time, I think. It's perfectly simple; but I wish I could speak to them myself. I had better stay here, perhaps. Now, tell them the bugle says Tra-ra-ra or Tra-ramaung. No, don't drive on, that man. He must only start when the bugle sounds Trara - maung, you understand," and the Colonel swept his arms sideways as if he were dandling a baby or imitating a well-coached small boy reciting "Sail on, thou Ship of State." "Now I think they understand. It only wants patience, you see, and the result is so much more gratify. ing than slipshod lounging along anyhow. Now, I think we're ready. Pass the word back to the bugler, Mr Ventris, please." The three G's sounded again. The first cartman was scowling fixedly at the Colonel, and did not start until the Colonel, the interpreter, the convoy officer, several of the guard, and cartman or two had shouted maung at him. The others followed with the ponderous deliberation of a loaded railway truck being started by hand. "Very slovenly; no proper spirit about it; but they've got the idea now. I think with a little practice-just halt them again, interpreter. We'll try a few starts by word of mouth. I'll give the time, tra-ra-RA. They start on the RA, of course." But the leading driver was no sooner stopped than he jumped down, propped up the pole of his cart with a forked stick and lifted the yoke off his bullocks, and at the same time shouted to the men behind. Quite a number of them immediately followed his example. "What is the meaning of this? Why are they outspanning?" For the first time Cherry hinton looked really annoyed. "That bullockman says he has not come here to learn battle-tricks and march-past. He says he will go to Wundauk, Civil Officer, and tell him he will not stay here all day. And besides, he make oath and swear it is time to stop march, not to begin march. There is no water for ten miles along road, and the water buffaloes will become mad and devastate everybody." "Mr Ventris, have that cartman arrested. I will take him to the Assistant Commissioner myself. But before I go"Colonel Cherry hinton looked down the line and saw all the cartmen taking their bullocks out, and then he looked at his watch. "Hullo! it's nine o'clock. We've been here three and a half hours. Well, I suppose it is latish. But it is very annoying; just when they had begun to grasp the idea. Why, even the bullocks had begun to realise what was wanted of them. Well, they can move on at half-past five this afternoon and go by moonlight. You can return your men to quarters, Mr Ventris, but give me one file to take this cartman to the Assistant Commissioner." At the Civil Officer's the Colonel wanted the cartman punished for gross insubordination and disobedience of orders. The cartman gave an excited account of what he called the senseless manœuvres, and said all the villagers would disappear if they were treated in this way, and no more carts would be to be had. He was the headman of a small village himself. The Assistant Commissioner sided with the cartman, and said the Colonel's ideas were purely vexatious and his action quite illegal. Colonel Cherry hinton said discipline must be maintained, and if a case of disobedience like this occurred again, he would have the man flogged. The Civil Officer, who was not a competition wallah, but an unliterary man who had left the army for the Commission, said if the Colonel did that, he would have the men who did the flogging arrested by the police, and would report the Colonel himself to the general officer commanding, as a person who would make good relations with the people hopeless. morning, Smith. You'll make quite a success in the Commission if you always remember to be firm. I shall have another try with these friends of yours in the evening. They improved quite a lot this morning." But in the evening, as soon as the Colonel and the bugler appeared, the cartmen began to trickle off along the road. It was no use trying to stop them. If one cart was stopped, the others simply drove round. It is possible that they had got hints from the Assistant Commissioner or the transport officer, who was getting anxious about the Mathibu rations. At any rate, there was no stopping them any more than you could stop a gale of wind by puffing out your cheeks against it. The Colonel took it very well: "They really are much better than they were. Perhaps it was a mistake to start it with so big a convoy. We will get a dozen empty carts and practise them at it as an example to the rest. They will get into it by degrees. System is such a very desirable thing, and on thing, and so conducive to work. Don't you think so?" The Colonel first of all began to grin, and then smacked his thigh with great emphasis: "By Gad, sir, you're the sort of man I like. You know your own mind, and you act on fixed principles, whether they are good or not. As a matter of fact, the whole of the cartmen would be all the better for a flogging; but you're quite right, this scoundrel here is no worse than than the others. It was only his bad luck that he was the front man. Let the man go," he said to the guard. "Good "Most conducive to work," said the Transport Officer. Colonel Cherry hinton lectured the officers of the regiment at three the next morning on patience. He said it was a very rare but a very necessary soldierly quality, almost as necessary as system. J. GEORGE SCOTT. THE IMMIGRANT IN SOUTH AMERICA. READERS of the newspapers may have observed that the Italian Government has disputes pending both with Brazil and the Argentine Republic. There are superficial differences between the two cases, but in essentials they are identical. The point at issue in both is the ill-usage of the Italian immigrants. We are not directly concerned in the quarrel. The British subjects who go to South America go as capitalists or as the skilled men employed by capitalists. They are few in number, and it must be readily confessed that if they do not prosper the fault is mainly their own. We speak of the rule and not of the exceptions, which of course are to be found. And what is true of us is, in the main, true of the French and the Germans. A handful of Frenchmen may be seen working in the vineyards of the Argentine province Mendoza. There are small German agricultural colonies in Brazil. Some of them are sinking into the native half-breed population. Others, notably in Santa Catarina and Rio Grande, occupy tracts of country, and have succeeded in obtaining the right to conduct their municipal affairs in German. So far from coalescing with the Brazilians, they are imposing the use of their own language on them. They present a problem which causes some anxiety to the governing persons of the Republic. If they are not enterprising, and it is said that they are not, they are stolid and pertinacious