URUGUAY
Whoever wishes to have something by which to distinguish Uruguay from
its many sister republics, the size and character of each of which
are unfamiliar to many of us in Europe, may learn to remember that it
is the smallest of the South American states, and that it has neither
mountains, nor deserts, nor antiquities, nor aboriginal Indians.
Nevertheless, it is by no means a country to be described by negatives,
but has, as we shall presently see, a marked character of its own.
Having belonged to the viceroyalty of Buenos Aires, and being peopled
by men of the same pure Spanish stock as those who dwelt in Argentina,
it would probably have continued to be a part of that country but
for the fact that, as it lay close to Brazil, it was from time to
time occupied and held by the Portuguese of that county, sometimes by
conquest, sometimes by formal cession from the crown of Spain. Thus
its people, who had, when part of the Spanish dominions, a governor
of their own under the Viceroy, began to acquire a sort of national
consciousness as a community distinct from their fellow-countrymen on
the opposite shore of the Rio de la Plata and the Uruguay river. They
got the name of the _Banda Oriental_ (East Side), as opposed to the
rest of Argentina on the west side of the Uruguay. When the colonists
began, from 1810 onwards, to assert their independence of the crown
of Spain, the Orientales, as the Uruguayans were then usually called,
had to fight their own battle and fought it valiantly. The Portuguese
of Brazil, now allying themselves with Spain in defence of monarchy,
invaded the country, and it was their expulsion in 1814, as the
outcome of a long struggle under the famous patriot leader Artigas,
that finally set Uruguay free. After the Argentines had tried more
than once to force her into their federation, and the Portuguese had
again invaded and occupied the devastated land, Uruguay was ultimately
recognized as a sovereign State in 1828 by both Argentina and Brazil,
the latter now independent of Portugal. By this time incessant wars
and sufferings had formed a distinctive type of character and lit up a
flame of national feeling which has burnt strongly ever since.
With an area of only 72,000 square miles, as against 1,135,000 in
Argentina and 3,208,000 in Brazil, Uruguay seems like a garden plot
between two vast estates. But she is a veritable garden. There is
hardly an acre of useless ground within her borders. Except a few bare
hilltops and a few sandy stretches on the coast, all is available,
either for cattle and sheep, or for tillage, or for forest growth. No
country is more favoured by nature. The surface is gently undulating
along the sea and rises inland into swelling downs intersected here and
there by ranges of hills. The abundant grass is deemed the best for
cattle in all South America, so for many years ranching was practically
the only industry. Latterly, however, a great deal of land has been
brought under cultivation. Wheat and maize are the principal crops,
and there are now many vineyards. As the climate, while generally
resembling that of central Argentina, is tempered by the neighbourhood
of the Atlantic, the winters are less cold and the summers cooler
in Montevideo than they are on the other side of the Plate estuary.
Further north, where Uruguay adjoins Brazil, the midsummer heats
are severe and the vegetation becomes subtropical. It is a cheerful
country, with scenery constructed, so to speak, on a small scale, as
befits a small republic. Broad uplands of waving grass, with here and
there tree clumps, and in the centre and north of the country bosky
glens winding through rocky hills, make the landscape always pleasing
and sometimes romantic. There are no great forests, no deserts, no
volcanoes, nothing half so grand as the peaks of the Argentine Andes,
but nothing half so monotonous as the flats of the Argentine Pampa.
Montevideo the capital has the same air of freshness and cheerfulness
which belong to Uruguayan landscape and the Uruguayan climate. It has
grown to be a great and prosperous city in respect of its port, which
makes it the chief seat of the republic's commerce. The estuary of the
River Plate is much deeper on this northern side than on the southern,
so large ships have always been able to approach nearer to this
shore than they could do to the Argentine. By deepening the entrance
and running out breakwaters, a good harbour has now been created,
accessible to vessels of exceptionally deep draught which could not
(in 1910) come up to the docks in Buenos Aires. The city is also more
fortunate in its site, for the ground, a dead flat on the Argentine
side, here rises from the shore in a slope steep enough to afford fine
views over the sea and to enable the church towers and other tall
buildings to present an effective sky-line.
