions we had in the early days in the south, and these old mansions 

 still exist, but they are used now as grain houses — storage houses, and 

 the people congregate in the cities as they do here. The reason Is 

 that the lands are generally in the hands of the wealthy people. They 

 are held in large acreages and the work of conducting these large 

 holdings is in the hands of natives who operate them on a salary or 

 percentage basis, while the managers are in touch with them just enough 

 to see that they are getting satisfactory results. 



Buenos Aires is a city that compares very favorably with the best 

 cities in the United States, is modern in its convenience and improve- 

 ments, and it has also a fine municipal theatre building costing over 

 a million dollars. It has as fine a system of public school buildings as 

 I have seen in any city anywhere; it has streets and parks and other 

 improvements, and an underground railway that is said to be, and 

 undoubtedly is, finer than the subway in New York. It covers a large 

 area and that is probably the reason they put in the subway — it covers 

 so much territory that transportation is quite a problem. They pride 

 themselves on the civic improvements and the modern methods of city 

 development. It is a city that compares very favorably with Paris 

 and other of the European cities, more because of its characteristics 

 than any that we have. 



The question that should naturally concern us is what future lies in 

 that country. A good many of our people are going down there. The 

 banking interests in New Yoi'k and other eastern cities have expanded 

 in that direction and American capital is going in there much more 

 rapidly during recent years than formerly. I met a young man last night 

 who expects to leave in January to establish the first cement plant in 

 that country, for they have been importing Iowa cement heretofore. They 

 have all of the raw material and this will be the first American plant 

 going in there. American capital is going into their railroad enterprises 



