THE FORMATION OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLES
When the Iberians arrived in America they found either tribes or peoples of semi-civilised inhabitants. These natives differed from the Spanish and Portuguese invaders to such a degree that their conquest was a true creation of new societies on the ruins of ancient barbarian states. Before analysing the various aspects of American history we must therefore know something of the genius of the conquering race.
Conquerors and vanquished intermingled; territorial possession modified the spirit of the conquerors; and the colonies began to dream of conquering their independence. After twenty years of warfare the republic became the political type of these societies, which were exhausted by Spanish tyranny. Two periods, one of military anarchy, the other of domestic order, wealth, and industrialism, succeeded in the new States.
HIDALGO. A priest who prepared for the independence of Mexico from the Spanish power.
HIDALGO.
A priest who prepared for the independence of Mexico from the Spanish power.
LATIN AMERICA
CHAPTER I
THE CONQUERING RACE
Its psychological characteristics—Individualism and its aspects—The sentiment of equality.—African fanaticism.
Travellers and psychologists find in modern Greece the craft of Ulysses, the rhetorical ability of the Athenian sophists, and the anarchy of the brilliant democracies once grouped about the blue Mediterranean. Though its purity has been tainted by the onset of Africa and the Turks, the old Hellenic spirit survives in the race. A similar vitality is to be observed in America. The transatlantic Creole is a Spaniard of the heroic period, enervated by miscegenation and climate. It is impossible to understand or explain his character unless we take into account the genius of Spain. The wars of independence gave the Latin New World political liberty, and a deceptive novelty of forms and institutions, but beneath these the spirit of race survives: the Republic reproduces the essential traits of the colonial empire. In the cities, despite the invasion of cosmopolitanism, the old life persists, silent and monotonous, flowing past the ancient landmarks. The same little anxieties trouble mankind, which no longer has the haughty moral rigidity of the old hidalgos. Belief, conversation, intolerance—all retain the imprint of the narrow mould imposed upon them by three centuries of the proudly exclusive spirit of Spain. To study the political and religious history of the last century in the American democracies is to add a chapter to the history of Iberian evolution. Beyond the ocean and the fabled columns which were overthrown by the pikes of the conquistadors is another Spain, tropical, and divided against itself, in which the grace of Andalusia has vanquished the austerity of Castile.[1]
If the troublous existence of the metropolitan state could be reduced to the simplicity of a formula, that formula would also explain the troublous history of a score of American republics, just as the deep root will reveal the germ of the vicious development of a tropical tree. But nothing would be more impossible than to reduce to an abstract and enforced unity the disturbed evolution of Spain, full as it is of anarchy and bloodshed. The Peninsula, divided into hostile regions, the refuge of inimical races, presents in its past such contradictions as defy synthesis. Amid this theocratic people the development of municipal liberties was premature. While feudality still imposed its authority upon the rest of Europe, Spain saw the rise of the free cities. Beside the eternal Quixotism which renounces the vulgar kingdom of the useful in order to give itself only to the ideal the wise refrains of the people express a dense, prosaic, positive realism. The Catholic nation par excellence furnished the Duke of Alba with the troops that were to conquer Rome. After long years of absolute monarchy the old democratic spirit was reborn in the Peninsular juntas which opposed the French invasion. From Cantabria to Cadiz we discover, beneath the unity of Castile, a splendid variety of provincial types. The Asturian hardness contrasts with the rhythm of Andalusia, the impetuosity of Estremadura with the dryness of Catalonia, the tenacity of the Basques with the proud idleness of the Castilian.
From this territorial complexity arises a turbulent life: the secular struggle in favour of national unity, the generous epic of the Catholic crusade against Islam, and the gloomy pursuit of religious unity by means of inquisitorial holocausts. European history is transformed south of the Pyrenees. Feudality is arrested; the crusade against the infidel lasts eight centuries; religion and empire are established in magnificence like that of the Oriental theocracies. In the wealth of this national development persist the racial characteristics which we wish to determine: individualism, democracy, the local spirit so inimical to great unities, and the African fanaticism which is satisfied only with excessive sensations and extreme solutions—in short, the heritage of a grave and heroic race, in a state of perpetual moral tension, proud in the face of God and king and fate.
Individualism is the fundamental note of the Spanish psychology. An Iberian characteristic, it has all the force of an imperious atavism. It exalts any form of action, of self-affirmation; it inspires an unreasonable confidence in self and the powers of self; it tends to develop human energy, to preserve the national independence from external pressure, to defend it against the rigour of the law, the moral imperative, and the rigidity of duty; and it creates in exalted spirits an ardent desire of domination.
Strabo observed among the primitive Iberians, who were divided into hostile tribes, an immense pride, inimical to union and discipline. In his life and attitude the Spaniard reveals all the outward and inward aspects of individualism. The austerity and arrogance revealed by the very folds of the hidalgo's mantle, by his majestic port, his sonorous speech, and his lordly gesture, the personal valour which turns history into an epic, the audacity, the love of adventure, and the isolation, are forms of personal exaltation. "The Spaniards, in their simplicity," says the squire Marcos de Obregon, "persuade themselves that they are the absolute masters of all."
Individualism explains the analogies between Iberian and English history: the civilisation of the Peninsula recalls, in some of its characteristics, that of the Anglo-Saxons. In both we find the premature affirmation of liberty, an excessive pride, and a long struggle against invasions. From this arises an aggressive imperialism: commercial in the north, religious in the south. In England the climate and the territory gave individualism a utilitarian bent; in Spain the conflict with Islam gave it a warlike tendency. Idealism, the inward life, and imaginative exaltation created the Puritans in England; in Spain the mystics and the inquisitors. But in the conquest of hostile circumstances the Saxon acquires a sense of realism; while the Iberian, under a fiery sun, becomes in Spain as in America a hunter of chimeras. A symbol will express the resemblance between the two histories: Ariel and Caliban, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza represent the same eternal dualism of idealism and realism. Caliban has given England a vast empire; the knight-errant has returned to his native La Mancha, exhausted by his barren adventure.
Spanish evolution, and the moral and religious aspects of Peninsular life, are to be explained by this perpetual exaltation of the individual. Stoicism is the moral aspect of individualism. It preaches virility (esto vir. says Seneca): it develops the human will as opposed to Destiny; it is a gospel of austerity in the face of suffering, of silent heroism in the face of death. Seneca is for Roman Spain the teacher of energy; from his teaching proceeds that tenacious faith in character which touches Peninsular history with a grave virility. Christianity, which proclaims human dignity, becomes the national religion south of the Pyrenees. According to the Stoics, all men are equal before Destiny; according to Christ, they are equal before God; and of these two doctrines a formidable pride is born. Finally, in mysticism, the original expression of the religious genius of Spain, there is nothing to recall the pantheism of the Orient, nor the annihilation of man before the Absolute. The Peninsular mystics exalt their individuality, draw strength from the visit of their Friend, become divine through ecstasy, and aspire with the ardour of conquerors to the possession of God. To the German Reformation, which preached predestination, the theologians of Spain opposed free human choice, the efficacy of action, and the dignity and merit of effort. The Spanish religion was by no means satisfied with speculation; it made for action and preached energy. The struggles of Spain have a religious significance; the heroes are mystics and the mystics "knights of the Divine order." Ignatius Loyola and Saint Teresa dream of heroic undertakings and read the romances of chivalry. Mysticism inspires the warriors; faith purifies the covetousness of the conquerors.
Wilful and mystical, the Spanish temperament is active, and expresses itself externally in conflict; it manifests itself in comedy and tragedy. The Peninsular genius is dramatic. Adventure, movement, and the shock of passions are developed in an ample theatre which expresses all the aspects of aggravated individualism. The struggle is not only for independence, but for fame, to preserve the integrity of honour in the general eye. Jealous and revengeful, this preoccupation in respect of honour, which is profoundly Spanish, inspires innumerable tragedies. Antagonisms, ruptures, theses, and antitheses abound in Iberian history; the positivism of Sancho Panza, the idealism of Don Quixote; obstinacy and idleness; sloth and violence; parasitism and adventure; gloom and solemnity such as we find in the paintings of Zurbaran and Ribera, together with the frivolity of harmonious dance and festival and light-headed madness in the hot sunlight; faith in the will and acceptation of destiny; the ardour of mystics and conquerors and the cynicism of rogues and beggars; heroic disinterestedness and passionate covetousness: these are the irreducible contradictions of the Spanish mind, which explain the long conflict, the intensity of the internal drama. On the stage we find the reflection of these conflicts, these indurated wills; subtle passions, grandiose pride, lofty character; tragedies with a touch of farce and comedies with a mystic background. The literature of Chivalry—the immense crop of romances, the rude primitive poetry, the Cid, the Children of Lara—is a commentary upon individualism and action. The great literary types—the hero, the adventurer, the mystic, the noble chieftain, the knight, the lover—are exalted individualities. The picaro himself belongs to this hardy family; he is proud as any knight, and a goodly number of knights are picaresque. Subtle and sceptical, the picaro employs both cunning and heroism in the daily struggle for life. Of "Gongorism," a school of Spanish literature, Martinez-Ruiz has written that it is the expression of movement in language, a dynamic poetry for men of action. Dramas and romances of energy, violent epics, with nothing of the antique serenity: these form the true literature of Spain.
In art and philosophy and literature there are really no schools, but writers, philosophers, and painters; such as El Greco, who left no imitators; solitary individuals such as Gratian and Quevedo. But in Spain we see the triumph of those military and political organisations in which the individual finds the greatest freedom: the people, the tribe, the guerilla band, the battalion. The cult of rebellious and exuberant energy is general. In the relations of king and subject the same Peninsular individualism appears.
"For besar mano de rey
No me tengo por honrado,
Porque la besÓ mi padre
Me tengo por afrentado."
says a Spanish rhyme. Obedience to the king is conditional; it is based upon the monarch's respect for the supreme order of justice, and his submission to a tacit or explicit contract between king and people. Charters, traditions, and usages limit the absolutism of the monarch. In the Cortes of Orcana in 1469 it is declared that the king is the "mercenary" of the people, who pay him a "salary."[2] All Spanish obedience is steeped in this kind of pride; the nobles of Aragon feel themselves individually the equals of the king, and collectively his superior. The cities, federated into hermandades or unions, treat with the monarch; they form a State within the State; they oppose the Government and force it to recognise their privileges. In 1226 the cities of Aragon and Catalonia demand of Jaime II. the grant of a charter of popular rights. Insurrections are frequent, and are incarnated in a hero of the rude national epic: the Cid. Mariana, a historian, authorises any violence directed against royal tyranny.
This individualism upholds a strict justice against the narrowness of the laws and the Byzantine debates of lawyers; against sentences, penalties, and tribunals. Poems and proverbs express this continual clash between the juridic ideal and the law; the Peninsular conscience condemns the partial and precarious justice of the codes. Joaquin Costa writes: "Of all the epics known to me—whether national or racial—the Spanish has done most to elevate the principle of justice, and has rendered the cult of justice most fervent." Austere and inviolable, the law represents a category of eternal relations, beside which all individualities are insignificant, even that of the king, and all institutions fragile, even the Church.
Stoical because it believed in pure justice; nourished by rude heroisms, inward visions, romances, and legends; exalted by mystic dialogues, and hardened by centuries of religious wars; the Spanish spirit, full of enthusiasm, entered upon the Renaissance, that sixteenth century which was to reveal the new continents across the ocean, the laws of Nature behind her mystery, and to create imperious personalities which opposed themselves to Fate. Then Spanish individualism broke out into mysticism, audacity, and adventure: it was the epoch of conquistadors, of politicians, of inquisitors, of Jimenez and Pizarro, Torquemada, Loyola, and Cortez. Spain broke through the circle of the Old World, fought in defence of Christian civilisation at Lepanto, and of Catholicism in Germany and Flanders; coveted the Mediterranean countries; colonised an immense and unknown continent; threatened Europe with the religious imperialism of Charles V. and Philip II., and, thanks to the legions of the Duke of Alba, imposed her will on the Pope. Her policy had the old Roman majesty and force; literature had found its "golden age"; philosophy proposed the vast harmonious solutions of Fox Morcillo, and laid down the bases of natural and national law by the pens of Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto. It was a splendid prodigality of energy, creation, conquest, and heroism—the last stage of a history of violent stoicism, which announced a long and majestic decadence.