Montevideo, with its 300,000 inhabitants against the 1,300,000 of
Buenos Aires, has streets by no means so thronged as are those of the
Argentine capital. Neither are the houses quite so high, nor is there
the same sense of a vast country behind, pouring its products out by
this water-gate that leads to Europe. But here, just as in Buenos
Aires, everything is modern. Only one public building, the old Town
Hall in the chief plaza, dates from colonial times and has, or seems
by its quaintness to have, a sort of artistic quality which is absent
from the work, all French rather than Spanish in character, of the last
sixty years. The plazas are handsome, well laid out and planted, and
the street architecture creditable, with fewer contrasts of meanness
and magnificence than one usually sees in the growing cities of North
America. There is an absence not only of external squalor, but of any
marks of poverty, for the people seem brisk and thriving, with plenty
of money coming in. For many miles round the environs are studded with
tasteful villas, and the well-kept roads that traverse them are lined
by splendid rows of Australian blue gums. Three points of interest
deserve to be specially mentioned. One is the Cerro, an isolated
conical hill on the southwestern side of the bay, opposite the main
city, and an object so conspicuous and picturesque on this generally
tame coast that it has found a place in the arms of the republic. The
castle that surmounts it has no merit as a building, but the view is
superb along the coast and out to sea where the pale grey waters of
the Paraná and Uruguay meet the ocean blue. The second ornament of
the suburbs is the Botanical Garden. Its display of spring flowers,
both native and European, and the wonderful variety of trees from
semitropical and temperate regions, give a vivid sense of the powers of
this admirable climate, not oppressive in the blaze of its sunlight,
yet warm enough for roses twice as luxuriant as the best that Europe
can show. Lastly, there is a fine collection of wild animals in a
garden belonging to a private gentleman of large means, who is unique
in the personal relations which his kindly disposition has enabled
him to establish with the creatures, even with the beasts of prey.
There were splendid jaguars and pumas, and there were South American
ant-eaters with tongues longer than themselves. But what most delighted
the holiday crowd, who are permitted to ramble through the gardens,
was to see a brace of lion cubs strolling about in a friendly way
among men, women, and children, while the owner led us close up to the
bars of the cage in which his pet lion, a superb giant, sat peacefully
blinking and made us stroke it and rub its back. The lion took the
attention benignly and beamed on his master, but the attitude of the
lioness in the further corner of the cage did not encourage any such
familiarities.
Like Argentina, Uruguay is destined to be a pastoral and agricultural,
not a mining or manufacturing country. There are some minerals,
including gold, manganese, iron, and coal, but none of these is worked
on a large scale, and it has not yet been proved that either coal or
iron is present in quantities sufficient to form the basis of any
important industry. Cattle are at present the chief source of wealth,
the export of meat having been greatly increased by the recently
invented methods of freezing and chilling. Meat, hides, wool, wheat,
and maize are likely to continue to be the mainstay of the country's
prosperity; and as only about one-eighth of the surface is at present
under tillage, there is room for great expansion. No better evidence
of progress can be furnished than the extension of railways. The first
was begun in 1866. There were, in 1910, 1472 miles in operation,
and construction continues to go briskly forward. The chief centres
of population are either on the coast or on the banks of the great
navigable river Uruguay, whence cattle, meat, and wool are shipped.
So far, therefore, Uruguay has all the material conditions required for
prosperity and happiness, an abundance of good land, a temperate and
genial climate, water highways for traffic provided by Nature in her
rivers, artificial iron highways on land, supplied by enterprising
British capitalists. What is to be said of her inhabitants?
They were, till recent years, almost entirely of Spanish stock. The
warlike native Indians, one of whose tribes, the Charruas, were fierce
fighters, having been killed off, and the weaker tribes having quietly
melted away, very little aboriginal blood has mingled itself with
the Iberian stock. Some negroes are to be found along the Brazilian
frontier, but they do not seem to have perceptibly affected the
European element. Of late years a stream of immigrants has flowed in
from Italy, yet in no such volume as toward Argentina. There is also
a steady, though smaller, inflow from Spain; among whom there are,
fortunately, many industrious Basques. Rather more than a fifth of the
population are of foreign birth, a proportion small compared to that
of the foreign-born population of Rhode Island or Massachusetts. These
new-comers will soon be assimilated and are not likely to modify the
national type.
