THE RISE OF NEW NATIONS
In A.D. 1808, when Napoleon Bonaparte, the true Liberator of Spanish
America, moved his armies into Spain, the dominions of the Spanish
Crown stretched south eight thousand miles from the bay of San
Francisco to the Straits of Magellan. The population that was scattered
thinly over that vast region was mostly native Indian, but there may
possibly have been a million of pure Spanish stock and many times that
number of mixed Spanish and Indian blood. All except the Indians spoke
Spanish; all except the wild heathen tribes were Roman Catholics, and
the white men were orthodox Catholics, with universal and genuine
horror of heresy. All who were of pure European or of mixed blood
followed customs and held ideas generally similar; all had been ruled
by governors sent from Spain under laws and an administrative system
drawn up and carried out on similar lines. In every region the Roman
Church was powerful and monasteries abounded. There were no sharp
local distinctions among this Spanish and Indo-Spanish population.
Intercolonial trade was indeed forbidden, and permission to travel from
one colony to another had to be obtained. But as all were subjects of
one king and members of one Church, there was no political separation
beyond that which was involved in the existence of various local
jurisdictions. A native of Mexico was not a stranger on the banks
of the Orinoco or the Paraná any more than the Bostonian Benjamin
Franklin had been a stranger when he came to settle in Philadelphia.
They could hardly be said to form one nation, for they had no national
organization, but they all alike belonged to the same Hispano-American
nationality.
In A.D. 1908 there were in the same area, but now between the
Rio Grande Del Norte and Cape Horn (the territories now known as
California, Arizona, and New Mexico having by this time become annexed
to the United States) sixteen independent republics,[101] all of which
had freed themselves from the Spanish Crown between 1810, when the
first risings took place in Mexico and Argentina, and 1826, when the
flag of Spain was finally lowered on the fortress of Callao, the last
stronghold on the American mainland of the successor of Charles the
Fifth. That which had been one widely scattered and loosely connected
people had become divided into many distinct communities, each with its
own government, its separate historical traditions, its local prides
and local antagonisms, its more or less definite and sharp-cut national
consciousness. From the amorphous mass of protoplasm, so to speak, of
1808, each part of which was generally similar to every other part,
there had emerged sixteen separate organisms, some markedly different
and no two alike, although those distinctive features which make up
national character had become much more fully developed in some than in
others. That is to say, there are now instead of one people sixteen new
nations.
But can we describe these sixteen republics as Nations?
What is a Nation?
It is dangerous to offer a definition which may not correspond to
usage, for usage is the only true master and interpreter of words;
and usage is in this case loose and varying. But it might be not far
wide of the mark to say that while a nationality is a population held
together by certain ties, as, for example, language and literature,
ideas, customs, and traditions, in such wise as to feel itself a
coherent unity, distinct from other populations similarly held together
by like ties of their own, a Nation is a nationality, or a subdivision
of a nationality, which has organized itself into a political body,
either independent or desiring to be independent. This description
would encounter some doubtful cases. The Athenians in antiquity and the
Florentines in the Middle Ages were hardly nations, though they were
independent states, for they were parts of a wider Greek and Italian
people. The Swiss, Alemannian Germans to begin with, grew slowly into
a nation, and were scarcely so to be described before A.D. 1648. Now,
though they speak three languages and spring from at least three
nationalities, they are as united a nation as there is in the world.
The Magyars did not cease to be a nation because their constitutional
freedom and rights of self-government were overthrown in 1849 and not
regained till nearly twenty years later. Were the thirteen American
colonies before 1776 a nation, or did they become so in that year,
or not till the union of all of them was finally assured in 1791?
Tuscany, though independent under its local rulers till 1859, was not
a nation, and still less were the States of the Church. But is Bavaria
to-day to be deemed a nation? Ireland and Scotland figure as nations
in after-dinner speeches on the days of their respective saints: are
they so at other times also? and if they are, is Wales a nation? Were
the Transvaal and the Orange Free State nations before the South
African war of 1899? They were certainly parts of a Dutch South African
nationality. If Canada and Australia are nations, is the Union of South
Africa one also? or does the whole British people all over the world
constitute a nation?
