EFFECTS OF COMPETITION 227 



have helped to mask the inferiority of the new land 

 to the better land in the east. 1 



The rise in the value of land and the advance of 

 colonization led, at each of those crises of develop- 

 ment which characterize the recent history of Argentina, 

 to a multiplication of railway concessions granted by 

 the national Government and the various provincial 

 authorities. These have to be bought up by the 

 leading companies, as each of them wanted to keep 

 exclusive control of the region in which it had estab- 

 lished itself. This concentration could not be accom- 

 plished in a perfectly methodical way, and the various 

 systems now overlap, which is not to the interest 

 of the companies. Thus Villa Maria, on the Central 

 Argentine line from Rosario to Cordoba, is also served 

 by a line belonging to the Santa Fe railways and by 

 a line of the Pacific Company which puts it in com- 

 munication with Buenos Aires. On the other hand, 

 the Central Argentine penetrates to the very heart of 

 the area of the Pacific at Junin. 



However, competition between the various com- 

 panies has had the effect of dividing the Pampean 

 plain into three great spheres of influence. The first, 

 in the north, is that of the Central Argentine and the 

 Buenos Aires y Rosario line. In 1908 the Argentine 

 Government officially sanctioned the fusion of the two 

 companies, though it had really been accomplished 

 a few years before. The second sphere, in the south, is 

 that of the Pacific, the attraction of which was the line 

 from Buenos Aires to Villa Mercedes, and which in 

 1907 bought the line from Villa Mercedes to Mendoza 

 and the Trans-Andean, a natural continuation of its 

 system. Moreover, in 1904 the Pacific absorbed the 

 line from Bahia Blanca to the north-west, which has 

 been linked up once more with its original system at 



1 J. Lopez Mafian, El actual problema agrario (Buenos Aires, 1912, 

 Ministerio de agricultura, Direccion General de agricultura y defensa 

 agricola). 