agriculturists, they strike deep in the soil, and they are suspected by the Brazilians of cherishing ambitions incompatible with the unity of the country. All men are armed in Brazil. The central government is weak. The Brazilians increase slowly or not at all. Being, with few exceptions, half- breeds, they need to be continually recruited by the unmixed race on either side, or else they tend to die out. Their famlies are small and unhealthy. It is not easy to explain why. The facts are well known, but they are shameful to name. The reader will allow us to say no more than this-that a certain hereditary disease is not only widely prevalent but is all but universal in Brazil. The German population is sound. Its families are large, and they flourish greatly, for the climate on the tablelands of Santa Catarina and Rio Grande inside the Terra do Mar is favourable to children. So they grow, and there are many Brazilians who look forward with anxiety to what the German will do, perhaps at no very remote date. They do not fear the coming of the Kaiser with a fleet and an army. Against that danger they know they are protected by the United States. They fear the German within their gates. This German colony is a local and peculiar thing. When we speak of the immigration to South America, we are not thinking of the skilled Englishman or Scot, the French or the German, but of the great bulk of the Europeans who go to the former colonies of Spain and Portugal. Now they are to the extent of five-sixths of the total number of those who go to the river Plate, Italians and Spaniards. In the case of Brazil we must allow for the Portuguese, but even there the Italians are the majority, and the Spaniards, mainly from Galicia, are numerous. The contribution of other nationalities is trifling in comparison. These are "Austrians," so called, who for the most part are Poles. Polish villages are to be found in Argentina where the children born in the Republic are still wholly ignorant of the corrupt Castilian spoken by the native Argentines. There are Slovaks called Hungarians, and Russians of whom a half are Jews, and there are Syrians. These last, who began to come in very recent days, are already a marked element in Brazil and in the River Plate Republics. Half of them are Mohammedans. There are two mosques in the Brazilian State of São Paulo. Arabic papers are published both there and in Argentina. The Syrians are pedlars who wander far up to the Matto Grosso in Brazil, and in Argentina to the remotest borders of the west and south. Prosperity turns them into merchants, and VOL. CXC.-NO. MCLIII. they congregate in the towns. They are by common consent sordid in their ideas and filthy in their habits. But they grow rich, and are a force to be taken into account. Any description of the drift of people into South America which omitted all mention of its oddities would be misleading. For some reason not easily apparent, the Corsicans favour Venezuela. A few years ago a crowd of Japanese coolies was brought in to develop the cultivation of rice in São Paulo. They had been recruited in the ports, and turned out to be perfectly useless on the land. In a short time they drifted into the towns, where they became notorious as footpads and housebreakers. Minorities and oddities are negligible. Italy and Spain have supplied the great indispensable mass of labour, just as Great Britain has supplied capital. £300,000,000 of English money have gone into Argentina alone. With this and the Italian labourer the Republic might have grown rich, though it drew neither men nor funds from other sources. Without them it would not have escaped from its native state of stagnant sloth. The questions worth putting are these: How is this labour recruited? How does it work? How is it treated? It will be obvious that this emigration of labour from Europe does not go of itself. The hundred and twenty thousand Spaniards who sailed from Corunna and Vigo alone in 1908, and the large number who left Almeria, went from 2 s dire poverty under the stimulus of necessity. They did not all go to South America. Many, perhaps, of them went to Cuba or the United States. Ever since the "Pearl of the Antilles" was freed from the curse of Spanish administration, a stream of emigration has set into it from Old Spain. Whole villages have gone, taking their priests with them, and they prosper. Multitudes go to the United States, and in particular from Biscay and Santander. But we are not concerned with them. The Spaniards and Italians who go to the States may have much to contend with, but they do not suffer from the evils which have provoked the Italian Government to retaliate on Brazil and the river Plate. The Italian in the States is not always liked, and he is generally regarded as a hewer of wood and drawer of water. A story goes about that an Irish foreman who found much difficulty in making a gang of Italians understand what they were to do, turned to a countryman and said, "And these are the -'s they make popes of." But if the Italian is not rated high in the States, he does not suffer at the hands of Fazendeiros and Estancieros, district judges and Comisarios of Police, as he does in Brazil and the river Plate. The Northern continent is a different world from the Southern. The labour which goes to the latter is mainly contracted for, and hired by capital, with passages paid out and back again. It is to a very great extent migratory, and is a larger version of what we know in Europe in the shape of the harvesters who, among ourselves, come from Ireland and the Highlands to England and the Lowlands of Scotland; from London to the hop-fields and market-gardens of Kent; or the Continent, from Poland to Germany and Denmark. The visitor who leaves a Western European port for South America will be taken into Cherbourg, perhaps to Corunna, certainly to Vigo and Lisbon, now and then to Leixoes for Oporto. At all those places he will see larger or smaller crowds of men, women, and children, drawn from the whole length and breadth of Europe, who ship for South America. In the busy seasons, that is to say when the coffee "cherries begin to be plucked in São Paulo in April, or in Novem ber when the maize and wheat harvests are coming on by the river Plate, these thirdclass passengers will number a thousand or twelve hundred ; and he will see the same sight if he goes by a German line, or by a Spanish, or by the "Messageries Nationales" from Marseilles (who bring the Syrians), or by the fine swift steamers of the Italian "Veloce" and "Lloyd Sabauda." To them should be added the Royal Dutch and the Austrian lines. It is, by the way, a useful corrective to national complacency, and also a warning, to learn how good most of these lines are. British officers, who are close observers |