PROBLEMS
Serious problems arise from a consideration of the Latin democracies, which are in the full tide of development. They are divided, in spite of common traditions, and they comprise races whose marriage has not been precisely happy. In spite of the resources of the soil, and its fabulous wealth, these States live by loans. Their political life is not organised; the parties obey leaders who bring to the struggle for power neither an ideal nor a programme of concrete reforms. The population of these States is so small that America may be called a desert.
We will consider all these problems minutely: problems of unity, of race, of population, of financial conditions, and of politics.
CHAPTER I
THE PROBLEM OF UNITY
The foundations of unity: religion, language, and similarity of development—Neither Europe, nor Asia, nor Africa presents this moral unity in the same degree as Latin America—The future groupings of the peoples: Central America, the Confederation of the Antilles, Greater Colombia, the Confederation of the Pacific, and the Confederation of La Plata—Political and economical aspects of these unions—The last attempts at federation in Central America—The Bolivian Congress—The A.B.C.—the union of the Argentine, Brazil, and Chili.
A professor of the American university of Harvard, Mr. Coolidge, writes that if there is one thing that proves the backwardness of the political spirit of the Latin Americans, it is precisely the existence of so many hostile democracies on a continent which is in so many respects uniform. With so many points in common, with the same language, the same civilisation, the same essential interests, they persist in maintaining the political subdivisions due to the mere accidents of their history.[1] And he advises in all sincerity that these inimical nations should associate themselves in powerful groups, a means of defence which no nation could oppose, neither the United States nor Europe. If, for example, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Paraguay were to unite with the Argentine Republic; if the old United States of Colombia were re-established, and if, as formerly, Venezuela and Ecuador, with perhaps Peru, were to form a confederation; if the republics of Central America were at last to succeed in forming a durable confederation, and were perhaps to join Mexico—then Latin America would consist only of a few great States, each of which would be sufficiently important to assume by right an enviable position in the modern world, and to fear no aggression on the part of any foreign power.
The Latin Republics pay no attention to this wise counsel; we observe among them a tendency toward further disagreement, toward an atomic disintegration. Originally a different and a wider movement, in the sense of the close union of similar nationalities, did manifest itself. The contrary principle prevails to-day, and it results in the separation of complementary provinces and the conflict of sister nations.
During a century of isolated political development, and under the influence of territory and climate, divergent characteristics have manifested themselves in the nations of America. Mexico is without the tropical eloquence we find in Colombia; the Chilian inflexibility contrasts with the rich imagination of the Brazilians; the Argentines have become a commercial people; Chili is a bellicose republic; Bolivia has an astute policy, the work of a slow and practical people, which has given it a new strength; Peru persists in its dreams of generous idealism; Central America remains rent by an anarchy which seems incurable; Venezuela is still inspired by an empty "lyricism." Some of these republics are practical peoples governed by active plutocracies; others are given to dreaming and are led by presidents suffering from neurosis. In the Tropics we find civil war and idleness; on the cold table-lands, in the temperate plains, and in the maritime cities, wealth and peace.
But such divergences do not form an essential separation; they cannot destroy the age-long work of laws, religion, institutions, tradition, and language. Unity possesses indestructible foundations, as old and as deep-rooted as the race itself.
From Mexico to Chili the religion is the same; the intolerance of alien cults is the same; so are the clericalism, the anti-clericalism, the fanaticism, and the superficial free thought; the influence of the clergy in the State, upon women, and the schools; the lack of true religious feeling under the appearance of general belief.
To this first very important factor of unity we must add the powerful and permanent influence of the Spanish language, whose future is bound up with the future of the Latin Transatlantic peoples. Sonorous and arrogant, this language expresses, better than any other, the vices and the grandeur of the American mind; its rhetoric and its heroism, its continuity of spirit from the feats of the Cid to the Republican revolutions. The Spanish tongue is an intimate bond of union between the destinies of the metropolis and those of its ancient colonies, and it separates the two Americas, one being the expression of the Latin and the other of the Anglo-Saxon genius.
The language is always to a certain extent transformed in these democracies; provincialisms and Americanisms abound; the popular tongue differs from the autocratic Castilian. Don Rufino Cuervo predicts that Spanish will undergo essential alterations in America, as was the case with Latin at the time of the Roman decadence. An Argentine writer, SeÑor Ernesto Quesada, believes that a national language is in process of formation on the banks of the Plata, and that the barbarisms of the popular speech are forecasts of a new tongue. In Chili an exalted patriot has upheld the originality of the Chilian race and language in an anonymous book, claiming that they derive from the Gothic. Thus is the effect of the national spirit exaggerated. Among the Ibero-American republics there is a profound and general resemblance in the pronunciation and the syntax of the language; the same linguistic defects even are to be found in all. The Spanish of the Peninsula loses its majesty overseas; it is no longer the language, lordly in its beauty, solemn in its ornaments, of Granada, of Mariana, of Perez de Guzman. Familiar, declamatory, pronounced with a caressing accent, the Castilian of America is uniform from North to South.
More effectual than religion and language the identity of race explains the similarity of the American peoples, and constitutes a promise of lasting unity. The native race, the Spanish race, and the negro race are everywhere mingled, in similar proportions, from the frontier of the United States to the southern limits of the continent. On the Atlantic seaboard European immigration, an influx of Russians, Italians, and Germans, has given the supremacy to the white race, but this influence is limited to small belts of land, when we consider the vast area of the continent.
A single half-caste race, with here the negro and there the Indian predominant over the conquering Spaniard, obtains from the Atlantic to the Pacific. There is a greater resemblance between Peruvians and Argentines, Colombians and Chilians, than between the inhabitants of two distant provinces of France, such as Provence and Flanders, Brittany and Burgundy, or between the Italian of the north, positive and virile, and the lazy and sensual Neapolitan, or between the North American of the Far West and the native of New England. The slight provincial differences enable us the better to understand the unity of the continent.
This identity explains the monotonous history of America. A succession of military periods and industrial periods, of revolts and dictatorships; perpetual promises of political restoration; the tyranny of ignorant adventurers, and complicated and delusive legislation.
It is in the great crises of its history that the essential unity of the race is revealed. The Wars of Independence were a unanimous movement, an expression of profound solidarity. In 1865, after half a century of isolation, the democracies of the Pacific once more united to oppose Spain's attempt at reconquest. Soldiers of different nations, who had already fought in bygone battles, but against each other, now fought side by side for the common liberty. The same unity of inspiration has brought the nations together in opposition to many projects of conquest: the expedition of Flores against Ecuador, of France against Mexico, and the Anglo-French alliance against Rosas. At the second Hague Congress in 1907 Latin America revealed to the Western world the importance of her wealth and the valour of her men, and supported her ideal of arbitration; to the Monroe doctrine she opposed the doctrine of Drago, and, without preliminary understanding, asserted her unity.
No other continent offers so many reasons for union, and herein lies the chief originality of Latin America.
In Europe states and races are in conflict, and the unstable equilibrium is maintained only by means of alliances. Religions, political systems, traditions, and languages differ. History is merely a succession of turbulent hegemonies: of Spain, England, France, and Germany. We find artificial nations, like Austria; unions of democratic and theocratic peoples, like the Franco-Russian Alliance; rival empires of the same race, like England and Germany; political alliances of alien races, like Germany and Italy; and the dispersion of peoples painfully seeking to recover their lost unity, like the Poles, the Irish, and the Slavs. The federation of Europe is a Utopian dream.
Africa is not yet autonomous; it is a vast group of enslaved peoples of primitive races, colonised by the great European powers. There the Anglo-Saxon genius is seeking to establish a political union between English and Dutch, and one day, perhaps, the empire dreamed of by Cecil Rhodes will stretch from Cairo to the Cape. But the unity of Africa is impossible; for the colonists come to the Dark Continent as conquerors, as the representatives of hostile interests; they can but quarrel over Morocco, Tripoli, and the Congo. Oceania possesses only a partial unity in the Australian commonwealth, the work of England. In Asia it is still more impossible to guess whence a future unity might arise. Mussulmans and Buddhists share India; Japan has won only an ephemeral superiority; China retains all her irreducible independence; in Manchuria and Korea Russian and Asiatic interests are opposed; in Turkestan, Persia, and Tibet the conflicts of race and religion are enough to destroy any hope of union.
In America and in America only the political problem is relatively simple. Unity is there at once a tradition and a present necessity, yet in spite of this fact the disunion of the Latin democracies persists.
Forty years ago Alberdi thought it necessary, and believed it possible, to redraw the map of America.
To-day the Latin nations overseas are less plastic; the frontiers seem too definitely established, and prejudices too deeply rooted to allow of such a recombination; but the formation of groups of nations is no less urgent. If the unity of the continent by means of a vast federation in the Anglo-Saxon manner seems impossible, it is none the less necessary to group the Latin-American nations in a durable fashion, according to their affinities. While respecting the inevitable geographical inequalities which give certain peoples an evident superiority over others, and the no less inevitable economic inequalities which create natural unions, it would still be possible to found a stable assemblage of nations, a Continent.
There is a spontaneous hierarchy in the Latin New World; there are superior and inferior democracies, maritime nations and inland states. Paraguay will always be inferior to the Argentine Republic; Uruguay to Brazil; Bolivia to Chili; Ecuador to Peru; Guatemala to Mexico; as much from the point of wealth as in population and influence. The preservation of the autonomy of republics which differ so greatly in the extent and situation of their territories can only be removed by federative grouping. To oppress and colonise these countries is the desire of all imperialists, no matter whence they come; but the peace of America demands another solution; which is, not the synthesis which some one powerful State might enforce, but the co-operation of free organisms. By grouping themselves about more advanced peoples the secondary nations might succeed in preserving their threatened autonomy.
Central America, exhausted by anarchy, may aspire to unity; these five small nations maintain a precarious independence in the face of the United States. Until 1842 Central America was only one State, and subsequent attempts at unification proved that this was not merely the artificial creation of its politicians. When the Panama Canal has divided the two Americas, and increased the power of the United States, these nations, together with Mexico, might form a true Spanish advance-guard in the North.
Moreover, the free islands of the Caribbean Sea might be united in a Confederation of the Antilles, according to the noble dream of Hostos. Greater Colombia might be reconstituted, with Ecuador, New Granada, and Venezuela. Their greatest leaders have desired their union, as a preventive of indefinite and fractional division and internal discord. On the basis of common traditions, and for important geographical reasons, these three nations might form an imposing Confederacy. Once the Canal is open, this group of peoples, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, on the northern extremity of the continent, would form a massive Latin rampart, a country capable of absorbing European emigration and of opposing to Anglo-Saxon invasion the resistance of a vast populated and united territory.
Bolivia, the inland republic, deprived of her coast-line by Chili, has already been twice united to Peru; in 1837, under the authority of Santa-Cruz, and in 1879, to oppose the supremacy of Chili on the Pacific. What should henceforth separate it from a people to which it is united by so many historical and economic ties, and a similitude of territory and race from Cuzco to Oruro? Chili and Peru will be either two perpetual enemies, or two peoples drawn together by a useful understanding. Their geographical proximity, their mutually complementary products—the tropical fruits of Peru and the products of the temperate zones of Chili—might contribute to bring them together. Have we not here an actual economic harmony? In the moral domain the very causes which have engendered hatred between Chili and Peru, from the time of Portales to that of Pinto, might equally prove to be the elements of future friendship. Peru, impoverished by the Chilian conquest, and deprived of her deposits of nitre, would no longer be the victim of the Chilian greed of gold, nor the hatred of a poor colony for the elegant vice-kingdom. Chili is wealthier than Peru, and her people have more energy and more will-power, although they may have less imagination, less nobility of character, and less eloquence. The Peruvian vivacity and grace may be contrasted with the prosaic deliberation of Chili; the anarchy of the one country with the political stability of the other; the idealism of Peru with the common-sense of Chili. Physically and morally these two countries complete one another. The economic necessities of each might form the permanent basis of a possible alliance. The Confederation of the Pacific, formed by Peru, Bolivia, and Chili, would be a safeguard against future wars in America. Unhappily Chili professes and seeks to enforce a superiority founded upon victory, just as, when the German Empire was confederated, victorious and warlike Prussia enforced her superiority over artistic Bavaria.
The Confederation of La Plata, the heir to the traditions of the colonial era, might be formed of Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Rosas did seek to create this great federal organisation. During the course of the century Uruguay has extended her sympathies alternately to the Argentine and to Brazil, and Paraguay, during a period of epic grandeur, defended her isolation. The union of these republics was prevented by national rivalities and the ambitions of their caudillos, but it will surely be effected in the future under the pressure of the power of Argentina. It is true that Uruguay has only too definite an originality in the matter of intellect, from the point of view of liberalism and education, but the federation of the future would not be the imposition of a harsh hegemony of one nation over others, but rather the co-operation of republics with equal rights which had at last understood the poverty of their isolated condition. Paraguay, remote and concealed, ruled sometimes by a Jesuitical and now by a civil dictatorship, has need of a place in such a vast confederation of cultivated peoples.
