fever, and when these have established themselves in large numbers, there will be no place left for the white man. The southern planters who subsidised Walker, intended to turn Nicaragua into another Louisiana. Now that slavery is abolished, the country can only be developed by free Indians or by free negroes coming in from the states. These are the two natural sources of the coloured labour that is indispensable.
Of the other countries—one and all—that have been classed as predominantly Indian, it may be said that they are not likely to encourage European immigration on a very extended scale, or, if they did encourage it, to attract it. The circumstances of the Argentine Republic are exceptional. "It is estimated," says Mr. Curtis, "that the extent of agricultural land in the Argentine Republic equals 600,000 square miles; an area equal to Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, Iowa, and Wisconsin, and capable of producing every crop in these states."[1] Let it be added that these enormous tracts lie fairly near together, that they are traversed in great part by railways, that the climate is that of Southern France, and that Indians are hardly a more real danger than in the United States. It is easy to understand 600,000 immigrants pouring into such a paradise in the space of ten years. Contrast Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, which are in a great measure tropical Switzerlands; Quito, for instance, being 2000 feet higher than the Hospice of the Great St. Bernard in Europe, and Cuzco and Potosi and the capital of Bolivia higher still. The fertile niches of these countries are already occupied by Indians. The reclaimable parts can only
- ↑ Curtis's Capitals of Southern America, p. 584.
