THE LATIN SPIRIT AND THE GERMAN, NORTH
AMERICAN, AND JAPANESE PERILS
From a racial point of view, it is true, one cannot call the South American republics Latin nations. They are rather Indo-African or Africo-Iberian. Latin culture—the ideas and the art of France, the laws and the Catholicism of Rome—have created in South America a mental attitude analogous to that of the great Mediterranean peoples, which is hostile or alien to the civilisation of the Germanic or Anglo-Saxon peoples.
New influences, whether they come from Germany or Anglo-Saxon America, and even more those that come from Japan, are dangerous to the Latin-American nations, if they tend to destroy their traditions.
CHAPTER I
ARE THE IBERO-AMERICANS OF LATIN RACE
Spanish and Portuguese heredity—Latin culture—The influence of the Roman laws, of Catholicism, and of French thought—The Latin spirit in America: its qualities and defects.
Contrasting the Imperial Republic of North America with the twenty democracies of South America, we seek the reason of the antagonism which exists between them in the essential element of race. The contrast between Anglo-Saxons and Latins is the contrast between two cultures.
The South American peoples consider themselves Latin by race, just as their brothers of the North are the remote descendants of the Anglo-Saxon Pilgrim Fathers; but although the United States were created largely by the aggregation of austere English emigrants, there has been no intervention of pure Latin elements in the colonisation of the South. Navigators of Latin blood discovered an unknown continent, and Spaniards and Portuguese conquered and colonised it; but there was little Latin blood to be found in the homes formed by the sensuality of the first conquerors of a desolated America.
Emigrants from Estremadura and Galicia, Andalusians and Castilians, many-hued men of Spain and Portugal, were all concerned in the first interbreeding with the vanquished races; they were Iberians, in whom the anthropologists discover moral analogies with the Berbers of North Africa. The Basques, rude and virile, who emigrated from Spain to dominate America, did not come of Latin stock; the Andalusian element, from Seville or Cadiz, was of Oriental origin. A Spain that was half African and half Germanic colonised the vast territories of America; two heredities, Visigoth and Arab, were united in its strange genius.
The French and Italian colonists have not the importance of the Spaniards and Portuguese; they are inferior in numbers and in wealth. The Iberians have jealously defended their racial prerogative in these isolated transatlantic colonies. After three centuries, when once the continent was opened to the outside world and to European commerce, the Italians invaded the rich plains of the Argentine; there they contributed to the formation of a new race, which is more Latin than Spanish.
But we must not forget the innumerable Anglo-Saxons who have founded families in the Argentine and in Chili, and have brought wealth to those countries; nor the Germans in Southern Brazil, nor the Asiatics of the Peruvian seaboard. Iberians, Indians, Latins, Anglo-Saxons, and Orientals all mingle in America; a babel of races, so mixed that it is impossible to discover the definite outlines of the future type.
It is useless to look for unity of race in such a country. And even in the United States the confused invasion of Russian Jews and Southern Italians is little by little undermining the primitive Anglo-Saxon unity.
This confusion of races in the North and the South leaves two traditions, the Anglo-Saxon and the Iberian. By force of assimilation these traditions are transforming the new races. Englishmen and Spaniards disappear, but the two moral inheritances survive.
The Latin tradition is not far to seek in the Americans of the South. They are not exclusively either Spanish or Portuguese; the legacy received from Spain is modified by persistent influences of French and Italian origin.
From Mexico to La Plata, by long continued and extensive action, the Roman laws, Catholicism, and the ideas of France have given a uniform aspect to the American conscience.
Laws of Spanish origin prevail in South America; they have formed the rigid framework of civil life. These laws, in spite of strong feudal elements, are of Roman origin. Under the influence of Roman law Alfonso X. unified Spanish legislation, during the first half of the thirteenth century; three centuries later the Spaniards colonised America. The Partidas, that vast encyclopÆdia of law and collection of Castilian laws in particular, is a Roman code. It confirmed the individualist sense of property as against the Spanish forms of collectivism; it reinforced the power of the paterfamilias in the austere Iberian family; it consecrated equality, authorising marriage between free men and the serfs formerly banished from the State; and it adopted the Roman formalism.
Politically, after the downfall of the feudal system, ambitious princes, from the time of Alfonso X. to that of the Catholic Kings and of Charles V., enforced their royal authority in the Roman sense. These monarchs were CÆsars; they concentrated all the powers of the State in themselves; they centralised, unified, and legislated. This royal absolutism destroyed privilege and levelled mankind. A vast Spanish democracy was formed, subject to CÆsar, after the manner of the Roman people. The Latin sense of authority and law prevailed in the Spanish colonies; property was individual and absolute; civil equality obtained; in spite of racial differences, Indians and Spaniards were theoretically on the same plane; the family, like the Roman gens, united slaves and children under the gloomy paternal power. The distant monarch was a formidable overlord, to whom viceroys and chapters, courts, judicial and ecclesiastical, addressed themselves to demand laws and regulations, penalties and sanctions.
Catholicism was indissolubly bound up with the Roman authority of the laws; in Spain and America the prince was at the same time the shepherd of the Church. Religion was an instrument of political domination; it was an imperial force, a legacy of the Latin genius. It multiplied forms and rites; it disciplined the colonists, demanding outward obedience and uniformity of belief and manners. "The Roman Church," says Harnack, "is a juridical institution." Catholicism is also a social religion. In America it created the Brazilian nation in opposition to the Dutch peril; it founded republics among Indians inimical to all forms of organised social life; it extended the field of Latin endeavour, and from North to South favoured the constitution of new governments and societies.
Under the double pressure of Roman Catholicism and legislation, America became Latinised. It learned to respect laws and forms, to submit to a religious as well as a civil discipline. French ideas, added to these influences, first prepared the way for the Revolution, and afterwards dominated the mind of America, from the Declaration of Independence to our own days.
These ideas constituted a new factor of Latin development. France is the modern heir of the genius of Greece and Rome, and in imitating her, even to excess, Ibero-Americans have assimilated the essential elements of the antique culture. We find in the Gallic spirit the sense of taste and harmony, the lucidus ordo of the classics; the love of general ideas, of universal principles, of the rights of man, and a hatred of the mists of the North and the too violent light of the South; rationalism, logical vigour, emotion in the presence of beauty, and the cult of grace. France has been the teacher of social life and letters to the American democracies; her influence is already of no recent date. Voltaire and Rousseau were the theorists of the revolutionary period; Lamartine taught "lyrism" and romantic melancholy; Benjamin-Constant, the theory of politics, and Verlaine the lamentations of decadence.
Either indirectly, through the influence of the thought and literature of Spain and Portugal, or directly, these republics have lived by the light of French ideas.
Thus a general current of thought has arisen on the American continent which is not merely Iberian, but also French and Roman. France has effected a spiritual conquest of these democracies, and has created a new variety of the Latin spirit. This Latin spirit is not a thing apart; it is formed of characteristics common to all the Mediterranean peoples. French, Greeks, Italians, Portuguese, and Spaniards find therein the fundamental elements of their national genius, just as in antiquity the Greek women found in Helen the reflection of their own beauty. To this spiritual synthesis Spain contributes her idealism; Italy, the paganism of her children and the eternal suggestion of her marbles; France, her harmonious education.
In the Iberian democracies an inferior Latinity, a Latinity of the decadence prevails; verbal abundance, inflated rhetoric, oratorical exaggeration, just as in Roman Spain. The qualities and defects of the classic spirit are revealed in American life; the persistent idealism, which often disdains the conquests of utility; the ideas of humanity and equality, of universality, despite racial variety; the cult of form; the Latin instability and vivacity; the faith in pure ideas and political dogmas: all are to be found in these lands oversea, together with the brilliant and superficial intelligence, the Jacobinism, and the oratorical facility. Enthusiasm, sociability, and optimism are also American qualities.
These republics are not free from any of the ordinary weaknesses of the Latin races. The State is omnipotent; the liberal professions are excessively developed; the power of the bureaucracy becomes alarming. The character of the average citizen is weak, inferior to his imagination and intelligence; ideas of union and the spirit of solidarity have to contend with the innate indiscipline of the race. These men, dominated by the solicitations of the outer world and the tumult of politics, have no inner life; you will find among them no great mystics, no great lyrical writers. They meet realities with an exasperated individualism.