These groups of nations will thus form a new America, organic and powerful. Brazil, with her immense territory and dense population; the Confederation of La Plata; the Confederation of the Pacific; Greater Colombia: these will finally establish the continental equilibrium so anxiously desired. In the North, Mexico and Central America and the Confederation of the Antilles would form three Latin States to balance the enveloping movement of the Anglo-Saxons. Instead of twenty divided republics we should thus have seven powerful nations. We should have not the vague Union of which all the Utopian professors since Bolivar have spoken, but a definite grouping and confederation of peoples united by real economic, geographical, and political ties.
To realise these fusions there are both economic and political methods. Hasty conventions would be powerless to uproot the hatreds and the narrow conceptions of patriotism peculiar to the American peoples. The organisation of the continent should be the work of thinkers, statesmen, and captains of industry, a work fortified by time and history. To the tradition of discord we must oppose another, the tradition of union.
A series of partial commercial treaties, navigation treaties, railway systems, customs unions, and international congresses (like those recently held at Montevideo and Santiago) may all be indicated as means of realising unity. The railways above all will create a new continent; for isolation and lack of population are the enemies of American federation.
To-day these peoples do not know one another. Paris is their intellectual capital, where their poets, thinkers, and statesmen meet. In America everything makes for separation: forests, plains, and mountains. What does Venezuela know of Chili, Peru of Mexico, Colombia of the Argentine? Even in the case of neighbouring nations the political leaders do not know one another. The psychology of neighbouring peoples is a mystery; whence traditional errors and disastrous wars. American journalism is ignorant of nothing in European life—the sessions of the Duma, the ministerial crises of Roumania, the nobility of the Gotha Almanac, the scandals of Berlin; but of the public life of the American nations it publishes only the vaguest and most erroneous news. By stimulating the love of travel and building railroads these peoples would escape from an isolation so perilous. "Every line of railroad which crosses a frontier," said Gladstone, "prepares the way for universal confederation." The Yankees have understood this, which is why they are preparing to build a great Pan-American railway to unite the two Americas under their financial sceptre.
The line which has recently united the two capitals of the South—Santiago and Buenos-Ayres—has contributed to the formation of a solid understanding between Chili and the Argentine. That which will unite Lima and Buenos-Ayres in the near future will bring the culture of the Argentine to the Bolivian table-lands, as far as Cuzco, the centre of Inca tradition; it will draw together the seaboard populations of the two oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific, and will prove a powerful agent of civilisation and unity. The great rivers of the Amazonian basin from the Putumayo to the Beni, the affluents of the Rio de la Plata, the Magdalena and the Orinoco, united by new railroads, will also contribute to the continental unity by multiplying international relations. One may well repeat the celebrated phrase, that to govern is to lay rails. Railways vanquish barbarism; they attract the stranger, people the desert, civilise the native. Political organisation and internal peace correspond with the development of the means of communication. With the appearance of the rails the caudillos lose their influence, and a double transformation is effected; in the interior by the civilising action of commingled interests, and at the exterior by the new relations which the multiplication of railways involves.
Customs unions in Germany created the Imperial unity; Mr. Chamberlain thinks that a Zollverein would increase the power of the British Empire. The economic grouping of nations prepares the way for future confederations. The frequent congresses which unify law and jurisprudence, and bring together politicians, men of letters and scientists, all tend to the same result. To increase the number of these assemblies, to hold them in different capitals of the continent, and to replace the Pan-American Congresses, whose plans are somewhat indefinite, by racial Latin-American Congresses, would be equally to the profit of the economic and intellectual unity of the continent, and the harmony of its politics and its laws. An undivided, uniform American law,[2] a single monetary system, a similar policy in respect of protectionism and free trade, the unification of methods of teaching, and the equivalence of academic diplomas and university degrees, are questions that might be discussed at these general assemblies. Each nation would have ministers in the other republics, who would be at once intellectual emissaries and propagandists, while to-day American peoples who send ministers to Austria or to Switzerland have no accredited representatives in the capitals of adjacent states. The national ambitions which satisfy our politicians to-day would be replaced by a more ample and original design, embracing the future of an entire continent, as was the case a century ago.
In short, we should neglect no form of co-operation—conventions, travel, diplomatic labours, periodical congresses, commercial treaties, and partial groups of nations. Nothing but a disastrous weakness can perpetuate the present division of the Latin peoples in the face of the unity of the United States.
The nations of the South are not unaware of this necessity, and after a century of independence they are seeking to reconstitute the ancient unions. Central America, disturbed by periodic wars, is endeavouring to create a Confederation. In 1895 a treaty between Honduras, Nicaragua, and Salvador formed the Republic of Central America; only Costa Rica and Guatemala held aloof from this union. In 1902 all these nations, with the exception of Guatemala, accepted a convention of arbitration. In 1905 the presidents of the five republics met at Corinth in order to honour the work of Morazan and Rufino Barrios; spontaneously, or at the instance of the United States and Mexico, they signed various treaties intended to realise the unity of the sister nations. A Central American Pedagogic Institute was created, and a "Bureau of the Five Republics," with the same object of unification. In 1907, after nine different conflicts in the interval, a conference of these same nations was assembled at Washington. On this occasion a tribunal of arbitration for Central America was installed, and the neutrality of Honduras was recognised. This tribunal, which sits at Cartago, in Costa-Rica, is to judge the conflicts between states and the diplomatic claims of the governments and of individuals. Moreover, the Republics of Central America have agreed to a declaration which provides that they will recognise no government which has been enforced by a revolution or a coup d'État, and that they will not intervene in the political movements of neighbouring countries.
The Court of Arbitration thus established had already, in 1909, settled differences between Salvador and Honduras, and between Guatemala and Nicaragua, by rejecting the pretentions of Honduras in the one case and of Nicaragua in the other.[3] In short, the United States and Mexico are leading these peoples, who used to be in a condition of perpetual discord, towards the unity necessary to their progress.
A Congress met recently (1911) at Caracas, which was attended by the representatives of the states liberated by Bolivar—Venezuela, New Granada, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru. This was a truly Bolivian assembly in honour of the national hero. The object of this Congress was to reconstitute Greater Colombia with the three Republics which formerly made part of it—Venezuela, New Granada, and Ecuador; this would be a return, after the lapse of a century, to the harmonious union of the sister peoples, which would truly give them a common future.
The formation of a great Bolivian State, after a period of isolation lasting more than a century, is certainly the dream of generous statesmen. It is not easy to conceive of the political union of peoples as far removed as those of Venezuela and Bolivia, but this assembly might well result in a natural union of the peoples of the North; a new Greater Colombia, whose provinces would stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
In the south the A.B.C., the alliance of the Argentine, Brazil, and Chili, is the question incessantly discussed in the sensational press, and in the chancelleries, which love to surround themselves with an atmosphere of mystery. These three nations, wealthy, military powers, situated in distinct zones, are seeking confederation; their ambition is to exercise in America a tutelage which they consider indispensable. Already the understanding of May, 1902, had limited the armaments of Chili and the Argentine, and had put an end to a long conflict. The rivality between the Argentine and Brazil; the old friendship between that country and Chili, which afterwards changed to a jealous alienation; the rivalry between the Argentine and Chili in the matter of wealth and power; discord, threats of war, uneasy friendships; all this is insufficient to restrain the military ambition of the three great nations. The statesmen of Buenos-Ayres, Rio de Janeiro, and Santiago are labouring to effect the realisation of an alliance between the three most highly civilised and organised and most advanced nations of the continent. Once this union is accomplished, to the indisputable influence of the United States will be added the moderative influence of the three great States of the South, and the equilibrium between Latins and Anglo-Saxons would be its immediate result.
There are writers in America who defend the chauvinistic autonomy of small countries as against the natural supremacy of such combinations of States. It is, however, certain that these alliances do not in any way threaten the countries which take part in them; they respect their internal constitution, and their historic organisation; they confine themselves to a fusion of general and external interests, to matters of commerce, and of peace and war. These utilitarian partisans of the independence of each separate nation cannot conceive of the grouping of nations as in the Greater Colombia, the Confederation of the Pacific, or the Southern Alliance, without the existence of obvious commercial interests. It is certainly true that the Zollverein, or permanent customs agreement, was the basis of German unity. But there are moral interests as powerful and as obvious as the interests of commerce. Should not a common danger, such as the Yankee peril in Panama and Central America, impel nations toward federation and unity?
Moreover, federation is not always the result of purely commercial ties. Our century tends to synthetical action. As modern nations were formed by overcoming the old feudal anarchy, so metropolis and colonies are uniting in our days to form formidable empires which merely commercial interests could not explain. What economic tie served as the basis of the South African Federation, a group of hostile races retaining a memory of autonomy? Did not North and South in the United States enter upon a terrible war of interests, and, in spite of this utilitarian antagonism, is not Lincoln, the founder of the Union, as great to-day as Washington, the founder of nationality? The enormous power of the North American nation is the result of this unity. If the patricians of the South had been victorious in the War of Secession, if they had succeeded in annihilating the Federal bond, then instead of the Republic which overawes Europe and aspires to Americanise the world there would be two powerless and inimical States; in the South an oligarchic nation served by slaves, and in the North a feeble assemblage of Puritan provinces, while the Far West would be incapable of resisting the Yellow Peril.
But there are economic ties between the Latin nations, which may assist the preparation of respectable unions. Between Brazil and Chili, Peru and Chili, Bolivia, Chili, and Peru, or the Argentine, Paraguay, and Bolivia, there are actual currents of commercial exchange, of agricultural products from complementary zones, and therein a basis of union may be found.
Latin America cannot continue to live divided, while her enemies are building up vast federations and enormous empires. Whether in the name of race or commercial interests, of common utility or true independence, the American democracies must form themselves into three or four powerful States. The Latin New World is alone in resisting the universal impulse toward the establishment of syndicates and federations, trusts and trades unions, associations and alliances—in short, of increasingly vast and increasingly powerful organisations.
CHAPTER II
THE PROBLEM OF RACE
The gravity of the problem—The three races, European, Indian, and Negro—Their characteristics—The mestizos and mulattos—The conditions of miscegenation according to M. Gustave Le Bon—Regression to the primitive type.
The racial question is a very serious problem in American history. It explains the progress of certain peoples and the decadence of others, and it is the key to the incurable disorder which divides America. Upon it depend a great number of secondary phenomena; the public wealth, the industrial system, the stability of governments, the solidity of patriotism. It is therefore essential that the continent should have a constant policy, based upon the study of the problems which are raised by the facts of race, just as there is an agrarian policy in Russia, a protectionist policy in Germany, and a free-trade policy in England.
In the United States all the varieties of the European type are intermingled: Scandinavians and Italians, Irish and Germans; but in the Latin republics there are peoples of strange lineage: American Indians, negroes, Orientals, and Europeans of different origin are creating the race of the future in homes in which mixed blood is the rule.
In the Argentine, where Spanish, Russian, and Italian immigrants intermingle, the social formation is extremely complicated. The aboriginal Indians have been united with African negroes, and with Spanish and Portuguese Jews; then came Italians and Basques, French and Anglo-Saxons; a multiple invasion, with the Latin element prevailing. In Brazil Germans and Africans marry Indians and Portuguese. Among the Pacific peoples, above all in Peru, a considerable Asiatic influx, Chinese and Japanese, still further complicates the human mixture. In Mexico and Bolivia the native element, the Indian, prevails. The negroes form a very important portion of the population of Cuba and San Domingo. Costa-Rica is a democracy of whites; and in the Argentine, as in Chili, all vestiges of the African type have disappeared. In short, there are no pure races in America. The aboriginal Indian himself was the product of the admixture of ancient tribes and castes.
In the course of time historic races may form themselves; in the meantime an indefinable admixture prevails.
This complication of castes, this admixture of divers bloods, has created many problems. For example, is the formation of a national consciousness possible with such disparate elements? Would such heterogeneous democracies be able to resist the invasion of superior races? Finally, is the South American half-caste absolutely incapable of organisation and culture?
Facile generalisations will not suffice to solve these questions. Here the experience of travellers and of American history even is of greater value than the verdicts of the anthropologists. In the first place the half-breeds are not all hybrids, and it is not true that the union of the Spaniard and the American has always been sterile. Hence the absolute necessity of understanding the proper character of each of the races which have formed modern America.
