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housemen, and the shop-keepers. The pulperos retail wine, 

 brandy, candles, sausages, salt, bread, spices, wood, grease, brim- 

 stone, &c. Their shops are generally lounging-places for the idle and 

 dissipated of the community. In Buenos Ayres there are about 

 seven hundred of them, each more or less in the interest of some 

 richer individual. The warehousemen sell earthen and glass ware, 

 drugs, various articles of consumption, and some goods of home- 

 manufacture, wholesale and retail. The shop-keepers amount to 

 nearly six hundred in number ; they sell woollen cloths, silks, cotton 

 goods of all sorts, hats, and various other articles of wearing ap- 

 parel. Many of them make considerable fortunes, those especially 

 who trade to Lima, Peru, Chili, or Paraguay, by means of young 

 men whom they send as agents or factors. There is another descrip- 

 tion of merchants, if such they may be called, who keep in the 

 back-ground and enrich themselves by monopolizing victuals, and 

 by forestalling the grain brought to market from the interior, much 

 to the injury of the agricultural intei'est. 



The second class of inhabitants consists of the proprietors of 

 estates and houses. They are in general Creoles, for few Europeans 

 employ their funds in building, or in the purchase of land, until 

 they have realised a fortune to live upon, which commonly takes 

 place when they are far advanced in life, so that their establish- 

 ments pass immediately into the hands of their successors. The 

 simple landholders derive so little revenue from their possessions, 

 that they are generally in debt to their tradesmen ; their gains are 

 but too commonly engrossed by the monopolists, and having no 

 magistrate to represent them, they find themselves destitute of ef- 

 fectual resources against wrong and extortion. So defective and ill- 

 regulated are the concerns of agriculture in this country, that the 

 proprietor of an estate really worth 20,000 dollars can scarcely 

 subsist upon it. 



Under the class of landed proprietors I may reckon the cultiva- 

 tors, here called quinteros or chacareros, who grow wheat, maixe, 



G 



