outreached the plans of its unsuspecting founders that it is constantly being faced with the ever new problem of modifying existing conditions to meet metropolitan requirements. It was a comparatively simple matter to fill in and pave the old quagmires that posed as streets; it was quite another thing to widen them to accommodate modern traffic. Laid out by Moorish-influenced Spaniards in a century when the passing of two horsemen constituted the maximum demand for space, the streets of old Buenos Aires are narrower and more congested than the most inadequate of those at the southern end of Manhattan Island. In most cases the problem has been frankly abandoned, for nothing short of destroying all the buildings on one side or the other of these medieval passageways could improve them. The result is that a walk through what was the entire city fifty years ago, and is now the business section, is an ordeal or an amusing experience, according to the mood or the haste of the victim. The sidewalks are rarely wide enough for two persons at once, the roadway between them is so scanty that the pedestrian has barely room to back up against the adjoining wall when tram-cars or automobiles, which form almost constant procession up or down them, are passing. Yet those within these vehicles are little better off in the battle with patience than the struggling, jostling throng of foot-travelers, for it is a rare experience for them to find a half-block of unobstructed going.

The Porteño has made various bold attacks upon this problem of congestion. Nearly thirty years ago he hewed his way for a mile and a half through the very heart of the old town, destroying hundreds of buildings in his insistence on more space. The result is the Avenida de Mayo, corresponding in a way to a combination of our Broadway and Fifth Avenue, but still more nearly resembling the boulevards of Paris in the neighborhood of the Opéra. But the Avenida is, after all, of insignificant length compared with the mammoth Buenos Aires of to-day, and the older flanking street of Rivadavia, once the principal highway to the pampa beyond, cutting the entire city in two from the

waterfront to the open plains, is quite incapable of handling the through traffic which refuses to risk itself in the constricted calles of the down-town labyrinth.

There are other places in the old town where this heroic treatment has been applied. Wherever the stroller wanders he is certain to come out every few minutes on an open space, a little park or a plaza, which has been grubbed out by the bold demolition of a block of houses. I cannot recall a single city of my acquaintance where parks are anything like as epidemic as they are in Buenos Aires. Some of them are so tiny that they may be crossed in a hop, skip, and a jump, though even in the old part they are more apt to cover at least a block; the largest is aristocratic Palermo, where one may wander half a day without crossing the same ground twice.

Buenos Aires is not a city of skyscrapers. Built on a loose soil that is quite the antithesis of the granite hills of Manhattan Island, with unlimited opportunity to spread out across the floor-flat plains beyond, it has neither the incentive nor the foundation needed for pushing its way far aloft. Custom in this respect has crystallized into requirement, and a city ordinance forbids the height of a building to exceed one and one third the width of the street it faces. The result is that while it has fewer architectural failures, fewer monstrosities in brick and stone, the city on the Plata has nothing that can rival the epic poems among buildings to be found at the mouth of the Hudson. Nor has it anything striking in its general appearance. From a distance it looks curiously like one of our own large cities decapitated to an average height of three or four stories, with only here and there an ambitious structure peering timidly above the monotonous general level. "Flat" and "drab" are perhaps the two words which most fully describe its general aspect.

Comparisons may be odious, but they are inevitable in viewing such a parvenu among the great cities of the earth as the Argentine capital. When one has noted the origin of nearly all its people, it is no longer surprising that

Buenos Aires is far more of a European than an American city. Architecturally, and in many other subtle little touches, it most resembles Paris, with hints of Madrid, London, and Rome thrown in, not to mention certain features peculiarly its own. Like virtually all LatinAmericans, the Porteño is most enamored of French culture and point of view. Not only is he accustomed to refer to his city as the "Paris of South America,"-all South American capitals are that to their own people, but he copies more or less directly, more or less consciously, from the earthly paradise of all good argentinos. The artistic sense of the Latin, too, comes to his aid in this almost subconscious endeavor; or, if the individual man lacks it, there is the guiding hand of the community ever ready to sustain his faltering steps. City ordinances not only forbid the erection of structures which do not fit into the general scheme of a modified Paris, but Buenos Aires rewards those who most successfully carry out its conception of civic improvement. Every year the building judged to be the greatest addition to the city's beauty is rewarded a bronze façade-plate and is relieved for the first decade of its existence from the burden of taxes.