The Spaniards who arrived in the New World came from different provinces; here alone is a prime cause of variety. Simultaneously with the languid Andalusian and the austere Basque, the grave Catalonian and the impetuous Estremaduran left Spain. Where the descendants of the Basque prevail, as in Chili, the political organism is more stable, if less brilliant, than elsewhere, and a strong will-power shows itself in work and success. The Castilians brought to America their arrogance, and the fruitless gestures of the hidalgo; where the Andalusians are in the majority their agile fantasy, their gentle non curanza, militates against all serious or continuous effort. The descendants of the Portuguese are far more practical than those of the Spaniards; they are also more disciplined and more laborious. The psychological characteristics of the Indian are just as various; the descendant of the Quechuas does not resemble the descendant of the Charruas, any more than the temperament of the Araucanian resembles that of the Aztec. In Chili, Uruguay, and the Argentine, there were warlike populations whose union with the conquerors has formed virile half-castes, an energetic and laborious plebs. In Chili Araucanians and Basques have intermingled; and is it not in this fusion that we must seek the explanation of the persistent character of the Chilian nation, and its military spirit? The Aymara of Bolivia and the south-east of Peru is hard and sanguinary; the Quechua of the table-lands of the Andes is gentle and servile. It is by no means a matter of indifference whether the modern citizen of the Latin democracies is descended from a Guarani, an Aztec, an Araucan, or a Chibcha; he will, as the case may be, prove aggressive or passive, a nomadic shepherd or a quiet tiller of the common soil.
The Indian of the present time, undermined by alcohol and poverty, is free according to the law, but a serf by virtue of the permanance of authoritative manners. Petty tyrannies make him a slave; he works for the cacique, the baron of American feudalism. The curÉ, the sub-prefect, and the judge, all-powerful in these young democracies, exploit him and despoil him of his possessions.[1] The communities, very like the Russian mir, are disappearing, and the Indian is losing his traditional rights to the lands of the collectivity. Without sufficient food, without hygiene, a distracted and laborious beast, he decays and perishes; to forget the misery of his daily lot he drinks, becomes an alcoholic, and his numerous progeny present the characteristics of degeneracy. He lives in the mountains or table-lands, where a glacial cold prevails and the solitude is eternal. Nothing disturbs the monotony of these desolate stretches; nothing breaks the inflexible line of the limitless horizons; there the Indian grows as melancholy and as desiccated as the desert that surrounds him. The great occasions of his civil life—birth, marriage, and death—are the subjects of a religious exploitation. Servile and superstitious, he finally loves the tyrannies that oppress him. He adores the familiar gods of the Cerros, of the mountain. He is at once a Christian and a fetish-worshipper; he sees in mysterious nature demons and goblins, occult powers which are favourable and hostile by turn.
There are, nevertheless, regions where despotism has developed in the Indian a sort of passive resistance. There he is sober and vigorous, and by his complete adaptation to the maternal soil he has grown apathetic and a creature of routine. He hates all that might destroy his age-long traditions: schools, military training, and the authority that despoils him. Conservative and melancholy, he lives on the border of the Republic and its laws; his heart grows hot against the tyranny from which he forever suffers. Dissimulation, servility, and melancholy are his leading traits; rancour, hardness, and hypocrisy are the forms of his defensive energy. He supports his slavery upon this cold earth, but he sometimes revolts against his exploiters; and at Huanta and Ayoayo he fought against his oppressors with true courage, sustained by hatred, as in the heroic times of Tupac-Amaru.[2] After this bloody epic he resumed his monotonous existence under the heedless sky. In his songs he curses his birth and his destiny. In the evening he leaves the narrow valley where in his slavery he is employed in agricultural labours, to journey into the cerros and mourn the abandonment of his household gods. A weird lamentation passes over the darkening earth, and from summit to summit the Cordillera re-echoes the sorrowful and melodious plaint of the Indian as he curses conquest and warfare.
The negroes of Angola or the Congo have mingled equally with the Spaniard and the Indian. The African woman satisfied the ardour of the conquerors; she has darkened the skin of the race.
The negroes arrived as slaves; sold a usanza de feria (as beasts of burden), they were primitive creatures, impulsive and sensual. Idle and servile, they have not contributed to the progress of the race. In the dwelling-houses of the colonial period they were domestics, acting as pions to their masters' children; in the fields and the plantations of sugar-cane they were slaves, branded by the lash of the overseer. They form an illiterate population which exercises a depressing influence on the American imagination and character. They increase still further the voluptuous intensity of the tropical temper, weaken it, and infuse into the blood of the Creole elements of idleness, recklessness, and servility which are becoming permanent.
The three races—Iberian, Indian, and African—united by blood, form the population of South America. In the United States union with the aborigines is regarded by the colonist with repugnance; in the South miscegenation is a great national fact; it is universal. The Chilian oligarchy has kept aloof from the Araucanians, but even in that country unions between whites and Indians abound. Mestizos are the descendants of whites and Indians; mulattos the children of Spaniards and negroes; zambos the sons of negroes and Indians. Besides these there are a multitude of social sub-divisions. On the Pacific coast Chinese and negroes have interbred. From the Caucasian white, bronzed by the tropics, to the pure negro, we find an infinite variety in the cephalic index, in the colour of the skin, and in the stature.
It is always the Indian that prevails, and the Latin democracies are mestizo or indigenous. The ruling class has adopted the costume, the usages, and the laws of Europe, but the population which forms the national mass is Quechua, Aymara, or Aztec. In Peru, in Bolivia, and in Ecuador the Indian of pure race, not having as yet mingled his blood with that of the Spanish conquerors, constitutes the ethnic base. In the Sierra the people speak Quechua and Aymara; there also the vanquished races preserve their traditional communism. Of the total population of Peru and Ecuador the white element only attains to the feeble proportion of 6 per cent., while the Indian element represents 70 per cent. of the population of these countries, and 50 per cent. in Bolivia. In Mexico the Indian is equally in the majority, and we may say that there are four Indian nations on the continent: Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia.
In countries where the pure native has not survived the mestizos abound; they form the population of Colombia, Chili, Uruguay, and Paraguay; in this latter country Guarani is spoken much more frequently than Spanish. The true American of the South is the mestizo, the descendant of Spaniards and Indians; but this new race, which is almost the rule from Mexico to Buenos-Ayres, is not always a hybrid product. The warlike peoples, like those of Paraguay and Chili, are descended from Spaniards, Araucanians, and Guaranis. Energetic leaders have been found among the mestizos: Paez in Venezuela, Castilla in Peru, Diaz in Mexico, and Santa-Cruz in Bolivia. An Argentine anthropologist, SeÑor Ayarragaray, says that "the primary mestizo is inferior to his European progenitors, but at the same time he is often superior to his native ancestors." He is haughty, virile, and ambitious if his ancestors were Charruas, Guaranis, or Araucanians; even the descendant of the peaceable Quechuas is superior to the Indian. He learns Spanish, assimilates the manners of a new and superior civilisation, and forms the ruling caste at the bar and in politics. The mestizo, the product of a first crossing, is not otherwise a useful element of the political and economic unity of America; he retains too much the defects of the native; he is false and servile, and often incapable of effort. It is only after fresh unions with Europeans that he manifests the full force of the characteristics obtained from the white. The heir of the colonising race and of the autocthonous race, both adapted to the same soil, he is extremely patriotic; Americanism, a doctrine hostile to foreigners, is his work. He wishes to obtain power in order to usurp the privileges of the Creole oligarchies.
One may say that the admixture of the prevailing strains with black blood has been disastrous for these democracies. In applying John Stuart Mill's law of concomitant variations to the development of Spanish America one may determine a necessary relation between the numerical proportion of negroes and the intensity of civilisation. Wealth increases and internal order is greater in the Argentine, Uruguay, and Chili, and it is precisely in these countries that the proportion of negroes has always been low; they have disappeared in the admixture of European races. In Cuba, San Domingo, and some of the republics of Central America, and certain of the States of the Brazilial Confederation, where the children of slaves constitute the greater portion of the population, internal disorders are continual. A black republic, Hayti, demonstrates by its revolutionary history the political incapacity of the negro race.
The mulatto and the zambo are the true American hybrids. D'Orbigny believed the mestizo to be superior to the descendants of the Africans imported as slaves; Burmeister is of opinion that in the mulatto the characteristics of the negro are predominant. Ayarragaray states that the children born of the union of negroes with zambos or natives are in general inferior to their parents, as much in intelligence as in physical energy. The inferior elements of the races which unite are evidently combined in their offspring. It is observed also that both in the mulattos and the zambos certain internal contradictions may be noted; their will is weak and uncertain, and is dominated by instinct and gross and violent passions. Weakness of character corresponds with a turgid intelligence, incapable of profound analysis, or method, or general ideas, and a certain oratorical extravagance, a pompous rhetoric. The mulatto loves luxury and extravagance; he is servile, and lacks moral feeling. The invasion of negroes affected all the Iberian colonies, where, to replace the outrageously exploited Indian, African slaves were imported by the ingenuous evangelists of the time. In Brazil, Cuba, Panama, Venezuela, and Peru this caste forms a high proportion of the total population. In Brazil 15 per cent. of the population is composed of negroes, without counting the immense number of mulattos and zambos. Bahia is half an African city. In Rio de Janeiro the negroes of pure blood abound. In Panama the full-blooded Africans form 10 per cent. of the population. Between 1759 and 1803 642,000 negroes entered Brazil; between 1792 and 1810 Cuba received 89,000. These figures prove the formidable influence of the former slaves in modern America. But they are revenged for their enslavement in that their blood is mingled with that of their masters. Incapable of order and self-government, they are a factor of anarchy; every species of vain outer show attracts them—sonorous phraseology and ostentation. They make a show of an official function, a university title, or an academic diploma. As the Indian could not work in the tropics black immigration was directed principally upon those regions, and the enervating climate, the indiscipline of the mulatto, and the weakness of the white element have contributed to the decadence of the Equatorial nations.
The mulatto is more despised than the mestizo because he often shows the abjectness of the slave and the indecision of the hybrid; he is at once servile and arrogant, envious and ambitious. His violent desire to mount to a higher social rank, to acquire wealth, power, and display, is, as SeÑor Bunge very justly remarks, a "hyperÆsthesia of arrivism."
The zambos have created nothing in America. On the other hand, the robust mestizo populations, the Mamelucos of Brazil, the Cholos of Peru and Bolivia, the Rotos of Chili, descendants of Spaniards and the Guarani Indians, are distinguished by their pride and virility. Instability, apathy, degeneration—all the signs of exhausted race—are encountered far more frequently in the mulatto than in the mestizo.
The European established in America becomes a Creole; his is a new race, the final product of secular unions. He is neither Indian, nor black, nor Spaniard. The castes are confounded and have formed an American stock, in which we may distinguish the psychological traits of the Indian and the negro, while the shades of skin and forms of skull reveal a remote intermixture. If all the races of the New World were finally to unite, the Creole would be the real American.
He is idle and brilliant. There is nothing excessive either in his ideals or his passions; all is mediocre, measured, harmonious. His fine and caustic irony chills his more exuberant enthusiasms; he triumphs by means of laughter. He loves grace, verbal elegance, quibbles even, and artistic form; great passions or desires do not move him. In religion he is sceptical, indifferent, and in politics he disputes in the Byzantine manner. No one could discover in him a trace of his Spanish forefather, stoical and adventurous.
But is unity possible with such numerous castes? Must we not wait for the work of many centuries before a clearly American population be formed? The admixture of Indian, European, mestizo, and mulatto blood continues. How form a homogeneous race of these varieties? There will be a period of painful unrest: American revolutions reveal the disequilibrium of men and races. Miscegenation often produces types devoid of all proportion, either physical or moral.
The resistance of neo-Americans to fatigue and disease is considerably diminished. In the seething retort of the future the elements of a novel synthesis combine and grow yet more complex. If the castes remain divided there will be no unity possible to oppose a probable invasion. "Three conditions are necessary," says M. Gustave Le Bon, "before races can achieve fusion and form a new race, more or less homogeneous. The first of these conditions is that the races subjected to the process of crossing must not be too inequal in number; the second, that they must not differ too greatly in character; the third, that they must be for a long time subjected to an identical environment."
Examining the mixed peoples of America in conformity with these principles we see that the Indian and the negro are greatly superior to the whites in numbers; the pure European element does not amount to 10 per cent. of the total population. In Brazil and the Argentine there are numbers of German and Italian immigrants, but in other countries the necessary stream of invasion of superior races does not exist.
We have indicated the profound differences which divide the bold Spaniard from the negro slave; we have said that the servility of the Indian race contrasts with the pride of the conquerors; that is to say, that the mixture of rival castes, Iberians, Indians, and negroes, has generally had disastrous consequences. Perhaps we may except the fortunate combinations of mestizo blood in Chili, Southern Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. Finally, the territory has not yet exercised a decisive influence upon the races in contact. The modern Frenchman and Anglo-Saxon are born of the admixture of ancient races subjected for centuries to the influences of the soil. The great invasions which modified the traditional stock took place a thousand years ago; they explain the terrible struggles of the Middle Ages. The new American type has not so long a history.
In short, none of the conditions established by the French psychologists are realised by the Latin-American democracies, and their populations are therefore degenerate.
The lower castes struggle successfully against the traditional rules: the order which formerly existed is followed by moral anarchy; solid conviction by a superficial scepticism, and the Castilian tenacity by indecision. The black race is doing its work and the continent is returning to its primitive barbarism.