Distrustful of hierarchies, Spanish individualism created social and democratic forms. Traditions, doctrines, customs, and laws denoted an exact sense of human equality. "Monachal democracy," said Menendez-Pelayo, in speaking of Spain, because the levelling of all classes offered certain conventual characteristics, and because there was a Christian basis to the fervour of the equalitarians; a "picaresque" democracy, wrote Salillas, alluding to the equality of the knight and the picaro, to the double phenomenon of a proud people making pretensions to nobility and a careless aristocracy continually drifting into democracy by reason of the lack of middle classes and the traditional idleness of the hidalgo. An anarchical democracy, inimical to hierarchy, proud and undisciplined, according to the analysis of Unamuno, in his profound work, En torno al Casticismo; a democratic CÆsarism, thought Oliveira Martins, for the absolutism of the monarch was not feudal royalty, but rather a principality of the Roman type. The king presided over a democracy of knights, mystics, adventurers, and rogues. This spirit of equality may be observed even in the formation of the Spanish aristocracy; the Gothic and hereditary nobility is foreign to the evolution of the Peninsular. The national aristocracy is to be found in the bosom of the Church; it is elective, subject to the current popular vicissitudes, to such a degree that the ecclesiastical councils are more truly national than the military councils and assemblies. Servitude is less rude in mediÆval Spain than in the rest of Europe; the cultivator progresses, but disappears from the other side of the Pyrenees before the invasion of feudalism, and the hired or leasehold cultivator is almost free. There are tributary nobles: between the democracy and the nobility there are no irreducible divisions.
This equalitarian development is especially notable in the political world. In Spain feudalism is not a national institution, and the spirit of Gothic kingship becomes transformed under Iberian influences. In Leon and Castile the nobility are less powerful than in France or other parts of Spain, Catalonia, Navarre, and Aragon.[3] The social classes are not superimposed in rigorous order; cities acquire franchises, and "popular seigneuries" are formed.
The monarchy, too, undergoes this process of levelling or democratisation. The Emperor aims at equilibrium in equality; he destroys the excessive privileges of the aristocracy and the people; in the political conflict he leans to one side or the other alternately. The popular tongue consecrates the equality of the social classes: "In a hundred years a king becomes a thrall; in a hundred and six a thrall becomes a king." "All are equal to the king, except in wealth."
The Spanish commune lasts, because it is the centre of this great democracy. From the beginnings of Peninsular history we see the cities struggling for their independence. They reproduce the djemaa of the Atlas, beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, amid the Berbers, the parents of the Iberians; the djemaa is the African progenitor of the Spanish commune; both make an equal distribution of goods, and endeavour to avoid poverty. The djemaa, or municipality, or commune, isolated and autonomous, constitutes the political unit: the State is a confederation of free cities. The Spanish towns defend their liberties against every form of artificial unity, whether Phoenician, Greek, or Roman. Rome reigns for seven hundred years; but because she partially recognises the autonomy of the municipalities, the Spanish democracy; she increases civil rights, founds small republics, which elect their own magistrates, administer the communal finances, and discuss the payment of imposts and the distribution of lands in their ward. Thus Spanish individualism is satisfied. Rome, absorbing and centralising under the CÆsars, destroys local liberty; but a deep-seated current re-establishes the autonomy of the peoples when the Roman power decays. Assemblies of free citizens govern the cities; the Visigoth monarchy, at the suggestion of the national Church, respects the municipal organisation. Thus a hybrid system springs up, feudal in the Germanic character of the predominant aristocracy, democratic by virtue of the Councils, the Church, and the tenacious power of the cities. In the struggle against the Moors the kings compound with the proud, free cities, conceding charters and municipal privileges in exchange for a tribute of gold or flesh and blood.
Liberty and democracy are of more ancient date in Spain than in England. The charter of Leon, dated 1020, anterior to the great English charter, grants the municipalities an administrative and judicial jurisdiction; it recognises the hereditary rights of the serf in the soil which he tills, and his full liberty to change his seigneur; herein we see a modified feudalism. The first charters of Castile recognised the rights of the cities. In the councils of Burgos in 1169 and of Leon in 1188 the delegates of the municipalities figured; even in the Cortes of Aragon, where the Germanic tradition was predominant, representatives of the cities were admitted as early as the twelfth century. The overlord, who extended his protectorate over a city, did not despoil it of its former sovereignty; the Behetrias were cities or groups of cities which chose as their guardian a baron or warrior chief, without losing anything of their autonomy. The cities, proud of their privileges, united with the royal power in struggling against the nobility; thirty-four of them, in 1295, constituted the Hermandad (brotherhood, guild) of Castile, which eventually numbered as many as a hundred cities. In ancient Spain we are always discovering something of the nature of a contract, a concert of free wills, a perpetual concordat between governors and governed. From the Iberian tribe to the Roman city, from the city with its franchises to the villages grouped in hermandades, and from these to the popular juntas which defend Spain against the power of France and organise an epic resistance, there is an obvious historical continuity. Local patriotism is inimical to ambitious constructive policies. Many peoples invade the Peninsula—Semites, Berbers, Arabs, Copts, Touaregs, Syrians, Kelts, Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Franks, Suabians, Vandals, Goths: they become superimposed like geological strata, draw apart from one another in the mountainous parts of Spain, and convert the quarrels of provinces and the rivalries of cities into regional conflicts and racial antagonisms.
In the clash of Spanish individualities, in the rude assertion of municipal prerogatives, in the democratic developments which are so hostile to any hierarchy, an African or Semitic patriotism is revealed, which converts history into a bloody tragedy. In the arid Castilian plain, confined by its glaring horizons, under its burning sun, we see the spectacle of a proud people defending absolute principles with aggressive faith. Religion is dry and fiery as the desert. SeÑor de Unamuno, writing of Spain,[4] calls her "a nation fanatical rather than superstitious, to whom the Semitic monotheism is better adapted than the Aryan polytheism." Jews and Moors are expelled from the Peninsula in the name of simple and rigid ideals, by an intolerance at once religious and political. Thus the spiritual integrity of Spain is achieved; but industry decays, poverty increases, decadence appears, and in a Spain drained of its blood by autodafÉs and emigrations a solitary cross is raised, the symbol of an African Christianity, to which the love of mankind is a stranger.
Spain is African, even from the prehistoric ages. The Iberian is like the men of the Atlas; like them, he is brown and dolicocephalous. The Kabyle douar and the Spanish village present remarkable analogies. An early geological change separates, by a narrow strait, two similar countries; two successive invasions spread an infusion of African blood throughout the Peninsula. Phoenicians and Carthaginians found colonies in maritime Spain; in 711 seven thousand Berbers establish themselves in the south; and the invasion of the Almohades in 1145 still further unites Iberians and Africans. During the long centuries of conflict between Christians and Arabs the two races intermingle under the cultivated tolerance of the Khalifs. The Gothic kings seek the aid of Arab chieftains in their quarrels; the Cid is a condottiere who fights alternately in the Mussulman and Christian armies, serving, with his troop of heroes, under the highest bidder. The Spanish monarchs in turn intervene in the quarrels of the Khalifs, and Alfonso VI., in 1185, allies himself with the Moorish king of Seville in order to conquer Toledo. The Arabs study under the masters of the Spanish capitals, while the Spaniards study Arabic, and are initiated into Oriental science. The language still preserves traces of the commerce between the two races. The Arabs, sceptical and refined, overlords already enervated by the grace and luxury of Andalusia, rule without fanaticism; they leave the vanquished their religion and their usages, their laws, authorities, and judges; they free such Christian slaves as are converted to Islam. The Mozarabs, Christians who live in the Mussulman States, without renouncing their faith and customs, pave the way for the fusion of the hostile races. In spite of a continual warfare, under the indifferent and alien rule of the Arab both victors and vanquished become subject, as did the first Gothic kings, to the national influence. It seems as though the gradual action of a common life were about to reconstitute the primitive type of man who once peopled Iberia from the Pyrenees to the Atlas.
The originality of Spain, contrasting, in her development, with the Indo-European nations, comes from Africa, from the atavism of the Iberians, from the long domination of the Moors, and from the Semitic Orient.
The anarchy of the tribe persists; the clergy are all-powerful, as are the African marabouts. To the feudal nobility and the European parliament the Peninsula opposes the Councils; to the struggles between Pope and Emperor, the Oriental fusion of religion and the monarchy, the Inquisition, and the omnipotence of the clergy; to the Reformation, the coalition of Catholics with Protestants, and the league of the princes of Christendom with the Sultan, a fanatical Christianity which realises the ideal of national unity by expelling Jews and Moors, and burning sorcerers and heretics in the crackling flames of autodafÉs. When Spain enters upon her decadence her ancient characteristics—individualism, the municipal spirit, and the democratic fervour—disappear, and the African and Semitic influences predominate. Under the theocracy the nation of conquerors degenerates; at Villalar the monarchy conquers the free cities and the arrogant nobility. The clergy reign in school and palace; as in the East, they form a superior caste. Rogues and ruffians—the picaros—succeed to the heroes and adventurers of the days of old; an Oriental parasitism invades the Peninsula, and legions of arrogant beggars people the highways of Castile. It is the final crisis of heroic Quixotism. The Moors are revenged for their defeat, imposing their African fanaticism on an impoverished Peninsula. New Spains across the ocean rise against the decadent mother-country. Exhausted with creating new nations, the conquering race sinks into repose, and a score of democracies prepare to enjoy its moral heritage.
The conquerors—The conquered races—The influence of religion in the new societies—Colonial life.
In the sixteenth century the Spanish race conquered the various kingdoms of America. It founded new societies, destroyed ancient empires, and created cities in the wilderness; and in the following century it made innumerable laws and sent forth innumerable warlike expeditions. Between one period and the next—the rude epic of conquest and the tame existence of the civilised colonies—a strange contrast is to be observed.
In the first period cupidity may be said to be the deus ex machina of the great epic acted by the conquerors: there is a bloody and barbarous conflict with the unknown territory, the hostile Indians, the mysterious forests, the enormous rivers, and the desert that swallows whole legions. This marvellous age is followed, in the silent cities, by a monotonous, pious, puerile existence. Exhausted by heroism, the race declines, mingles itself with the Indians, imports black slaves from Africa, and obeys its Inquisitors and viceroys. The obscure events of its lamentable existence take place in a veritable wilderness. Grey and unrelieved is this period, the period known as "the Colony," for the unstable societies of America reflect the life of Spain; while the first, that of the Conquest, is an age of greed and bloodshed, in which the impetuous adventurers of the Peninsula roam from Mexico to Patagonia, realising, in the words of de Heredia's sonnet, their "brutal and heroic dream."
The Spaniard and the Portuguese of the sixteenth century were men of the Renaissance; of that age which was perturbed by the restored spectacle of the life of the world. Voyages, discoveries, Greek myths and classic poems, which filled the past with legends and heroic deeds, gave the Latins of the Mediterranean the longing to explore lands and seas unknown. Individuality developed with an energy that often merged in crime. Tyrants or conquerors longing for power and adventure lived in regions far removed from ideals of good and evil. Mystics—for the mediÆval gloom still hung over Europe—they joined cupidity to faith, and renounced a life of contemplation in order to push back the limits of the world. Heirs of the Phoenician ambition, the Portuguese encircled Africa before discovering America; and many a Spanish captain, before invading the regions oversea, had fought in Flanders, pillaged Rome, and repeated the journey of Don Quixote across La Mancha.
The soul of the conquistador combined audacity with covetousness, superstition with cruelty, the pride of the hidalgo with the rigour of the ascetics, a rigid individualism and a thirst for glory with an infallible faith in the greatness of its own destiny. The adventurers of the Peninsula were professors of energy: like the Italian condottieri, like the captains of the Napoleonic epic. A group of adventurers enslaved the empire of Mexico, destroyed the power of the Incas, and defeated the indomitable Araucan. Cortez burned his ships when his companions spoke of renouncing the difficult enterprise of conquest. Pizarro, with twelve of his lieutenants, resolved, in a desert island, to invade Peru.
Cortez conquered Mexico; Pizarro and Almagro, Peru; Valdivia and Almagro, Araucania; Jimenez de Quesada and Benalcazar, the territories of Colombia; Pedro de Alvarado, Guatemala; Martinez de Irala, Paraguay; Juan de Garay, the province of La Plata; Martin Affonso, the Souzas and others, Brazil. Others brought from Italy the spirit of the Renaissance; such was Pedro de Mendoza, enriched by the sack of Rome, who, in 1554, organised an expedition to the Rio de la Plata. The sixteenth century, the age of discoveries, was also the age of conquest. From all the provinces of Spain and Portugal adventurers poured into America. The energetic Basques led the way; but there were fiery Estremadurans, austere Castilians, meditative Portuguese, and witty Andalusians. Triumph lay before them; they advanced to conquest over the ruins of cities and the bodies of Indians. Their incredible prowess often ended in their death upon the soil they trod as intruders and invaders.
