Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill ARGENTINA NO nation of the southern continent is better qualified than Argentina to rebuke the stupid jest that refers to the Latin-American countries as opera bouffe republics. It has a domain one-third the size of the United States, or as large as the territory lying east of the Mississippi, with Texas added, stretching from tropic heat to antarctic cold, and possessing a frontage on the Atlantic as extensive as our own coast line from Portland, Maine, to Key West, Florida. It has over 500,000,000 acres of its 1,135,840 square miles of area available for the cultivation of life-sustaining products and distributed over vast, treeless, well-watered plains, every one of which is easily accessible to the seaboard with the simplest of railway construction. These plains have no suchnatural obstructions to transportation as our Alleghanies or Rockies, and have for their produce a much shorter haul to the European world of consumers. Argentina has the further advantage of over 18,000 miles of up-to-date railways radiating from its port cities, and five river systems, one of which, La Plata, the outlet for the waters of the Parana and Uruguay, is second only to the Amazon among the world's great rivers. It is 180 miles wide at its mouth, and pours into the Atlantic a flood greater by eighty per cent, than that cast by the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico. The timber regions of the country are rich in structural and cabinet woods. It has a grazing industry that ranks second only to Australia in sheep, second only to the United States in cattle, and second only to the United States and Russia in horses. In 1910 it exported to Europe 190,430 live animals and $130,000,000 worth of frozen beef, mutton, pork, hides, and other animal products. Its total foreign commerce amoun...