Without multiplying doubtful cases, however, the description presented
above, and any description which tries to represent current usage,
would recognize the fact, that wherever a community has both political
independence and a distinctive character recognizable in its members,
as well as in the whole body, we call it a nation. Applying such a
test to the Spanish-American republics, some of them, such as Mexico,
Argentina, and Chile, are undeniably nations, while even some at
least of the smaller, such as Cuba, Ecuador, and Paraguay, have
attained sufficient individuality and consciousness of corporate
unity to make them feel and act together and desire to preserve
their independence.[102] If they maintain that consciousness and
that independence for another fifty years, their nationhood will be
indisputable. The bud is opening, even if the form and colours of the
petals are not yet fully visible.
By what process, then, and through the working of what forces did
this more or less uniform common substance, this raw material for the
making of states, which a century ago was spread over the vast Spanish
colonial empire, become differentiated into the sixteen nations that
exist to-day?
There is nothing in history more interesting than the study of the
process by which nations are evolved from races or tribes. The widest
range of phenomena are those supplied by the formation of the kingdoms
of modern Europe through the admixture or contact of the peoples
comprised in the Roman Empire with the barbarian tribes which entered
it or received civilization from it. The growth of France, Germany,
Spain, Portugal, England, Scotland, and (by contact with little
mixture) of Poland, Russia, and the Scandinavian states, and in more
recent times the creation of Greece and Belgium and Rumania and the
re-creation as nations of Servia and Bulgaria, are all instances of
the process. But in the case of the greater and older nations this
process occupied many centuries, and its earlier stages are obscure.
Here in Spanish America it has been going on under the eyes of the
civilized world in an age when everything is or can be known, and
it has taken only a hundred years. In all probability, nothing like
this, no creation of new national entities coming about over so large
an area in so short a time, can ever occur again. The causes which
have produced these divergences from one type into many, turning the
colonial Spaniard, who was in essentials much the same kind of man
wherever he lived, into a Mexican or Uruguayan, a Peruvian, Chilean, or
Argentine (to take a few of the more marked new national forms), are as
interesting a subject for enquiry and reflection as could engage the
thoughts of a philosophic historian.
All I can do here is to suggest some of these causes which occur to
the mind of one who travels in Spanish America. To work the subject
out in detail would need years of reading as well as many a journey.
Hitherto few of those who have read have travelled, and few of those
who have travelled have read. I have done so much less of either than
the magnitude of the subject demands, that I must ask indulgence for
even throwing out suggestions which are meant to urge others, better
equipped than myself, to prosecute the enquiry.
The primary factor which determined the territorial limits of each
republic is to be found in the existence in colonial days of certain
administrative divisions. The Viceroyalties and Captaincies General
constituted so many governmental areas, the inhabitants of each of
which felt a sort of community among themselves, although they had no
share in the government. In a few of these areas there existed what
might be called the rudiments of a distinctive character belonging
to the inhabitants of that area and marking them off from those who
dwell in other divisions. In the larger number of areas there was not
yet anything of the sort. When the insurrections broke out and as
the War of Independence proceeded, the dwellers in each Viceroyalty
or Captaincy General fought for themselves (with more or less help
from insurgent bands elsewhere), and when they set up a revolutionary
government, they tried to make the old provincial capital the seat of
that government, so that in this way the boundaries of the old areas
tended to remain, and that which had been an administrative division
passed into a Republic. Yet it was still only a body of inhabitants in
an area, not a nation. What we have to ask is--How did these groups of
inhabitants occupying each its own territory, in only some few of whom
did there exist the rudiments of a distinctive national character--how
did they grow into Nations in the proper sense of the word?
The aim of this chapter will accordingly be:--
I. To indicate the main influences which have differentiated the
inhabitants of Spanish America into distinct Nations. These
influences are partly physical, partly racial, partly
historical.
II. To enquire how far the process of differentiation has gone in
making the people of any, and which, of the republics into true
Nations, _i.e._ in giving them both distinctive traits of
character and a strong national self-consciousness.
III. To ascertain to what extent there remains among the peoples of
these republics any common Hispano-American sentiment, any
sense of kinship linking them together in spite of political
separation, possibly even underlying political hostility.