The America conquered by the Spaniards and Portuguese was peopled by various races and occupied by many different civilisations. The invaders unified all these regions, imposing uniform laws, customs, and religion. In Brazil they found scattered tribes: Tupis, Tupinambas, Caribs; in Paraguay, the Guaranis; in Uruguay, the Charruas. The organisation of these peoples of hunters and fishers was simple; in time of war as in peace they obeyed their chiefs. These vast territories presented many different tongues, and an infinite variety of tribes, clans, and societies; ranging from cannibalism and savagery, through the primitive forms of culture, to nomadism and the sedentary state. The Araucanians of Chili, a warlike people, held assemblies to decide upon war, joined in confederations, and obeyed a cacique, who was the strongest and bravest man of the tribe. They lived in isolation the better to preserve their independence.
Three barbaric monarchies—the Chibchas or Muiscas in Colombia, the Incas in Peru, and the Aztecs in Mexico—which boasted of laws, majestic cities, social classes, colleges of priests, reigning dynasties, organised armies, academic myths, and even hieroglyphs and astrologers (not unlike those of Assyria)—differed profoundly in their complex political organisation from the tribes of America. Although the Incas were not the liberal princes of Marmontel's dream, and although the history of their rule was not an idyll, their meticulous and beneficent tyranny did after long wars of conquest erect in the ancient Tahuantisuyu a great empire of silent obedience, an anticipation of the ideals of State Socialism. Property was collective, and existence subject to strict regulations. The Incas made labour obligatory, supervised all agricultural operations, and respected, when they extended their domains, the rites and customs of vanquished races.
If the Inca monarchy recalls the great empires of Asia, China, and Assyria, Mexico, on the other hand, appears to have been a feudal kingdom in which caciques, governors of vast provinces, ruled beside the absolute monarch. "There is no general overlord," observed Cortez. There was a central authority, as in Peru, but the Mexican despotism was more rude and barbarous than that of the Incas; the blood of human victims dripped from its smoking altars. The social organism had not reached the degree of perfection attained by the Inca monarchy.
The Spanish and Portuguese conquerors, with their mediÆval ideas, their African fanaticism, their marvellous ships, and their powerful weapons, terrified these peoples who were still dwelling in the age of bronze and polished stone. Historians report the surprise of these hungry adventurers before the treasures of Mexico and Peru. Atahualpa offered to fill with gold the chamber in which Pizarro held him prisoner. The court of Montezuma displayed an Asiatic luxury: surrounded with women, buffoons, idols, and strange birds, under a resplendent canopy loaded with gold and jewels, the Aztec monarch advances like a king in an Oriental tale. His escort is of haughty princes. The imperial city abounds in temples, lakes, and causeways; it is melancholy and sumptuous, the capital of Mexico. The chroniclers of the time tell us how the cupidity of the conquistadors was awakened: men who had left a ruined Spain to find these immense treasures in America; they are writing for impoverished hidalgos, and fear that they will not be believed when they speak of this fabulous abundance of gold. Since the days of Ophir and the Queen of Sheba, says one of these historians, "no ancient writing had ever stated that gold, silver, and jewels" had ever been discovered in such vast quantities as those which Castile was about to receive from her new colonies.
The soldiers of the conquest pillaged these treasures, sacked temples and palaces, and quarrelled over their wealth in a series of tragic struggles. Around the mines cities sprang up and parties were formed; at Potosi VicuÑas and Biscayans, excited by the sight of the metal which delighted their cupidity, prolonged the savagery of the first conflict. Where minerals existed the colonial life was unstable, harsh, and brutal; in poor countries, such as Chili and the Argentine, societies were slowly formed which cultivated the soil: tenacious oligarchies bound to the new country by solid interests.
The vanquished races and the victors differed greatly from one another; hence amidst the political and moral unity of the new societies arose different characteristics and incipient antagonisms. Spaniards and Portuguese took Indian wives or women; the leaders married princesses of Mexico and Peru; the soldiers founded provisional homes in the colonies. The Andalusians settled in the tropics; the Basques in the temperate regions; and the Castilians swarmed in the towns. A curious affinity of race, as between the Basques and the Araucanians, and analogies of climate and landscape, and, apart from these factors, the erratic wanderings of the conquerors, explain this original diversity of the American provinces. Why should they be similar: the offspring of the gentle Indian Quechuas and the fiery Andalusians; the children of the virile Araucanians and the calm, reasonable Basques? Wherever the native population was more abundant, and the political organisation more complicated, as in Mexico and Peru, its influence on miscegenation was more potent than in colonies from which the Indian was disappearing (as the Charruas of Uruguay or the nomadic tribes of Brazil) before the onset of civilisation. The climate, severe on the plateaux, and favourable to an energetic existence, warm and enervating on the coast, contributed to the variety of human types. The first families sprung of the sensuality of the conquerors already revealed the elements of future developments.
It was an age of creation: races and cities, new rites and customs; all were sprung of the crossing of Iberian and Indian. The diversity of the elements whose fusion was paving the way for a new caste gave mankind an interesting variety. The negro, imported by the Spaniard for the cultivation of the tropical soil, added yet another complication to the first admixture of castes. Grotesque generations with every shade of complexion and every conformation of skull were born in America from the unions stimulated by the kings of Spain. In the Anglo-Saxon provinces of North America the climate only changed the invaders; in the Iberian colonies the conquered race, the land itself, the air they breathed, all modified the conquerors. Creation, the synthesis of human elements, action and reaction between the country and the men who ruled it, a crucible continually agitated by unheard-of fusions of races; all this gave the process of evolution the intensity and the aspect of a continual conflict. From the negro bozal recently imported from Africa to the quinteron, the offspring of slaves purified by successive unions with the whites; from the Indian who mourned his monotonous servitude in the solitude of the mountains, to the coloured student of the universities, we find, in the seventeenth century as in the twentieth, in the colonies as in the republics, every variety of this admixture of Iberians, Indians, and Africans. From a social point of view the rank of the individual corresponded generally with the shade of his epidermis. "In America," wrote Humboldt at the beginning of the nineteenth century, "the more or less white skin determines the position which a man holds in society."
The Spaniard degenerated in the colonies. The passage from a period of violence to one of conventual quietude betrayed this slow decadence of the invader, under the pressure of the climate and in contact with the conquered races. The Creole, the Spaniard born in America, has lost the prickly characteristics of the hidalgo: the proud individualism, the love of bloody adventure, the stoicism, the tenacity in resistance and conflict, and the rigidity of faith.
In flexibility, brilliance, and grace he has surpassed the rude Iberian; but his effort is transitory, his will weak; his hatred is as ephemeral as his love. The new race produces neither mystics nor men of action, but poets, orators, admirable intriguers, superficial scholars, brilliant commentators of exotic ideas; from the seventeenth century onwards they succeed to the first generation of audacious colonists, heroic monks, and warlike captains.
To extend the domains of the monarch, to "cause the Indians to live in the knowledge of our Catholic faith," they conquered America, and they brought to the New World a religion, a political rÉgime, universities, an economic system—all the elements, in short, of a traditional civilisation. Absolutism in government, monopoly in matters of commerce and finance, intolerance in questions of dogma and morality, tutelage and rigorous isolation; these were the foundations of Spanish colonisation. The methods practised by the Dutch and the English in their colonies were not essentially different. Toqueville and Boutmy have studied the effects, in the United States, of Calvinistic intolerance and commercial monopoly. They have remarked upon the slavery of negroes in the agricultural districts of Virginia, and the cupidity of the emigrants who pursued the Indians with a truly Puritan ardour.
The viceroy, the representative of the monarch, exercised full powers of government in the colonies. He presided over the Real Audiencia, the king's tribunal, was superintendent of finances, protector of the Church, and chief of the army. To him all power was subordinate, whether ecclesiastical, military, or civil. A luxurious court surrounded him, the flattery of courtiers intoxicated him, and subornation had its way with him. Sometimes the viceroys represented the real aspirations of the colonists, and were serious legislators, such as Francisco de Toledo, in Peru; or they defended the colonists from the expeditions of filibusters with such energy that their fiercely contested battles evoked the sentiment of nationality. At other times they enriched themselves by the sale of posts, and drained the treasury, or passed in progress through the cities of their state, haughty overlords surrounded with luxury and gold.
To her political despotism corresponds the commercial monopoly which Spain established in her dominions. Humboldt defined the ancient ideal of the colonising races in his "Essay on the Government of New Spain": "For centuries a colony was regarded as useful to the metropolis only inasmuch as it furnished a great number of raw materials and consumed plenty of goods and merchandise, which were borne by the vessels of the mother-country."[1] England, Holland, Spain, and Portugal acted upon the same exclusivist principles; the ordinances of Cromwell were as inflexible on this point as the schedules of Philip II. Commercial liberty and industrial competition were condemned on the same grounds as rebellion and heresy.
Politics and economics were subordinated to religion; the third combined the absolutism of the first and the monopoly of the second. The conquest of America was apostolic. The Spanish captains fought to convert the overseas infidels. The imperialism of Charles V. and Philip II. had a religious character. To preserve the colonies from heresy it closed the ports, prohibited all traffic with foreigners, and imposed a conventual seclusion upon a whole world. The Church was the centre of colonial life. She governed in the spiritual order; imposed punishments, flagellations, exile, and excommunication, and delivered unbelievers and sorcerers to the purifying care of the Inquisition. In the department of morals she kept a watchful eye upon the people; she defended the Indians, and often opposed the governors. Viceroy and cacique feared her equally. A formidable moral power, she helped to discipline the unruly Creoles, to unite classes and races, and to form nations. The cities were adorned by her chapels and convents, and to these convents, in pious mood, the hidalgos often left all their possessions.
Thus property became a monopoly of the convents. Hence a plethora of monks and nuns, and the accumulation, in Mexico and at Lima, of enormous wealth. In Peru the annual income of the archbishop amounted to £8,000, and that of some bishops to £4,000. What with bishops and viceroys there was no lack of luxury. A pompous and sensual Catholicism satisfied the imagination of the Creoles, the superstitious fears of the Indians, and the cheerful materialism of the negroes. The Aztec, the quechua, accepted from the monks a strange, Byzantine dogma, mingled with aristocratic ideals and Oriental mysteries. The native soon confounded the two mythologies. In Mexico, so Humboldt reported, "the Holy Ghost is the sacred eagle of the Aztecs." Novel and sumptuous rites were added to the traditional religion. Processions and festivals, a kind of continual religious fair, united all races. The people loved the cult of religion, with its external manifestations, its virgins loaded with heavy ex-votos, its sorrowing Christs, its gorgeously-decked saints, and the glitter of gold and silk.
As confessor the priest influenced the family and directed the education of children; as preacher he condemned immorality and judged the governors. As in Byzantium, as in the Florence of Savonarola, the colonial monk, speaking in the name of the exploited populace, was an austere professor of virtue. The Creole admired his ecclesiastical learning, and his invincible attitude before the powers of this world; in him the Indian found a protector.
The American colonies differed in social composition. The negro abounded in Peru and Cuba, but soon disappeared in Chili and the Argentine. The poverty of Araucania contrasted with the opulence of Caracas, Lima, and Mexico. In the Aztec capital some territorial seigneurs drew forty thousand a year sterling in revenues. Frezier valued the jewels of a rich lady of Lima at 240,000 livres of silver. The melancholy Sierra, peopled by Indians, contrasted with the life of the coast, where luxurious cities attracted the traveller. In the cities of the interior, Cordoba or Charcas, we find settled traditions, tenacity, and sobriety, but in the capitals of the coast all is luxury, instability, and licence.
Spain tended to destroy this variety by uniform laws.[2] Originality was as odious to her as heresy. Customs and beliefs, hierarchies and privileges, all must be uniform. Under such a rÉgime the life of the colonies was dull and monotonous. The cities slumbered, lulled by the murmur of prayers and fountains. Idleness was the natural condition of the Creole; lengthy meals and daily siestas limited his inconsiderable activities. The empty streets and squares knew hours of silence; rejoicings were ordered, and the orders pasted on the hoardings; gaiety itself was imposed. It seemed as though time itself must stand still in these cities of parallel streets; that the ideal of all men must be absolute quietude.
The hidalgo of noble origin, the owner of vast domains, governed his sons and his slaves with the severity of a Roman patrician. He could be neither merchant nor manufacturer; commerce and industry were "low callings." He was attracted rather by the bar, the subtleties of the "doctors," the scholarship and poetry of the courts. Whether at the university or the cabildo (municipality), his life would be the same. He would sing the glory of viceroys in Gongoric rhymes, or commentate upon Duns Scotus, or meticulously construct acrostics or syllogisms. In the cafÉ, at social gatherings, in the literary salons, he would whisper criticisms of the governors and the bishops, or discuss the titles to nobility of a marquis of recent creation, or the purity of blood of an enriched mulatto. A conventual chapter, or the quarrel of a bishop and a viceroy, or a bull-fight, would fill him with ecstasy. Attending mass in the morning, and in the evening driving through the stately streets in a luxurious calÈche, the proud caballero would bear himself majestically. At night, in his gloomy house, he would find his wife telling her beads, surrounded by docile slaves.