Indisciplined, superficial, brilliant, the South Americans belong to the great Latin family; they are the children of Spain, Portugal, and Italy by blood and by deep-rooted tradition, and by their general ideas they are the children of France. A French politician, M. Clemenceau, found in Brazil, the Argentine, and Uruguay, "a superabundant Latinism; a Latinism of feeling, a Latinism of thought and action, with all its immediate and superficial advantages, and all its defects of method, its alternatives of energy and failure in the accomplishment of design." This new American spirit is indestructible. Contact with Anglo-Saxon civilisation may partially renew it, but the integral transformation of the spirit proper to the Latin nations will never be accomplished. It would be a racial suicide. Where Yankees and Latin Americans intermingle you may better observe the insoluble contradictions which divide them. The Anglo-Saxons are conquering America commercially and economically, but the traditions, the ideals, and the soul of these republics are hostile to them.
The Ibero-American race should seek to correct its vices without forsaking the framework of tradition which is proper to it. Without losing its originality as a nation, France is to-day triumphant in many departments of sport, and is spending her energy and inventive genius upon the conquest of the air without counting the cost; she has made her own victories which seemed to belong to the Anglo-Saxon. At the same time, if the American democracies are to acquire a practical spirit, a persistent activity, and a virile energy, they must do so without renouncing their language, their religion, and their history.
The defence of the Latin spirit has become a duty of primordial importance. BarrÈs, an impassioned ideologist, preaches the cult of self as a remedy for barbarism; no foreign tutelage must trouble the spontaneous internal revelation. The republics oversea, wending their way under hostile or indifferent eyes, sous l'oeil des Barbares, must cultivate their spiritual originality in the encounter with inimical forces.
The North American peril, the threat of Germany, the menace of Japan, surround the future of Latin America like those mysterious forces which, in the drama of Maeterlinck, dominate the human stage, and in silence prepare the way for the great human tragedies. To defend the traditions of the Latin continent, it is useful to measure the importance of the influences which threaten it.
CHAPTER II
THE GERMAN PERIL
German Imperialism and the Monroe doctrine—Das Deutschtum and Southern Brazil—What the Brazilians think about it.
The Teutonic invasion is troubling our Ibero-American writers. The tutelary protection of the United States does not suffice to make them forget the European peril; memories of the Holy Alliance, of that crusade of religious absolutism and reconquest, are still lively in Latin America.
Three great nations—England, France, Germany—aspired to establish their supremacy oversea in a lasting manner. England, a colonising power in all parts of the world, thought to rule at Buenos-Ayres; the defence of that Spanish city by the Viceroy Liniers was, says OnÉsime Reclus, the Latin revenge for the taking of Quebec. France attacked Mexico, and forced a monarch upon her; England and a French monarch sent expeditions against the nationalist dictator Rosas, and Lord Salisbury, in a diplomatic duel with the North American Secretary of State, Mr. Olney, attempted to ignore the tutelary significance of the Monroe doctrine.
The triumphs of these attempts would have founded in Latin America extensive colonies, proud and populous. The efforts of the ill-organised republics could not have prevailed against them.
For the new continent this would have meant a loss of autonomy; but the Monroe doctrine stood in the way of any conquests save those made by the United States, and a sudden disagreement between the two invading nations, France and England, in their campaign against Rosas, caused these attempts to miscarry. The three Guianas, British Honduras, and some of the West Indian islands, bear witness to the ambitions of Europe; they are the scattered fragments of the empire which the Old World coveted. Invasions of capital and of merchant vessels quickly replaced those of warships.
Secretly, without the employment of these warlike means, Germany began to make herself felt; her imperialism wore a mercantile disguise, or took the form of immigration. Persevering Teutonic colonists made their way toward Brazil, Chili, and Central America, and although the European peril was over the German peril survived. Neither Russia, who possesses vast desert territories in Asia, nor Italy, whose ambitions are limited to Africa, to Tripoli, considered the possibility of conquest upon the American continent.
Against flat invasion by any power the tutelage of the United States is a protection, but the Monroe doctrine is powerless against the slow and imperceptible invasion of German immigration. By virtue of their capital and their adventurers, Germany and the United States are slowly occupying South America; other continents being closed to their ambitions of expansion, it is in the free territory of the New World that they found their colonies. There we find their bankers and merchants, the rude emissaries of these commercial powers. Americans and Germans resemble one another by race and in energy. The Middle West of the United States was peopled by German emigrants; two imposing cities, New York and St. Louis, are vast reservoirs of Teutonic energy. The new empire is actuated by ambitions similar to those of the United States; both are conquering and plutocratic powers. The German Empire has the passions of a new people; the active faith, the practical Christianity, the cult of gold, the instinct of gigantic accumulations, of cyclopean enterprises, trusts, and combinations, and the optimism, the anxious desire to improvise the civilising work of centuries by the pressure of sheer wealth. The Kaiser and Colonel Roosevelt, Biblical shepherds of their people, evangelists of the strenuous life, direct the ardent industrial evolution of their nations, and establish a mystic imperialism. It is from this analogy of tendencies that the future clash will come. To-day the continual incursion of the United States into South American affairs and the organised immigration from Germany are different forms of the same ambition.
In Guatemala and Costa Rica the influence of Germany is immense; the importance of her capital in Central America can only be compared with that of England in the Argentine. It is valued at £15,000,000. Germans acquire landed property, build railroads, and found banks. In these regions two dominating influences are in conflict: German imperialism and the Monroe doctrine. The Kaiser hastens to recognise President Madriz in Nicaragua, while the revolutionists, protected by the United States, hasten to deprive him of his ephemeral power. Dispersed throughout Chili, Venezuela, Peru, and Central America, the Germans are concentrating in southern Brazil. They aspire to the integral colonisation of three Brazilian States—Santa-Catalina, Parana, and Rio Grande do Sul. Since 1825 a slow current of humanity has invaded these rich provinces: 350,000 Germans are established there, where they rule the municipalities, enjoy rights of self-government, despise the negroes and half-castes, and live in an aristocratic isolation. They have retained the language, traditions, and prejudices of their native country. In certain colonies of the South there are only 10 per cent. of Brazilian citizens; the Germans represent the prevailing race, the effective nationality. Their efforts further the territorial ambition of Das Deutschtum.
Economists recommend that the excessive immigration which constantly pours into the United States should be directed towards South America. A tenth part of the population of the United States admits to a Teutonic origin; there are eight millions of Germans in the huge northern democracy. Thanks to affinities of race, or thanks to the assimilative action of the national spirit, this colossal colony does not form a State within the State; its members adapt themselves to the American life, and in the numerous schools of the country they assimilate an Anglo-Saxon culture. They do not threaten the normal development of the republic, as do the negroes of the South and the Asiatics of the Far West.
In Brazil the Germans occupy eight thousand square miles of territory. They proudly contrast the magnificent destinies of the Vaterland with the turbulent federalism of the Brazilian States. The colonisation companies affiliated to the powerful and active banks, in especial the Deutsche Uberseeische Bank, a marvellous instrument of conquest, are extending the prosaic Teutonic hegemony through Brazil and the whole of Latin America. In Chili Germans direct the education of the country, and organise the army; just as in the Prussian schools, they teach an intolerant patriotism and a strongly nationalistic history.
While the emigrants are realising their imperialistic Odyssey, German professors are condemning the Monroe doctrine. Hugo MÜnsterberg, professor of philosophy at Harvard, and Adolf Wagner, an economist of Berlin, regard the Yankee thesis merely as a perishable improvisation upon a fragile foundation. The interest of Germany demands that the United States should abandon their tutelage, and that the swarming Germanic legions should invade the southern continent. MÜnsterberg writes in his book The Americans that the Yankee will soon realise "the error and folly" of his argument, which he qualifies as a moribund doctrine. No Russian, French, or Italian colony in South America, he says, could create difficulties in the United States; but the doctrine which forbids their establishment will be the cause of conflicts in the future. If South America were set free from this tutelage, if its bearing were limited to Central America, the possibilities of a conflict between the United States and Europe would be considerably diminished. Does not this disinterested counsel conceal a desire to found colonies upon a continent which the vigilance of the United States would no longer protect?
An economist who, like Treitschke and Sybel, believes in the divine mission of the German Empire, Gustave Schmoller, would like to see a nation of twenty or thirty millions of inhabitants founded in Southern Brazil.