This retrogression constitutes a very serious menace. In South America civilisation is dependent upon the numerical predominance of the victorious Spaniard, on the triumph of the white man over the mulatto, the negro, and the Indian. Only a plentiful European immigration can re-establish the shattered equilibrium of the American races. In the Argentine the cosmopolitan alluvium has destroyed the negro and mitigated the Indian. A century ago there were 20 per cent. of Africans in Buenos-Ayres; the ancient slave has now disappeared, and mulattos are rare. In Mexico, on the other hand, in 1810 the Europeans formed a sixth part of the population; to-day they do not form more than a twentieth part.
Dr. Karl Pearson, in his celebrated book National Life and Character, writes: "In the long run the inferior civilisations give proof of a vigour greater than that of the superior civilisations; the disinherited gain upon the privileged castes, and the conquered people absorbs the conquering people." He declared further that Brazil would quickly fall into the power of the negroes, and that while the Indians would multiply and develop in the inaccessible regions of the north and the centre, the white peoples, crowded out by the progress of these races, would be numerous only in the cities and the more salubrious districts. This painful prophecy will be accomplished to the letter if, in the conflict of castes, the white population is not promptly reinforced by the arrival of new colonists.
But crossing alone will not communicate the superior characteristics of the race to the mestizo in a lasting manner. "It is necessary that he should be the fruit of a union of the third, fourth, or fifth degree; that is, that there should have been as many successive crossings, with a father or a mother of the white race, before the mestizo can be in a condition to assimilate European culture," writes an Argentine sociologist. For this vast process of selection to be realised to the profit of the white man not only must the races subjected to admixture exist in certain proportions, but the mass of Europeans must prevail and impose their temper upon the future castes. In short, the problem of race depends upon the solution given to the demographic problem. Without the help of a new population there will be in America not merely a lamentable exhaustion but also a prompt recoil of the race. The phrase of Alberdi is still true: "In America to govern means to populate."
The colonists brought with them the traditions and manners of the disciplined races, a moral organisation which was the work of centuries of common life. People of rural extraction, when they reached America, upheld the established interests, the government, the law, and the peace; they worked, fought, and laid up treasure. Moreover, only the most enterprising of men emigrated, and they transmitted to the new democracies an element of vitality they had not before known. As early as the second generation the descendants of the foreign colonists were already Argentines, Brazilians, or Peruvians; their patriotism was as ardent and devoted and exclusive as that of their fathers. They completely adopted the local manners. They had been transformed by the action of the American environment.
Basques or Italians have already transformed the Argentine. They arrive as artisans, or labourers, or clerks and traders; they form agricultural colonies and become landowners. They soon break their fetters; their sons become merchants, financial agents, or wealthy plutocrats. Of 1,000 inhabitants there are 128 Italians and only 99 Argentines who own land. These Latins are prolific; in 1904 1,000 Argentine women gave life to 80 infants; 1,000 Spanish women to 123, and 1,000 Italian women to 175.[3] These immigrants thus increase the national wealth and people the desert.[4] Moreover, their descendants figure in politics and letters. Let us mention only a few Argentine names remarkable on one count or another: Groussac, Magnasco, Becher, Bunge, Ingegnieros, Chiappori, Banchs, and Gerchunoff.
CHAPTER III
THE POLITICAL PROBLEM
The caudillos: their action—Revolutions—Divorce between written Constitutions and political life—The future parties—The bureaucracy.
The development of the Ibero-American democracies differs considerably from the admirable spirit of their political charters. The latter include all the principles of government applied by the great European nations: the equilibrium of powers, natural rights, a liberal suffrage, and representative assemblies, but the reality contradicts the idealism of the statutes imported from Europe. The traditions of the prevailing race, in fact, have created simple and barbarous systems of government. The caudillo is the pivot of this political system: leader of a party, of a social group, or a family whose important relations make it powerful, he enforces his tyrannical will upon the multitude. In him resides the power of government and the law. On his permanent action depends the internal order of the State, its economic development, and the national organisation. His authority is inviolable, superior to the Constitution and its laws.
All the history of America, and the inheritance of the Spaniard and the Indian, has ended in the exaltation of the caudillo. Government by caciques, absolute masters, like the caudillos themselves, is very ancient in Spain, as was shown by Joaquin Costa in his analysis of the foundations of Spanish politics. In each province, in each city, was a central personage in whom justice and might were incarnated; admired by the crowd, obeyed by opinion, enforcing his manners and his ideas. The American Indians obeyed caciques, and the first conquerors quickly saw that by winning over the local chiefs they would at the same time subject the native populations. The existence of the caudillos may also be explained by territorial influences. It has been written that the desert is monotheistic; over its arid uniformity one imposing God reigns supreme. It is the same with the steppes, the pampas, and the table-lands of America; vast and monotonous tracts; Paez and Quiroga were divinities of such regions. No other force could limit their authority. Contrasted with the uniform level of mankind which is the work of the plains, their firm chieftainship assumed divine attributes. American revolutions are like the Moorish wars directed by mystic Kaids.
SeÑor Raphael Salillas writes that in Spain the cacique is a hypertrophy of the political personage; he symbolises the excess of power and of the ambition of Spanish individualism. In America the first conquistadors quarrelled for the supreme authority. The civil wars of the Conquest arose from conflicts between chiefs; none of them could conceive of power as real unless it was unlimited and despotic. After them the all-powerful viceroy, a demi-god in his powers, exercised a similar domination. The South American President, the heir to the traditions of the governors of the colonial epoch, also possesses the maximum of authority; the Constitution confers upon him powers like those of the Czars of Russia.
Power for its own sake is the ideal of such men. The less important chieftains are satisfied by the government of a province; the great leader aspires to rule a republic. Questions of personality are the prevailing characteristics of politics; and despotic rulers abound. When a "Regenerator" usurps the supreme power a "Restorer" appears to dispute it with him; then a "Liberator," and finally a "Defender of the Constitution." The lesser gods fight to their hearts' content, and the democracy accepts the victor, in whom it admires the representative leader, the robust creation of the race. Such a man is not like the character of Ibsen's, who is strong in his isolation; in the caudillo the average characteristics of the nation, its vices and its qualities, are better defined and more strongly accentuated; he obeys his instincts and certain fixed ideas; he conceives of no ideals; he is impressionable and fanatical.
SeÑor Ayarragarray distinguishes two varieties of caudillo; the cunning and the violent. The latter was above all peculiar to the military period of Ibero-American history. The leader of a band that ravaged like the Huns, he ruled by terror and audacity, enforcing the discipline of the barracks in civil life. The caudillo of the cunning type exercised a more prolonged moral dictatorship; he belongs to a period of transition between the military period and the industrial period. This new master retained the supreme power by lies and subterfuges. A half-civilised tyrant, he used wealth as others used force, and instead of brutally thrusting himself on the people he employed a system of tortuous corruption.
The rule of the caudillos led to presidential government. The Constitutions established assemblies; but tradition triumphed in spite of these theoretical structures. Since the colonial period centralisation and unity have been the American forms of government.
In the person of the President of these democracies resides all the authority which usually devolves upon the public functionaries. He commands the army, multiplies the wheels of administration, and surrounds himself with doctors of law and PrÆtorian soldiers. The Assemblies obey him; he intervenes in the course of elections, and obtains the Parliamentary majorities that he requires. The upper magistracy is sometimes indocile to the desires of the Government, but in the life of the provinces the judges depend absolutely upon the political leaders. The supreme direction of the finances, the army, the fleet, and the administration in general rests with the President, as before the republican era it belonged to the viceroy.
The parties fight among themselves, not only for power, but to obtain this omnipotent presidency. They realise that the chief of the Executive is the effective agent of all political changes; that ministers and parliaments are only secondary factors in political life. An Argentine sociologist, SeÑor Joaquin Gonzalez, has said very justly that "each governmental period is characterised by the condition and the worth of the man who presides over it. This presidential system, in default of a solid and elevated political education, has in great measure favoured the return to the personal rÉgime."
To this system correspond the political groups without programmes; men do not struggle for the triumph of ideas, but for that of certain individuals. The consecrated terms lose their traditional meaning. There are civilists who uphold militarism; liberals who strive to increase the presidential authority; nationalists who favour cosmopolitanism; constitutionalists who violate the political charter. The personal system groups conservatives and liberals together. Even in Chili, where the activity of the parties has been unusually continuous, the older parties have split up into shapeless factions. The President establishes his despotic authority over the confusion of these rival groups; he tries to dissolve the small factions, to divide them, in order to rule them.
Without ideals or unity of action the parties are transformed into greedy cliques, which are distinguished by the colour of their favours. As in Byzantium, so in Venezuela, the Blues struggle against the Yellows, while in Uruguay the Whites oppose the Reds, red being the distinctive colour of the Argentine federalists. An aggressive intolerance divides these groups; they gather round their gonfaloniere and their party symbol in irreducible factions. No common interest can reconcile them, not even that of their native country. Each party supports a leader, an interest, a dogma; on the one side a man beholds his own party, the missionaries of truth and culture; the other are his enemies, mercenary and corrupt. Each group believes that it seeks to retain the supremacy in the name of disinterested virtue and patriotism. Rosas used to call his opponents "infamous savages." For the gang in possession of power, the revolutionaries are malefactors; for the latter the ruling party are merely a government of thieves and tyrants. There are gods of good and evil, as in the Oriental theogonies. Educated in the Roman Church, Americans bring into politics the absolutism of religious dogmas; they have no conception of toleration. The dominant party prefers to annihilate its adversaries, to realise the complete unanimity of the nation; the hatred of one's opponents is the first duty of the prominent politician. The opposition can hardly pretend to fill a place of influence in the assemblies, or slowly to acquire power. It is only by violence that the parties can emerge from the condition of ostracism in which they are held by the faction in power, and it is by violence that they return to that condition. Apart from the rule of the caudillos the political lie is triumphant; the freedom of the suffrage is only a platonic promise inscribed in the Constitution; the elections are the work of the Government; there is no public opinion. Journalism, almost always opportunist, merely reflects the indecision of the parties. Political statutes and social conditions contradict each other; the former proclaim equality, and there are many races; there is universal suffrage, and the races are illiterate; liberty and despotic rulers enforce an arbitrary power. By means of the prefects and governors the President directs the elections, supports this or that candidate, and even chooses his successor. He is the supreme elector.
The representative assemblies become veritable bureaucratic institutions; deputies and senators accept the orders of the President. According to SeÑor L. A. de Herrera, two castes are in process of formation, "on the one hand the oligarchies, which possess the supreme power in defiance of the public will, and on the other the citizens, who are deprived of all participation in the government." Frequent revolutions and pronunciamentos, according to Spanish tradition, disturb the ruling class in the exercise of power; these superficial movements cannot be compared to the great crises of European history, which result in the disappearance of a political system or bring about the advent of a new social class. They are merely the result of the perpetual conflict between the caudillos; the leaders and the oligarchies change, but the system, with its secular vices, remains.
The South American revolutions may be regarded as a necessary form of political activity: in Venezuela fifty-two important revolts have broken out within a century. The victorious party tries to destroy the other groups; revolution thus represents a political weapon to those parties which are deprived of the suffrage. It corresponds to the protests of European minorities, to the anarchical strikes of the proletariat, to the great public meetings of England, in which the opposing parties attack the Government. It is to the excessive simplicity of the political system, in which opinion has no other means of expression than the tyranny of oligarchies on the one hand and the rebellion of the vanquished on the other, that the interminable and sanguinary conflicts of Spanish America are due. These internal wars continually retard the economic development of the State and decrease its stability; they ruin the foreign credit of the republics, prepare the way for humiliating interventions, and give rise to tyrannies; but it must not be forgotten that revolution, in these democracies without law and without real suffrage, has often been the only means of defending liberty. Against the tyrants even conservative spirits have revolted, and rebellion has become reaction.
For the rest, the civil wars have lost their former character. They used to symbolise the return to primeval chaos; vagabond multitudes, armed bands, desolated the fields and burned the towns. Assassination, theft, the devastation of property and estates, war without mercy, fire, and all the powers of destruction were in revolt against the feeble foundations of nationality.
As by the inverse selection of the Spanish Inquisition, the most intelligent and the most cultivated perished. Brutal horsemen occupied the cities in which Spanish civilisation had attained its apogee. Sarmiento has described the assault on the nomad wagons which bore the national penates across the Argentine pampas in a sort of Tartar Odyssey amid the infinite desolation of the plains. Even when the social classes were organised and the economic interests defined the rivality of the leaders continued, and politics remained personal. However, civil war is already no longer the brutal onset of men with neither law nor faith, no longer an irruption of outlaws. The drama has replaced the epic; the conflict of passions and interests succeeds to the battles of semi-divine personages, proud of their tragic mission. Men buy votes; electoral committees falsify the suffrage, as in the United States, by force of money.
Thus the plutocracy conquers the benches of Congress.
If the continent spontaneously creates dictators then is all the ambitious structure of American politics—parliaments, ministers, and municipalities—merely a delusive invention?
