One of the first inquiries that engages the mind of the visitor to Uruguay and Argentina is why the great body of water that separates the two countries—apparently an arm of the sea—should not be called the Gulf of La Plata. After a brief stay in this region of great cities, great productiveness, and great opportunities, it will probably occur to him that dwellers among such great things could be satisfied with nothing less than an estuary of the broad Atlantic to serve as a river for their capitals. If the ParanÁ and Uruguay—mighty rivers which rank in size immediately behind the Mississippi—had joined their floods some miles above Buenos Aires, instead of flowing separately into La Plata, a stream of unquestionable status might have satisfied their demands; but the God of Waters willed otherwise, evidently not anticipating the greatness of these people and their illimitable ambition.

The exact point at which La Plata River merges with the Atlantic is also a matter of speculation among geographers. For all practical purposes, however, Montevideo, the capital, metropolis, and chief port of Uruguay, lies just beside this phenomenon. One can say, therefore, that the eastern side of the little peninsula on which the main city is built faces the ocean, while the southern and western fronts, bordering the bay of the actual port, look upon the river Plata.

Taking the night boat at Buenos Aires, one arrives in Montevideo in the early morning after a pleasant ride of just a hundred miles diagonally across the river, and is immediately impressed with the picturesqueness of El Cerro, an ancient fortress that still poses as the guardian of the entrance of the river. Much more important to-day, however, is the lighthouse that rises from this height. Entering the port the visitor comes upon a modern city of almost four hundred thousand inhabitants, possessed of all the attributes of the present-day metropolis; an adequate and up-to-date system of docks, fine business blocks, public buildings, plazas, boulevards, and broad streets laid out on the checkerboard scheme, sewer, water, and lighting systems, and extensive and well-managed electric tramway lines.

To the Buenos Airean, naturally enough, Montevideo is a second Brooklyn, for the “ferry” trip of a hundred miles is not incongruous where people think in superlatives. Here the Buenos Airean may come, after a period of consuming activity in his own more closely built city, for rest and soul expansion among the leisurely and dignified Montevideans, and, at the expense of his neighbor, even permit himself a bit of friendly chaff in which he might venture to use the word “soporific.” The Montevidean by no means resents the imputation. There is no resentment because, although a restful atmosphere does pervade the city, there is not the slightest taint of stagnation. The Montevidean is conscious that his sturdy, vigorous, and even bellicose race has built up a nation unique in South America in its promise of material prosperity; that his country is among the richest in the quality and varied productiveness of its soil of any on the continent, and that his city, housing a third of the country’s population, is the pivot of the nation’s astonishing commercial activity and one of the most healthful and delightful residence cities in the world.

Montevideo was founded in 1726, but remained a comparatively unimportant way station until some thirty years ago, when it began to imbibe the modernism of its big rivals in Brazil and Argentina. To-day it is almost as cosmopolitan as Buenos Aires, the Italian element predominating among the foreigners, with the British preËminent as investors of capital, as in the latter city. To the superb Solis Theater come all the European companies that appear in Buenos Aires; club life is best represented in the Club Uruguay and the English Club, situated on opposite sides of the Plaza Matriz; and afternoon tea has come to be an important feature of the social life, several tea houses being now distributed over the leisure sections of the city.

The pride of the Montevidean is Prado Park. He has made of it one of the fairest gardens imaginable—its lakes and rolling lawns and great variety of trees and flowering bushes, its intersecting avenues of towering eucalyptus trees rivaling Japan’s famous avenue of cryptomerias, on the road to Nikko, all give pleasure to the city’s thousands, who, like Parisians, seek the country scenes for their holiday amusements. Driving along Agraciado Road and other plane-tree-shaded avenues, the visitor reaches either of the pleasure suburbs of ColÓn or PocÍtos.

In these excursions he has an excellent opportunity to note the varied styles of architecture coming into vogue in the more progressive cities of South America; they range from the comfortable bungalow of the British residents, to that strange development of the old Spanish home (the quinta) in which the wealthy Spanish-Americans love to house themselves on the outskirts of the cities. Until recent years the Spanish house in town and country was bare and unlovely on the outside; its beauty and richness were confined to the interior surroundings of the patio; where, in feudal privacy, the family secluded itself. To-day, in the new era of civic pride and the freer association of society in the modern boulevard and cafÉ life, the adornment is extended to the outside, and the effort made, by the addition of pinnacles and towers and much delicate tinting, to add to the attractiveness of the “city beautiful.” In the business sections, of course, the modern architecture corresponds for the most part with the type seen in the great cities of Europe and North America.