Concentrated in the three provinces of Brazil, an unmixed and hostile race would struggle against the Brazilian half-breeds and prevail over them, which is what these professors of conquest desire. This fruitful invasion would realise the dream entertained by those rich bankers of Augsburg, the Velzers, who three centuries ago bought a Venezuelan province from the Hispano-Germanic monarch, Charles V. Heirs of this vast abortive plan, the German financiers of our days dream of planting a foreign province in the heart of the vast territory of Brazil.
Brazilian thinkers have protested against this German conquest in disguise; they recognise the danger, and seek to avoid it. Sylvio Romero suggests, as a means of limiting this expansion, the education of the race along Anglo-Saxon lines, which would develop the love of initiative and the sense of effort, a migration of Brazilian proletarians who should occupy these southern territories and hold them against the Germans, and finally, the establishment of military colonies in the threatened regions. It is the traditional struggle for nationality, for the possession of the very soil itself. Language is an instrument of conquest; it is therefore urgent to enforce the use of Portuguese in the schools of the South, where the far-sighted colonists teach only their own tongue. Foreign syndicates acquire large and numerous stretches of territory; SeÑor Romero would have these land trusts inhibited, and would favour the establishment of indigenous centres among the German populations, in order to contend with this perilous invasion by an alien race.[1]
The national uneasiness has even affected the art of the country; GraÇa Aranha has written, in Canaan, the drama of the contact of races. "For the moment," says Milkau, the blond invader of the half-breed country, "we are nothing more than a solvent acting upon the race of the country. We are effecting a new conquest, slow, persistent, and pacific in the means employed, but terrible in its ambitious intention." Hentz, his companion, proudly describes the triumph of the white man, and the expulsion of the "coloured man who was born on the land." He prophesies a terrible future: "The Germans will arrive with their thirst for possession and domination, and their originality, the harsh originality of barbarians, in unnumbered legions; they will kill off the sensual and foolish natives who have built up their societies upon this splendid soil and have degraded it by their turpitude."
It is the purging of a territory infested by African slaves. Germany, mother of men without number, officina et vagina gentium, invades with her blond legions the land of brown men, sends forth her chaste Teutons to the conquest of the lascivious forest.
Without denying the reality of this peril, we cannot but realise that it would be difficult to establish on Brazilian soil colonies which should reflect the glory of Das Deutschtum. Already 350,000 Germans are lost in the national mass; demographically they signify nothing as against the 19 millions of Brazilians. To found a colonial empire in the interior of the Lusitanian Republic it would first of all be necessary to have a strong basis of population; the theorists of the Germanic movement of expansion would dispose of 18 to 20 million emigrants in these rich southern provinces. Moreover, the Germanic invasion is not concentrated upon Brazil. The United States absorb the Germanic alluvium; and the Brazilian half-breeds being fertile, the numerical disproportion between the natives and the blond invaders would in the future be enormous.
On the other hand, the contingent of Teutonic immigration is diminishing. The modern cities of industrial Germany are increasing in numbers and in population; they are absorbing new elements into their artificial life. The rural multitude which migrates is changing the direction of its painful journey; it no longer forsakes its fatherland, but leaves the silent fields for the enervating life of the cities. Its taste has become sophisticated; it prefers urban attractions to the adventures of emigration. In the last ten years barely 30,000 Germans have left the Vaterland each year. Not with such scanty legions as these will Germany establish a centre of domination oversea, for even these are divided among the United States, Central America, and Brazil.
The Italians, enriched and triumphant, are invading the Argentine and Southern Brazil. Theirs is a current of increasing volume; more than 50,000 Latins emigrate annually; they adapt themselves to their new country, acquire immense stretches of soil, and accumulate enormous fortunes, until names of foreign origin begin to predominate in the world of Argentine letters and in the plutocratic salons of the new continent. They transmit their Latin heritage to their numerous children. The stiff-necked group of German colonists cannot vanquish these races, whose affinities are the same as those of the natives, and who bring oversea the sensuality of Naples and the commonsense of Milan.
When German emigration is not excessively concentrated upon one point it forms laborious and assimilable populations. The German learns more readily than the Englishman the language of his new country; he studies local manners and adopts them; he brings to the restless and turbulent democracies of America his deliberation, his spirit of industry, and his methodical activity. In the Argentine, in Chili, in Peru, in countries where he has not yet undertaken to establish the foundation of an empire, his influence has been fruitful.
The tutelage of the United States seems to us more dangerous than the German invasion.
CHAPTER III
THE NORTH AMERICAN PERIL
The policy of the United States—The Monroe doctrine: its various aspects—Greatness and decadence of the United States—The two Americas, Latin and Anglo-Saxon.
To save themselves from Yankee imperialism the American democracies would almost accept a German alliance, or the aid of Japanese arms; everywhere the Americans of the North are feared. In the Antilles and in Central America hostility against the Anglo-Saxon invaders assumes the character of a Latin crusade. Do the United States deserve this hatred? Are they not, as their diplomatists preach, the elder brothers, generous and protecting? And is not protection their proper vocation in a continent rent by anarchy?
We must define the different aspects of their activities in South America; a summary examination of their influence could not fail to be unjust. They have conquered new territories, but they have upheld the independence of feeble States; they aspire to the hegemony of the Latin continent, but this ambition has prevented numerous and grievous conflicts between South American nations. The moral pressure of the United States makes itself felt everywhere; the imperialist and maternal Republic intervenes in all the internal conflicts of the Spanish-speaking democracies. It excites or suppresses revolutions; it fulfils a high vocation of culture. It uses or abuses a privilege which cannot be gainsaid. The better to protect the Ibero-Americans, it has proudly raised its Pillars of Hercules against the ambition of the Old World.
Sometimes this influence becomes a monopoly, and the United States take possession of the markets of the South. They aim at making a trust of the South American republics, the supreme dream of their multi-millionaire conquistadors. Alberdi has said that there they are the "Puerto Cabello" of the new America; that is to say, that they aim, after the Spanish fashion, at isolating the southern continent and becoming its exclusive purveyors of ideas and industries.
Their supremacy was excellent when it was a matter of basing the independence of twenty republics of uncertain future upon a solid foundation. The neo-Saxons did not then intervene in the wars of the South; they remained neutral and observed the peace which Washington had advocated. They proclaimed the autonomy of the continent, and contributed to conserve the originality of Southern America by forbidding the formation of colonies in its empty territories, and by defending the republican and democratic States against reactionary Europe.
But who will deliver the Ibero-Americans from the excess of this influence? Quis custodiet custodem? An irresponsible supremacy is perilous.
Naturally, in the relations of the United States and the nations of the South actions do not always correspond with words; the art of oratory is lavish with a fraternal idealism, but strong wills enforce their imperialistic ambitions. Although fully attentive to the fair-sounding promises of the North, the statesmen of the South refuse to believe in the friendship of the Yankees; being perturbed by the memory of ancient and recent conquests, these peoples perhaps exaggerate the danger which might come from the North. A blind confidence and an excessive timidity are equally futile.
In 1906, at the conference of Rio de Janeiro, Secretary Root, in the presence of assembled America, was the lay prophet of the new gospel.
"We do not wish," he said, "to win victories, we desire no territory but our own, nor a sovereignty more extensive than that which we desire to retain over ourselves. We consider that the independence and the equal rights of the smallest and weakest members of the family of nations deserve as much respect as those of the great empires. We pretend to no right, privilege, or power that we do not freely concede to each one of the American Republics." This was the solemn declaration of a Puritan politician; Mr. Root continues the noble tradition of Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton.
Ten years earlier another secretary, Mr. Olney, declared to Lord Salisbury that the great Anglo-Saxon Republic was practically sovereign—paramount was his word—on the American continent, and that its fiat was law in affairs which called for its intervention. Which is the truth: the imperialistic declarations of Mr. Olney or the idealism of Mr. Root?
Against the policy of respect for Latin liberties are ranged the instincts of a triumphant plutocracy. The centre of North American life is passing from Boston to Chicago; the citadel of the ideal gives way to the material progress of the great porcine metropolis. There is a conflict of dissimilar currents of morality. The Puritan tradition of New England seems useless in the struggle of the Far West; the conquest of the desert demands another morality; the morality of conflict, aggression, and success. The trusts raise their heads above the impotent clamour of the weak. The conflict between the new-comers is tumultuous and brutal; as in the time of imperial Rome, the latter-day republicans are becoming aware of their defeat by a new caste, animated by an impetuous love of conflict. It is the struggle between idealism and plutocracy, between the tradition of the Pilgrim Fathers and the morality of Wall Street; the patricians of the Senate and the bosses of Tammany Hall.