Sensuality and mysticism were the pleasures of the colonists. The convents themselves, despite their high walls, were not able to shut out these violent delights. Licentious monks, nuns with lovers, sprightly abbÉs, figure in the chronicles of the period as in the Italian contes. The cloister, with its rich arabesques, the patio (courtyard) perfumed with orange-blossom, the murmuring jet of the fountain: these evoke the passion of Andalusia. A devout society pays the insatiable convents a tribute of gold and virgins; and love, fleeing the dead cities, takes refuge in cells quick with ambition and unruly desires.
The woman, guarded in the Oriental fashion, in houses strong as fortresses, attracts society to her salon by her Parisian grace; in a world of ponderous scholars she is famous for her amenity and subtlety. Her fidelity, for the hidalgo, is a question of his honour. The husband revenges himself for transgressions by terrible punishments, as in the Calderonian drama, while the heroic lover brings his exasperated desires to the Moorish balcony, where he awaits his lady in torment. Away from home, a host of illegitimate unions, of concubines, of clandestine amours.
Passion will be tragic and devotion voluptuous; in place of mystics we shall find illuminÉs. The devil is the essential personage of this religion of minutiÆ; thanks to him the dreary colonial life is surrounded by mystery; his appearances and his manoeuvres thrill the Creole's blood. Hobgoblins, sorcerers, spells, thefts of the consecrated host, and exorcisms occupy the Inquisition; tales of incubi and succubi, of pacts with Satan, of ghosts that expiate their old offences in long-abandoned houses; absurd miracles of saints; processions mingling with the dances of slaves; gaily decked temples and parasitic rights which stifle the traditional faith, deprive the Catholicism of Spain of its Semitic rigidity.
All through life the pious colonist is surrounded by marvels. He loves nature with an ingenuous faith, and attributes to the saints and demons a continual intervention in his placid existence. An unexpected sound reveals the presence of a soul in torment; a tremor of the earth, the divine wrath; sickness is a proof of diabolic influence; health, of the efficacy of an amulet. In the pharmacies chimerical products may be purchased—condor's grease, unicorn's horns, and the claws of the "great beast."
The monotonous hours are passed in devotions and futilities, prayers and conventual disputes, long ceremonies and useless entertainments. Sometimes the even course of life is interrupted by a startling feat of prowess, or a festival, all gold and servility; the royal seals have arrived, a princess is born in Spain, a treasure has been discovered, a port has been sacked by audacious pirates, or sorcerers or Portuguese Jews are to be burned in an imposing autodafÉ. Then the provincial cities, slowly threaded by sumptuous processions, are all astir, but the dazzling vision is only ephemeral, and the grey monotony returns, with its petty quarrels, its indolence, its exaggerated rites.
The royal seals arrive under a pallium, and a luxuriously appointed horse advances, bearing the treasure. The spectators kneel before the symbol of monarchical majesty, and incense, as at the feet of a Byzantine ikon, expresses the adoration of believers. The viceroy also enters beneath a canopy, passing in solemn procession through the servile city, while the bells of a hundred churches celebrate his advent, and a solemn cohort of cabildantes in their robes, monks of all orders, and bedizened doctors, praise with courtier-like devotion the glory of the royal messenger. In the religious festivals the majestic altars which the devout, in token of penitence, carry upon their shoulders, bear virgins clad in velvets and glittering with jewels, or saints that bow to one another like courtly hidalgos, or Christs that weep before the wondering crowd. Around these gorgeous altars dance the slaves, and the monks chant a melancholy anthem. Seized by a sacred intoxication, men and women scourge their bodies till they bleed.
The cry of anguish mingles with the monotony of the prayers, amidst the tremulous excitement of the faithful.
The autodafÉs were the supreme feast of blood. The chronicles of the time praise the "marvellous" spectacle. The funeral procession advanced towards the pyre, surrounded by burlesque and fanatical groups. Groaning monks hemmed in the sorcerers, the blasphemers, the heretics; some bearing a yellow and others a green veil, and lugubrious draperies on which were miniature paintings descriptive of the infernal torments; others wore dunces' caps, which excited the cruelty of the people. As the victims proceeded to the pyre a crowd thirsting for the sight and sound of martyrdom, drunken with the heat of the sun, acclaimed the holocaust beneath the impassive tribune of the Inquisitors. Farce and grotesque invention mingled with tragedy, Oriental luxury with a mystic terror; and the great lady who at night would be dancing the pavane in her salon now devoutly sniffed the acrid stench of charred flesh and blood.
CHAPTER III
THE STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE
I. Economic and political aspects of the struggles—Monarchy and the Republic—The leaders: Miranda, Belgrano, Francia, Iturbide, King Pedro I., Artigas, San Martin, Bolivar—Bolivar the Liberator: his ideas and his deeds.
II. Revolutionary ideology—Influence of Rousseau—The Rights of Man—The example of the United States—English ideas in the constitutional projects of Miranda and Bolivar—European action: Canning.
I. Oppressed by theocracy and monopoly, by privileged castes and Peninsular functionaries, the Spanish and Portuguese colonies aspired towards independence. The English provinces of the North separated themselves from England for practical reasons; in the struggles of the South we see a double economic and political motive. In some vice-royalties, such as that of La Plata, the struggle was due chiefly to an opposition of interests; in other provinces, as in Venezuela, ideas of political reform were predominant.
Writers have attempted to explain the unanimity of the liberative movement by a "historical materialism" analogous to that of Karl Marx and Labriola; but the reality, richer and more complex, does not submit itself to this logical simplicity. The revolution was not merely an economic protest; it nourished concrete social ambitions. An equalising movement, it aimed at the destruction of privileges, of the arbitrary Spanish hierarchy, and finally, when its levelling instinct was aroused and irritated, the destruction of authority to the profit of anarchy. The Creoles, deprived of all political function, revolted; in matters of economics they condemned excessive taxation and monopoly; in matters of politics they attacked slavery, the Inquisition, and moral tutelage. Charles III. had recognised, in 1783, in spite of the counsels of his minister Aranda, the independence of the United States, which were to serve his own colonies as precedent, and he expelled the Jesuits from America, the defence of the Indians against the oppression of Spanish governors. The corruption of the courts, the sale of offices, and the tyranny of the viceroys, all added to the causes of discontent, disturbance, and poverty.
The Creoles opposed nationality to patriotism, the half-castes opposed democracy to the oligarchies. These were two phases of a great revolution. The first battle was over in 1830, and the conflict between the privileged class and the democracy commenced. It reached its culminating point about 1860, with the enfranchisement of the slaves, but it continued during the rest of the century and engendered an interminable civil discord.
The Spanish provinces, subjected to a political absolutism, transformed themselves into republics, a change of system that was not effected without a moral crisis. Even while fighting their battles the Creoles sought uneasily for a new mould into which to pour their liberalism. In the face of increasing disorder they had thoughts of a monarchy, of an oligarchic republic, of a permanent presidency: of various forms which might possess the necessary stability. Three phases may be distinguished in the movement of liberation: the colonial, the monarchical, and the republican.
During the first phase the colonists manifested their loyalty to the Peninsular monarchy.
The first colonial juntas, in 1809 and 1810, desired the Spanish suzerainty to be preserved. They invoked the feudal tie which bound them to the monarch, the imprisoned Ferdinand VII. The French were triumphant in the Peninsula, but they swore fidelity to the absent king. Vassalage having been destroyed by the foreign invasion, the colonies, in accordance with the law of las partidas, acquired the right of self-government; they were reserved for the king. The juntas disguised their radical ambitions under legal forms. Their effort towards traditionalism was perhaps sincere on some occasions, but the current of revolution, which was gathering itself together in the womb of history, destroyed these provisional vistas. Thus the cabildo of Buenos-Ayres declared that "no obligations would be recognised other than those due to his person" (the King's). Spaniards and Americans joined in taking an oath of fidelity to Ferdinand VII. The captain-general of Venezuela, deprived of his functions in 1810, was replaced by a "Supreme Junta," preserving the rights of the sovereign, and the oath of fidelity to the monarch was observed. In 1809 the Junta of La Paz, which emancipated the Creoles, and the revolt of Quito, recognised the same royal tutelage. The Chilian regulations of 1811 enacted that the executive power should govern in the name of the king. In 1821 Iturbide proclaimed his submission to the king upon founding the empire of Mexico.
It was an ephemeral loyalty, given to a king who had abdicated, who had suffered exile, and who, after the liberal Cortes of Cadiz, re-established a despotic government. These immense colonies did not revolt merely in order to restore an incapable prince to his throne. While newly-created generals were winning battles political autonomy was becoming a fact. The Creoles, who had directed the revolutionary movement, concealed their bold ambitions from a populace that was passive, a slave to routine, and largely royalist.
GABINO BARREDA. Great Mexican Educationalist GENERAL JOSÉ ANTONIO PAEZ. President of Venezuela (1831-1935 and 1838-1842)
GABINO BARREDA.
Great Mexican Educationalist
GENERAL JOSÉ ANTONIO PAEZ.
President of Venezuela (1831-1935 and 1838-1842)
The American Élite were monarchists. In liberating a continent their generals and statesmen professed to endow the new nations with the stability of a monarchy. Iturbide was Emperor of Mexico. The lieutenants of Bolivar offered the latter a crown; Paez persistently held the imperial ambition before him. Belgrano, in 1816, at the Congress of Tucuman, stated that the best form of government for the Argentine was "a tempered monarchy"; and many deputies in that Assembly demanded the restoration of the throne of the Incas and of its traditional seat at Cuzco: in short, the creation of an American dynasty.
Bolivar wished to see Colombia and Spanish America constitutional monarchies with foreign princes. Ministers were to exercise a policy "of vigilance or defence, of mediation or influence, of protection or tutelage" on the part of the great European states in respect of the Colombian nation. Other partisans of the monarchy were Flores, Sucre, Monteagudo, Garcia del Rio, Riva-AgÜero, and the Argentine director Posadas, who wished to establish that form of government "on solid and permanent foundations" in the provinces of La Plata; Dean Funes, the Colombians NariÑo, Mosquera, Briceno Mendez, and others. The founders of South American independence understood that only a strong government could save the new nations from demagogy, anarchy, warfare between military chiefs, and untimely provincial ambitions. They wanted autonomy without licence, monarchy without despotism, and political solidity without Spanish suzerainty.
Despite this conviction on the part of the revolutionaries, South America saw the birth of the Republic. Alberdi wrote that its origin was involuntary, and that it was the result of European indifference and Yankee egoism; more than involuntary, it was spontaneous. The demagogues and the crowd accepted it as the negation of monarchy. The latter symbolised the Gothic despotism, the old humiliating domination, the persistence of castes and municipal privilege. In the popular mind, naturally of a simplifying tendency, monarchy was slavery; anarchy and the republic were liberty; there was no distinction between the King of Spain and other princes, between the absolutism of Ferdinand VII. and the constitutional monarchy of England. A universal hatred condemned all kings. The republic was not so much an organisation or a political system as a negation, and indissolubly bound up with it were the cardinal ideas of country, equality, and liberty.
Monarchy offered America stability and independence; it would have prevented civil war and avoided half a century of anarchy. It was the sole American tradition. The battles of the Revolution gave the hegemony to ambitious generals; against these a central government, above the quarrels of parties, would have defended liberal institutions. A constitutional prince would have given these divided nations unity and continuity, under the pressure of which ambitions, parties, and classes would finally have found their places. The social elevation of half-castes and mulattos would have been less violent under such a system.
Finally, the American monarchy would have entered into the group of Occidental nations, and the Monroe doctrine would not have isolated her politically from the Europe that sent her men, money, and ideas.
But would it have been possible to found respectable and lasting dynasties in America? The fall of two empires, Mexico and Brazil, tells us that republicanism is obscurely implicated with the destinies of the country. The new States had no nobles to surround a prince, nor could they have supported the luxury of a court.
The equalitarian instinct condemned all hierarchies in America, and there were no princes to become creators of nationality as in modern Europe. The viceroys and semi-feudal barons exercised an ephemeral empire and were not Americans; the colonies were used to frequent changes of authority. To these reasons in favour of a republic we must add the danger that foreign monarchies might have involved the continent in the diplomatic complications of Europe. Perhaps even the Holy Alliance would have led the colonies back to Spain, as a prodigal child is led back to its parents.
