THE ARGENTINE REPUBLIC.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 436, 11 January 1890, Page 4

THE ARGENTINE REPUBLIC.

THE CITY OP BUENOS AYRES. An Aucklander who has just returned from the Argentine Republic sends us the following notes :

The population of Buenos Ayres is between (100,000 and 700,000, principally Spaniards and Italians. The immigration from January to September of the present year averaged 808 adult arrivals each day. The demand for labour is ; great the pay is, in contrast with the cost of living, poor. Labourers can be had from one and a-nalf to two dollars per day. She hours of work are pretty well from daylight to dark, Sundays included. There is also a good demand for mechanics. The rate of wages ranges from two and a-haJf to four dollars a day of ten hours. Work is carried on in most factories and on most contracts until one o’clock on Sundays. Most of the buildings are brick, plastered both in and outside. The bricks are of a very inferior quality, as also is the lime. Accidents frequently happen by part of the wall of a building being erected falling. Struts are commonly used to shore up buildings when one from alongside is taken down. The buildings are not very high, a five - storied one being a rarity. Some are very finely finished, the marble used giving them a very good appearance. The Italian workmon too are very good at decorating the walls, etc. A painter and decorator from Auckland whom I saw there admitted that for decorating we are simply nowhere alongside the Italian, but for letter-writing and such like the English could walk over them. The city is divided by the street Calls Rivadavia and numbers right and left from it. It is said you can travel seven miles along this one street and six miles either side of it and still be within the confines of the city. To show to what extent the inhabitants carry their love for display, they have decided to form a drive right through the heart of the city, and for that purpose have purchased the ground and buildings thereon between the two streets Rivadavia and Victoria at a fabulous sum, and have already razed to ground jpart of the Court House and other buildngs between Calles Bolivar and Peru, and have formed and laid it with wooden blocks, pitch pine being used on a concrete bed. The tram system is a great feature of the city. The returns year showed that thirty-six millions of people were carried on them in that jear. In one thing they seem to be in advance of us, and that is their mode of hitching on the spare horse. They never stop to do it. The rider of the spare horse has a coil of rope attached to the girth of the saddle at one end, a hook spliced into the other ; when he is wanted he rides to the tram, turns liis horse, drops the hook which is caught up from the ground by the guard with a crook and put over the guard iron. When the pinch is over, the hook is let go, the horseman recoils his rope and returns to his post. This is all done without any stopping whatever. The drivers are all provided with a horn, which they are required to blow as a warning. Upon approaching each corner, they make a hideous noise with them, sufficient to invoke a rare amount of blessings upon their heads by the ordinary new chum.