The great historical parties are divided; while the democrats do not forget the ideal of Washington and Lincoln, the republicans think only of imperialism.
Will a generous Élite succeed in withstanding this racial tendency? Perhaps, but nothing can check the onward march of the United States. Their imperialism is an unavoidable phenomenon.
The nation which was peopled by nine millions of men in 1820 now numbers eighty millions—an immense demographic power; in the space of ten years, from 1890 to 1900, this population increased by one-fifth. By virtue of its iron, wheat, oil, and cotton, and its victorious industrialism, the democracy aspires to a world-wide significance of destiny; the consciousness of its powers is creating fresh international duties. Yankee pride increases with the endless multiplication of wealth and population, and the patriotic sentiment has reached such an intensity that it has become transformed into imperialism.
The United States buy the products they themselves lack from the tropical nations. To rule in these fertile zones would to them appear the geographical ideal of a northern people. Do not their industries demand new outlets in America and Asia? So to the old mystic ambition are added the necessities of utilitarian progress. An industrial nation, the States preach a practical Christianity to the older continents, to Europe, and to lands yet barbarous, as to South America; they profess a doctrine of aggressive idealism, a strange fusion of economic tendencies and Puritan fervour. The Christian Republic imposes its tutelage upon inferior races, and so prepares them for self-government.
This utilitarian and mystical expansion is opposed to the primitive simplicity of the Monroe doctrine. In 1823, to counter the political methods of the Holy Alliance, President Monroe upheld the republican integrity of the ancient Spanish colonies. The celebrated message declared that there were no free territories in America, thus condemning in advance any projected establishment of European colonies upon the unoccupied continent of America, and that the United States limited their political action to the New World, and renounced all intervention in the disputes of Europe.
At the close of the last century the political absolutism of the Holy Alliance was only a memory; democracy is progressing, even in the heart of the most despotic of monarchies, and France is republican. Europe, after the tragic adventure of the Mexican Empire, abandoned her expeditions of conquest. The United States, forgetting their initial isolation, intervened in the politics of the world; they defended the integrity of China, took part in the conference of Algeciras, and maintained peace in the East. Like the character in Terence, nothing in the world leaves them unconcerned. The two bases of the Monroe doctrine, the absolutism of Europe and the isolation of the United States, exist no longer, but the Monroe doctrine persists indefinitely. "If," says Mr. Coolidge, professor of political law at the University of Harvard, "if, by his principles, the American finds himself drawn to conclusions which do not please him, he ordinarily revolts, forsakes his promises, and jumps to conclusions that suit him better." To the logic of the Latins Americans and Englishmen oppose utility, common sense, instinct.
The Monroe doctrine has undergone an essential transformation; it has passed successively from the defensive to intervention and thence to the offensive. From a theory which condemned any change of political rÉgime among the new democracies under European pressure, and which forbade all acquisitions of territory, or the transfer of power from a weak to a strong nation, there arose the Polk doctrine, which, in 1845, decreed the annexation of Texas for fear of foreign intervention. In 1870 President Grant demanded the seizure of San Domingo as a measure of national protection, a new corollary of the Monroe doctrine. President Johnson was anxious to see his country in possession of Cuba in the name of the "laws of political gravitation which throw small States into the gullets of the great powers." In 1895 Secretary of State Olney, at the time of the trouble between England and Venezuela, declared that the United States were in fact sovereign in America. From Monroe to Olney the defensive doctrine has gradually changed to a moral tutelage.
If theories change, frontiers change no less. The northern Republic has been the beneficiary of an incessant territorial expansion: in 1813 it acquired Louisiana; in 1819, Florida; in 1845 and 1850, Texas; the Mexican provinces in 1848 and 1852; and Alaska in 1858. The annexation of Hawaii took place in 1898. In the same year Porto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, and one of the Marianne Islands, passed, by the Treaty of Paris, into the hands of the United States. They obtained the Samoan Islands in 1890, wished to buy the Danish West Indies in 1902, and planted their imperialistic standard at Panama in 1903.
Interventions have become more frequent with the expansion of frontiers. The United States have recently intervened in the territory of Acre, there to found a republic of rubber gatherers; at Panama, there to develop a province and construct a canal; in Cuba, under cover of the Platt amendment, to maintain order in the interior; in San Domingo, to support the civilising revolution and overthrow the tyrants; in Venezuela, and in Central America, to enforce upon these nations, torn by intestine disorders, the political and financial tutelage of the imperial democracy. In Guatemala and Honduras the loans concluded with the monarchs of North American finance have reduced the people to a new slavery. Supervision of the customs and the dispatch of pacificatory squadrons to defend the interests of the Anglo-Saxon have enforced peace and tranquillity: such are the means employed. The New York American announces that Mr. Pierpont Morgan proposes to encompass the finances of Latin America by a vast network of Yankee banks. Chicago merchants and Wall Street financiers created the Meat Trust in the Argentine. The United States offer millions for the purpose of converting into Yankee loans the moneys raised in London during the last century by the Latin American States; they wish to obtain a monopoly of credit. It has even been announced, although the news hardly appears probable, that a North American syndicate wished to buy enormous belts of land in Guatemala, where the English tongue is the obligatory language. The fortification of the Panama Canal, and the possible acquisition of the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific, are fresh manifestations of imperialistic progress.
The Monroe doctrine takes an aggressive form with Mr. Roosevelt, the politician of the "big stick," and intervention À outrance. Roosevelt is conscious of his sacred mission; he wants a powerful army, and a navy majestically sailing the two oceans. His ambitions find an unlooked-for commentary in a book by Mr. Archibald Coolidge, the Harvard professor, upon the United States as a world-power. He therein shows the origin of the disquietude of the South Americans before the Northern peril: "When two contiguous States," he writes, "are separated by a long line of frontiers and one of the two rapidly increases, full of youth and vigour, while the other possesses, together with a small population, rich and desirable territories, and is troubled by continual revolutions which exhaust and weaken it, the first will inevitably encroach upon the second, just as water will always seek to regain its own level."
He recognises the fact that the progress accomplished by the United States is not of a nature to tranquillise the South American; "that the Yankee believes that his southern neighbours are trivial and childish peoples, and above all incapable of maintaining a proper self-government." He thinks the example of Cuba, liberated "from the rule of Spain, but not from internal troubles, will render the American of the States sceptical as to the aptitude of the Latin-American populations of mixed blood to govern themselves without disorder," and recognises that the "pacific penetration" of Mexico by American capital constitutes a possible menace to the independence of that Republic, were the death of Diaz to lead to its original state of anarchy and disturb the peace which the millionaires of the North desire to see untroubled.
Warnings, advice, distrust, invasion of capital, plans of financial hegemony—all these justify the anxiety of the southern peoples.
The people of the United States have always desired a Zollverein, a fiscal union of all the Republics; they wish to gather into their imperial hands the commerce of the South, the produce of the tropics. The unity of the German Empire was born of a Zollverein or customs union, and perhaps in the future the same means will create that eternal empire of which the patriotism of Mr. Chamberlain used to dream. The United States, according to candid Professor Coolidge, are, in respect of Latin America, in a position analogous to that of Russia in respect of the nations of the Zollverein: their population is greater and more imposing. "History shows us," he writes, "that when feeble states and powerful states are closely associated the independence of the weak states runs certain risks."[1] The Yankee ideal, then, is fatally contrary to Latin-American independence.
For geographical reasons, and on account of its very inferiority, South America cannot dispense with the influence of the Anglo-Saxon North, with its exuberant wealth and its industries. South America has need of capital, of enterprising men, of bold explorers, and these the United States supply in abundance. The defence of the South should consist in avoiding the establishment of privileges or monopolies, whether in favour of North Americans or Europeans.
It is essential to understand not only the foundations of North American greatness, but also the weaknesses of the Anglo-Saxon democracy, in order to escape from the dangers of excessive imitation.
The Anglo-Saxons of America have created an admirable democracy upon a prodigious expanse of territory. A caravan of races has pitched its tents from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and has watered the desert with its impetuous blood. Dutch, French, Anglo-Saxons, and Germans, people of all sects, Quakers, Presbyterians, Catholics, Puritans, all have mingled their creeds in a single multiform nation. At the contact of new soil men have felt the pride of creation and of living. Initiative, self-assertion, self-reliance, audacity, love of adventure, all the forms of the victorious will are united in this Republic of energy. A triumphant optimism quickens the rhythm of life; an immense impulse of creation builds cities in the wilderness, and founds new plutocracies amidst the whirlpool of the markets. Workshops, factories, banks; the obscure unrest of Wall Street; the architectural insolence of the skyscraper; the many-coloured, material West; all mingle perpetually in the wild, uncouth hymn which testifies the desperate battle of will and destiny, of generation against death. Poets have exalted the greatness of America. Hear Walt Whitman, the bard of this advancing democracy:—
"Long, too long, America....