In some States in which the economic life is intense, as in the Argentine, Chili, Brazil, and Uruguay, benevolent despotism does not mark the high-water limit of national development; there new parties are forming themselves, and the caudillos will soon disappear. Dr. Ingegnieros foresees the creation in the Argentine of new political groups, with financial tendencies. The rural class which rules in the provinces and possesses the great mass of the national wealth, which is derived from stock-raising and agriculture, and the commercial and industrial middle-class of the cities, will form, like the Tories and Whigs in England, the two parties of the future. Once the secondary parties have disappeared, the two great political organisations will prevail alone.
This transformation of the old groups is logical. In the colonial period the conflict for the possession of power took place within the narrow limits of public life; the Spaniards were in the majority in the audiencas, the courts, and the Creoles in the cabildos, the municipalities. The former upheld religious intolerance, economic monopoly, and the exclusive and universal empire of the metropolis; the latter endeavoured to obtain economic and political equality, the abolition of privileges, and a national government. After the revolution these divisions grew more complex; federalism and unity, religious quarrels, and sometimes the mutual hostility of the different castes, divided men into shifting groups. Politics became the warfare of irreducible clans. In the organised nations of the south the dissensions gradually lost their importance, and a general indifference succeeded to the old theological hatreds. Federals and municipalists were still fighting, but the original bitterness of their antagonism was dead. On the other hand, the castes were progressively becoming confounded by intermarriage.
However, the economic factors persisted, and their importance has increased as towns and industries have developed. Financial questions will in future divide the citizens of those democracies which have become plainly industrial; the agrarians will oppose the manufacturers and the free-traders the protectionists. Like the republicans and democrats of the United States, certain groups will favour imperialism and others neutrality. The group which would stimulate Yankee or German influence will be opposed by another, the partisan of Italian or French activity.
Already in Cuba there are some who favour annexation by the United States, while others demand complete autonomy. Some politicians would agree to immigration without reserve or restriction, while others, the nationalists, would defend the integrity of their inheritance against foreign invasion. America, like modern France, will have its mÉtÈques; they will be the Europeans, the Yankees, and the yellow races.
Apart from the southern nations there has as yet been no formation of classes or social interests. None of the problems which agitate Europe—extension of the suffrage, proportional representation, municipal autonomy—have any immediate importance among them. The State is the necessary guardian, a kind of social providence whence derive riches, strength, and progress. To weaken this influence would be to encourage internal disorder; only those Constitutions have been of use in America which have reinforced the central power against the attacks of a perpetual anarchy.
The progress of these democracies is the work of foreign capital, and when political anarchy prevails credit collapses. Governments which ensure peace and paternal tyrants are therefore preferable to demagogues. A young Venezuelan critic, SeÑor Machado Hernandez, having studied the history of his country, rent as it has been by revolutions, considers that the best form of government for America is that which reinforces the attributions of the executive and establishes a dictatorship. In place of the Swiss referendum and the federal organisation of the United States autocracy is, it seems to us, the only practical practical means of government.
To increase the duration of the presidency in order to avoid the too frequent conflicts of parties; to simplify the political machine, which transforms the increasingly numerous parliaments into mere bureaucratic institutions; to prolong the mandate of senators and deputies, so that the life of the people shall not be disturbed by continual elections; in short, to surrender the ingenuous dogmas of the political statutes in favour of concrete reforms: such would appear to be the ideal which in Tropical America—in Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia—would arrest the destructive action of revolutions.
It is obvious that a president furnished with a strong authority may quickly become a tyrant, but in these nations is not political power always a semi-dictatorship which is tolerated? The head of the State governs for four years according to the term of the Constitution, but his action is continued by his successor. The real duration of his political action is twenty years.
If a tutelary president is necessary it is none the less essential to oppose his autocracy by a moderative power which would recall, in its constitution, the life-Senate of Bolivar. One may even conceive of a Senate which would represent the real national interests: a stable body, the union of all the forces of social conservation; a serene assembly untroubled by democratic cravings, in which the clergy, the universities, commerce, the industries, the army, the marine, and the judiciary, might defend the Constitution and tradition against the assaults of demagogy, against too audacious reformers. Garcia-Moreno wished to see the mandate of the senators extended to a term of twelve years.
The quality of the legislative chambers is ineffective in America. In fact, both being elected by the popular vote, and having like electoral majorities, the Lower Chamber always gets its way with the Senate, which represents neither interests nor traditions. There is in reality one uniform assembly artificially divided into two independent bodies. The whole is dominated, there being no conservative institutions as a useful corrective, by the anonymous or Jacobin will of the multitude, which is moved by all sorts of divided interests: the craving for power, provincial pride, and a passion for cabal and intrigue.
A factor of American politics which is as serious as the periodical revolutions is the development of the bureaucracy.
In the still simple life of the nation the organs of the public administration are complicated in the most exaggerated manner. The budget supports a sterile class recruited principally among the Creoles, who prefer the security of officialism to the conquest of the soil. Energy and hope diminish with the almost infinite increase of the "budgetivores."
Foreigners monopolise trade and industry, and thus acquire property in the soil which has been inherited by a race of Americans without energy.
A North American observer[1] writes that the great fortunes of the Argentines of American extraction have been made by the ever-increasing value of real estate, and are due to the natural development of the country rather than to their own initiative or enterprise. But the South Americans are on the way to waste these fortunes, and the fortunate colonists from Spain and Italy are gradually replacing them in the social hierarchy.
According to a Mexican statesman, SeÑor Justo Sierra, the government in South America is an administration of employÉs, protected by other employÉs, the army. These nations, which are being invaded by active immigrants, are thus directed by a group of mandarins, and if the young men of these countries are not encouraged in commercial and industrial vocations by a practical education the enriched colonists will expel the Creole from his ancient position. A few writers defend the bureaucracy as the refuge, in the face of the cosmopolitan invasion, of the choice spirits of the nation: writers, artists, and politicians. "If foreigners dispose of the material fortune of the country," says a distinguished young observer, SeÑor Manuel Galvez, "it is just that we others, Argentines, should dispose of its intellectual fortune." A noble idealism, satisfied by an unreal wealth! But from the point of view of the national life this lack of equilibrium is disturbing. In face of the progress of the victorious foreigners who are making themselves masters of the soil, to shut oneself up in a tower of ivory would be the most complete of renunciations.
In the organisation of the America of the future we must not forget the suggestions of Caliban. Among the innumerable bureaucrats who devour the budgets there will not always be writers worthy of official protection; they will rather be recruited among an indolent youth, restive under any sustained effort.
The encouragement of "choice spirits" must not be confounded with the unjustifiable maintenance of a legion of parasites. The caudillo multiplies functions in order to reward his friends; nepotism prevails in the world of politics.
The great political transformations of the future will be due to the development of the common wealth; new parties will appear and the bureaucracy will have to be considerably diminished.
CHAPTER IV
THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM
Loans—Budgets—Paper money—The formation of national capital.
Unexploited wealth abounds in America. Forests of rubber, as in the African Congo; mines of gold and diamonds, which recall the treasures of the Transvaal and the Klondyke; rivers which flow over beds of auriferous sand, like the Pactolus of ancient legend; coffee, cocoa, and wheat, whose abundance is such that these products are enough to glut the markets of the world. But there is no national capital. This contrast between the wealth of the soil and the poverty of the State gives rise to serious economic problems.
By means of long-sustained efforts, an active race would have won financial independence. The Latin-Americans, idle, and accustomed to leave everything to the initiative of the State, have been unable to effect the conquest of the soil, and it is foreign capital that exploits the treasure of America.
Since the very beginnings of independence the Latin democracies, lacking financial reserves, have had need of European gold. The government of Spain used to seize upon the wealth of her colonies to satisfy the needs of a prodigal court, and to prevent its own bankruptcy. The independence of America was won with the aid of English money, hence the first of the necessary loans. Canning encouraged the South American revolutionaries, and the English bankers gave their support to their plans, in the shape of loans to the new governments. Colombian, Argentine, and Peruvian agents solicited heavy loans in the City of London, without which assistance the Spanish power could never have been defeated.
The republican rÉgime thus commenced its career by assuming imperious financial responsibilities. Before commencing to practise a policy of fiscal economy, it was necessary to accept the conclusion of the most urgent loans, but once the European markets were open the financial orgy commenced. In 1820 SeÑor Zea concluded the first Colombian loan; in 1821 the government of that country declared that it could not ensure the service of the debt. The necessities of the war with Spain and the always difficult task of building up a new society demanded the assistance of foreign gold; loans accumulated, and very soon various States were obliged to solicit the simultaneous reduction of the capital borrowed and the rate of interest paid. The lamentable history of these bankrupt democracies dates from this period.
Little by little these financial contracts lost all semblance of serious business. In the impossibility of obtaining really solid guarantees the bankers imposed preposterous conditions, and issue at a discount became the rule with the new conventions. A series of interventions in Buenos-Ayres, Mexico, San Domingo, and Venezuela, diplomatic conflicts, and claims for indemnity resulted from this precarious procedure. Moreover, thanks to the protection accorded by their respective countries, foreigners acquired a privileged position. The Americans were subjected to the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts, before which they could demand the payment of their claims on the State; foreigners enjoyed exceptional treatment. A statute was enacted in their favour, and their governments supported them in the recovery of unjustifiable claims. Sir Charles Wyke, English minister to Mexico, wrote to the Foreign Office in 1862: "Nineteen out of twenty foreigners who reside in this unfortunate country have some claim against the government in one way or another. Many of these claims are really based on the denial of real justice, while others have been fabricated throughout, as a good speculation, which would enable the claimant to obtain money for some imaginary wrong; for example, three days' imprisonment which was intentionally provoked with the object of formulating a claim which might be pushed to an exorbitant figure."[1]
In face of the string of debts which arose from the loans themselves, or from claims for damages suffered during the civil wars, the governments could only succumb. The immorality of the fiscal agents and the greed of the foreigner will explain these continual bankruptcies, which constitute the financial history of America.
The descendants of the prodigal Spanish conquerors, who knew nothing of labour or thrift, have incessantly resorted to fresh loans in order to fill the gaps in their budgets. Politicians knew of only one solution of the economic disorder—to borrow, so that little by little the Latin-American countries became actually the financial colonies of Europe.
Economic dependence has a necessary corollary—political servitude. French intervention in Mexico was originally caused by the mass of unsatisfied financial claims; foreigners, the creditors of the State, were in favour of intervention. England and France, who began by seeking to ensure the recovery of certain debts, finally forced a monarch upon the debitor nation. The United States entertained the ambition of becoming the sole creditor of the American peoples: this remarkable privilege would have assured them of an incontestable hegemony over the whole continent.
In the history of Latin America loans symbolise political disorder, lack of foresight, and waste; it is thanks to loans that revolutions are carried out, and it is by loans that the caudillos have enriched themselves. Old debts are liquidated by means of new, and budgetary deficits are balanced by means of foreign gold. When the poverty caused by political disorder becomes too great the American governments clamour feverishly in the markets of Europe for the hypothecation of the public revenues, and the issue of fresh funds, offering to pay a high interest, and recognising the rights of suspended creditors.
On the one hand the budget is loaded to create new employments in order to assuage the national appetite for sinecures, while the protective tariffs are raised to enrich the State. Thus the forces of production disappear, life becomes dearer, and poverty can only increase. America has until lately known little of productive loans intended for use in the construction of railways, irrigation works, harbours, or for the organisation of colonies of immigrants.
The product of the customs and other fiscal dues is not enough to stimulate the material progress of a nation. So application is made to the bankers of London or Paris; but it is the very excess of these loan operations and the bad employment of the funds obtained that impoverishes the continent. The excessive number of administrative sinecures, the greed of the leaders, the vanity of governments, all call for gold; and when the normal revenues are not sufficient to enrich these hungry oligarchies, a loan which may involve the very future of the country appears to all to be the natural remedy.
The budgets of various States complicate still further a situation already difficult. They increase beyond all measure, without the slightest relation to the progress made by the nation. They are based upon taxes which are one of the causes of the national impoverishment, or upon a protectionist tariff which adds greatly to the cost of life. The politicians, thinking chiefly of appearances, neglect the development of the national resources for the immediate augmentation of the fiscal revenues; thanks to fresh taxes, the budgets increase. These resources are not employed in furthering profitable undertakings, such as building railroads or highways, or increasing the navigability of the rivers. The bureaucracy is increased in a like proportion, and the budgets, swelled in order to dupe the outside world, serve only to support a nest of parasites. In the economic life of these countries the State is a kind of beneficent providence which creates and preserves the fortune of individual persons, increases the common poverty by taxation, display, useless enterprises, the upkeep of military and civil officials, and the waste of money borrowed abroad; such is the "alimentary politics" of which Le Play speaks. The government is the public treasury; by the government all citizens live, directly or indirectly, and the foreigner profits by exploiting the national wealth. A centralising power, the State forces a golden livery upon this bureaucratic mob of magistrates and deputies, political masters and teachers.
