Note 80 — Chapter XI · MONTE VIDEO.

The liberal spirit of this State encourages foreigners. Imitating the United States, it facilitates the acquirements of the privileges of native citizens by emigrants from foreign countries, and even surpasses, in this respect, the wise provisions of that system, so advantageous for a new and thinly-peopled country, and so successfully adopted by North America. Foreign merchants have brought their business and capital to Monte Video, while hard-working Basques, Germans, Irish, French, and Italians, (chiefly Genoese) have flocked to this city, and, in most instances, obtained the rights of denizens or citizens. Residence, marriage with a native, the acquisition of a certain amount of property, real or personal, are among the conditions conferring citizenship. This privilege may appear to be somewhat easily granted; but it must be recollected that no ‘Oriental’ citizen existed previous to 1828; consequently there has not been time for the development of any very jealous feeling of exclusive national rights, as possessed by one race only in the republic of the Uruguay. It is for these reasons that so many foreigners have flocked to the Banda Oriental, and settled in the interior as well as in the towns; and hence the rapid increase of Monte Video in trade and population, which even the invasion and siege of its capital, so lately at an end, have not sufficed to reduce to the level of their former comparative insignificance. The whole of the Banda Oriental being freed from the invaders, and the independence of the republic being guaranteed by Brazil, commerce and agriculture are therefore now reviving; and it is to be hoped that the numerous resources of the country will be peaceably and usefully developed; while the free navigation of the tributaries of the River Plate, now ensured, will be of the greatest importance to the trade of all nations, and produce incalculable benefits to the States through which those noble rivers flow. The exports, as before stated, comprise all of the staple commodities produced by the Argentine provinces, viz: hides, tallow, horns, horse-hair, jerked beef, wool, &c., to which, in all probability, corn will be added in a few years, the soil of this State being for the most part admirably adapted to agricultural purposes.