324 A BOOK-LOVER S HOLIDAYS 



teresting to a man accustomed to the absolute 

 and unconscious democracy of the Western cow 

 camps and hunting trails. One vital fact im 

 pressed me in connection with them as in con 

 nection with my Spanish-speaking and Portu 

 guese-speaking friends in South America. They 

 were always fathers of big families as well as 

 sons of parents with big families; the big family 

 was normal to their kind, just as it was normal 

 among the men and women I met in Brazil, 

 Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay, to a 

 degree far surpassing what is true of native 

 Americans, Australians, and English-speaking 

 Canadians. If the tendencies thus made evi 

 dent continue to work unchanged, the end of 

 the twentieth century will witness a reversal 

 in the present positions of relative dominance, 

 in the new and newest worlds, held respectively 

 by the people who speak English, and the 

 people who speak the three Latin tongues. 

 Darwin, in the account of his famous voyage, 

 in speaking of the backwardness of the coun 

 tries bordering the Plate River, dwells on the 

 way they lag behind, in population and material 

 development, compared to the English settlers 

 in Australia and North America. Were he 

 alive now, the development of the countries 

 around Buenos Ayres and Montevideo would 