Bolivar expounded the defects of a foreign monarchy. To the imported king he would have preferred the irremovable president and the English senate, and if in the face of advancing anarchy he glanced at the question of European princes he soon understood that it could never prove a radical solution of the problems of the New World. "There is no power more difficult to maintain than that of a new prince" he told the Bolivians. There were in America "neither great nobles nor great prelates, and without these two props no monarchy is permanent." To the Liberator kings symbolised tyranny; he connected independence with republicanism, and believed that nature itself would oppose the monarchical system in America. In 1829, in a letter to Vergera, the Colombian Minister of Foreign Affairs, he expressed his arguments against the monarchy with great precision: "No foreign prince," he wrote, "would accept as his patrimony a principality which was anarchical and without guarantees; the national debts and the poverty of the country leave no means to entertain a prince and a court, even miserably; the lower classes would take alarm, fearing the effects of aristocracy and inequality; the generals and the ambitious of every stamp could never support the idea of seeing themselves deprived of the supreme command; the new nobility indispensable to a monarchy would issue from the mass of the people, with every species of jealousy on the one hand and of pride on the other. No one would patiently endure such a miserable aristocracy, steeped in ignorance and poverty and full of ridiculous pretensions." The creator of five nations, Bolivar was profoundly conscious of the new social body, a disturbed and disorganised mass. He understood that the ambition of his lieutenants and the equalitarian tendency of the mob would oppose an American monarchy or a foreign principality. Iturbide and Maximilian, two emperors dethroned and shot, have justified his objections.
England, who might have founded constitutional monarchies in America, in spite of the Holy Alliance, pursued a commercial rather than a political policy. In 1829 Lord Aberdeen announced that his Government would not permit the establishment of a French or English prince, nor a prince of any other European dynasty, in Colombia. He would accept only a Spanish prince, or the monarchy of Bolivar himself.[1] The Conde de Aranda proposed to the King of Spain that America should be divided into nations governed by the Infantas, but his plan was not followed up. Once the independence of America was a fact, and the despotism of Ferdinand VII. re-established, no Spanish prince could be acceptable either to Argentina or Colombia. In the face of European indifference the tentative efforts of the monarchists spent themselves in America, and the continent acquired its definitive individuality. In opposition to the monarchies by divine right of the Old World a liberal world came to birth; incoherent and incipient nationalities adopted equalitarian constitutions, which were, in the distant future, to flood their deserted territories with immense moral and material forces.
From Mexico to Chili the same revolutionary fervour engendered the partial movements of 1808 to 1811. Conspirators similar to the Italian carbonari, lodges in which men spoke of liberty in the midst of ingenuous rites, and university students who had read the EncyclopÆdists, were preparing the great crusade. The year 1809 was the first of the Revolution. On the 1st of January there was a popular rising in Buenos-Ayres; on the 16th of July a revolt at La Paz; on the 2nd of August a meeting took place at Quito. In 1806 an English expedition attacked Buenos-Ayres. At a venture, on his way home from Africa, an officer who entertained ambitions in the direction of new territory and new sources of wealth—Sir Home Popham—invaded the capital of the viceroyalty of La Plata. This city was defended not by the legitimate Spanish authority, but by a noble caudillo, who was soon to be a popular viceroy: Santiago de Liniers, the hero of the "Reconquest." In this struggle against the imperialist invader the Argentine people found the first revelation of nationality. First they freed themselves from the English; then from the Spaniards. On the 25th of May, 1810, the cabildo abierto (the municipality and the people), who had united on the 22nd, demanded the dismissal of the viceroy, and elected a governmental and revolutionary junta, patriotic but undecided. As early as 1808, in Montevideo, a junta formed in the heat of a violent popular commotion had turned against the viceroy of Buenos-Ayres.
Spain implacably condemned these precursors of the Independence. She exiled or strangled the rebels, Zela in Peru; Dr. Espejo in Ecuador; Gual y EspaÑa in Venezuela; two indomitable priests, Hidalgo and Morelos, in Mexico; Father Camilo Henriquez and Dr. Martinez de Rosas in Chili; Tiradentes in Brazil; NariÑo in Colombia; all, between 1780 and 1810, struggled against the governors and viceroys, and in their liberal enthusiasm were precursors of the audacious wars of the future. The most notable of these was a Byronic individual, the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda. He was born in Caracas in 1756. He had a brilliant career in Europe, knew ministers and monarchs, was the favourite of Catherine of Russia, fought beside Dumouriez in the armies of the French Revolution, went to the United States with the legion which Spain sent thither to fight in the cause of American independence, obtained the sanction of Pitt to lead revolutionary expeditions against the Spanish authorities in Venezuela, and was concerned in all the liberative movements of his time, whether in Caracas or Buenos-Ayres. He formed an alliance between the destinies of the continent and the ambition of England, the gold of the London bankers, and the interests of English merchants, and so contributed, even more than by his abortive enterprises, to the cause of American liberty.
The cycle of the Precursors closed and that of the Liberators opened. The Spanish reaction had not vanquished the revolutionary principle. The first caudillos were dead; they were replaced by fresh leaders: the Directors, energetic and impassioned: Belgrano and San Martin in the Argentine, Dr. Francia in Paraguay, Artigas in Uruguay, Iturbide in Mexico, General Morazan in Central America, King Pedro I. in Brazil, and Bolivar, the liberator of five republics.
GENERAL FRANCISCO DE MIRANDA (VENEZUELA). Who prepared for the liberation of his country.
GENERAL FRANCISCO DE MIRANDA (VENEZUELA).
Who prepared for the liberation of his country.
Belgrano, an economic reformer, a supporter of commercial liberty, a founder of schools, was the leader of the Argentine emancipation. He fought in Paraguay, where he suggested autonomy; in Uruguay, in the Argentine Sierra, and on the frontiers of Upper Peru. He was not a fortunate leader; he won the battle of Tucuman, but he was defeated by the royalists in other battles: Vilcapugio and Ayohuma. He retired, then returned to the struggle; took part in the civil wars against the dissident leaders, defended the constitutional monarchy at the Congress of Tucuman, and from 1808 to 1820 personified the uncertain progress of the Argentine revolution.
San Martin was his superior as a successful fighter, and in the scope of his action as liberator; he was a continental figure. A great general, able to organise armies and lead them to victory, his mind was methodical and conservative; he disliked abstractions, and was concrete and positive in his plans. He delivered Chili and contributed to the independence of Peru. While others were drawing up political programmes he was winning battles. He recalls Washington by the disinterested nobility of his character; he refused power after liberating two nations, and condemned himself to exile, being surrounded by ambitious generals who quarrelled for the supreme power. In action he was simple and orderly, and progressive; he defeated the Spaniards at San Lorenzo in 1813, giving proof of admirable warlike qualities; he then led the army of the North which fought in Upper Peru, and became the intendant of an Argentine province, Cuyo, in 1814. There he formed an army, and proposed to cross the Andes to the aid of the Chilian patriots. According to a French military critic, M. Charles Malo, "the passage of the Andes was in no way surpassed by the more famous passage of the Alps by the French." The summits of the Cordilleras are over twelve thousand feet high; and it was across them that the army of San Martin, decimated and heroic, victorious over cold and fatigue, made its way into Chili. From that time forward the Argentine leader was an American general. At the foot of the Cordilleras, on the flanks of Chacabuco, he gained a decisive battle over the Spaniards (1817). He dislodged them from the summits which they occupied and entered Santiago in triumph, and was there proclaimed supreme director of Chili. He accepted the command of the armies, and was thereafter victorious at Maipo (1818), where his artillery put the royalists to flight. Chilian independence once assured, he aspired to fresh victories in Peru. American autonomy was his unfaltering ambition.
The Peruvian viceroyalty was the centre of the Spanish power, the treasury and arsenal of the royalists. Bolivar, in Colombia, and San Martin, in Chili, understood that all their victories would remain futile if they did not defeat Spain in the richest and most impregnable of her domains. Lord Cochrane, an English privateer, who had seen service in the Mediterranean, formed a squadron in Chilian waters for the purpose of dominating the Pacific (1819). He defeated the Spanish fleet at Callao, and declared a blockade of the Peruvian ports as far as Guayaquil. During this time San Martin was making ready, with his Argentine and Chilian troops, for his expedition of liberation. The Peruvian revolutionaries were awaiting him. He landed at Pisco (1820) with his army, and proclaimed the independence of Peru at Lima, which the Spaniards had deserted, on the 21st of July, 1821. Appointed Protector of the Republic which he had founded, he promulgated a provisional Constitution. Then from the North came another Liberator, Bolivar, to discuss with San Martin, in that mysterious interview at Guayaquil, the destinies of the Spanish New World.
SAN MARTIN. General of Argentine, Liberator of Chile, and Protector of Peru.
SAN MARTIN.
General of Argentine, Liberator of Chile, and Protector of Peru.
San Martin, stoical and silent, yielded to the impetuosity of Bolivar, abandoned Peru to him, the theatre of his future deeds of prowess, renounced his position (1822), and left America. His ambition, like his genius, was circumscribed; he preferred military glory to dictatorships; he believed in the benefits of foreign monarchies: he could organise armies, but he was powerless before anarchy.
Bolivar is the greatest of the American liberators. He surpasses some in ambition, others in heroism, and all in multiform activity, in prophetic insight, and in power. He was, amid the glorious generals and rival caudillos, the hero of Carlyle, "source of light, of intimate and native originality, virility, nobility, and heroism, in contact with whom every soul feels that it is in its element." All powers yielded to him. "Often," writes General Santander, "I go to him full of rancour, and only to see him disarms me, and I go away full of admiration." The people, with an infallible instinct, understood his heroic mission and worshipped him; the clergy praised him, and the glory of Bolivar was sung in the Catholic churches. He was statesman and warrior; he could criticise Olmedo's ode on the battle of Junin, decide the make-up of a journal, draw a plan of battle, organise legions, draft statutes, give diplomatic advice, and direct great campaigns; his genius was as rich and as various as that of Napoleon. Five nations, which he had snatched from the rule of Spain, seemed to him a narrow theatre for his magnificent career; he conceived a vast plan of Continental federation. At Panama he assembled the ambassadors of ten republics, and was already dreaming of an amphictyonic league of nations which should influence the destinies of the world.
Simon Bolivar was born at Caracas on the 24th of July, 1783, of a noble family of Vascongadas. In his youth he travelled through Europe in company with his tutor, Simon Rodriguez: an austere mentor. He studied the Latin classics, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Holbach, and the EncyclopÆdists. Before his tutor, at Rome, on the Monte Sacro, he swore, like Hannibal of old, to consecrate his life to the liberation of his native country. He was nervous, impetuous, sensual—traits of the American Creole of the South; active and persevering in his undertakings, as an heir to the tenacity of the Biscayan should be; generous to a fault, and valiant to the verge of folly. He had the bearing and the features of a typical caudillo; the forehead high, the back straight; a luminous glance that impressed both friends and enemies, a resolute air, and eloquent gestures. His was a nature shaped for action, unhesitating and immediate; he had the face and the genius of an Imperator. At Caracas, after his long years of travel, he kept his Roman oath. From 1813 to 1830 he fought against the Spaniards and against his own generals, indefatigable in his task of liberation. Two terrible Iberian warriors, Boves and Morillo, carried "war to the death" into Venezuela. Bolivar opposed them, aided by Bermudez Piar, MariÑo, and Paez, lieutenants alternately for and against him during his warlike career. In the Antilles he made ready for many expeditions. He was appointed supreme leader, provisional president, and director of the country; his generals doubted him, were jealous of his fame, and conspired against his authority, but Bolivar continued the war in the midst of the anarchy of Colombia.
BOLIVAR IN 1810.
BOLIVAR IN 1810.
He routed the Spaniards at Boyaca in 1819, and at Carabobo in 1821, and entered Caracas victorious. Colombia liberated, he turned to Quito. One of his lieutenants, Sucre, a man heroic and noble as the heroes of antiquity, won fresh battles at Bombona and Pinchincha (1822). Peru appealed to the Liberator, to "Bolivar, the hero of America."
The Colombian caudillo did not ignore the perils of the undertaking; the Spanish troops were good fighters; they had been victorious, and were not without resources in the Sierra; and the Peruvian and Colombian allies were inferior to them in experience and cohesion. "This matter of the war in Peru demands an enormous effort and inexhaustible resources," he wrote to Sucre. Impelled by his genius, he accepted the offer of the Peruvians, for he did not forget that "the loss of Peru would necessarily involve that of the whole of the south of Colombia." The Congress of Lima invested him with "the supreme military authority throughout the territory of the Republic." Two great battles, Junin and Ayacucho (1824), assured the independence of America. At Junin Bolivar led a cavalry charge which decided the day, which was followed by a hand-to-hand fight, not a single musket-shot being heard above the ring and clash of the sabres. Sucre was the hero of Ayacucho: it was he who devised the admirable plan of battle. The patriots were 6,000, the Spaniards 9,000. The Spanish artillery was superior to that of the allies. The enemy opened fire, descending the hillsides; the two lines of battle drew together. Night brought a truce; the officers of the two armies chatted in friendly groups before the coming conflict. On the morning of the 9th of December a charge of cavalry under General Cordova scattered the Spanish battalions: whereupon the royalist reserve came into action. The left wing of the allies wavered, but was reinforced, and the victory was complete. The Spanish army capitulated, its generals surrendered, and Peru was abandoned by its ancient rulers. Bolivar praised the heroism of Sucre, "the father of Ayacucho, the saviour of the sons of the sun," and Lima lauded the Liberator to the skies, proclaimed him the father and saviour of Peru, and elected him permanent President. After these victories the capture of Potosi by the troops of Sucre and the reduction of the fortress of Callao, where the penates of Spain were guarded, terminated Bolivar's magnificent career. His last years were melancholy, like a tropical twilight. Paez and Santander revolted against him; he was given the supreme power and deprived of it; he was offered a crown, and was the victim of conspiracy. The Liberator died, abandoned, a tragic figure, at Santa Marta, on the deserted Colombian coast, like Napoleon at St. Helena, at the age of forty-seven, on the 17th of December, 1830.