For who except myself has yet conceived
What your children en masse really are?
They will make the most splendid race the sun
Ever shone upon,"
he cries, in his free rhythms.
"O mother of a mighty race!"
said Bryant, celebrating the glories of North America, and the fastidious Whittier would have the United States excel the Old World on its own ground:
"And cast in some diviner mould
Lest the new cycle shame the old."
They have reconciled equality with liberty, in manners and in law. Fair play, the identical chances which the Republic offers her citizens, in creating schools, in fostering the advance of self-made men in society, constitutes the firmest foundation of the life of a republic. Equity and equality prevail above the eager onrush of her citizens; equality in industrial struggles against monopolies; equality in the churches in place of intolerance; equality in school instead of the privileges created by wealth. This persistent exaltation of liberty matches the sentiment of social discipline. The Germanic sense of organisation is added to the Anglo-Saxon individualism; associations multiply and become a gigantic network spread over the entire face of the country; clubs, leagues, societies of co-operation and production and philanthropic institutions.
But this civilisation, in which men of strong vitality win wealth, invent machines, create new cities, and profess a Christianity full of energy and accomplishment, has not the majesty of a harmonious structure. It is the violent work of a people of various origin, which has not yet been ennobled by the patina of tradition and time. In the cities which restless workers hastily raise on barren soil, one can as yet perceive no definitive unity. Race antagonism disturbs North America; the negroes swarm in the South; Japanese and Orientals aspire to the conquest of the West. Neo-Saxon civilisation is still seeking its final form, and in the meantime it is piling up wealth amid the prevailing indiscipline. "We find in the United States," says M. AndrÉ Chevrillon, "a political system, but not a social organisation." The admirable traditions of Hamilton and Jefferson have been subjected to the onslaught of new influences, the progress of plutocracy, the corruption of the administrative functions, the dissolution of parties, the abuse of the power of monopolies. The axis of the great nation is becoming displaced towards the West, and each step in advance marks the triumph of vulgarity.
An octopus of a city, New York, might be taken as the symbol of this extraordinary nation; it displays the vertigo, the audacity, and all the lack of proportion that characterise American life. Near the poverty of the Ghetto and the disturbing spectacle of Chinatown you may admire the wealth of Fifth Avenue and the marble palaces which plagiarise the architecture of the Tuscan cities. Opposite the obscure crowds of emigrants herded in the docks you will see the refined luxury of the plutocratic hotels, and facing the majestic buildings of Broadway, the houses of the parallel avenues, which are like the temporary booths of a provincial fair. Confusion, uproar, instability—these are the striking characteristics of the North American democracy. Neither irony nor grace nor scepticism, gifts of the old civilisations, can make way against the plebeian brutality, the excessive optimism, the violent individualism of the people.
All these things contribute to the triumph of mediocrity; the multitude of primary schools, the vices of utilitarianism, the cult of the average citizen, the transatlantic M. Homais, and the tyranny of opinion noted by Tocqueville; and in this vulgarity, which is devoid of traditions and has no leading aristocracy, a return to the primitive type of the redskin, which has already been noted by close observers, is threatening the proud democracy. From the excessive tension of wills, from the elementary state of culture, from the perpetual unrest of life, from the harshness of the industrial struggle, anarchy and violence will be born in the future. In a hundred years men will seek in vain for the "American soul," the "genius of America," elsewhere than in the indisciplined force or the violence which ignores moral laws.
Among the Anglo-Saxon nations individualism finds its limits in the existence of a stable home; it may also struggle against the State, according to the formula consecrated by Spencer, "the man versus the State." It defends its jealous autonomy from excessive legislation, from the intervention of the Government in economic conflicts or the life of the family. And it is precisely the family spirit which is becoming enfeebled in North America, under the pressure of new social conditions. The birth-rate is diminishing, and the homes of foreign immigrants are contributing busily to the formation of the new generations; the native stock inheriting good racial traditions would seem to be submerged more and more by the new human tide. A North American official writes that "the decrease in the birth-rate will lead to a complete change in the social system of the Republic."[2] From this will result the abandonment of the traditional austerity of the race, and the old notions of sacrifice and duty. The descendants of alien races will constitute the nation of the future. The national heritage is threatened by the invasion of Slavs and Orientals, and the fecundity of the negroes; a painful anxiety weighs upon the destinies of the race.
The family is unstable, and divorces are increasing at an extraordinary rate. Between 1870 and 1905 the population doubled; during the same period the divorces increased sixfold and the marriages decreased. There is no fixity in the elements of variety, and the causes of this state of transition will not disappear, as they are intimately allied with the development of the industrial civilisation which has brought with it a new ideal of happiness. By emancipating men and women from the old moral principles it has modified sexual morality; by accelerating social progress it has brought an additional bitterness into the social mÊlÉe, a greater egoism into human conflict.
Excessive and heterogeneous immigration prevents any final crystallisation; in the last ten years 8,515,000 strangers have entered into the great hospitable Union. They came from Germany, Ireland, Russia, or Southern Italy. It is calculated that the United States are able to assimilate 150,000 to 200,000 immigrants each year, but they certainly cannot welcome such an overwhelming host without anxiety.
Criminality increases; the elaboration of a common type among these men of different origin is proceeding more slowly. Doubtless beneath the shelter of the political federation of the various States a confused agglomeration of races is forming itself, and this justifies the query of Professor Ripley: "The Americans of the North," he says, "have witnessed the disappearance of the Indians and the buffalo, but can they be certain to-day that the Anglo-Saxons will survive them?"
In seeking to imitate the United States we should not forget that the civilisation of the peoples of the North presents these symptoms of decadence.
Europe offers the Latin-American democracies what the latter demand of Anglo-Saxon America, which was formed in the school of Europe. We find the practical spirit, industrialism, and political liberty in England; organisation and education in Germany; and in France inventive genius, culture, wealth, great universities, and democracy. From these ruling peoples the new Latin world must indirectly receive the legacy of Western civilisation.
Essential points of difference separate the two Americas. Differences of language and therefore of spirit; the difference between Spanish Catholicism and the multiform Protestantism of the Anglo-Saxons; between the Yankee individualism and the omnipotence of the State natural to the nations of the South. In their origin, as in their race, we find fundamental antagonisms; the evolution of the North is slow and obedient to the lessons of time, to the influences of custom; the history of the southern peoples is full of revolutions, rich with dreams of an unattainable perfection.
The people of the United States hate the half-breed, and the impure marriages of whites and blacks which take place in Southern homes; no manifestation of Pan-Americanism could suffice to destroy the racial prejudice as it exists north of Mexico. The half-breeds and their descendants govern the Ibero-American democracies, and the Republic of English and German origin entertains for the men of the tropics the same contempt which they feel for the slaves of Virginia whom Lincoln liberated.
In its friendship for them there will always be disdain; in their progress, a conquest; in their policy, a desire of hegemony. It is the fatality of blood, stronger than political affinities or geographical alliances.
Instead of dreaming of an impossible fusion the Neo-Latin peoples should conserve the traditions which are proper to them. The development of the European influences which enrich and improve them, the purging of the nation from the stain of miscegenation, and immigration of a kind calculated to form centres of resistance against any possibilities of conquest, are the various aspects of this Latin Americanism.[3]
CHAPTER IV
A POLITICAL EXPERIMENT: CUBA
The work of Spain—The North American reforms—The future.
By turns Spanish and North American, and frequently disturbed by the conflict of these two Americanisms, the history of the "pearl of the Antilles" has been a long political experiment. Its result, the success of one method or the other, will prove the aptitude or the incapacity of the Latins of America in the art of organising a State or instituting a Republic.
The last colony, the final vestige of the vast Spanish Empire overseas, Cuba still betrayed, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the political and moral influence of the mother country. The exuberant and classic land of tobacco and sugar, its tropical opulence attracted pioneers and colonists. Spain therefore fought to retain this country, which she granted in recompense of the audacity of her adventurers and the rapacity of her officials.