That type strikes the foreign observer as already distinct and well
marked. The Uruguayan is, of course, first and foremost a Colonial
Spaniard, but a Spaniard moulded by the conditions of his life during
the last ninety years. He has been a man of the country and the open
air, strong, active, and lawless, always in the saddle riding after
his cattle, handy with his lasso and his gun. Fifty years ago he
was a Gaucho, much like his Argentine cousin beyond the river. Now
he, too, like that cousin, is settling down, but he has retained
something of the breezy recklessness and audacity, the frankness and
free-handedness, of the older days. A touch of this Gaucho quality,
in a milder form, is felt through all classes of Uruguayan society.
Democratic equality in manners is combined with a high sense of
personal dignity, an immense hopefulness, an impulsive readiness to try
all experiments, a national consciousness none the less intense because
it already rejoices over the triumphs it is going to achieve. Whether
there is more of "ideality" than in Argentina I will not venture to
say, but there is less wealth and less ostentation. Englishmen and
North Americans settled in Montevideo like the Uruguayans, and say they
are good fellows. There is evidently something attractive about them
when the sons of such settlers grow up fond of the country, willing and
proud to be its citizens. You will hear an English-speaking youth of
either race say, if asked whether he is an Englishman or an American,
"I am an Uruguayan."
While we were in Montevideo a revolution broke out in the country.
There was sharp fighting about forty miles away from the city and the
railways were bringing in the wounded. It caused no great excitement,
having been expected for some weeks, and the newspapers told their
readers very little of what was happening. They did not know much, for
the military authorities had stopped every channel of communication.
That, however, would of itself have been a very poor reason for not
furnishing details. There were other and more imperative grounds for
reticence. We were unfortunately unable to see anything and could
learn little of the revolution, but its origin and especially the
perfect _sang-froid_ of the Montevideans, both natives and Englishmen,
struck us as curious. A short explanation of the conditions attending
such outbreaks may throw light on the phenomena of other republics as
well as Uruguay.
Ever since the colonists declared their independence of Spain, fighting
has been almost incessant in this smiling land. They fought first
against the Spanish troops, and then against the Portuguese rulers
of Brazil; they fought several times against Argentina and Paraguay,
and almost incessantly against one another. As soon as independence
had been secured and the Portuguese finally expelled, the two leading
generals (Rivera and Oribe) who had led the patriots to victory
quarrelled, and before long were striving in arms for the chief place
in the republic. Their adherents grew into two factions, which soon
divided the nation, or so much of it as took an active interest in
politics. At the first battle General Oribe, who headed one of the
parties, rode a white horse, and his lancers carried white pennons on
their spearheads; so they were called the Blancos. The followers of the
rival general, Rivera, had red pennons, and he rode a bay horse. They
were, therefore, the Colorados. From that day on Uruguayans have been
divided into Whites and Reds. Seventy-five years had passed and the
grandsons of the men who had fought under Oribe and Rivera in 1835 were
still fighting in 1910.
For what have they been fighting? At first there were no principles
involved; it was a personal feud between two soldiers, who not long
before had stood shoulder to shoulder against the Brazilian invader.
But just as political parties sometimes drop the tenets with which
they started and yet live on as organizations, so sometimes factions
which started without tenets pick them up as they go along and make
them watchwords. A party is apt to capture any current issue, or be
captured by it, and to become, thereafter, committed to or entangled
with it. Thus the Whites became in course of time the country party as
opposed to the Reds of the towns, and especially of Montevideo, and
thus, as the city is the home of new views and desires for change, the
Reds have become the anticlerical and the Whites the church party. It
would seem that the colours have nothing to do with the now almost
forgotten term (common in France in 1848-1851) of the "Red Republic,"
but another sort of connection with Europe may be found in the story
that the Garibaldian red shirt, which figured on so many battle-fields
in Sicily and Italy, was due to Giuseppe Garibaldi's having fought
on the Colorado side, in 1842-1846, against Rosas and the Argentine
invaders, the emblem being retained when that last of the heroes raised
his standard in the Italian revolution of 1848.[87]
When an insurrection is planned in Uruguay, word is sent round that its
supporters are to rendezvous, armed and mounted, at certain spots on
a certain day, and when the government gets to know of the plan, its
first step is to seize all the horses in the disaffected districts and
drive them to a place where they are kept under a strong guard. The
horse is the life of a revolutionary movement, a tradition from the
grand old Gaucho days; and without horses, the insurgents are powerless.