Statesman and general, Bolivar was even greater in the assembly than on the field of battle. Equal to Sucre and San Martin as tactician, as politician he was the greatest of all the caudillos. He was the thinker of the Revolution; he drafted statutes, analysed the social condition of the democracies he liberated, and foretold the future with the precision of a seer. The enemy of ideologists, like the great First Consul, an idealist and a romantic, a lover of syntheses in the region of ideas and of politics, he never forgot the rude environment of his deeds. His Latin dreams were tempered by a Saxon realism. A disciple of Rousseau, he wished "the will of the people to be the only power existing on the face of the earth"; but in the face of an anarchical democracy he sought uneasily for a moral power. In 1823 he thought that the sovereignty of the people was not illimitable: "justice is its basis, and perfect utility sets a term to it." A republican—"since Napoleon has been a monarch," he said, he who so admired Napoleon, "his glory seems to me a gleam from Hell"—he wished, despite the servile admiration of his friends, to be neither a Napoleon nor an Iturbide. He disdained all imperial pomp; he wished to be merely the soldier of the Independence. He made a profound analysis of the failings of a future monarchy in the old Spanish colonies. At the Conference of Guayaquil (1822) San Martin represented the monarchical tendency, Bolivar the republican principle. Their opposition was irreconcilable, said Mitre, the Argentine historian, for one was working for the Argentine hegemony and the other for the Colombian: the first respected the individuality of the separate peoples and would only accept intervention in exceptional cases; the second wished to unite the various peoples according to a "plan of absorption and monocracy."[2] This antagonism called for a superior point of agreement, a synthesis, for the Colombian doctrine brought with it as a reaction the premature formation of unstable democracies, and the Argentine theory favoured indifference, egoism, and the isolation of nations united by race, tradition, and history.
The genius, aristocratic pride, and ambition of Bolivar impelled him towards autocracy. He exercised a dictatorship and believed in the benefits of a permanent presidency. "In republics," he stated, "the executive power should be of the strongest, for all conspire against it; while in monarchies the legislative power should be supreme, for all conspire in favour of the monarch. Hence the necessity of giving a republican magistrate more authority than a constitutional prince." He did not forget the dangers of an autocratic presidency; but he feared anarchy, "the ferocious hydra of discordant anarchy," which grew like a noxious vegetation, stifling his triumphant work. He regarded with amazement the contradictions of American life: disorder leads to dictatorship, and the latter is the enemy of democracy. "The permanence of power in a single individual," writes the Liberator, "has often marked the end of democratic governments." Yet "indefinite liberty, absolute democracy, are snares in which all republican hopes come to grief." Liberty without licence, authority without tyranny: such was the ideal of Bolivar. In vain did he struggle single-handed amid ambitious generals and a disordered people; before he died he understood the vanity of his efforts. "Those who have served the cause of the Revolution," he cried, "have ploughed the sand.... If it were possible that a portion of the world should return to its primitive chaos, such would be the last phase of America." He denounced the moral poverty of these new republics with the severity of a Hebrew prophet. "There is no faith in America, neither in men nor in nations. Their treaties are waste paper; their constitutions are paper and ink; their elections are battles; liberty is anarchy, and life a torment."
This pessimism, the credo of his maturity, was born of his implacable analysis of American failings. Bolivar understood the original traits and the vices of the new continent. "We are," he said, "a small human family; we possess a world of our own, surrounded by vast oceans; new in almost every art and science, although, in a certain sense, old in the usages of civil society. The present state of America recalls the fall of the Roman Empire, when each part formed a distinct political system, in conformity with its interests, its situation, or its corporations." "We shall not see, nor the generation following us," he wrote in 1822, "the triumph of the America we are founding: I regard America as in the chrysalis. There will be a metamorphosis in the physical life of its inhabitants; there will finally be a new caste, of all the races, which will result in the homogeneity of the people."
While scholars were constructing Utopias, imitating, in their provisional statutes, the federal constitution of the United States, and legislating for an ideal democracy, Bolivar was studying the social conditions of America. "We are not Europeans," he wrote, "nor Indians either; but a kind of half-way species between the aborigines and the Spaniards; American by birth, European by right, we find ourselves forced to dispute our titles of possession with the natives, and to maintain ourselves in the country which saw our birth in spite of the opposition of invaders: so that our case is all the more extraordinary and complicated." "Let us be careful not to forget that our race is neither European nor North American; but rather a composite of America and Africa, than an emanation from Europe, since Spain herself ceased to be European by virtue of her African [Arab] blood, her institutions, and her character."
The Liberator proposed political institutions suited to a continent which in its territory and race and history was original. He was in favour of a tutelary authority: "The American States need the care of paternal governments which will heal the wounds and sores of despotism and war." He loathed federalism and the division of power: "Let us abandon the federal forms of government: they are not suited to us. Such a form of society is a regularised anarchy, or rather a law which implicitly prescribes the necessity of dissociating and ruining the State in all its members.... Let us abandon the Triumvirate of the Executive Power, by concentrating it in the person of a President, and conferring on him a sufficient authority to enable him to maintain himself and contend against the inconveniences inherent in our recent situation." He taught valuable lessons in public wisdom: "To form a stable Government we must have the basis of a national spirit which has for its object a uniform inclination towards two capital points: to moderate the general will and limit the public authority. The blood of our fellow-citizens presents many diversities: let us mix it in order to unify it; our constitution has divided its powers: let us confound them in order to unite them.... We ought to induce immigration of the peoples of North America and Europe, in order that they may settle here and bring us their arts and sciences. These advantages, an independent government, free schools, and intermarriage with Europeans and Anglo-Americans, will totally change the character of the country, and will render it well-informed and prosperous.... We lack mechanics and agriculturists, and it is these that the country has need of to ensure advancement and progress." In Bolivar's writings are to be found the best programmes of political and social reform for America; he was the first sociologist of these romantic democracies.
Carabobo and Junin were his great military triumphs; the letter from Jamaica (1815), the constitutional project of Angostura (1819), the statute of Bolivia (1825), and the Congress of Panama (1826) were his most admirable political creations. To unite the American nations in a permanent assembly; to oppose Anglo-Saxon power by Latin force, the necessary factor of Continental equilibrium; to labour in favour of unity and synthesis: such was the aim of the abortive Assembly of Panama. The letter from Jamaica was a prophecy which the docile reality was to accomplish during the century. "From the nature of the different regions of the country, from the wealth, population, and character of the Mexicans," said the Liberator, "I imagine that they will attempt in the beginning to establish a representative Republic in which the Executive will have very wide attributes and will be concentred in a single person, who, if he governs with wisdom and justice, will attain almost naturally to irremovable authority." "If the preponderant party is military or aristocratic, it will be in favour of a monarchy, which will probably be limited and constitutional in the first place, but will very soon become absolute." The presidency of Porfirio Diaz, the empire of Iturbide and Maximilian, supported by the monarchist party, and even the dictatorship of Juarez, and the powers which the Mexican constitutions have conferred on the head of the State, all confirmed the predictions of Bolivar. "The States of the Isthmus of Panama as far as Guatemala will form a federation." This federation existed until 1842, and to-day the Central American republics are slowly returning to it. Panama was for the Liberator the emporium of the world. "Its canals will shorten the distances of the world, will strengthen the ordinary ties between Europe, America, and Asia, and will bring to this happy region the tribute of the four quarters of the globe. There alone, perhaps, the capital of the world might be set, as Constantine pretended to make of Byzantium the capital of the ancient world."
"New Granada will unite itself to Venezuela in order to form a Central Republic, whose capital will be Maracaibo, or a new city, which, under the name of Las Casas (in honour of that hero of philanthropy), will spring up on the confines of the two countries, on the superb harbour of Bahia-Honda." Bolivar kept Venezuela and New Granada united until 1830; then new leaders, such as General Mosquera, wished to establish the federation which even to-day is still the object of the politicians of Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia. "At Buenos-Ayres there will be a central government, in which the military power will be supreme as a consequence of intestine divisions and external war." This is a prophecy of Argentine history up to the advent of Rosas, the struggles of the caudillos, and the anarchy of 1820. "This constitution will necessarily degenerate into an oligarchy or a monocracy." And a plutocratic group did actually rule in Buenos-Ayres, and over all rose the monocracy of Rosas. "Chili is called by the nature of her situation, by the simple customs of her virtuous inhabitants, and the example of her neighbours, the proud Republicans of Araucania, to enjoy the benefits of the just and mild laws of a republic. If any republic lasts long in America I incline to think it will be the Chilian.... Chili will not alter her laws, manners, or practices; she will maintain the uniformity of her political and religious opinions." The long stability of the Araucanian nation, the homogeneity of its population, the lasting nature of its political charter, the conservative character of its institutions, the slow and steady development of Chili until the war of the Pacific and the revolution of 1891, fully realised the prophecies of Bolivar. "Peru includes two elements inimical to all just and liberal government—gold and slavery. The first corrupts everything; the second is corrupt in itself. The soul of a serf rarely succeeds in taking liberty sanely. It rushes furiously into tumult, or lives humiliated in chains. Although these rules are applicable to all America, I believe they apply with most reason to Lima. There the rich will not tolerate the democracy, and the slaves and the liberated slaves will not tolerate the aristocracy; the first will prefer the tyranny of a single person, in order to avoid popular persecutions and to establish a rule that will at least be pacific." The evolution of Peru proved the profound truth of this statement. The oligarchy accepted military dictators, who upheld property and preserved peace. As early as 1815, when America was still a Spanish domain, Bolivar, watching the spectacle of social forces in conflict, announced not merely the immediate struggles, but the secular development of ten nations. He was a great prophet. To-day, a century later, the continent is fulfilling his predictions as though they were a fate strangely laid upon it.
At Angostura the Liberator placed before the Colombians a draft of a constitution. The bases of this constitution were republican government, the sovereignty of the people, the division of powers, civil liberty, and the abolition of slavery and of privilege. In this remarkable essay we find the theories of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Bentham, the realism of England and the democratic enthusiasm of France. The legislative power is to be composed of two chambers: the first popularly elected, and the Senate hereditary, according to the English tradition, formed by the Liberators who would found the nobility of America. The president is a kind of constitutional king; his ministers, who are to be responsible, will govern. The judiciary will acquire stability and independence. A new authority, the Moral Power, completes the political structure. This Moral Power of the Liberator's Republic is an imitation of the Athenian Areopagus and the Roman censors: it is to be responsible for education and ensure respect for morality and the law; "it chastises vice by opprobrium and infamy, and rewards the public virtues by honour and glory." Bolivar had a tendency towards moral and intellectual despotism: this tribunal was to compel good behaviour. Later the Liberator condemned the teachings of Bentham in the Universities of Colombia, and accepted Catholicism as an instrument of the Government. Article 2 of the Angostura draft states that "ingratitude, disrespect, and disloyalty toward parents, husbands, the aged, the magistrates, and citizens recognised and proclaimed as virtuous; the breaking of the given word, in no matter what connection; insensibility before public misfortunes or those affecting friends or immediate relations, are recommended especially to the vigilance of this moral power." This was paternal tyranny, exercised over the feelings, the conduct, and the passions.
Bolivar created a republic—Upper Peru, which was to call itself Bolivia in memory of its founder. He gave it the constitution he wished, but in vain, to apply to Peru and Colombia. He developed there the ideas expounded in the Angostura draft, and thereby defined his ideal of a republic; it was, in fact, a monarchy in which the power was hereditary. The president must be irremovable and irresponsible, "for in systems without hierarchy there must be—more than in others—a fixed point upon which magistrates and citizens, men and things, may revolve." Against anarchy, a fixed magistracy; against tyranny, independent powers; the judiciary elected by Congress among the citizens nominated by the electoral colleges; the legislature composed of three chambers: tribunes, senators, and censors. The first exercise their functions for four years, the second for eight, and the last are permanent, "and exercise a moral and political control"; they constitute the "moral power." With this system the Liberator avoided political anarchy and the destructive ambition of the caudillos, constituting two stable forces in the midst of shifting democracies—the censors and the permanent president. He adapted unity and permanence—characteristics of the constitutional monarchy—to republicanism. The generals quickly realised that this constitution was a menace to them, and rose against it in Bolivia, in Peru, and in Colombia.