Its geographical situation, its wealth, its traditions, are all exceptional. The race, imaginative and precocious, is fertile in poets, heroes, and orators. We see generals of thirty, poetical swordsmen, divided between their battles and their verses; irreducible guerillas, orators full of tropical eloquence, passionate pilgrims, who wander through America relating the miseries of the Spanish tyranny: a gloomy tale which has made the liberated democracies attentive to the fate of their captive sister. Thus Europe used to shudder at the fate of Poland or Ireland. Astonishingly audacious were these soldiers—Garcia, Maceo, Gomez—who defended the national liberty to the death; bitter were the battles, the hand-to-hand conflicts, the wars of skirmishes and outposts. Of the high lineage of Bolivar, San Martin, and Sucre, the last of the Liberators, at once poet, statesman, and warrior, a Gothic knight enamoured of an ideal Dulcinea—the autonomy of Cuba—Marti was the representative leader of the nation.
As in the other colonies, freed a century earlier, the action of Spain in Cuba was at once fertile and limited, useful and disastrous. What effort could be more paradoxical than that of loading with fetters, with prohibitions and monopolies, the very cities whose birth and development was the work of Spain? Authoritatively she sought to stamp out the longing for liberty, and in this island consumed by racial hatred—the old hatred of the conquerors and the Creoles—she responded to every revolutionary demand for independence by a terrible policy of repression. One of her governors left the bloody traces of an Alva, the pacificator of Flanders.
In Madrid a great minister, Canovas del Castillo, an uncompromising traditionalist, believed that Spain should possess a colonial empire "to preserve her position in the world." From that time only energetic action in the revolted islands could save the metropolis. Already, in 1865, at the beginning of his career, he wished to limit the representation of Cuba and Porto Rico; and in 1868, when the long war broke out, he supported the demands of the 9,000 Spaniards who demanded the rejection of all reform.[1] Once in power, in 1876, Canovas was still more emphatic; the Cuban problem was to be solved only by violence. The generosity of Martinez Campos was followed by the inflexible severity of governors who turned the island into a vast barracks. The timid liberties granted to Zanjon were soon suppressed; neither popular elections nor commercial liberties were allowed, but martial law, and a general to aid the Spaniards of the island in their war against the Creoles and mulattos.
In 1878 the first civil war was over, but in 1895 the revolt was so successful, so popular, so terrible, that Martinez Campos abandoned the government of the island, feeling himself incapable of "wholesale shootings and other feats of the same kind." Marti, tragic symbol of revolt, was killed. General Weyler installed a Reign of Terror; the island was exhausted. No one could dislodge the guerillas from the plantations of sugar-cane which served them as refuge. Weyler ordered a "concentration" of women, children, and the non-combatants in the fortified cities. Offences of opinion were punished by death, and absolute submission was demanded. The intervention of the United States forced Spain to grant a brittle autonomy in 1896. The assassination of Canovas by an anarchist permitted a reaction against his uncompromising ideals, and an offer was made of a constitution, and of elective chambers, without, however, authority over the governor sent by the metropolis, and a Council of Administration, to which the Cubans would have access; but economic interests were ignored and sugar and tobacco were not set free.
Cuba was awaiting her crusader, her Lohengrin. The United States filled the rÔle. Attentive to the affairs of the island, they negotiated, arranged for intervention with non-official agents, and New York began to fit out filibustering expeditions. The incidents of the Yankee campaign against Spain are well known, from the sinking of the Maine by an explosion in Havana roadstead to the Treaty of Paris. Once their rival was vanquished would the States give Cuba her longed-for liberty? Porto Rico was conquered and Cuba obtained only a mediocre autonomy.
Here is a difficult question: what was it that impelled the Americans to undertake the adventure: imperialistic ambition or chivalrous impulse, as many Cubans still believe? The opinion of their politicians was always clear; annexation of the island or preservation of the status quo. They feared that Spain might cede the colony to a power better armed than herself, and Cuba, since the time of Jefferson, had been reckoned among those countries which a "law of political gravitation" should eventually give them. An eminent Brazilian historian and diplomatist, Oliveira Lima, has even demonstrated that when Bolivar, after convoking the Congress of Panama in 1826, had thereupon proposed, as the last stage of his vast epic, to give liberty to Cuba, it was the United States that prevented him. For they knew that independence would also mean the enfranchisement of subject races, and they needed slaves for the proud and wealthy feudal State of Virginia. These tropical countries, Cuba and Porto Rico, were the promised prey of a future Federal imperialism, and Spain might remain their guardian until the States could demand their cession or undertake their conquest.
Thus the very interest which in 1826 vetoed the independence of Cuba was later to give the choice between autonomy or war; a dilemma from which the haughty metropolis could not escape. Between the commercial brutality of old and this recent Quixotism there is only an apparent contrast: a hidden logic has guided American policy. If we consider the end in view—to assure the incontestable control of the Caribbean Sea, by purchase or annexation of its islands—the former attitude of a country which had not yet peopled its own territory, and that provoked to-day by a plethora of wealth and men, no longer appear irreconcilable.
As early as 1845 the purchase of Cuba was discussed in Washington. The famous "Ostend manifesto" (1854) issued by the American diplomatists, expounded their right to seize the island in case Spain should refuse to sell it. This resolution to give independence to a country they despaired of buying was therefore only the end of a long campaign.
Certainly in 1898, once peace was signed and Porto Rico conquered, they respected this independence. But their detachment was incomplete; they occupied the island, sent governors thither, and generously reformed the finances, education, and hygiene of the country. A provisional tutelage, soon followed by the proclamation of the Republic. Was this the independence of which Marti had dreamed? The treaty which proclaimed it also limited it; the Platt amendment found its way into the margin of a liberal text, reserving to the United States the right of intervention to remedy any possible anarchy. A strange severity, to demand of an untried tropical republic, where the hostility of castes was extreme, a serene and untroubled existence! Eventual military occupation for the purpose of suppressing revolts would be a dangerous snare to independence. Intervention in the public affairs of the old Spanish colony, twice repeated, was both times followed by a campaign of annexation in the Yellow Press. It is difficult to guess whether Yankee imperialism, with its ever-increasing appetite, will respect the autonomy of the island in the face of periodic occupations. It will probably prefer a protectorate or a final conquest when wearied of the turbulence of a democracy incapable of self-government.
Will this beautiful island one day become a State of the Anglo-Saxon or Federal Union? The accession of the Cubans to this democracy would cause a disturbance in the political and social world as profound as that created by Japanese immigration in the Far West. The plutocrats of the States have too much contempt for half-breeds and negroes willingly to accept deputies from a country where the profound admixture of races contains an important African element; a society which despises the negro cannot wholly agree with one ruled largely by Spanish half-castes of Indian and African ancestry. The protectorate would be a step toward the control of the Tropics which Mr. Benjamin Kidd and other English sociologists imagine to be the appanage of their race.
The civilising work of the United States has been admirable. Once Spain was defeated and her colony conquered, they transformed the education, finance, and hygiene of the island to prepare the people for the liberty they ignored. It was four years before they gave it; four years of pedagogy, of which Brigadier-General Wood, military and civil chief, was in charge, until on the 20th of May, 1902, "thanks to the goodwill of President Roosevelt, we were recognised as having attained our majority."[2]
Four years of extraordinary activity transformed the exhausted island into a prosperous country, a reform which we may follow in the memoirs of General Wood. Two years of endeavour extirpated the yellow fever, which had prevailed in Havana since 1762. The Yankees fought the mosquitos, the vehicles of the disease, and their sanitary works and measures decreased the death-rate from 91.3 per 1,000 in 1898 to 20.63 in 1902. In the same period the deaths among the American troops fell from 91.03 to 20.68. They also attacked malaria and tuberculosis, until Havana, as one of them proudly writes, became one of the healthiest cities of America.
Pavements, gutters, sewers, the demolition of old buildings and the construction of new; asylums, hospitals, and prisons, gave the island an aspect at once modern and sanitary. The fiscal revenues, formerly badly employed by an unskilful bureaucracy, found useful employment; dilapidations were noted and a railway statute was passed. The Yankees opened up new roads, knowing how far the prosperity of the island depended on them; in 1906, the second year of the occupation, there were only 610 kilometres of carriage-roads in Cuba, while Jamaica, with one-fifth the area, had 10,113.[3]
Communications being thus improved, the sugar industry, on which the prosperity of the island depends, developed rapidly. The visitors did not forget to attract immigrants and to reconstruct the ports.