The Blancos have been out of power in Uruguay since 1864, but they hold
well together and compose an opposition which acts by constitutional
methods in the legislature (when any of its partisans can find an
entrance) and by military methods outside the constitution, in the open
country, whenever peaceful methods are deemed useless. The parties have
become largely hereditary; a child is born a little Blanco or a little
Colorado, and rarely deserts his colour. Feeling runs so high that in
Blanco districts it is dangerous for a man to wear a red necktie, just
as in driving through certain Irish towns a harmless botanist from
Britain may, when his car approaches a particular quarter, be warned by
the driver to throw away or cover over the ferns which he has gathered
in a mountain glen, because the sight of the obnoxious colour will
expose him to be stoned by those who regard its display as an affront.
These revolutions, however, have in the course of years been tending
to become rather less frequent, and certainly less sanguinary, just as
in parts of South America there are volcanoes once terrible by their
tremendous eruptions which now content themselves with throwing out
a few showers of ashes or discharging a stream of lava from a little
crater near the base. This rising ended with a surrender, accompanied
by an amnesty which included the absence of any decree of confiscation
of property, so no blood was shed except in the field.
When I asked what were the grievances alleged to justify the revolt
of November, 1910, the answer was that an election of the legislature
was impending, that the new legislature would, when elected, proceed
forthwith to the choice of a President of the republic for the next
four years, that the Blancos fully expected that the elections would be
so handled by the government in power as to secure a majority certain
to choose a particular candidate whom the Blancos feared and disliked,
and that therefore the only course open to the latter was to avert
by an appeal to arms the wrong which would be done to the nation by
tampering with the rights of the electors. How much truth there may
have been in these allegations the passing traveller could not know,
nor was it for him to judge whether, if true, they would warrant an
appeal to force.
The conditions in some Latin-American republics are peculiar, and can
be paralleled only in one or two other parts of the modern world. In
the years between 1848 and 1859 when despotic governments held sway in
most parts of Europe, the ingenuous youth of Britain used to assume, as
Thomas Jefferson had done fifty years before, that every insurrection
was presumably justifiable and entitled to the sympathy of all lovers
of freedom. Of recent years, since constitutional governments have
been established in nearly all countries, the presumption is deemed to
be the other way, and revolts are _prima facie_ disapproved. In some
American republics, however,--and here I am speaking not of Uruguay,
but of more backward communities,--there is no presumption at all
either way. A government in Nicaragua or Honduras, for instance, has
usually obtained power either by force of arms or by a mock election
carried through under military pressure. To eject it by similar means
is, therefore, in the eye of a constitutional lawyer, not a breach of
law and order, because the government which it is sought to eject has
no legal title, being itself the child of wrongdoing. On the other hand
the insurgents are probably no better friends of law and order than is
the government. If they succeed by arms, they will not hold an honest
election, but will rule by force, just as did their predecessors.
There is, accordingly, no ground for the award of sympathy or moral
approval to either faction, while for foreign powers the problem of
when to recognize a government that has come in by the sword, and will
presently, like the Priest of the Grove at Nemi, perish by the sword,
is no easy one, and must usually be solved by waiting till such a
government has made itself so clearly master of the situation as to
possess a _de facto_ title likely to hold good for some time to come,
and perhaps ultimately pass into a title _de iure_.[88]
Reverting to Uruguay, the most curious and historically instructive
feature of her case is that these recurrent civil wars and attempts
at revolution do not seem to have retarded her prosperity. She saw
more incessant fighting from 1810 till 1876 than any other part of the
world has seen for the last hundred years. Even since then risings and
conflicts have been frequent, and though there has been no foreign
war since 1870, when that with Paraguay ended, the presence on either
side of two great powers, not always friendly to her or to each other,
has often caused anxiety. Nevertheless, the country has continued to
grow in wealth and population. Capital has flowed in freely to build
railways, and the good opinion which European investors entertain is
shewn by the fact that the Uruguayan five per cent bonds average just
about par in the London stock market. Foreign trade has increased
fivefold since 1862. Without forsaking their love of fighting, the
people have turned to work, and the land or cattle owner depends less
on foreign labour than he does in Argentina. Thus it would seem that
as there have been countries ruined by war--as Central Asia Minor was
by the long strife between the Seljukian Turks and the East Roman
Emperors, and as Germany suffered from the Thirty Years' War injuries
it cost her nearly two centuries to repair, so there are countries
which have thriven in the midst of war. In the sixth and fifth
centuries B.C. the Greek cities of Sicily were seldom at peace. They
fought with the Carthaginians, they fought with one another, they
fought for or against a Tyrant within their own walls; and all this
fighting was done by citizen soldiers. Yet they throve and erected
those majestic temples whose ruins we admire at Girgenti and Selinunte,
while the iron peace of Rome in those later days, when the island had
been made a province, brought to the country folk misery interrupted
only by servile insurrections.