In October, when the summer comes into these latitudes south of the Equator, the quintas assume a most entrancing aspect. Some of them, set in the midst of gardens many acres in extent, are veritable haunts of delight. Toll has been levied upon every resource to add to their charm. The gardens are inclosed within hedges that blaze with the color of the hedge-rose, honeysuckle, bougainvillea, wistaria, and other creeping vines. Inside, forming a background, may be seen a goodly growth of ivy-covered oaks or chestnut trees. Within, nearer the fairy-like home, and in the random of artistic disorder, are many flowering bushes and trees—lilacs mingling their scent with magnolia, orange, myrtle, and mimosa—while the lawns are carpeted with a brilliant profusion of periwinkles, pansies, marigolds, arum lilies, and carnations, the whole yielding up the delights of its ever changing fragrance as the wondering guest wanders about in company with his courtly host and hostess.

In entire harmony with this perfection of nature is the beauty of the women. They are justly famous. To the far-famed grace and natural Spanish stateliness of her sisters throughout South America, the Uruguayan seÑorita adds a freshness of complexion and sprightliness of temperament that go to make a most bewitching consummation of feminine charm. Her praises are sung by all visitors; not less appreciative, her own kith and kin liken her, in their poetic way, to all pleasant things from a dove to the moon.

It is with genuine regret that the traveler leaves the hospitable capital for a trip through the country; but he will soon discover that the delightful climate (like that of Tennessee, but without the snows of winter) is characteristic of Uruguay as a whole. From the capital radiate some fifteen hundred miles of good railways penetrating Brazil at several points, and also tapping the commerce along the Uruguay River.

The country he will see is one great rolling pasture as large as all New England, and with occasional ridges of mountains. None of these, however, exceeds two thousand feet in height. Until recently Uruguay was given over almost entirely to the raising of cattle and sheep; now it promises great strides in products of the soil. Indeed, it is the boast of the Uruguayan that not an acre of his country’s 72,000 square miles of territory is unproductive. Here can be seen growing corn, wheat, and potatoes, and a great impetus has of late been given to viticulture—and there is no fear of either drought or frost. So far, however, only about three per cent. of the territory is under cultivation in foodstuffs. In 1909 Montevideo handled imports to the value of $35,000,000 and exports amounting to $32,000,000, while the ports of Rocha, Maldonado, and Colonia, on the south coast, and Salto, PaysandÚ, Fray Bentos, MercÉdes, and others on the Uruguay, handled three millions more of imports and exports. Her production in cattle in that year amounted to 6,827,428, in sheep 16,608,717, and in pigs, horses, mules, and goats 700,000.

At Fray Bentos, on the Uruguay River, the Liebig Company has located a great plant, slaughters over three hundred thousand head of cattle a year, and does an enormous business in extract of beef, canned meats, hides, tallow, hair, horn, and other by-products. A day’s sojourn in the prosperous, if soup-laden, atmosphere will give one a proper appreciation of the rest of the country, for nowhere has Nature been more lavish with her favors, nowhere has she distributed more favorable conditions for life and national prosperity—everything man needs for food or clothing is here capable of being raised. Every section is reached by navigable rivers, which also furnish abundant water for irrigation and mechanical purposes. The country being on a gold basis, its credit in the European money markets is excellent.

Uruguay, as one historian expresses it, has always been the cockpit of the southern half of the continent. From the time of the appearance of the first whites in the Plata region—Diaz de Solis in 1515, and ten years later Sebastien Cabot—down to the period of Hernando Arias and Garay, who, in about 1580, permanently established the power of Spain on the river Plata, the Spanish and Portuguese settlements on the Plata and Uruguay had to contend with the incessant hostilities of a race of Indians—the CharrÚas, who, next to the Araucanians of Chile, had the distinction of offering the most vigorous and successful opposition to the dominion of the Europeans in South America.

Throughout the colonial rÉgime, Uruguay constituted the eastern border province (Banda Oriental) of Spain’s La Plata colony, and was the storm center of the Spanish and Portuguese strife for territorial control. Following this period came the abortive invasion of the English in 1806, and, a few years later, the wars of independence. When Spanish rule came to an end in the Plata country, the Banda Oriental became the bone of contention between Brazil and the newly born state that is now Argentina—a veritable new-world Flanders and the theater of many fierce battles. Brazil held the province from 1817 to 1829, and called it her Cis-platine Province. Finally, on May 1, 1829, Uruguay achieved her independence and set up a government of her own under the style of the Oriental Republic of Uruguay.

There is good reason, then, why the Uruguayans should have emerged from these three hundred years of turbulent character building into independence with a bellicose personality exactly suited to the Montague-and-Capulet existence that prevails in her politics between the Blancos, or reactionists, and the Colorados, who now hold the political power and stand for progress. The forcefulness of the nation is now finding its expression in industrial and commercial enterprises and has made of her chief port a powerful commercial rival of the busy mart across the Plata.