The founders of the Independence were surrounded by brilliant leaders, such as O'Higgins, the Carreras, GÜemes, La Mar, Santander, Santa-Cruz, and Sucre, admirable as hero and statesman; but above them, dominating them all like an oak in the midst of saplings, according to the classic image, towered Bolivar, Liberator of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia.
BOLIVAR. The Liberator of Venezuela, New Granada, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia.
BOLIVAR.
The Liberator of Venezuela, New Granada, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia.
He was the genius of the South American Revolution. He felt himself dominated by "the dÆmon of war." Like all great tormented spirits since Socrates, he obeyed, in his impetuous campaigns, an interior divinity. In his acts and his speeches, in his dignity and his faith, there was a notable grandeur. He worked for eternity, accumulating dreams and Utopias, dominating the hostile earth and censorious man; he was the Superman of Nietzsche, the representative man of Emerson. He belonged to the ideal family of Napoleon and CÆsar; a sublime creator of nations; greater than San Martin, greater than Washington.
II. From France, as emissaries of the ideal, came the doctrines of the Revolution. In the EncyclopÆdia we find the intellectual origin of the South American upheavals. The patricians in the archaic colonial cities smiled upon Voltaire; they adopted the essential ideals of Rousseau, the social contract, the sovereignty of the people, and the optimism which conceded supreme rights to the human spirit untainted by culture. Bolivar had read the Contrat Social in a volume that had formed part of the library of Napoleon; by will he left this book to an intimate friend. The great, sounding promises—democracy, sovereignty, human rights, equality, liberalism—stirred the patriotic tribunes like fragments of a new gospel. The masonic lodges worked in silence against the power of Spain and Portugal, and upheld the humanitarian ideas of French philosophy. In the lodge of Lautaro, San Martin and Alvear received their initiation as revolutionaries. In Mexico the lodge of York was transformed into a Jacobin club. In 1794 Antonio NariÑo, the forerunner of Colombian independence, translated the Rights of Man. The Venezuelan Miranda fought in the revolutionary armies of France; the Peruvian Pablo de Olavide, the friend of Voltaire, took part in the Convention; Raynal, Condorcet, and Mably had American disciples. Montesquieu was read in the universities as an antidote to the absolutism of the viceroys; Beccaria, Filangeri, and Adam Smith were among the prophets. Not only did French thought predominate, but the Revolution, the Terror, the Jacobin madness, the eloquence of the Girondins, the dictatorship of the First Consul, and the Empire, even, all exercised an immense influence upon the rising democracies of America. Iturbide, Emperor of Mexico, imitated Napoleon; in Buenos-Ayres there was a Directoire, as in Paris; there were consuls in Paraguay, and Rivadavia was a Girondist lost among the gauchos.
To the aid of French theory came the example of North America; Washington and the federal system served the Iberian statesmen as models. Belgrano exalted the first President of the United States as a hero "worthy of the admiration of our own age and of the generations to come—an example of moderation and true patriotism." He translated the Farewell Address, which was his favourite reading. Bolivar wished to be the Washington of South America. One of the forerunners of Brazilian independence, JosÉ Joaquin de Maia, had known Jefferson in Paris, and informed him that "the Brazilians considered the North American Revolution as the expression of their desires, and they counted on the assistance of the United States." The first South American constitutions betrayed this double influence; they adopted the policy of federalism, copying the political organisation of the United States, and were inspired by French ideas. They destroyed the privileges of the nobility, and established equality of caste. This was the case with the first Venezuelan constitution, despite the efforts of Miranda and Bolivar—opponents of federation. The Chilian constitution of 1822 and the Peruvian constitution of 1823 conferred a conservative function upon the Senate, as in the North American Republic; and the first Chilian statutes established federation. In Mexico and in Central America the federal principle dominated the constitutions of 1824 and 1826. The Argentine constitution of 1819 was a copy "for the united provinces of South America of the Declaration of Independence of the United States."
To French doctrines and the example of the United States we must add the influence of English ideas. Miranda and Bolivar admired the political constitution of Great Britain, and were inspired by it. Bolivar, in 1818, recommended the study of this constitution: "You will find therein," he said, "the division of powers, the only means of creating free and independent spirits, and the liberty of the press—that incomparable antidote to political abuses." His enthusiasm for Voltaire and Rousseau was tempered by a study of English methods. In his Angostura draft he recommended a permanent Senate, a reproduction of the House of Lords. The British Executive—the sovereign surrounded by responsible ministers—seemed to him "the most perfect model, whether for a kingdom, or an aristocracy, or a democracy." The Colombian Constitution of Cucuta (1821), in which the political ideas of the Liberator were predominant, merited the eulogy of the Marquis of Lansdowne. "It has for its basis," said the English minister, "the two most just and solid principles"—property and education. Miranda laid before Pitt a constitutional essay inspired by British ideas, with a House of Commons, an Upper Chamber composed of hereditary Inca caciques and censors; in which curious project we find American traditions mingled with political forms borrowed from the English.
Spain also contributed to the development of the revolutionary ideas. She united the populations of America under her crushing authority; she combined in a single body all the disinherited castes which were later to struggle for independence.
"The despotic rigour of authority," wrote Bauza, "unites all these heterogeneous elements with a rigid tie, and forms a race of them."[3] The Napoleonic invasion provoked a reaction in the peninsula: the juntas—provisional representations of nationality—took the place of the captured king. The central junta proclaimed in 1808 that "the American provinces are not colonies, but integral portions of the monarchy, equal in their rights to the rest of the Spanish provinces." In 1810 the Regency informed the American colonies: "Your fate depends upon neither ministers nor viceroys nor governors: it is in your own hands." The constitution of the Cortes of Cadiz (1812), at which the deputies of the colonies were present, declared "that the Spanish Union cannot be the patrimony of a person nor a family—that sovereignty resides essentially in the nation—and that the right of making law belongs to the Cortes and the king." In these documents, independence, national sovereignty, the idea of the native country, and the functions of the assemblies came overseas from the metropolis. The struggles against privateers, against the English invasions of Buenos-Ayres and the Dutch invasions of Brazil, and the influence of the territory itself, created the sentiment of nationality in America. French, English, and Spanish ideas fertilised this vague aspiration. Before imposing themselves upon the universities and assemblies these ideas became current in the journals and the meetings of the cabildo and revealed to the Creole oligarchy its desire for independence.
From 1808 to 1825 all things conspired to help the cause of American liberty; revolutions in Europe, ministers in England, the independence of the United States, the excesses of Spanish absolutism, the constitutional doctrines of Cadiz, the romantic faith of the Liberators, the political ambition of the oligarchies, the ideas of Rousseau and the EncyclopÆdists, the decadence of Spain, and the hatred which all the classes and castes in America entertained for the Inquisitors and the viceroys. So many forces united engendered a sorry and divided world. The genesis of the southern republics is rude and heroic as a chanson de geste. Then history degenerates until it becomes a comedy of mean and petty interests—a revolutionary orgy. Such was the evolution of South America during the nineteenth century.
CHAPTER IV
MILITARY ANARCHY AND THE INDUSTRIAL PERIOD
Anarchy and dictatorship—The civil wars: their significance—Characteristics of the industrial period.
Spencer observed the invariable succession of two periods in the development of human affairs—the military and the industrial period. Bagehot contrasted a primitive epoch of authority and a posterior epoch of discussion. Sumner-Maine discovered a historic law—the progress from status to contract; from the rÉgime imposed by despotic governors to a flexible organisation accepted by free wills. Thus, in three different formulÆ, we may express the same principle of evolution. In the beginning a warlike and theocratic authority determines ritual, customs, dogma, and laws. The common conscience is potent; individuality accepts without discussion or scepticism the essential rules of social life. History is thereafter a struggle between authority and liberty, a progressive affirmation of autonomous wills, an assertion of destructive and censorious individualism.
In America political development presents the same successive phases. Invariably we find the sequence of the two periods, one military and one industrial or civil. The Independence realised, the rule of militarism sets in throughout the republics. After a period of uncertain duration the military caste is hurled from power, or abdicates without violence, and economic interests become supreme. Politics are then ruled by "civilism." The military rÉgime is not theocratic, as in some European monarchies; the President does not combine the functions of religion and empire. None the less, the civil period involves a fatal reaction against the Church—a period of anti-clericalism or radicalism. The revolution is confined to a change of oligarchies: the military group gives way to plutocracy.
GENERAL JUAN JOSÉ FLORES. President of Ecuador (1831-1835 and 1839-1843).
GENERAL JUAN JOSÉ FLORES.
President of Ecuador (1831-1835 and 1839-1843).
As the generals of Alexander disputed, after his death, for the provinces of Europe, Asia, and Africa, the remains of the imperial feast, and founded new dynasties in the flood of Oriental decadence, so the lieutenants of Bolivar dominated American life for a period of fifty years. Flores in Ecuador, Paez in Venezuela, Santa-Cruz in Bolivia, and Santander in Colombia, governed as the heirs of the Liberator. So long as the shadow of the magnificent warrior lay upon the destinies of America, so long the caudillos triumphed, consecrated by the choice of Bolivar. The monarchial principle was thus forced upon unconscious humanity. The Liberator left America in the hands of a dynasty.
The wars of the peoples were therefore civil conflicts; the quarrels of generals ambitious of hegemony. United in independence, united during the colonial period, the new nations were divided, and stood aside at the suggestion of these warriors; as Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, in the name of Santa-Cruz or Gamarra, Castilla or Flores. The national conscience was roughly shaped upon the field of battle. The generals imposed arbitrary limits upon the peoples; they are the creators in American history; they impress the crowds by their pomp and pageantry; by military displays as brilliant as the gaudy processions of the Catholic cult; by magnificent escorts and decorations and forms of etiquette; they call themselves Regenerators, Restorers, Protectors.
This first period is troublous, but full of colour, energy, and violence. The individual acquires an extraordinary prestige, as in the time of the Tuscan Renaissance, the French Terror, or the English Revolution. The rude and bloodstained hand of the caudillo forces the amorphous masses into durable moulds. South America is ruled by ignorant soldiers: the evolution of her republics must therefore be uncertain. There is, therefore, no history properly so called, for it has no continuity; there is a perpetual ricorso brought about by successive revolutions; the same men appear with the same promises and the same methods. The political comedy is repeated periodically: a revolution, a dictator, a programme of national restoration. Anarchy and militarism are the universal forms of political development.
As in European revolutions, anarchy leads to dictatorship; and this provokes immediate counter-revolution. From spontaneous disorder we pass to a formidable tutelage. The example of France is repeated on a new stage; the anarchy of the Convention announces the autocracy of Bonaparte. The dictators, like the kings of feudalism, defeat the local caciques, the provincial generals; thus did Porfirio Diaz, Garcia Moreno, Guzman-Blanco, &c. And revolution follows revolution until the advent of the destined tyrant, who dominates the life of the nation for twenty or thirty years.
Material progress is the work of the autocracy; as witness the rule of Rosas, Guzman-Blanco, Portales, and Diaz. The great caudillos will have nothing to do with abstractions; their realistic minds urge them to encourage commerce and industry, immigration and agriculture. By imposing long periods of peace they favour the development of economic forces.
In matters political and economic the dictators profess Americanism. They represent the new mixed race, tradition, and the soil. They are hostile to the rule of the Roman Church, of European capital, and of foreign diplomacy. Their essential function, like that of the modern kings after feudalism, is to level mankind and unite the various castes. Tyrants found democracies; they lean on the support of the people, the half-breeds and negroes, against the oligarchies; they dominate the colonial nobility, favour the crossing of races, and free the slaves.
ARTIGAS. Liberator of Uraguay.
ARTIGAS.
Liberator of Uraguay.
Anarchy is spontaneous, like that which Taine discovered in the Jacobin Revolution. There is a movement hostile to organisation, to civilisation: thus Artigas fought at once against the King of Spain, the Argentine Revolution, and the Portuguese. He would have no subjection; he was a patriot to the death. GÜemes fought against Spaniards and Argentines. The caudillos are like chiefs of barbarian tribes; they uphold local autonomy, division, and chaos. Sarmiento compares Lopez, Ibarra, and Quiroga, violent chieftains of the Argentine sierra and pampa, to Genghis Khan or Tamerlane. "Individualism," he says, "is their essence; the horse their only arm; the pampa their theatre." The montoneras are Tartar hordes, burned by the sun—a wild, devastating force. Their leaders represent the genius of the continent; they have the rudeness, the fatality of natural forces. Like Igdrasil, the fantastic tree of Scandinavian mythology, they send their roots deep into the earth, into the obscure kingdom of the dead.
