The people of the Argentine, and particularly of Buenos Aires, have much the same feeling toward the _madre patria_ as the average American has toward England—forgiving, though perhaps still a bit resentful of the past, aware of the common heritage, on the whole a trifle disdainful. The popular term for a Spaniard in Buenos Aires is “Gallego” (or, in the slurring Argentine pronunciation, “Gajego”), and the Galician has stood for centuries as all that is stupid, servile, and clumsy, the unfailing butt of Spanish drama. The _Porteño_ never says he speaks Spanish, though his tongue is as nearly that of Spain as ours is that of England; even in his school books he calls it the _idioma nacional_.
But the _argentino_ is still largely Spanish, whether he admits it or not; he is distinctly of the Latin race, for all the influx of other blood. The types one sees in his streets are those same temperamental Latin-Americans to be found from Mexico to Paraguay, a more glorified type, perhaps, more in tune with the great modern moving world, almost wholly free from non-Caucasian mixture, larger and better nourished, and with the ruddiness and vigor of the temperate zone. But they have much the same overdeveloped pride, the same dread of demeaning themselves by anything suggestive of manual labor. No _Porteño_ of standing would dream of carrying his own valise from station to tramway; even the Americans sent down to set up harvesting machinery on the great _estancias_ cannot throw off their coats and pitch in, lest they instantly sink to the caste of the peon in the eyes of the latter as well as in those of the ruling class. Caste lines are sharper in the Argentine than anywhere in western Europe; as in all South America there is little or no “middle class,” few people of moderate wealth, tastes, and station to fill in the great gulf between the day-to-day workman and the powerful landed proprietors who dwell sumptuously in the capital on the income from their vast estates out on the pampas, which they see far less often than the medieval lord did his feudal domain.