The government of General Wood installed modern schools in the old Spanish school-houses, while it built special schools, kindergartens, and technical colleges in the large towns.
Under the Spaniards education was obligatory, no doubt, but it was the Americans who brought a lapsed law into force. Fines punished parental neglect. A thousand teachers went to Harvard, in the year 1900 alone, sent thither by General Wood to improve their methods of teaching; new pedagogic methods and a wider culture strongly modified social and political life. The Americans left ten times as many schools as they found, and an education adequate to the race and the Cuban child, who is "impressionable, nervous, and furiously imaginative."
Governor Wood requested his country to reduce by one-half the customs rates upon the coffee, fruits, and sugar which the island produced, as the basis of a Zollverein profitable to both countries. He complained, in his memoir, of the indifference of the wealthy towards the communal and political life, which he wished to render more active. A law passed by him regulated the elections in the new Republic.
The Cubans willingly recognise that the Americans have performed an excellent work in education and finance, but accuse them of having provoked in political life a corruption analogous to that of the leaders or bosses of Tammany Hall, which replaces violence by fraud. It is difficult to speak of such a matter, but perhaps the reaction against these dangerous methods was insufficient. In 1906, after four years of independent life, President Estrada Palma demanded intervention. It must be recognised that the Americans did not respond without some uneasiness. Mr. Roosevelt, in a letter to the Cuban diplomatist Gonzalo de Quesada, gave some admirable advice: "I solemnly exhort the Cuban patriots," he said, "to form a close union, to forget their personal differences and ambitions, and to remember that they have one means of safeguarding the independence of the Republic: to evade, at all costs, the necessity of foreign intervention, intended to deliver them from civil war and anarchy."
Heedless of the voice of the shepherd of the American people, they asked him to put an end to the long quarrel between the liberals and the moderates. The Americans occupied the island for a year; Mr. Taft, the new President, was one of the pacificators. It is difficult to judge whether the anarchical inhabitants of the island have gained ground since the departure of the Americans. One of their most remarkable politicians, SeÑor Mendez Capote, believes that in Cuba—and more generally in any very young country where the government has need of an unfailing authority in order to check discord—representatives of one or both parties ought to belong to the Cabinet in order to render political life less changeable and to decrease its contrasts.[4] This organisation is impossible in a democracy which passes alternately from revolt to dictatorship.
Some Cubans, satisfied with the material progress effected, would prefer annexation. Others, and among them one of the most remarkable writers of the country, SeÑor Jesus Castellanos, are never tired, remembering their happy intervention, of calling the United States, "the great sister Republic." Certainly the States have given Cuba autonomy, but was it not a treacherous gift? Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. The historic interest of Cuba for the Americans is to-day increased by imperialistic ambitions. A Harvard professor, Mr. Coolidge, writes in a book already cited: "A glance at the map is enough to show us how important the island is to the United States. Of great value by virtue of its natural resources and its temperate climate, it is strategically the key to the Gulf of Mexico, where the Mississippi Valley terminates facing the Caribbean Sea and the future Panama Canal. Its situation is comparable to that of Crete in the Eastern Mediterranean."
The danger is therefore serious; the island is already in the lion's mouth. Only a skilful policy can keep the hope of deliverance alive. The servitude offered by the modern Cyclops is only a gilded pill; and to swallow it the merchants of the island would willingly forget their national pride. Analysing Rodo's book, SeÑor Castellanos has denounced the excessive utilitarianism of these men, without idealism, and full of a cupidity and gross materialism, which makes any collective effort towards national unity impossible. Poets and dreamers, the Cubans would need to undergo some prodigious change before one could interest them in action, before they could understand in the medley of political conflict what is really in the interests of the country; before they could establish political solidarity in the place of anarchy, and temper their easy confidence in the Yankee by a necessary and self-preserving scepticism. Could they ever transform their intellectual gifts into a less showy but more efficacious capacity for conflict and discipline? Will they acquire a sense of reality? Cuba should serve the rest of Latin America as a kind of experimental object-lesson. She suffers from the characteristic malady of the race, the divorce between intelligence and will.
She opposes the Anglo-Saxon invasion, being still thoroughly Spanish, her deliverance being a matter of yesterday, but American also by the mixture of the two races, the conquerors and the vanquished, by the usual Latin virtues and defects. The loss of her independence would be a painful lesson to the republics of Central America, and to Mexico even, where anarchy is paving the way for servitude. The United States offer peace at the cost of liberty. The alternatives are independence or wealth, material progress or tradition. The choice between dignity and a future is a painful one. Only an abundant immigration under benevolent tyrants strong enough to enforce a lasting peace, only a new orientation of the national life, setting business and industry and rural life before politics, could save the country from the painful fate which seems to be hers.
A fresh intervention, followed doubtless by annexation, would demonstrate the racial incapacity for self-government—a mournful experience. The successive rule of Anglo-Saxons and Creoles would render obvious the superiority of the former in the matter of administration, economics, and politics.
CHAPTER V
THE JAPANESE PERIL
The ambitions of the Mikado—The Shin Nippon in Western America—Pacific invasion—Japanese and Americans.
Facing the United States in the mysterious Orient is an extensive empire which is sending its legions of pacific invaders into the New World. Anticipating the Japanese victories, the German Emperor warned a somnolent Europe of the terrible Yellow Peril; the peril of hordes like those of Genghis Khan, which would destroy the treasures of Western civilisation. This danger, after the defeat of Russia and the formation of the Anglo-Japanese alliance, has been felt in America from Vancouver and California down to Chili.
To dominate the Pacific is the ambition both of the North American Republic and the Asiatic Monarchy.
Before ruling America the Japanese, exposed to the hostility of the Californians, will fight in the North the great battle which will decide their fate. The Monroe doctrine, which liberated Latin America from the tutelage of the Holy Alliance, is perhaps destined to protect it also against the menace of the East. The Anglo-Saxons will not tolerate the foundation of Japanese colonies on the southern coasts of America, and to prevent them they are overcoming the obstacle of the Isthmus: are digging a canal, fortifying it, and increasing their navy. The United States understand that their future will baffle Japan, and by the acquisition of the Philippines they have become an Asiatic power. They defend the integrity of China, negotiate peace between Russia and Japan, demand the neutrality of the Manchurian railway, and claim a financial share in the Chinese loans and undertakings of material civilisation. The policy of Mr. Taft tends to ensure the American control of the Chinese finances.
The industry of North America needs outlets in Asia, because South America is still a commercial fief of Europe. On the other hand, the Japanese population is increasing at such an excessive rate that emigration is a necessary phenomenon for that country; a people of mariners hemmed in by the ocean naturally looks for fruitful adventures by sea. Moreover, the State stimulates emigration; socialism is causing it anxiety, and the dense population of proletariats is producing implacable caste antagonisms. Anarchists, brilliant propagandists of European doctrines, are spreading their convictions among the multitude which vegetates upon a poverty-stricken soil. Industrialism, and the general transformation of the nation, renders the protest of the disinherited still more bitter.
This current of emigration is neither chaotic nor fruitless. Even more than the German the Japanese is an emissary of imperialistic design. He does not become absorbed into the nation in which he lives; he does not become naturalised under the protection of hospitable laws; he preserves his worship of the Mikado, his national traditions, and his noble devotion to the dead.
Japan aspires to political domination and economic hegemony in Korea and Northern China. The Japanese have annexed Korea, and flying the Imperial standard upon this peninsula they have become a continental power. They have received from ancient China lessons in wisdom, artists and philosophers, and to-day the initiate seeks to rule the initiator. Japan is transforming China and teaching her the methods of the West; the philosophy of Heidelberg, the arts of Paris. In Manchuria, despite the ambitions of the United States, she pretends to supremacy for her industries and her banks.
"Asia for the Asiatics" is the Japanese cry, as "America for the Americans" is that of the people of the States.
Neither of these peoples respects the autonomy of foreign nations. The United States are conquering Asia economically, and the Japanese, the defenders of Oriental integrity, are slowly invading the Far West of America. The Philippines for the United States and Hawaii for Japan are the advance posts of commercial expansion on the one hand and imperialism on the other.
We are then face to face with a struggle of races, a clash of irreconcilable interests. In the proud northern democracy we note an uneasiness which reveals itself by the jealous exclusion of the Japanese from the life of the West, and by immovable racial prejudices. The American General Homer Lee, in a pessimistic book, The Valor of Ignorance, states that a heterogeneous nation in which foreigners constitute half the population can never conquer Japan. He foresees that the island empire, having eliminated its two rivals, Russia and China, by successive wars, will vanquish the United States and occupy vast territories in the American North-West. Only alliance with England, "to-day allied with the destinies of Japan," could save the Republic from subjection to her Oriental rivals.