The general ideas of this period are simple. There is a faith in the efficacy of political constitutions, and these are multiplied; men aspire to ideological perfection. They believe in the omnipotence of congresses, and distrust the Government. Constitutions separate the powers and enfeeble the executive, rendering it ephemeral; they divide authority by creating triumvirates, consulates, and governmental juntas. The liberalism of the charters is notable. They usually establish three powers, according to the traditional rule of Montesquieu, in order to ensure political equilibrium; they recognise all the theoretical liberties—liberty of the press, of assembly, the rights of property, and industrial and commercial liberty. They accept trial by jury, popular petition, universal suffrage—in short, the whole republican ideal. They consecrate a State religion, Catholicism, thus paving the way for religious revolutions, and all the "Red and Black" revolts and conspiracies of South American history. Election is in some republics direct; in others by the second degree, by means of electoral colleges which appoint the president and the members of the legislative chambers. From North to South institutions are democratic; they bestow political rights with a generous profusion. The judicial power is independent, sometimes elected by the people, generally by congress. The judges are often dependent on the executive. Justice and the law are ineffectual. The president cannot be re-elected.
These constitutions imitate those of France and the United States in the democratic tendencies of the one and the federalism of the other; they are charters of a generous and hybrid species. The presidential rÉgime exists in reality as in the United States; the parliaments are important in virtue of the constitution, but in actual political life are powerless in face of the pressure exercised by the military chiefs. The theory of the social pact and the ideology of the revolutionary are predominant in public speech.
The motives of the civil wars vary. In Ecuador men fight for the caudillos; in Colombia, for ideas; in Chili, for or against the oligarchy. All the national forces are involved in these wars. Revolution is the common heritage of these nations. The races which peopled America were warrior races, both Indians and Spaniards, and their warlike spirit explains the disorder of the republics. Castes and traditions are inimical: the psychological instability characteristic of primitive peoples wars upon discipline and authority.
Two social classes—the military class and the intellectual or university class—had been in opposition since the origin of the Republic. They disputed the supreme power, or sometimes the intellectuals sided with the generals. The "doctors," by aid of reasonings of Byzantine subtlety, justified the dictatorships as well as the Revolution. A Venezuelan deputy, Coto-Paul, in 1811, pronounced a lyrical eulogy of anarchy.
The generals distrusted the lawyers, who represented the intellectual tradition of the colony: Paez hated the juriconsults as Napoleon hated ideologists. And the "doctors," vanquished by the military power, became the docile secretaries of generals and caudillos; they drafted laws and constitutions, and expressed in polished formulÆ the rude intentions of the chiefs. To the violence of these latter they opposed subtlety; to the ignorance of despots, the scholastic ease and knowledge acquired in the universities of Spain.
To the struggles of classes was added the war of races; the half-breeds fought against the national oligarchy; the new American class was hostile to the aristocracy of the capitals. The Indians lived in the towns of the interior, in which the colonial isolation was unchanged; the metropolis—Buenos-Ayres, Lima, or Caracas—was still Spanish and increasingly alien. On the coast, where feeling was more mobile and will more variable, the ideas of reform took root; exotic ideas and customs were introduced; while the Sierra,[1] more American than the coast, remained slow and gloomy, and ignorant of the brilliant unrest of the capitals. Thus a triple movement came into being; inferior castes rose against the colonial aristocracy, the provinces against the all-absorbing metropolis, and the half-caste Sierra against the cosmopolitan seaboard.
The provinces desired autonomy; the capitals, monopoly and unity; the metropolis was liberal, the Sierra conservative. The political conflict might know a change of names, but this antagonism was universal. The leaders disguised their deep-seated ambitions under a cloak of general ideas; they supported unity or federation, the military or the civil rÉgime, Catholicism or radicalism. In Argentina the provinces fought against the capital; in Venezuela the coloured middle class against the oligarchies; in Chili the liberals against the pelucones, the proprietors of the soil; in Mexico the federals fought the monarchists; in Ecuador the radicals opposed the conservatives; in Peru the conflict was between the "civilists" and military caudillos. In the diversity of these quarrels we see one essential principle: two classes were in conflict—the proprietors of the latifundia and the poverty-stricken people, the Spaniards and the half-breeds, or the oligarchs and generals of a barbarous democracy.
In each republic the soil and the traditions of the country gave a different colour to the universal warfare. In the Argentine the provinces, under viceroys and intendants, enjoyed a partial autonomy; there federalism had remote antecedents. Unity seemed an imposition on the part of Buenos-Ayres, which possessed the treasury and the custom-houses of the nation, and monopolised the national credit and revenue. In Chili, the long, narrow country, with the Cordillera at the back, like a granite wall, naturally evoked a Unitarian republic. The disputes between centralisation and federalism were soon over. Unity was possible in Peru, a brilliant sub-kingdom, the centre of a long-established and powerful authority. But some aspects of these violent struggles remain obscure. In Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, and Mexico there was enmity between the coast and the Sierra. Lima and Caracas were capitals near the seaboard; Mexico and Quito were far removed from it. Yet in Peru the struggle was civil and military; in Ecuador, conservative and liberal; and in Mexico, federal and central. Why do we not find the religious struggles, which lasted so long in Colombia, in Bolivia and the Argentine? To explain this diversity we must study the psychology of the different conquistadors—Castilian, Biscayan, Andalusian, Portuguese—and of the different subjected races: the Quechuas, Araucanians, Chibchas, Aztecs, and the proportion in which they were mingled; for the action of the territory itself upon the various admixtures of blood would vary as it was tropical or temperate, coast or Sierra.
The confusion of the struggles in some democracies was extreme. The oligarchs were not always conservatives, nor the half-breeds always liberal. There were reactionary autocracies, like that of Portales in Chili, and liberal autocracies like that of Guzman-Blanco in Venezuela. The federals were usually democrats and liberals, but they were occasionally conservative and autocratic. The democrats of Peru were reactionary in matters of religion; those of Chili were radical. The civil rÉgime was conservative in Bolivia under Baptista and in Ecuador under Garcia-Moreno, but liberal in Mexico under Juarez and Chili under Santa-Maria and Balmaceda. Militarism was radical under Lopez in Colombia, but conservative under General Castilla in Peru. When political evolution followed its logical development, federalism, liberalism, and democracy formed a trilogy, and oligarchy was conservative and Unitarian.
Revolutions, in opposing castes and uplifting the half-breed, prepared the way for a new period. But a democratic society cannot easily establish itself in the face of the established aristocracies, and slavery still survived, although softened by liberal institutions. The military class, accessible to all, replaced the old nobility. Confusion of races commenced as early as 1850, when generous laws enfranchised the negroes, and new economic interests arose to complicate these democratic societies. Revolutions, dictatorships, and anarchy were the necessary aspects of the dissolution of the old society.
The age of generals gave way to an industrial period in which wealth increased, industries became more complex and numerous, and labour was subdivided, while association became more usual both in commerce and agriculture. Co-operation, organisation, and solidarity, unknown during the period of anarchy, were aspects of an intense economic development. The interests newly created sought for peace, and the internal order which favoured their expansion.
Politics commenced to eschew and disdain the squabbles of ideology, and constitutional liberties acquired precision and efficacy. Plutocracies came into being, and aspired to government in place of internal revolution and external warfare; immigration, transforming the social classification, facilitated their advent. National progress was effected despite the governments; it was an anonymous and collective task. The energetic individualities of the military epoch were followed by the laborious crowd. The caudillo receded to the background of politics; the captains of industry replaced him, the merchants and the bankers. Courage was once the supreme criterion of the man; now wealth is the touchstone by which individuals and peoples are judged. The table of human values changes; instruction, foresight, and practical common sense determine success in an industrial democracy. In the social ascension of the generations which industry and commerce have thrown forward to the attack upon the old patrician society, the prejudices of class and religion grow feebler, and after a century of conflict the nations of the present day emerge.
In the southern republics of America industrialism is supreme in the Argentine, Uruguay, and Chili; even in tropical Brazil. In Bolivia and Peru the last leaders are not yet dead, the parties are still personal, but their influence is not as decisive as it was thirty years ago. Among the northern peoples, from Mexico to Ecuador, anarchy and caudillism still survive; there political unrest has not yet been dominated by the principle of authority. The long dictatorship of General Castro and certain Central American presidents proves that the dictatorial rÉgime is the only form of government that is able to maintain peace in these countries.
It is hardly possible to determine the "historical moment" at which these republics passed from the military to the industrial system. The twilight of the caudillos was a long one. Even in the Argentine, where the economic life is magnificent and complex, their influence persists. In Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil there exists a latent militarism which might quickly destroy the work of the civil presidents. For ten years in Peru and Uruguay and Bolivia government has followed government without revolutionary violence, but can we say that the anarchy of fifty years has disappeared for ever? The political order is slowly becoming assured, and the relation between wealth and the increase of immigration and of peace is obvious. Even in the industrial field evolution is the work of a few caudillos who have been pacificators: General Pando in Bolivia, General Roca in the Argentine, Pierola in Peru, and Battle y Ordonez in Uruguay, not to speak of the greatest of all, Porfirio Diaz.
Economically speaking this period of development material is superior to the first period of sterile revolution; it is superior also from the political point of view, for institutions have been perfected and their constitutional action has defined itself. The municipalities and the legislative power have acquired a relative autonomy; they have been victorious over the executive, which was omnipotent during the military period. In beauty and intensity, however, the prosaic age of industrialism has been inferior to the preceding period. Of old, vigorous personalities rose above the common level, and history had the vitality of a tragedy; men played with destiny and with death as in the time of the Italian renaissance. "Tyranny," writes Burckhardt, "in the ancient Latin republics, commenced by developing to the highest degree the individuality of the sovereign, of the condottiere." He then demonstrates the equally personal character of the statesmen and popular tribunes of Florentine history.[2] This analysis is applicable to the American leaders. Heroic audacity and perpetual and virile unrest characterise the struggles of the caciques. The military cycle closed, the republics lose this dramatic interest. Instead of describing the history of governments we must study the economic evolution of nations, and their statistics of industry and commerce. In tragedy the chorus, the crowd, becomes the essential person; it judges and executes, it is spectator and creator, while the heroes of old, the conquerors of destiny and founders of cities, disappear in the mists of the past.
To these political changes correspond changes in manners and customs; the cities, too, have changed and have lost their archaic character. The cosmopolitan invasion has resulted in a brilliant monotony, and interest has become the sole motive of action; permanent war is followed by peace À outrance; the republics have gained in wealth and mediocrity. It is a period of transition: we cannot yet distinguish the firm lineaments of the future State.
Will the Argentine and Brazil become great plutocratic States like the United States? Will Chili, which is copying the social organisation of England, be subjected, like the Anglo-Saxon Empire, to the attacks of demagogy? The spectacle of these enriched nations permits us to affirm only that in revolutionary America four nations, the Argentine, Brazil, Uruguay, and Chili, will, before the lapse of a century, be definitively organised as republics.
Yet these States still betray old racial characteristics.
"The dead found the race," writes M. Gustave Le Bon. "The dead generations impose on us not only their physical constitution but also their thoughts. Forms of government matter little."[3] In the democracies of Latin America the "fundamental revolution" of which politicians boast has been sterile; under the republican mask the Spanish heredity survives, deep-rooted and secular. The forms vary but the soul of the race remains the same. President-autocrats replace the vice-kings; the old struggles between the governors of the State and the bishops persist, for patronage in ecclesiastical affairs, the prestige of the "doctors," and academic titles.
The ruling caste, the heir to the prejudices of Spain, despises industry and commerce, and lives for politics and its futile agitations. The territorial seigneurs still have the upper hand as before the Revolution. The ancient latifundia still survive, the great domains which explain the power of the oligarchy. Assemblies exercise a secondary function, as the municipal cabildos of old. Catholicism is still the axis of social life. The picaros of Spanish romance, haughty and ingenious parasites, are still accepted at their own value. The bureaucracy swallows up the wealth of the exchequer; it was formed a century ago of voracious Castilians; to-day it consists of Americans devoid of will. Despite the equality proclaimed by the constitutions the Indian is subjected to the implacable tyranny of the local authorities, the curÉ, the justice of peace, and the cacique. Under other names the little despots of the Spanish period are still alive and active.
The democracies of South America, then, are Spanish, although the Élite has always been inspired by French ideas. Democracies by proclamation and in their anarchy, equalitarian and of mixed blood, the individual often acquires a heroic significance like that of the supermen of Carlyle; mediÆval republics divided into irreducible families and factions, governed by enriched merchants; Greek republics, hostile to their own leaders, jealous of the virtue of Aristides and the wisdom of Themistocles, but without the plebiscitary ardour of the Hellenic community.
