The history of these regions and the process of their settlement
resembles in many points that of the western United States and
western Canada, but differs in one point of great significance. In
North America the settlement of the new lands has from first to
last been conducted by agricultural settlers drawn from the middle
or working-class of the older parts of the country or of Europe,
and the land has been allotted to them in small properties, seldom
exceeding one hundred and sixty acres. Thus over all the Mississippi
Valley states and over the Canadian northwest there has grown up a
population of small farmers, owning the land they till, and furnishing
a solid basis for the establishment of democratic institutions among
intelligent and educated men who have an interest in order and good
administration. In Argentina, however,--and the same is generally true
of Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Brazil,--the land, before or when it began
to be regularly settled, passed in large blocks into comparatively few
hands. There was no class like the men who settled New England in the
seventeenth century and whose descendants settled the Great West in
the nineteenth. The ideas of Spanish feudalism still lived among the
Argentine colonists of a century ago. Leading men or rich men took as
much land as they could get on the Pampas; and, seeing that there was
little competition, each could get pretty much all he wanted. Thus the
country became and is a country of great estates. They are measured
by the square league, which contains about six thousand acres. Though
a tendency to subdivision has set in and will doubtless continue,
_estancias_ of sixty thousand acres are not uncommon; and the average
holding is said to be even now about six square miles.