The occasional recurrence of such incidents as that of November, 1910,
had not for some years prior to my visit prevented the government of
Uruguay from emulating that of Argentina in efforts to keep abreast of
Europe in all sorts of administrative schemes for the advancement of
education, and for the development of the country. In two respects it
has entered on a policy different from that of other South American
states. It is the only one in which schemes or ideas tending towards
state socialism have been countenanced by the Executive, and it is
also the only one in which there is a distinctly antireligious party.
In Peru the church has still some political influence. In Chile she
has less, in Argentina practically none, but in neither is she the
object of hostility. Here, however, a section of the dominant party
is professedly antagonistic to the church, and this would seem to be
due not to any provocation given recently by the clergy, whose Blanco
friends have been long out of power, but rather to a spirit which seeks
to strike at and eliminate religion itself.
Such a movement does not seem, any more than do socialistic ideas, to
be a natural growth of the Uruguayan soil. Just as the anarchistic
propaganda in Argentina has been recently brought thither from Europe
by immigrants, so this less fierce expression of the revolutionary
spirit bears marks of having been transplanted from those parts of
southern Europe where the more violent advocates of change regard not
only the Roman Church, but religion itself, as hostile to progress and
to the reconstruction of society on a new basis. The rural population
of Uruguay are not the sort of people among whom such ideas would
spontaneously arise, for they belong, so far as their beliefs and views
of life are concerned, rather to the eighteenth than to the twentieth
century. Elsewhere in South America, enmity to the church has been due
to the power she has exercised in the secular world, or to the memory
of her old habits of repression. One does not hear, however, that she
has for a long time past been politically obnoxious here; nor can there
have been any memories of serious persecution to provoke hatred, for
the era of persecution was passing away when these regions began to be
thickly settled.
With her temperate climate and her fertile soil, Uruguay is an
attractive country. In no part of South America, except perhaps
southern Chile, would a European feel more disposed to settle down
for life. The people are of pure European stock and have many of
the qualities--frankness and energy, courage, and a high sense of
honour--which make for political progress. The country is no doubt
comparatively small, and it is the fashion nowadays to worship bigness
and disparage small nations. Yet the independent city communities, or
the small nations--such as were England and Holland in the seventeenth
century--have produced not only most of the best literature and art,
but most of the great men and great achievements which history records.
National life is apt to be more intense and more interesting where
it is concentrated in an area not so wide as to forbid the people to
know one another and their leaders. Thus one cannot but hope that
the Uruguayans, with some favouring conditions, and without the
disadvantage of excessive wealth suddenly acquired, will seriously
endeavour to smooth the road, now rough and dangerous, over which the
chariot of their republican government has to travel. It is not the
Constitution that is at fault, but the way in which the Constitution
is worked. The backward state of education and consequent incompetence
of the ordinary citizen is usually assigned as the source of political
troubles. There is certainly an inadequate provision both here and
generally in South America of elementary and secondary schools. But the
experience of many countries has shewn that the education of the masses
is not enough to secure a reform in political methods. There is surely
force in the view I heard expressed, that if the whole population, or
even the whole of the educated class in the population, were to exert
themselves to take more active part in politics, they could set things
right by checking the abuses or grievances out of which revolutions
grow and by moderating the party spirit which rushes to arms when
grievances remain unredressed.