I. Among the causes or influences which have tended to differentiation,
the first place may be assigned to geographical position. Where one
part of a nationality is cut off from the other parts by the sea, or by
deserts, or by dense forests, any peculiarities that already belonged
to it tend to develop further and become intensified, because they are
not affected by contact from without; and such a part, moreover, being
isolated, attains a stronger consciousness of itself as a separate
social and political entity. Two island republics, Cuba and Santo
Domingo, were thus destined by nature to stand apart from those of
the mainland as soon as their connection with the European sovereign
had been broken. The people of Chile, severed from Peru by a wide and
waterless desert, drew farther and farther apart from those of that
country. The Chileans and the Argentines are divided from one another
by a lofty mountain range, passable at a few points only, and at
those points with difficulty, so the differences between them, which
more frequent intercourse might have lessened, grew more pronounced.
Paraguay stands almost alone in her forests, and till steamships began
to ply on the great Paraná, could be reached from the coast only by a
tedious upstream voyage or an even more toilsome land journey.
Not less important is the influence of physical environment in
modifying both the race itself and the economic conditions of its life.
In Mexico, for instance, the existence of a compact area of fertile
soil around the lakes on whose shores the semi-civilization of the men
of Tezcuco and Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) arose, created in that area
a comparatively large population of pure Spanish blood and a still
larger one of mixed blood which ultimately became the core of the
Mexican republic and enabled it not only to hold together the outlying
territories, but, also, when it got a strong ruler, to set up a strong
centralized administration. Peru is cut up by the lofty and barren
Andean ranges into a number of valleys, each more or less isolated.
Some of its cities, like Arequipa, stand in solitary oases surrounded
by deserts, while the eastern towns are severed from the capital by so
many ridges and gorges that the formation of an active and homogeneous
public opinion has been retarded. Chile, on the other hand, had till
recently nearly all her inhabitants gathered in a comparatively
small cultivable area, favourable to the growth of a united people,
and similar conditions have accelerated the material progress and
intensified the patriotism of Uruguay. In the vast territories of
Colombia and Venezuela where, besides three or four cities lying far
apart, there are only small settlements scattered through a region of
mountain and forest, political cohesion and the sense of national life
must needs advance far more slowly than in a level and cultivated land
like Argentina, covered with a network of railways.
Climate has told for much in compelling the inhabitants of the colder
regions to work hard and enabling those of the hotter to take life
easily. The tropical states have on the whole lagged behind the
temperate ones, and there is between them a perceptible difference
in character and habits. In Bolivia the combined effect of the low
temperature, thin air, extreme dryness, and poor food has not only made
a large part of the plateau a sterile desert, but has also checked
the advance of the aboriginal race, and has confined the population
of Spanish origin to a small number of towns lying so far away from
one another that common political action becomes difficult and social
antagonisms remain acute.
While these physical differences have told upon all the divisions of
Spanish America, they have been in some all the more efficient because
they have been followed by economic consequences, and have induced
certain forms of industrial life. Cattle and the horse have determined
the habits of the Argentine and Uruguayan. Mining has had more to do
with the Peruvian and the Mexican. No one of the nations has taken to a
sea-faring life except the Chileans.
Whoever will compare Spanish America with Anglo-America (_i.e._ the
United States and Canada) will be struck by the far greater differences
of physical environment between the various parts of the former and
those of the latter, where no section of the country, except Florida,
Louisiana, and Texas is oppressively hot, even in summer, and where no
section, till one reaches Labrador, suffers from severities of cold
and wet such as check settlement in the far south of Chile and of
Argentina. Nature does less to differentiate Anglo-American man into
varieties than she does in the case of Spanish-American man.
Even more important than the influence of natural conditions has
been the presence in Spanish America of the aboriginal tribes. These
differed greatly in intelligence, courage, and a disposition to
industry. In some regions they were both numerous and warlike, as in
Mexico and Chile. In others they were numerous but easily conquered,
as in the Peruvian highlands and Central America and Paraguay. In
some they were too few to hold their ground, as in central Argentina
and Uruguay, or so feeble as neither to offer serious resistance
nor furnish servile labour. This was the case in Cuba and on some
of the coasts of the Caribbean Sea. The differences in intellectual
capacity were expressed in the degree of progress they had made
towards civilization; the Mexicans and the subjects of the Peruvian
Incas standing at the top, and the Amazonian savages in the east of
Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru at the bottom of the scale. As another
chapter treats of their present relations to the European part of the
population, it is enough to call attention here to the effect of the
infusion of native blood in differentiating various parts of the old
colonial population from one another. The volume of that infusion has
been greater in some regions than in others, and the native blood has
been unequal in quality. A half-Indian people tends to differ--whether
for worse or for better is another question--from a white people;
and a people mixed with Indians of a strong race, like the native
Mexican, differs from one which has received a blend of weaker native
blood. In persons of mixed race, the white element predominates, but
less evidently in physical appearance than in mental attributes. The
mestizos are all Christians and more generally educated; they draw
their ideas and habits from their European rather than their native
parentage, which, indeed, they prefer to ignore.