To sum up, the new continent, politically free, is economically a vassal. This dependence is inevitable; without European capital there would have been no railways, no ports, and no stable government in America. But the disorder which prevails in the finances of the country changes into a real servitude what might otherwise have been a beneficial relation. By the accumulation of loans frequent crises are provoked, and frequent occasions of foreign intervention.
A policy of thrift would have led to the establishment of economic equilibrium. Foreign gold has poured in continually, not only in the form of loans but in the shape of material works—railways, ports, industries, and industrial undertakings. It is in this way that English capital has accumulated in the Argentine, Uruguay, Brazil, and Chili, where it has become a prominent factor in the industrial development of the country. In the Argentine it amounts to 300 millions, in Brazil to 150 millions, in Chili to 51 millions, and in Uruguay to 46 millions of pounds sterling.
New problems arise from the relation between the size of the population and the amount of the capital imported. The increase of alien wealth in nations which are not fertilised by powerful currents of immigration constitutes a real danger. To pay the incessantly increasing interest of the wealth borrowed, fresh sources of production and a constant increase of economic exchanges are necessary; in a word, a greater density of population. The exhaustion of the human stock in the debitor nations creates a very serious lack of financial equilibrium, which may result, not only in bankruptcy but also in the loss of political independence by annexation.
The solution of the financial problem depends, then, upon the solution of the problem of population. Immigrants will solve it by increasing the number of productive units, by accumulating their savings, by irresistible efforts which lay the foundations of solid fortunes. It is true that the wealth which they will create will also be of foreign origin, but in the second or third generation the descendants of the enriched colonists will become true citizens of the country in which their fathers have established themselves. They will have forgotten their country of origin, and will mingle with the old families which conserve the national traditions.
The ideal of peoples whose economic condition is dependence is naturally autonomy; without it all liberty is precarious. A considerable stream of exports flows from America to Europe to pay for imports and the interest on foreign capital. Only this large exportation of products, as in the case of the Argentine, Mexico, and Brazil, can maintain a favourable commercial balance. The Argentine economist Alberto Martinez has demonstrated that as in his country there is neither an economic reserve nor a national capital, the diminution of exports causes serious financial disturbances; exchange is unstable, the rate rises, trade falls off, and credit is suspended.
In other countries the economic system is instability itself. It depends almost entirely on two or three agricultural products—coffee, cane-sugar, and rubber—and the incessant fluctuations in the prices of these products, which constitute the wealth of the country. One does not observe the regularity of the exports of the Argentine and Brazil, nor any important industrial development. To remedy the lack of equilibrium in the budget and to pay the interest on the foreign debt, the State, the guardian of the public fortune, once more resorts to loans. The creation of a national capital is thus an urgent necessity for these prodigal democracies.
By stimulating the development of agriculture, by creating or protecting industry, by diminishing the budgetary charges by the reduction of useless bureaucratic employments and sumptuary expenses, the Latin-American governments could gradually establish the necessary reserves.
On the other hand, fiscal agreements, commercial treaties, and railways must contribute to the solidarity of these nations among themselves. Europe has invested vast sums of capital in America; she sends thither large quantities of the products of her industries, but there are peoples more favoured than others by this invasion of capital. It should be possible by a series of practical conventions to lay the foundations of a Zollverein. The dependence of certain republics as compared with others should tend to make them commercially independent of Europe. Already a number of industries are being developed in America; in Brazil their yield attains the annual value of 46 million pounds; in 1909 the imports were diminished by 3 million pounds in consequence of this new economic factor. It may be supposed that in the still distant future the agricultural peoples of America will buy the products of their industrial neighbours, the Argentine, Brazil, and Uruguay. The unification of the monetary system will still further facilitate the development of this inter-state commerce, this trade between zones almost exclusively agricultural, and other regions both agricultural and industrial; thus closer economic relations will be the basis of a lasting political understanding. No American republic has yet reached the term of its economic development.
We may distinguish three periods in the evolution of the nations towards autonomy; during the first their dependence is absolute, in respect of ideas as much as of men and capital; such is the present situation of the majority of the Latin democracies. During the second period agriculture suffices for the national necessities and industry develops; the Argentine, Brazil, and Mexico are already in this state of partial liberty. Finally, the period of agricultural and industrial exportation commences, and the intellectual influence of the country makes itself felt beyond the frontiers. After France and England, Germany and the United States reached this glorious phase. Neither Mexico nor the Argentine nor Brazil is as yet flooding the world with its industrial products nor affecting it by its original intellectual activities; there is no culture or philosophy that we can properly term Argentine or Chilian. Europe is tributary to the Argentine for her wheat and meats, and to Brazil for her coffee, but ideas and machines come from Paris, London, and New York.
M. Limantour, who tried to save the Mexican railways from the Yankee capitalists, and the Argentine economists, who endeavoured to convert the foreign into a national debt, are preparing the way for the future reign of financial liberty; but this transformation depends on the increase of public or private wealth and the activity of immigrants, who in hospitable America soon become landed proprietors or merchants.
In the country districts, as in the cities, which are every day more numerous, the common wealth and the fiscal revenues are increasing, owing to the efforts of industrious men. Not only are foreign industrial undertakings being founded, but national institutions also, fed by national capital. When the necessary loans can be subscribed in the country itself, when railways and ports are constructed with State or private capital, or with the financial aid of other South American governments; when American multi-millionaires (there are already plenty of them in the Argentine) have effected the nationalisation of the public works now in the hands of foreigners, then the economic ideal of these democracies will be realised.
Latin America may already be considered as independent from the agricultural point of view; it possesses riches which are peculiar to it: coffee to Brazil, wheat to the Argentine, sugar to Peru, fruits and rubber to the Tropics. Its productive capacity is considerable. It may rule the markets of the world. The systematic exploitation of its mines will reveal treasures which are not even suspected. We may say, then, that even without great industries the American continent, independent in the agricultural domain, and an exporter of precious metals, may win a doubtless precarious economic liberty.
CONCLUSION
AMERICA AND THE FUTURE OF THE LATIN PEOPLES
The Panama Canal and the two Americas—The future conflicts between Slavs, Germans, Anglo-Saxons, and Latins—The role of Latin America.
A new route offered to human commerce transforms the politics of the world. The Suez Canal opened the legendary East to Europe, directed the stream of European emigration towards Australia, and favoured the formation, in South Africa, of an Anglo-Saxon Confederation. The Panama Canal is destined to produce profound perturbations in the equilibrium of the nations of the New World. Humboldt announced these changes in 1804:[1] "The products of China will be brought more than 6,000 miles nearer Europe and the United States; great changes will take place in the political condition of eastern Asia, because this tongue of earth (Panama) has for centuries been the rampart of the independence of China and Japan."
The Atlantic is to-day the ocean of the civilised world. The opening of the canal will thus displace the political axis of the world. The Pacific, an ocean separated from the civilising currents of Europe, will receive directly from the Old World the wealth and products of its labour and its emigrants. Until the present time the United States and Japan have shared in its rule as a mare clausum, and they are disputing the supremacy in Asia and Western America. Once the isthmus is pierced, new commercial peoples may invade with their victorious industries the enchanted lands of Asia and the distant republics of South America. New York will be nearer to Callao, but the distance between Hamburg and Havre and the Peruvian coast will be equally diminished. It has been calculated that by the new route the voyage between Liverpool and the great ports of the Pacific will be reduced by 2,600 to 6,000 miles, according to the respective positions of the latter, and the distance between New York and the same centres of commercial activity will be diminished by 1,000 to 8,400 miles. German, French, and English navigation companies will run a service of modern vessels direct to the great ports of Chili and China. The paths of the world's trade will be changed; Panama will form the gate of civilisation to Eastern Asia and Western America, as Suez is to Central Asia, Eastern Africa, and Oceania. The Atlantic will become the ocean of the Old World.
The trade of the new era must undergo unexpected transformations. The influence of Europe in China and Western America will be considerably increased. Germany should become the rival of the United States in the commercial supremacy in the East and in the republics of Latin America. Her vessels, messengers of imperialism, which now make long voyages through the Straits of Magellan to reach Valparaiso and Callao, will then employ the canal route. The vessels of Japan will bear to Europe, as formerly did the Phoenician navigators, the products of the exotic Orient; New York will dethrone Antwerp, Hamburg, and Liverpool; the English will lose their historic position as intermediaries between Europe and Asia. The United States, masters of the canal, will create in New York a great fair in which the merchandise of East and West will be accumulated: the treasures of Asia, the gold of Europe, and the products of their own overgrown industries. They will thus have won an economic hegemony over the Pacific, South America, and China, where they will be at least privileged competitors in the struggle between England and Germany. Between New York and Hong Kong, New York and Yokohama, and New York and Melbourne new commercial relations will be established. In approaching New York the East will recede from Liverpool and the ports of Europe, and the Panama route will favour the industries of the United States in Asia and Oceania. It may already be foreseen that the United States will be terrible competitors in Australia, and above all in New Zealand, where they will drive the English merchants from the markets. It is difficult to write, like Tarde, a "fragment of future history"; too many unknown forces intervene in the historical drama of the peoples. But no doubt, unless some extraordinary event occurs to disturb the evolution of the modern peoples, the great nations of industrial Europe and Japan, the champion of Asiatic integrity, will oppose the formidable progress of the United States.
The canal sets a frontier to Yankee ambition; it is the southern line, the "South Coast Line" of which a North American politician, Jefferson, used to dream. As early as 1809 he believed that Cuba and Canada would become incorporated, as States of the Union, in the immense Confederation; anticipating the rude lyrics of Walt Whitman, he dreamed of founding "an empire of liberty so vast that the like has never been seen." Heirs to the Anglo-Saxon genius, the Americans of the North wish to form a democratic federation.
They have succeeded in doing in Cuba what Japan has done in Korea: first, the struggle for autonomy, then the necessary intervention, then a protectorate, and perhaps annexation. Thus the prophecy of Jefferson will be realised. Between Canada, an autonomous colony, and the United States, there are common economic interests, and commercial treaties have created such a plexus of interests that the evolution from these practical alliances to political union would seem to be a simple matter. The disintegration of the Anglo-Saxon Empire will be the work of the United States. American activities in Canada are steadily increasing; the Yankee capital employed in various Canadian industries amounts to £20,000,000. Trade is increasing, and by virtue of new conventions the United States will be even better situated than ever to dispute the Canadian markets with England. In this free colony there is a Far West which the States have peopled. The East is Anglo-Saxon, industrial, aristocratic; the West, barbarian and agrarian, desires union with the neighbouring democracy. MÜnsterberg reports that a Boston journal prints every day, in large letters, on the first page, that the first duty of the United States is the annexation of Canada.
The friendship of England, and the moral harmony of the English-speaking world, will perhaps check the progress of American imperialism northward; but the capital which develops and exploits the west of Canada is a competitor which cannot be resisted. Moreover, such men as Goldwin Smith, a moral authority in Canada, counsel union with the great Republican neighbour. Free trade, which the English radicals wish to maintain, relaxes the economic ties which might ensure the duration of the British Empire, and prevents the formation of a Zollverein, of that fiscal union between Great Britain and her colonies which was the great project of Chamberlain. It is to guarantee commercial and economic interests that Canada is approaching the United States and withdrawing from England.
Mexico, where £100,000,000 of American capital is invested; Panama, a republic subjected to the protectorate of the Anglo-Saxon North; the Canal Zone, which the Yankees have acquired as a remote southern possession; the Antilles, which they are gradually absorbing; Central America, where ever turbulent republics tolerate pacificatory intervention; and Canada, rich and autonomous, form, for the statesmen of Washington and the Yellow Press, a great and desirable empire. In two centuries the small Puritan colonies of the Atlantic seaboard will perhaps have come to govern the continent from the Pole to the Tropics; and will create, with the aid of all the races of mankind, a new Anglo-Saxon humanity, industrial and democratic. Thus the Roman Republic, from her narrow home between the Apennines, governed the world, as did Great Britain, peopled by a tenacious race, the sea.
To check the advance of the United States the South will lack a political force of the same weight. The conflict between the united Americans of the North and the divided inhabitants of the South will necessarily terminate fatally for the Latin New World.
The Pacific will be the theatre of racial wars and vast and transforming emigrations. Once the canal is open it is extremely probable that European emigrants will descend in large numbers upon the seaboard of Western America. Brazil and the Argentine attract the modern adventurer; their Eldorado is in the Argentine plains or the forests of Brazil. Venezuela, invaded by emigrants of Germanic race, will be born again; a dense population will fill her valleys, and Caracas will become a great Latin city. But in Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia, there is a great lack of centres of civilisation in the interior, and the sierra is largely wild and unpeopled; all progress is in the small towns of the coast, set amidst the aridity of the desert. Chinese and Japanese, who are content with low wages, are crushing the European worker by their competition. Japanese colonies will people the American West from Panama to Chili, and in these new countries the fusion of Japanese and Indian blood is by no means impossible.