Such prophecies, however, do not assume a general character. While waiting for the future war the struggle for the Pacific between the two powers concerned remains acute. The Japanese emigrants halt at Hawaii, assimilate American methods, and resume their exodus toward the Californian Eldorado. In the islands they are electors; they prevail by force of numbers; they change their professions or industries with remarkable adaptability, and then return to Japan, or remain, and retain their national feeling inviolate. In California they follow humble callings; they are secretly preparing themselves for conquest. Numberless legions thus arrive from the Orient; they are proud, adventurous, speculative; they aspire to economic supremacy.
In California, that country of gold and adventure, the problem of Japanese immigration is becoming more complex. M. Louis Aubert explains that in this State the Japanese constitute a necessary defence against the tyranny of the trades unions.[1] They accept an absurd wage and furnish the financial oligarchy with useful arms and sober stomachs. When the associations of working men demand increased salaries and threaten the greedy plutocrats with strikes or socialistic demands, the Japanese passively submit to the iron law of capitalism. If the interests of the race demand their expulsion from California, the interests of the capitalist class demand their retention. The instinct of the democracy which supports the civilising mission of the white man, "the white man's burden," is stronger than its utilitarian egoism. The immigrant is accused of immodesty or servility. The energy, frugality, self-respect, triumphant patience, and hostile isolation of the Japanese in Hawaii and California cause the Americans much uneasiness.
Repulsed in the north, the conquering Japanese take refuge on the long coast-line of South America. They do not renounce California and its admirable soil, but they prefer to forget the disdain of the North, to compromise with that haughty democracy, and prepare in silence for the future conflict.
They are, as a race, transformed; they have forsaken their own history in the midst of the millennial and ecstatic Orient, and this renovation has resulted in an intense ambition of expansion. The Japan which apes Europe does not overlook the teachings of Anglo-Saxon imperialism. Its statesmen, disciples of Disraeli and Chamberlain, wish to found an immense empire under the tutelage of the Asiatic England, insular and proud as the United Kingdom itself. Count Okuma stated that South America was comprised in the sphere of influence to which the Japanese Empire may legitimately pretend. Is not this the very language of the conquerors of Europe, for whom such "spheres of influence" pave the way for protectorates, tutelage, or annexation? "Western America," write the Japanese journals, "is a favourable ground for Japanese emigration. Persevering emigrants might there build up a new Japan, Shin Nippon." It is the identical object of the Germans in Southern Brazil; the creation of a Transatlantic Deutschtum.
The Japanese emigrate to Canada, there to establish a base for the invasion of the United States; they do the same in Mexico, and settle even in Chili; but Peru is the favourite soil of these imperialistic adventurers. To a statesman here is a Shin Nippon whose future is assured, a new Hawaii. Its climate resembles that of Japan. "In Peru, as in the greater part of South America, the government is weak, and if energy be displayed it cannot refuse to accept Japanese immigrants," writes a journal of Tokio. "In this hospitable country the Japanese could receive education in the public schools, acquire lands, and exploit mines." It is necessary, says an Osaka news-sheet, that these immigrants should not return to Japan after amassing a fortune; they must remain in Peru and there create a Shin Nippon.[2] The Japanese immigrants are reminded that already there are 60,000 Chinese in the sugar plantations of Peru, and that this republic is one of the richest on the Pacific coast. A minute explanation is given of the agricultural products which can be raised in Mexico, Chili, and Peru, and what are the privileges granted to immigrants in these countries; but these comprehensive statements do not trouble American statesmen. The very date of the first Japanese exodus toward the Eldorado of the conquistadors has become the classic anniversary of the commencement of a new era; "the thirty-second of the Meijie," of the regeneration of the Empire. According to recent statistics 6,000 Japanese are at work in Peru, in the plantations of sugar-cane, the rubber-forests, or the cotton-fields; following the tracks of the Chinese, they fill the lesser callings and defeat the mulattos and half-breeds in the economic struggle. New fleets of steamers carry these persistent legions under the Imperial flag. The State protects the navigation companies which run between Japan and South America, and although the commerce thus favoured is more profitable to Peru and Chili than to Japan, the far-sighted Mikado encourages relations which are not particularly favourable to-day, but which permit of the development of Japanese influence all along the Pacific coast, and the creation of centres of Japanese population and influence in Mexico, Peru, and Chili.[3] The Japanese vessels discharge their human freight at Callao and Valparaiso. The soil, which lacks Chinese serfs, is thus fertilised by Japanese immigrants, and the agricultural oligarchy of Chili and Peru is satisfied. Brazil itself attracts these emigrants, replacing the fertile Italian invasion by these sober workers of a hostile race, and is preparing the way for the establishment on Brazilian soil of two groups of identical tendencies, but inimical: one Japanese, the other German.
Japanese spies have been captured in Ecuador and Mexico. At the centennial fÊtes of Mexico and the Argentine in 1910 a Japanese cruiser and an ambassador of the Mikado brought fraternal messages from the Orient. Uneasy on account of the North American peril, certain writers of the Latin American democracies entertain a certain amount of confidence in the sympathies of Japan; perhaps they even count upon an alliance with the Empire of the Rising Sun. But we cannot see, with the brilliant Argentine writer Manuel Ugarte, that Latin diplomacy must henceforth count upon Japan, because the hostility between that nation and the United States might be successfully exploited at the proper moment. In the commercial battles for the domination of the Pacific Japan does not support the autonomy of Latin America; her statesmen and publicists consider that Peru, Chili, and Mexico are spheres of Japanese expansion. We have cited conclusive opinions on this subject, and they contradict the optimism of the Argentine sociologist. Apart from the emigrants and the companies which encourage them the projects and designs of Count Okuma, leader of the Japanese imperialists, are manifested in the nationalist Press, which sometimes betrays more than it intends. To-day, in the face of the unanimous opinion of these journals, we cannot deny that Japan has ambitious designs upon America. The future war will be born of the clash of two doctrines, of two imperialisms, of the ideal of Okuma and the Monroe doctrine. Victorious, the Japanese would invade Western America and convert the Pacific into a vast closed sea, closed to foreign ambitions, mare nostrum, peopled by Japanese colonies.[4]
The Japanese hegemony would not be a mere change of tutelage for the nations of America. In spite of essential differences the Latins oversea have certain common ties with the people of the States: a long-established religion, Christianity, and a coherent, European, occidental civilisation. Perhaps there is some obscure fraternity between the Japanese and the American Indians, between the yellow men of Nippon and the copper-coloured Quechuas, a disciplined and sober people. But the ruling race, the dominant type of Spanish origin, which imposes the civilisation of the white man upon America, is hostile to the entire invading East.
The geography of the Oriental Empire in no sense recalls that of America; there are neither wide plains, nor mighty rivers, nor fertile and luxurious forests. Narrow horizons, gentle hills, minute islands, closed seas, and the strange flora of the harmonious insular landscape: lotuses, cryptomera, bamboos, chrysanthemums, dwarf trees. Beliefs, manners, and customs all differ radically from the American. "The Europeans," writes Lafcadio Hearn, "build with a view to duration, the Japanese with a view to instability." A keen sentiment of all that is fugitive in life, of the anguish caused by the incessant flux and mobility of things, causes men to love ephemeral apparitions. Buddhism speaks of the fluidity of life. Japanese art strives to fix passing impressions; the dew, the pale light of the moon, the fleeting tints of twilight, the provisional temples, the small houses of wood, the rice-paper shoji, on which the very shadows of those within are vague and momentary. There is nothing persevering in Japanese life; the inhabitant is a nomad and nature is variable. Impassive Buddhas, seated on their blue lotus flowers, contemplate the irresistible current of appearances. Mobility, and a religious sense of becoming: these would be elements of dissolution in a divided America.
Powerful and traditional, the Japanese civilisation would weigh too heavily upon the Latin democracies, mixed as they are. Bushido, the cult of honour and fidelity to one's ancestors, is the basis of an intense nationalism; the contempt for death, the pride of an insular people, the subjection of the individual to the family and the native land, and the asceticism of the samurai, constitute so formidable a superiority that in the conflict between half-breed America and stoic Japan the former would lose both its autonomy and its traditions.