Besides this influence, which we may call physiological, we must
further note, as a factor producing diversity, the social effect which
the presence of a native semiservile class has upon the character of
the ruling element in the population. Where such a class supplies
labour, the ruling element generally despises and refuses manual
work. Where the former is both numerous and ignorant, it usually
lowers the moral and probably also the intellectual standard of the
European inhabitants. In some republics the presence of this class has
encouraged civil wars and revolutions by furnishing Indian soldiers who
can be forced to fight and will fight well for causes in which they
take no interest. It has moreover made the provisions of constitutions
which confer universal suffrage seem hollow shams.
In some few Spanish-speaking countries, particularly along the
Caribbean coasts and in some of the maritime towns of Colombia and
Peru, the negro, imported after the Conquest, has become a race factor,
mingling with the whites to produce an intermediate breed which is
usually superior to the pure black, and mingling with the Indian to
produce one which is deemed to have the faults of both parents and the
merits of neither. But it was only the colony from Portugal which was
formerly the Empire and is now the republic of Brazil that received
slaves on a great scale. There are believed to be now at least eight
millions of blacks and mulattoes in that country, probably two-fifths
of the whole population. Such Indian blood as was mingled with the
Portuguese settlers has become scarcely noticeable, except in Pará and
along the banks of the Amazon. Brazil is, however, so different from
the Spanish republics in other respects that one need not insist on
this element of diversity.
From these physical and racial influences I pass on to those of a
historical order. Chief among these were the long-protracted struggle
for independence and the interminable civil wars that followed its
attainment. Under the Crown of Spain the collective life both of the
inhabitants of its dominions as a whole and of each section of those
inhabitants had been stagnant. Independence quickened its pulses and
accelerated the development of such latent forces as existed into
new forms. The political events of the revolutionary epoch and of
the ninety years that followed have done much not only to create new
nations, but also to mould them, while they were growing up, into
diverse shapes. In some republics the civil wars lasted longer than
they did in others, and left the country more exhausted and distracted;
in others again foreign intervention had the effect of consolidating
the people and creating a stronger patriotism than had existed before.
This was conspicuously the case in Mexico. The French invasion and
the long struggle which ended in the dethronement and death of the
unfortunate Maximilian of Hapsburg determined the fortunes of that
country, extinguishing the power of the Church, and renewing the
nation's confidence in itself which had been shattered by the war with
the United States. So, too, the heroic efforts made by the Uruguayans
under Artigas to shake off the yoke of Brazil and their subsequent
conflict with Argentina, then ruled by the tyrant Rosas, left a
permanent impress upon their character. In most of the Central American
states, on the other hand, progress in education, in civil order,
and in the turning to account of natural resources has been arrested
by their incessant strife with one another as well as by internal
convulsions.
The general result of the wars and revolutions which make up so much
of Spanish-American history has undoubtedly been to differentiate the
peoples and build up separate nations and strengthen the national
consciousness of the inhabitants of almost every republic. Whether that
strengthening has been a good thing or not, I do not attempt here to
enquire. But apart from it, the other consequences of so long a period
of struggle and bloodshed have been deplorable.
Effort and suffering do no doubt test and try a community. War, be it
civil or foreign, never leaves men the same as it found them, though
the common assumption that it makes them either stronger, or wiser in
the exercise of their strength, is as false as it is dangerous. If war,
apart from the pure aim and high spirit in and for which it conceivably
may be, but seldom has been, undertaken, ennobles the soul as well
as toughens the fibre of a nation, what virtues ought it not to have
bred in these South American countries, where the lance was always
glittering and the gun-shot always echoing?
