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230 The Argentine Republic, gentlemen, is the only South American nation that has not been populated because of the incentive of precious metals, the only one that does not owe its formation, development , and gradual prosperity to the magic of gold and silver locked up in its bosom, which has attracted European immigration to American shores ever since the discovery of the New World. Mexico with its rich mines, Peru with its mountains of gold, Chile with its silver, Brazil with its gold and precious stones, the pearls of the Antilles and Tierra Firme, the emeralds and opals of Central America, and more or less all the other regions whose names can be read on the map of this continent owed their growth and their origins to this type of riches, which we lacked. For a long time their wealth was measured by their heaps of gold, silver, and precious stones, which brought out our poverty all the more, while today those heaps of gems are the slag heaps of long-dead furnaces in comparison with the wealth that trade and industry have created and which gold can no longer measure alone. We, the dispossessed of this golden rain, did not have even the rich output of the tropics which provided new settlers with such bountiful profits. Weed-covered plains, landlocked between sterile mountains, stoneless rivers, and chaotic terrains that hemmed them in, the colonization of the River Plate area is a phenomenon worthy of our attention, as it is the only colonization in South America since the times of its discovery that was born and grew asking the land only for its daily bread by means of productive work—the only one that was born and grew amid hunger and poverty, despite being christened with a name that only the 2 BaRtolomé mitRE On Trade (1869) Original title: “Discurso al comercio de Buenos Aires [Speech to the Buenos Aires Chamber of Commerce] (February 21, 1869). Source: Obras completas de Bartolomé Mitre [Complete works of Bartolomé Mitre], vol. 16 (Buenos Aires: H. Congreso de la Nación Argentina, 1959). on trade (1869) : 231 future would justify. The name of the River Plate was a shining promise that trade has made a reality. This poor colony, saved by labor after supplying the most primary needs in life, was condemned to vegetate in obscurity and poverty, and most likely perish, had trade not come to inject it with that spirit of immortal life that increases the hardiness of societies over the passing of time. But the development of trade was impossible due to the restrictive laws that were the basis of the colonial system of the mother country. Its ports closed, its fruits rotting, condemned to be supplied with European artifacts that had traveled by land across the length of southern America, our trade system was a violation of natural laws, a sorry waste of labor in which life was spent without increasing social capital. It was an order of things in which ultimately the colony should have succumbed in sterility . Trade saved it from death, and injected it with new life, and—oddly enough—the hostilities aimed at the colony so as to wound the mother country were those that most directly contributed to reestablishing the balance of economic law, sending out output along roads traced by the hand of the Creator. The walls of Colonia del Sacramento, built as protection against smuggling, served as a shelter for trade.There it was fortified , there it unfurled its flag and endured the siege against monopoly, until at last the trade launched via its natural roads came to be a moral function for these countries, something that could not be suspended without compromising their very lives. The smugglers of all the world, and the trade and military expeditions from England at the start of this century contributed to bring down the last barriers of monopoly, until the revolution came and gave universal trade its legal status. Under the auspices of these noble origins, the sons of this land and all the traders here present, regardless of which country in the world they were born in, must recognize each other as the sons of the same fertile and generous mother. Whether they belong to the virile AngloSaxon race that has broadened the sphere of human activity, whether they come from the regions where the Phoenicians sailed, inspired by the spirit of trade, whether they be possessed of the mercantile spirit of those Italian republics...

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