It would be unreasonable to expect a community with such pride as this in

its personal appearance to permit itself to be disfigured by an elevated railway system. Besides, as it is spread evenly over an immense space of flat country, "B.A.'s" transportation problem is scarcely serious enough to require this concession to civic comfort. Of streetcars in the ordinary sense it has unlimited numbers, plying in all directions; all they lack is freedom to go their way unhampered in the oldest and busiest portion of town. portion of town. Their only peculiarity, to the American, is that they refuse to be overcrowded. No one may enter a tram-car while its seats are filled; nine persons, and nine only, may ride on the back platform. If you chance to be the tenth, there is no use insisting that you must ride or miss an important engagement. The car will refuse to move as long as you remain on board, and if there chances to be one of the spickand-span, Britishly imperturbable, New Yorkly impersonal policemen of Buenos Aires within call, you will probably regret your insistence. It will be far better to accept your misfortune with Latin courtesy and hail one of the taxis that are forever scurrying past. Or, if even the modest demands of these well disciplined public carriers are beyond your means, there is the ancient and honorable method of footing it. The chances are that if your destination is anywhere

within the congested business section you can walk to it and finish your errand by the time the inexorable street-car would have set you down there.

The descent to the Subterráneo stations on the Avenida de Mayo carries the mind instantly back to Manhattan. The underground scent is the same; news-stands and advertising placards are as inevitable; along the white-tile-walled platforms are ranged even penny-inthe-slot scales and automatic venders, though with the familiar plea, "Drop one cent," changed to "Echad 10 centavos," which is significant of the difference in cost of most small things in the metropolises of North and South America. Yet the subway fare, of similar amount, is a trifle cheaper on the Plata, the Argentine peso being normally worth barely forty-five cents. One's impression of being back in "Bagdad-on-theSubway," however, is certain to evaporate by the time he steps out of his first tren subterráneo in Buenos Aires. The Porteño believes in moving rapidly, but his interpretation of the word hurry is still far different from our own. There are certain forms of courtesy which he will not cast off for the mere matter of stretching his twenty-four hours a few minutes farther; there are certain racial traits of deliberate formality of which he is incapable of ridding himself. Moreover, the Subterráneo is British, and it retains the dignified leisureliness of its nationality. One buys a ticket of a man who is intensely aware of the fact that he is engaged in a financial transaction; at the gate another man solemnly punches the ticket and returns it to the owner, who is warned both by placards and italicized remarks on the ticket itself that he must be constantly prepared instantly to display it to the inspectors who are forever stalking through the cars; where he disembarks, it is solemnly gathered by still another intense employee, who will infallibly make the passenger who has carelessly mislaid the valuable document in question produce another ten-centavo piece and witness the preparation and cancelation of a billete suplementario before he is granted his freedom. There are no express trains; the locals are rather far apart; they cease their labors soon after

by disgruntled guards is lacking; signs to "Prepare yourself to leave the coach before arriving at the station of destination" take the place of any attempt to hustle the crowd. The company loses no courteous opportunity of "recommending to the passenger the greatest rapidity in getting on or off the cars, in order to accelerate the public service,' but mere signs mean nothing to the Spanish-American dowager of the old school, who is still inclined to take her osculatory and deliberate farewell of friends and relatives even though the place of parting be the open door of this

new-fangled mode of transportation, surrounded by inwardly impatient, but outwardly courtier-like, subway guards and station employees.

Three important railway companies operate five lines to the suburbs, and every evening great commuters' trains, more immaculate and palatial than the average of those out of our own large cities, rush away through the cool summer night with the majority of "B.A.'s" business men. It is perhaps a misnomer to call the score or more of residence regions suburbs, for they are compactly united into the one great city, of which they constitute fully three fourths the capacity. But each district bears its own name, nearly all of which suggest its character and history. Even a total stranger might guess that Belgrano and Flores are rather exclusive dwellingplaces; Coghlan, Villa Malcolm, Villa Mazzini, and Nueva Pompeya recall some of the races that have amalgamated to form the modern Porteño; one would naturally expect to find the municipal slaughter-house and less pleasant living conditions in Nuevo Chicago. In the larger and newer part of Buenos Aires the broad streets are in striking contrast to the crowded and narrow ones down town. Though the Porteño has inherited much of the Spaniard's preference for taking his front yard inside the house, neither the sumptuous dwellings of the aristocratic north suburbs nor the more plebeian residences of the west and south have that shut-in air of nearly all Latin-American cities, with the streets slinking like outcast curs through long rows of scowling, impersonal house-walls.

The far-flung limits of Buenos Aires inclose many market gardens, and the land side of the city belongs to the backwoods it faces; but the thousands of makeshift shacks which fringe it are not the abode of hopeless mortals, such as inhabit the hovels of less progressive South American towns. The outskirt dwellers of Buenos Aires have the appearance of people who are moving forward, who insist that another year shall find them enjoying something more of the advantages of civilization. Indeed, this atmosphere pervades the entire city, and brings out in pitiless contrast the

social inertia of the great Andean region. There are fewer slums in Buenos Aires than in New York, the children of the poorer classes are less oppressed in appearance, beggars are scarcer; though there is squalor enough, the conventillos, or single-story tenement-houses of the larger west-coast cities, are almost unknown. Economic opportunity has here given birth to new hope and brought with it the energy and productiveness which constitute a great people, and by the time the visitor has wandered with due leisure through the vast length and breadth of Buenos Aires he can scarcely fail to realize that here the Latin is coming into his own again.

