The Grand Tour in South America

Eight Republics in Search of a Future. By Rosita Forbes. (Cassell. 8s. 6d.)

MISS ROSITA FORBES describes racily and well the eight South American republics which she visited in 1932. Her methods are staccato, impressionistic and successful. She knows, by now, what the public expects from a book of travel, and in her latest she gives them all they want, and a little more. A little more, because she leavens her purple patches with social criticism and economic analysis ; sandwiched between the Quien saber ? and the sunsets, between the murderers and the machetes, we find estimates of cultural tendencies and political situations which, if rarely profound and never definitive, are always stimulating and suggestive. Much of the local colour she collected is the stuff Blue Books are made of.

Of every country she visited she presents a swift, confident, and fairly comprehensive sketch. In Brazil she draws a vivid picture of the Matto Grosso cattlemen bringing their herds down to the killing-plants. What she says about the coffee situation is not new, but it will bear repetition, espe- cially in non-technical language ; and the same applies to her remarks on the diversity of races which populate that vast and untried country.

Uruguay she sees as the Russia of South America. Habits and ethics derive from Spain ; culture from Paris ; ideology from Moscow. Suffering little from corruption and political unrest, and lacking the pernicious legacies—extravagance, absenteeism, and so on—o6 a " boom" period, Uruguay has at least some chance of attaining that Utopia on which her eyes are fixed to-day with more philosophy than fervour.

Paraguay is " very nearly a matriarchate," owing to the

effects of her _war -(1865,1870); against Brazil, -Uruguay and Argentina, which halved the population and left women in the ascendancy of eleven to one. Her peasant women are splendid amazons, but- the climate, discourages endeavour, and progress is not likely to be resumed until the settlement of her Chaco dispute with Bolivia, which squanders her

revenue on military expenditure.

The chapters on Argentina are the best in the book. Accord- ing to Miss Forbes, " the Argentine is not yet a fully deve- loped type." His own adaptability : the youthfulness of his country : the impacts of immigrant nationalities : the element of fluidity in labour due to the rapid territorial spread of development and the roving habits of the immigrants-- these and other factors have so far prevented the national

character from expressing- itself with certainty. Will Argentina become effectually Americanized before this

happens ? Miss Forbes is not sure. She criticizes with insight her social conventions ; praises warmly her natural beauties (neglected by the Argentines themselves, who cross the Atlantic to travel) : and concludes with a colourful account

of sheep-thieves in Patagonia.

Chile, stretching 2,000 miles up and down the ladder of latitude, offers many contrasts. Miss Forbes found sheep and Scotsmen in the south, forests and Germans further north, a medley of races in the wheat country round Valparaiso, and sheer deserts in the nitrate-producing north. She emphasized the significance of Chile in relation to South America as a whole :

" Her people share a common patriotism.. . . She is an old- established country with a civilization and a culture dating from the Middle Ages. . . . For centuries she represented racial and commercial stability in spite of her changing governments, and if to day the sport of politics proves too much for her common sense, if the `communism of hunger' by which her people are naturally affected is directed by ill-advised or alien agitators into dangerous channels, she will jeopardize not only her own interests but the general stability of South America."

From Chile Miss Forbes travelled north through the Indians

and llamas of Bolivia, then in the throes of a revolution; through the cocoa and crocodiles (she means alligators) of Ecuador ; and so dors-i the Chanchamyo Valley to the

Amazon.

Though her visit was short, the authoress saw a great deal

of South America. Her book is valuable because it tells us what we want to know. It tells us what places look like, and what it feels like to live in them. It describes the conversation

and the clothes, the food and the pastimes, the fads and the aversions, the doubts and the certainties of their inhabitants. Her conclusions may be sometimes wrong, but her descriptions are never dull.

One would scarcely have believed it possible that any publisher could print a book, which ranges a vast sub-con- tinent with considerable intimacy, without any sort of a map. By doing this, Messrs. Cassells have lost a fifth of their potential readers and embittered the rest. PETER FLEMING.