There will always be two distinct regions in South America, separated by the Andes and divided by the Tropics. The Atlantic region will retain its liberty, and increase in wealth and in power. It is possible that the south of Brazil will become German, but the Argentine, Chili, Uruguay, and the great Brazilian States will defend the Latin heritage and European tradition. To the north and the west depopulated and divided nations will struggle against an invasion of peoples of similar races coming from the east and against a conquering people from the north. Thanks to the protection of Japan, they may be able to free themselves from the tutelage of the United States, or they may be able to hold off the subjects of the Mikado by submitting to the influence of North America. Only the federation of all the Latin republics under the pressure of Europe—that is to say, of England, France, and Italy, who have important markets in America—might save the nations of the Pacific, just as a century ago Great Britain was able to defend the autonomy of these peoples against the mystic projects of the Holy Alliance.
The Monroe doctrine, which prohibits the intervention of Europe in the affairs of America and angers the German imperialists, the professors of external expansion, like MÜnsterberg, may become obsolete. If Germany or Japan were to defeat the United States, this tutelary doctrine would be only a melancholy memory. Latin America would emerge from the isolation imposed upon it by the Yankee nation, and would form part of the European concert, the combination of political forces—alliances and understandings—which is the basis of the modern equilibrium. It would become united by political ties to the nations which enrich it with their capital and buy its products.
Japan has not lost her originality as an Asiatic nation, because she is united to England by a treaty which assures the status quo in the East. The Latin republics will not renounce their character as American nations because they may conclude understandings with the nations of the West. Already there are commercial treaties between these nations and Europe, as well as a harmony of economic and intellectual interests. Brazil and the Argentine, where British money and French ideals prevail, might themselves unite to form a vast combination of alliances with the group of European nations which conquered, civilised, and enriched America: that is, Spain, France, and England. Will not a community of interests in America give a new strength to the union of these peoples in Europe? Great political changes would result from these new influences: the American Latins, by entering into the combinations of European politics, would divide Italy, whose interests in the Argentine and Brazil are so great, from the Triple Alliance, and would strengthen the understanding between England and France against Germany, which disputes with them not only the hegemony of Europe but also the preponderance in America. Canning, who opposed the designs of the Holy Alliance, used to say a century ago that he had given the New World liberty in order to restore equilibrium to the Old World. Against the theocratic peoples who were seeking to overshadow the destinies of the earth he evoked the apparition of these free democracies destined to establish the benefits of liberty on a firm footing. His hope was premature, because it was hardly possible for perfect republics to rise from the ruins of Spanish absolutism. Even to-day, after a century of attempts at constitutional government, only a few Latin American States—the Argentine, Brazil, Chili, Peru, and Bolivia—seem capable of fulfilling the desires of Canning.
These peoples would contribute to the defence of the Latin ideal. But is not this an excessive ambition for nations still semi-barbarous? The old races of the West contemplate their impetuous advance with much the same distrust as that which Rome experienced as she watched the turbulent migrations of Goths and Germans. And even if the Latin race could check its irremediable decadence by the aid of the wealth and youth of these American peoples, would it really be profitable to oppose the triumph of the Anglo-Saxons and the Slavs for the sake of saving a fallen caste? Seventy years ago Tocqueville visited the United States and divined their future greatness. To-day M. Clemenceau, a politician and a great admirer of the North American Republic, praises the Latin vigour, as he sees it in Buenos-Ayres, Uruguay, and Rio de Janeiro. The Yankee republic has realised the prophecies of the former critic, and it would not be strange if the southern democracies of America were to confirm the optimism of the latter. A new energy, undeniable material progress, and a fertile creative faith announce the advent, in the new continent, if not of the Eldorado of which the hungry emigrant dreams, at least of wealthy nations, rich in industry and agriculture; the advent of a world in which the glorious age of the exhausted Latin world may renew itself, as in the classic fountain. When Emerson visited England fifty years ago he declared that the heart of the Britannic race was in the United States, and that the "mother island," exhausted, would some day, like many parents, be satisfied with the vigour which she had bestowed upon her own children.[2] In speaking of Spain and Portugal, might not Argentines, Brazilians, and Chilians employ the same proud language?
The decadence of the Latins, which seems obvious to the sociologist, may really be only a long period of abeyance. The adventures in which such an exuberant force of heroism was expended might well result in a reaction, a weariness after creation. At the beginning of the modern period, in the sixteenth century, the English, undisciplined adventurers, were hostile to the regularity and monotony of industrial life; in the nineteenth century they built an empire, organised a powerful industrialism, and became slow and methodical; and in 1894 Dr. Karl Pearson was uneasy as to "the decadence of British energy which is revealed by the adoption of State socialism and by the poverty of mechanical invention."[3]
In the future the Latins may regain their old virility. The ricorsi which Vico saw in history cause certain peoples to recover the pre-eminence they have lost, while others, prosperous nations, fall back into decadence; no privilege is eternal, no reaction is irremediable and inevitable.
"Multa renascentur quÆ jam cecidere, cadentque
QuÆ nunc sunt in honore...."
The imperial policy of Charles V. and Philip II., the conquest of a continent by the Spaniards, Portuguese, and French, the glorious festival of the Renaissance, the triumph of Lepanto, the splendid empire of Venice, the political activity of Richelieu, the great century of French classicism, the Revolution which proclaimed the Rights of Man, and the Napoleonic epic, the liberation of Spanish America: this is the hymn of glory of the Latin race. To-day Belgium, Italy, and the Argentine give signs of a renaissance of that race, which men have supposed to be exhausted.
Heirs of the Latin spirit in the moral, religious, and political domain, the Ibero-American peoples are seeking to conserve their glorious heritage. The idea of race, in the sense of traditions and culture, is predominant in modern politics. Flourishing on every hand, we see Pan-Slavism, Pan-Islamism, Pan-Asianism, Pan-Germanism, Pan-Latinism—barbarous words which give an indication as to the struggles of the future. The Slavs of Dalmatia, Germany, Servia, and Bosnia would reconstitute, with the fragments of many divided nations, a State which would also be a race. Islam unites divers peoples by the ardour of a new fanaticism, under the inspiration of popular Khalifs or marabouts, from Soudan to Fez, from Bombay to Stamboul. Vast unions of scattered peoples are thus springing into formation, in the name of a religion or a common origin. Slavs, Saxons, Latins, and Mongols are contending for the possession of the world. It is thus that the drama of history becomes simplified; above the quarrels of precarious nations are rising the profound antagonisms of millennial races.
OnÉsime Reclus, in an excellent volume, the Partage du monde, has gone into the respective positions of each of these powerful groups. The conclusions of his analysis are full of hope; in spite of the Saxons and Slavs the Latins still hold vast territories, which they must people. Their geographical position, despite Anglo-Saxon imperialism and the immense surface of all the Russias of Europe and Asia, is certainly not inferior.
There are a hundred million Slavs scattered over an immense Asiatic and European territory, which stretches from Vladivostock to the Baltic Sea; two and a half milliards of hectares are waiting for the children of this prodigious race. By uniting the peoples of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland to the Germans of Austria, the German race, whether it propagates the gospel of Pan-Germanism by commercial penetration or by violence, possesses about 100 million hectares for 93 millions of men. The Anglo-Saxons, the natural enemies of German expansion, the rivals of the Deutschtum in Asia, Africa, and America, rule an almost unlimited area of milliards of hectares; India, Canada, the United States, South Africa, Egypt, Australia, conquered territories and kingdoms held in tutelage, peoples of all faiths and all races. More than 200 millions of Anglo-Saxons people this "greater Britain" without including India, which is not assimilable.
The territory occupied by the Latin peoples in Europe, America, and Africa is 3.9 million hectares, inhabited by 250 millions of men; the number of Latins is thus not really inferior to that of the Anglo-Saxons, nor are the territories open to Latin expansion inferior to those reserved for the rival race. With the French colonies in Asia they amount to 4 milliards of hectares.
Here we have a Latin superiority; by the extent of their territories and their numbers the Latins outnumber the Slavs and the Germans. They do not yield to the English either in human capital nor in wealth of exploitable territory. And England has reached the zenith of her industrial period, the maximum of her political development; the figures of the birth-rate in the industrial towns are diminishing, and emigration has almost ceased. The State is becoming the protector of a demagogic and decadent crowd. The United States seek to conquer new territories for their imperialist race. But the Latins possess in South America a rich and almost uninhabited continent, and in the north of Africa the French are in process of founding a colonial empire which will rival Egypt in wealth and importance, and will reach from Morocco to the Congo and from Dakar to Tunis.
Reclus calculates that Latin America could feed a hundred persons per square kilometre. While the natality of the Anglo-Saxon cities of the Atlantic seaboard in the United States remains stationary the Latin American population is increasing prodigiously; it is to-day 80 millions, and a century ago, when Humboldt visited the New World, it was approximately only 15 millions. It is possible that by the last years of the present century the number of South Americans will have reached 250 millions; the equilibrium between Latins and Anglo-Saxons will then be broken in favour of the former.
America is thus an essential factor of the future of the Latin nations. The destiny of France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy would be different if the 80 millions of Latin Americans were to lose their racial traditions; if in a century or two America were to pass under the sceptre of the United States, or if the Germans and Anglo-Saxons were to attack and oppress the nucleus of civilisation formed by the Argentine, Uruguay, and Southern Brazil. Economically America would lose markets; intellectually, docile colonies; practically, centres of expansion. To-day Anglo-Saxons, Germans, Slavs, and Neo-Latins are balancing forces which may develop in harmony in the framework of Christian civilisation without wars of conquest and without ambitions of monopoly. The moral unity of South America would contribute to the realisation of such an ideal. A new Anglo-Saxon continent running from Alaska to Cape Horn, built on the ruins of twenty Spanish republics, would be the presage of a final decadence. In the struggles of hundreds of years' duration between the Latin States and the barbarians, between Catholicism and Protestantism, between the French genius and the Teutonic spirit, between the Renaissance and the Reformation, the Latins would have lost the last battle.
America is a laboratory of free peoples. Dr. Charles W. Eliott, rector of the great University of Harvard, has studied the contribution of the United States to modern civilisation. Arbitration as a universal principle, toleration, universal suffrage, material well-being, and political liberty seem to him to be the characteristics of North American culture. In the Latin South we encounter similar principles. Arbitration is the basis of international relations; tolerance from the religious point of view is in process of development. Political liberty is still more a matter of Constitutions than of custom; but the liberal political charters, adapted to the principles of modern civilisation, are the ideal of these republics. When the wilderness is peopled by new races, democracies will grow to maturity within this scaffolding, and universal suffrage, individual rights and tolerance will be realities.
In Latin America, above all among the southern nations, one cannot conceive of the restoration of the old social order, or of despotism and religious inquisition. The new continent, whether Saxon or Latin, is democratic and liberal.
If as in the time of the Holy Alliance the theocratic peoples were to ally themselves—Catholic and warlike Austria, Germany, dominated by Prussian feudalism, Russia, mystic and formidable—the whole American continent would be the bulwark of liberty. If Germans and Latins or Latins and Anglo-Saxtons were to fight between themselves the overseas democracies would greatly contribute to the vitality of the Latin race. If in a Europe dominated by Slavs and Germans the peoples of the Mediterranean were forced to withdraw in painful exodus towards the blue sea peopled by the Greek islands and symbols old as the world, it is probable that the ancient myth would be realised anew, and that the torch which bears the ideal of Latin civilisation would pass from Paris to Buenos-Ayres or Rio de Janeiro, as it passed from Rome to Paris in the modern epoch, or from Greece to Rome in the classic period. America, to-day desert and divided, would save the culture of France and Italy, the heritage of the Revolution and the Renaissance, and would thus have justified to the utmost the fortunate audacity of Christopher Columbus.
Names in italics are those of literary men, philosophers, &c.