Though it is not quite so difficult to find a native argentino in Buenos Aires as to run to earth a genuine American in New York, there are many evidences that its growth has come mainly from across the sea. The city is not merely European in its material aspects, but in its human element. The Lew-comer will look in vain for any costume he could not find on the streets of Paris or Rome; the wild gauchos from the pampa, the beggars on horseback, the picturesque Carmelite monks and nuns that troop through the pages of "Amalia" and kindred stories of the past century are as scarce as feather-decked Indians along Broadway. No city of our own land is more completely "citified" than the Argentine capital. Though there has been far less European immigration to the Argentine Republic than to the United States as yet,-a mere five million who came to stay up to the beginning of the Great War,-a disproportionate number of these have remained in Buenos Aires. Fully half the population of the city is foreign born; it is an even bet on any man of this half that he came from Italy. The long-drawn vowels and doubled consonants of Italian speech are certain to be heard in every block, though more often as a foreign accent in the local tongue than in the native dialect of the speaker; for the Italian fits far more snugly into his environment in the Argentine than in the United States. He finds a language nearly enough like his own to be learned in a few weeks; there is a Latin atmosphere about the Southern republic, and

particularly its capital, which makes him feel so much at home that he is less inclined to segregate than in the colder Anglo-Saxon North. But as it is summer and grape-picking time in the bootleg peninsula when it is winter on the pampas, large numbers of Italians flit back and forth like migratory birds from one harvest to the other, or to spend the money earned where it is plentiful in the place where it will buy the most.

After the Spaniard there are French, English, and German residents, decreasing in proportion in the order named, and there are Americans enough to form a champion base-ball team and fling their challenges as far away as Montevideo. Jews are less ubiquitous than in our own metropolis, but they are numerous enough to support several synagogues and a company of Yiddish players for a season of several weeks.

It may be surprising to most Americans, as it was to me, to know that Buenos Aires is strictly a "white man's town." The one negro I ever saw there was posted before the door of a theater, in uniform, as an advance attraction. The caste of color, so intricate and unescapable in the Andes, is completely lacking here, and the Argentine Republic is the most fully European in race of any country in the Western hemisphere. Nor are the places of importance in its social structure confined to those of Spanish origin. As in Chile, there is a little aristocracy of third or fourth generation Irish, retaining the original spelling of their family names, but even themselves pronouncing them "O-conór," "Kel-yee," "O-bree-én" and the like. It is a comparatively ordinary experience in running glorified errands in Buenos Aires to come across business men with English or Irish names who speak only Spanish, or men who speak English with both an Irish brogue and a Spanish accent and accompany their remarks with the full gamut of Latin gesticulation.

To say that these transplanted Irish are active in both local and national politics is to utter a tautology. Strictly speaking, Buenos Aires is not self-governing; as a federal district-the largest in the world, by the way-it is ruled by

an intendente appointed by the national executive. But as its influence on the national life is far more potent than that of Washington and New York combined, as it has more "influential citizens" and large property-owners than all the rest of the republic, it has roundabout ways of imposing its own will upon itself. Not that those ways are devious in the cynical sense. It being something of a traditional hobby among the heads of the aristocratic old families, most of them with ample wealth, to accept municipal office and to seek public approval out of family pride, and their privilege to be free from the drawbacks of listening to every whim of an ignorant electorate, Buenos Aires enjoys the distinction among large cities of the western hemisphere of being for the most part rather well governed. On the whole, perhaps, a larger percentage of public funds are actually and advantageously spent in municipal improvement than in the case. of most "self-governing" cities. Besides, it is one of the distinctions between North and South America that while the cry of "graft" is more frequent in our municipal than in our national affairs, our neighbors to the south seem more capable of handling a city than a nation.

It is as easy to become a citizen in the Argentine as in the United States, but it is not quite so easy to remain one. The duties of citizenship are more nearly those of continental Europe than of the free and easy Anglo-Saxon type. There is compulsory military service, for instance. In theory every male citizen must enter the army or navy for at least two years when he reaches maturity; virtually there is by no means room for all of them in the armed force which the Argentine considers it necessary to maintain. Hence this requirement reduces itself to the necessity of drawing lots, and of serving if designated by the finger of fate. This is no new and temporary whim in the Argentine, but was already in force long before the European War. The argentino, however, goes his models of the Old World one or two better. The man who does not serve, either for physical or fortunate reasons, pays an extra yearly tax toward the support of the force from which he has been spared. As in continental Europe, every citizen