(^324) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
that the pastoral, seminomadic camps of the pampas needed much
manpower, or womanpower for that matter. (The authorities in Buenos
Aires would now and then round up prostitutes and exile them to the
largely male provinces by way of killing several birds with one stone.)
But the tough work of transport found few volunteers. The Indians, as
in the United States, would not work for wages, and Indian corvee
labor was abolished, at least in principle, in 1813. The slave trade was
also banned, and while slaves already there remained in servitude, their
children were born free; further, any slaves imported from abroad be
came free on entry.^23
The answer had to be immigration, but here, too, yesterday weighed
on today. Spanish rules of exclusion had discouraged entry; and even
after independence, immigration was dampened by political instability,
selective recruitment, and the lack of free land. This last was one of the
worst legacies of the colonial regime: vast domains had been given
away, assigned to the Church and to men of respect and power, and the
leftovers were grabbed up during the troubles that followed the revo
lution. Further territorial gains, we saw, were followed by similar dis
tributions. Thus the 1879 campaign against the Indians (what the
Argentines grandly described as la conquista del desierto, the conquest
of the wilderness) was preceded and financed by land sales, some 8.5
million hectares going to 381 persons. The buyers needed all the land
they could get, for as one moved southward, the climate became arid,
the soil barren. Patagonia could support perhaps a tenth as many sheep
per area as the province of Buenos Aires.
Not until the last third of the century did the flow of immigrants
pick up—about a quarter of them from Spain, the traditional source,
but now half from Italy, where population growth had outstripped
employment, especially in the countryside, north and south. Few new
comers came from northern or eastern Europe, and of these, many
subsequentiy left for the United States. Argentina was Mediterranean
territory.
For many decades, these migrants fitted uncomfortably into this
proudly backward society, full of illusions and prejudices, singularly
unwelcoming. Most of them stayed in Buenos Aires, with its semicos-
mopolitan culture. Sensitive contemporaries despaired: "The conver
sion most urgently needed in this country is not that of gold for paper
or paper for gold but that of the inhabitants of this land, born in Eu
rope, into human beings with all the rights inherent in members of a
civilized society: the conversion of foreign subjects into citizens."^24
nora
(Nora)
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