A.B.C., the (federation), 348-9
Aberdeen, Lord, 64
Absolutism, 51
Acosta, 247
African elements in Spain, 40-1
African race, see Negroes
Agriculture, 384-5
Alberdi, 236
Alcantara, President of Venezuela, 110
Alva, Duke of, 30
America, Anglo-Saxon, 16, see United States
America, South, the conquest of, 16, 44; early Constitutions, 82
Anarchy, military (86-94); leads to dictatorship, 88; spontaneity of, 89; in Colombia, 201; in the tropics, 222-31
Andes, San Martin crosses the, 67
Andrade, 183, 256-7
Antilles, the, 222
Arabs in Spain, 40-1
Aranda, 64
Aranha, GraÇa, 268
Arbitration, Court of, 347, 399
Argentine, the, 48, 77-8; first Constitution of, 83; 92 (134-46); revolution in, 134; early Constitutions, 134; federation of, 135; democracy in, 135; Constitution of 1826, 137-8
Artigas, 89, 127
Autocracy, follows revolution, 88, 93
Avellanada, 255
Ayacucho, 71
Ayagarray, 307
Aztecs, the, 47, 53, 149
BALMES, 274
Balmaceda, President of Chili, 170-8
Barreto, 273
Basques in S. America, 364
Belgrano, 61, 66
Bello, 246, 251-2, 272
Bentham, 245
Bilbao, 236-7
Blanco-Encalada, 125
Bolivar, 61, 63-9; youth of, 70; as general, 71; President, 71; downfall of, 72; character and principles, 72-80, 81-3, 102, 113, 122-3
Bolivia, 80, 122-6
Bonaparte, 88, 91
Bourget, Paul, 15
Boyer, President of Hayti, 229
Brazil (180-90); revolution in, 180; slavery abolished, 189; revolution in, 189
Buenos Ayres, 65
Bunge, C. O., 279
Bustamente, 150-1
Bureaucracy, 376-7
CABILDO, the, 98
California, Japanese in, 326
Canning, 393-4
Canovas, 314
Carabobo, 76
Caracas, Congress of, 348
Caro, 253-4
Carrera (Guatemalan), 224
Casimiro-Ulloa, 117
Castes, inimical, 91, 370
Castillo, 115-6
Castro, General, 105
Catholicism in S. America, 286
Caudillos, the, 16, 89, 94-5, 365-70
Central America, 83, 222-6; confederation of, 347
Chamberlain, Mr., 346
Charrua Indians, 131
Chibcha Indians, 47
Chili, 48, 92, 104 (164-79); social revolution in, 178, 342
Chivalry, literature of, 34
Church, the, in the colonies, 52-3
Cid, the, 34
Cities of Spain, 30, 33, 38, 40
Civil wars, 371
Clemenceau, M., 15
Clergy in Spain, 42
Cochrane, Lord, 68
Coolidge, Professor, 321, 335
Colombia (201-12); anarchy in, 201; parties, 202-3
Colonies, the Spanish (44-57); life in, 54-7; revolution, 58
Commune in Spain, 38
Comte, 274-5
Conquest of S. America, 16
Conquistadores, the, 45-8, 93
Constitutions of Chili and Venezuela, 82; of Bolivia, the Argentine, and Colombia, 83; of Venezuela, 103; of Chili, 104; of Venezuela, 105; of Colombia, 203-4; of Greater Colombia, 204; of Ecuador, 214; of Central America, 233
Convention, the French, 88
Cortez, 45
Costa-Rica, 225-6
Creole, the, 29, 50, 59, 360-1
Cuba (313-22); civil war in, 315; purchase mooted, 317; racial factors, 318
DARIO, RUBEN, 261-5
Decadence of conquerors, 44, 50, 85
Democracy in Spain, 37-40; in S. America, 93
Diaz, G., 255-6
Diaz, Leopoldo, 258
Diaz, President of Mexico, 77, 155-63
Dictators, the, 16
Directory of Buenos Ayres, 82
Don Quixote, 34
ECHENIQUE, President of Peru, 115
Echeverria, 254
Economic Problems (378-86); loans, 379, 381; foreign capital, 383
Ecuador, 92-3 (213-21)
EncyclopÆdists, the, 65, 81
England, policy of, 64; influence of, 83, 390
Equalitarianism, 63
Estrade, Angel de, 268
FALCON, President of Venezuela, 106-7
Faustinas I. of Hayti, 229
Federation, in Spain, 35; Bolivar's prophecies of, 77; see Unity
FeijÓ, Diego, 184-5
Feudal system, 30, 38
Flores, Dictator of Uruguay, 132-3
Flores, J. J., founder of Ecuador, 87, 213
Fombona, Blanco, 265, 268
FouillÉe, 277
France, Anatole, 15
France, intellectual influence of, 81-2
Francia, Dr., tyrant of Paraguay, 191-5
Free cities of Spain, 30, 35, 40
GARCIA-MORENO, President of Ecuador, 215-21
German capital, 292-4
German colonists, 291-7
German Emperor, the, 323
German Peril, the, 290-7
Gongorism, 34
Goths, the, 41
Guarani Indians, 191
Guatemala, 223
Guayaquil, 213
Guizot, 245
Guyau, 278
Guzman-Blanco, Dictator of Venezuela, 101, 106-8; policy of reconstruction, 108-10; return to power, 110-12
HALF-CASTES, 93, 338; see Mestizos
Hawaii, annexation of 303; Japanese in, 325-6
Hayti, 226-31
Heredity, in the Spanish republics, 97
Hispaniola, 226
Hostos, E. de, 272-3
Hugo, Victor, 261, 263
Humboldt, 50
IBERIANS, 31-2, 40-1
Ibero-Americans, 283-9
Ideology, political, 235-48
Ignatius of Loyola, 33
Incas, the, 47
Independence, wars of, 29, 58-81
Indians, at conquest, 46-8, 91; distribution of, 93, 352-3
Individualism, in Spain, 31-5; in S. America, 88
Industrialism, rise of, 94-6
Inquisition, the, 42, 52
Isthmus, States of the, 77
Itaborahy, 186
Italians in South America, 364
Iturbide, Emperor of Mexico, 61, 82, 149-50
JACOBINISM, 81
Japan, 393
Japanese Peril (323-31); emigrants, 327; spies, 329
JaurÈs, 15
JoÃo VI., 180-2
Juarez, Mexican Dictator, 152-5
Junin, 71,76
Juntas, 30; colonial, 60; revolutionary, 84
KING, see Monarchy
LA PAZ, revolt at, 65
La Plata, confederation of, 343
Lamartine, 244-5
Lansdowne, Lord, 83
Larreta, E. R., 269
Lastarria, 236-9
Latifundia, 92, 98
Latin race, the, 17; future of the, (387-400); decadence of, 395
Latin spirit, the, 17; in S. America, 287-9
Lavalleja, President of Uruguay, 127-9, 131
Law, influence of Spanish, 54
Lee, Gen. Homer, 325
Liberators, the, 66
Liniers, 65
Literature, 249-70
Lodges, revolutionary, 65-81
Lopez, Argentine caudillo, 89, 139
Lopez, tyrants of Paraguay, 196
Loyola, 33
Lugones, 265
MAIA, J. J. de, 82
"Maine," sinking of the, 315
Marmol, 254-5
Marti, 315
Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico, 154-5
Mestizos, 103, 356-60
Mexico, 48; first Constitution of, 83, 92-3 (149-63); intervention of the French, 153
Militarism, 86-94
Mill, James, 272
Mill, J. S., 274-5
Miranda, 66, 81, 83
Miscegenation, 48-50; in Peru, 194; see Indians, Mestizos, Negro, Race
Monagas, J. T. and J. G., Presidents of Venezuela, 103-5
Monagas, J. R., President of Venezuela, 107
Monarchy in Spain, 35-8; its relations at time of revolution with the revolted colonies, 60-1, 63
Monks, 52-3
Monopoly, 51-2
Monroe Doctrine, 290-1, 302-4, 392
Montalvo, 239-40
Montezuma, 48
Montt, President of Chili, 168-9
Mosquera, President of Colombia 206-7
MÜnsterberg, Professor, 294
Mystics of Spain, 33
NABUCO, J., 274
Nationality, early phases of, 84
Negroes, first introduction of, 49, 50; distribution of, 53, 355-6, 358-9
Nervo, A., 265
New Granada, 77
Nietzsche, 278
North American Peril, 298-312
NuÑez, Rafael, President of Colombia, 201, 206-11, 276
OLMEDO, 251
Olney, Secretary, 300
Orbegoso, 123
OrdoÑez, President of Uruguay, 132
Oribe, President of Uruguay, 129
PACIFIC, Confederation of the, 343
Paez, President of Venezuela, 61, 87, 91, 101-6
Palma, R., 267
Panama, 303; the Canal, 387-8
Pando, 126
Paraguay, 191-7; the great war in, 196-7
Pardo, Felipe, 252
Pardo, President of Peru, 117-9
Paz, 140
Pearson, Karl, 362
Pedro, Dom, I., 182
Pedro, Dom, II., 185-6, 188
Pelucones, 92
Peru, 68, 70-1; first Constitution, 82; 92-3 (113-121); War of Independence, 113, 342
Philosophy, 271-80
Picaro, the, in literature, 34, 43
Pierola, President of Peru, 120
Pitt, 83
Plutocracy, rise of, 94; future of, 97
PoincarÉ, R., 14
Political conflict, the, 92; problems, 365-77
Popham, Sir Home, 65
Portales, President of Chili, 118, 124, 165-8
Porto Rico, 303
Portuguese in S. America, 45-6
Posadas, 61
QUINTANA, 250, 252
Quiroga, General, 139-40
Quito, 65
RACE, problems of, 283-9, 351-64
Regenerators, the, 87
Renaissance, the, 45
Republics, early S. American, 39, 61
Revolutions, 65-81; ideology of, 81-5; 94
Reyles, Carlos, 206-9
Rio Branco, 187
Rivadavia, Dictator of the Argentine, 135-8
Rivera, President of Uruguay, 127-30
Rocafuerte, President of Ecuador, 214
Rodo, J. E., 133, 264, 266, 274
Rome, in Spain, 33
Roosevelt, Theodore, 304, 318
Root, Secretary, 300
Rosas, Argentine tyrant, 139-46
Rousseau, J. J., influence of, 81
SALAVERRY, 123-4, 254
Salisbury, Lord, 300
Salvador, 223
San Domingo, 226-31
San Martin, Protector of Peru, crosses the Andes, 67, 68-9, 72
San Martin, Zorilla, 256
Sancho Panza, 53
Santa-Ana, President of Mexico, 150-1
Santa-Cruz, President of Bolivia, 87, 114, 125
Santana, Dictator of San Domingo, 230
Santander, President of Colombia, 87, 205
Sarmiento, 242-3
Sierra, the, 91-2
Silva, J. A., 265
Slavery, 104; abolished in Brazil, 189
Slavs, the, 394-5, 397
Soublette, 103
Spain, early history of, 30-43; religion in, 33; laws of, in S. America, 285
Spencer, Herbert, 86, 274-6
Stoicism, 33
Sucre, 70-1, 213
TAFT, President, 320
Tammany Hall, 301, 320
Teresa, Saint, 33
Territorial overlords, 97-8
"Thirty-three, the," 128
Toussaint Louverture, 228-9
Trade, future of, 388-9
Tyranny, advantages of, 96
UGARTE, MANUEL, 266
United States, supremacy of, 299 intervention in South and Central America, 303-4; race troubles in, 308, 311; future influence of, 390-1
Unity, problems of, 335-50
Urbina, President of Ecuador, 215!
Uruguay, 127-33
VALENCIA, Convention of, 105
Varas, 168
Vargas, Dr., President of Venezuela, 102
Velasco, 125-6
Venezuela, 82, 92-3, 101-3; civil war in, 106; revolution of 1870, 108
Verlaine, 263
Viceroys, the, 51
Vivanco, 115
Voltaire, 81
WASHINGTON, 82
Weyler, 315
Wood, General, 318-9
YEGROS, Consul of Paraguay, 192
ZALDUA, DR., President of Colombia, 211
Zambos, 358-9
Zollverein, 305-6, 346, 349
The Gresham Press
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED,
WOKING AND LONDON
THE SOUTH AMERICAN SERIES.
Demy 8vo, Cloth.
VOL. I.—CHILE.
By G. F. SCOTT ELLIOT, M.A., F.R.G.S., Author of "A NATURALIST IN MID-AFRICA." With an Introduction by MARTIN HUME, a Map, and 39 Illustrations.
"An exhaustive and interesting account, not only of the turbulent history of this country, but of the present conditions and seeming prospects, ... and the characters of the Chileno and English and German colonists there."—Westminster Gazette.
VOL. II.—PERU.
By C. REGINALD ENOCK, F.R.G.S., Author of "THE ANDES AND THE AMAZON." With an Introduction by MARTIN HUME, a Map, and 72 Illustrations.
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By C. REGINALD ENOCK, F.R.G.S. With an Introduction by MARTIN HUME, a Map, and 64 full-page Illustrations.
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"The best and most comprehensive of recent works on the greatest and most progressive of the Republics of South America."—Manchester Guardian.
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VOL. V.—BRAZIL.
By PIERRE DENIS. With Historical Chapter by BERNARD MIALL, a Map, and 36 Illustrations.
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VOL. VI.—URUGUAY.
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VOL. VII.—GUIANA: BRITISH, FRENCH, AND DUTCH.
By JAMES RODWAY. With a Map and 36 Illustrations.
VOL. VIII.—VENEZUELA.
By LEONARD DALTON, F.G.S., F.R.G.S. With a Map and 34 Illustrations.
VOL. IX.—LATIN AMERICA: ITS RISE AND PROGRESS.
By F. GARCIA CALDERON. With a Preface by RAYMOND POINCARÉ, Prime Minister of France, a Map, and 34 Illustrations.
VOL. X.—COLOMBIA.
By P. J. EDER. With 2 Maps and 40 Illustrations.