Of the other formative and stimulative influences which the deliverance
from Spanish rule might have set to work upon the peoples of the
republics, of the development of science, art, and letters, and in
particular of that part of intellectual life which goes deepest down
into the soul of a people, theology and religious faith, of these
things as influences in building up a national individuality, there
is little to be said, because disturbed political conditions and the
backward state of education checked all such development. Until the
last thirty years it has had no fair chance, and in some republics has
little even now. One may observe, however, that in such progress as
can be recorded the Church has had scarcely any share. Both her claims
to authority and her property have been at one time or another (though
much less in recent years) a cause of political conflicts in most
republics. But the unfavourable conditions referred to have told upon
the Church itself, not to add that her ministers were under Spanish
rule and have continued to be both less well instructed and (of course
with many exceptions) less exemplary in life than the Roman Catholic
priesthood of France or Germany or of the United States.
The recent economic development of some few of these countries, and
especially the extension of their agriculture and their mining, have
naturally tended to give a practical turn to thought and action,
fixing men's minds on business, on the public improvements which
wealth makes possible, and on the enjoyments to which it invites.
If even old and highly cultivated nations, like the Germans and the
Italians, are felt by themselves and seen by their neighbours to
have been somewhat altered in spirit and aim under new conditions of
industrial and commercial life, how much more must similar conditions
tell upon communities intellectually younger and, so to speak,
more fluid, less "set" in a definite mould. These causes have been
increasing the differences between the more progressive and the more
backward republics. They have been setting their stamp upon Argentina
and Chile. A similar change, though it affected only a small class,
was discernible in Mexico during the later years of the supremacy of
Porfirio Diaz.
Immigration from Europe has not yet gone far enough to affect the
"type" of any South American people, or bear a part in the process of
national differentiation. It may, however, do so in the future, for
in countries where prosperity has created a large demand for labour,
and where public order is little disturbed, there begins to be an
inflow of settlers from abroad. In Mexico and Cuba immigration is
steady though not large, and is drawn almost entirely from Spain. In
Peru it is small, for the Chinese and Japanese who come are too few
to affect the character of the population. Some Germans entered Chile
thirty years ago, and constitute a valuable though comparatively small
element. A far greater number have settled in southern Brazil. Uruguay
receives a considerable but at present (1912) declining immigration
both from Italy and from Spain. To Argentina there come not only many
Spaniards, but a still fuller stream of Italians, who now form so
large an element that the Argentine of the future will be probably
one-third Italian in blood.[103] Into the other Spanish-speaking parts
of the New World there is at present very little immigration, nor are
the tropical regions fitted for agricultural settlers from Europe.
Chinese or Japanese or Indian coolies might do better, and there are
already plenty of Hindus in British Guiana. Should valuable minerals
be discovered in places where, as in Colombia, Venezuela, and northern
Brazil, labour is scarce, the temptation to introduce Asiatics would be
strong.
II. We have now to enquire what have been the results of the process of
nation-building. How many, and which, of the republics that were once
parts of the great Spanish dominion have now grown to be true nations?
But here a preliminary difficulty meets us. In speaking of the peoples
of these republics, are we to think of all their inhabitants, or only
of the ruling Hispano-American element, excluding the aborigines? Are
the aborigines, and such collective character as they possess, to be
taken into account when we seek to determine which communities deserve
to be called nations, or are they rather to be deemed subject tribes
standing outside and not sharing in genuine national life?
Without anticipating what will be said in a later chapter, it is
enough to remark here that from the United States frontier at El Paso
in latitude 32° north, down to the Tropic of Capricorn (latitude
23° south) a very large, though unascertained and at present
unascertainable part of the population--possibly a majority--consists
of Indians, most of whom speak their native languages, and some of whom
are mere savages. Even those who, like the Quichuas and Aymarás of the
Andean plateau, are in a fashion civilized, lead a life apart, and,
though in most republics legally citizens, have practically nothing
to do with the government of the countries they inhabit, except as
combatants in its foreign or civil wars. In Argentina the question
scarcely arises, because nearly all the population is of European
stock, while in Chile the Araucanians are practically the only pure
Indians left. We must, therefore, restrict our view to the two other
elements, the European and the mixed, these forming, for nearly all
practical purposes, one body. It is of them, not of the Indians, that
we have to think when we ask how far the inhabitants of each republic
have advanced into true nationhood.
For the purpose of determining whether any community ought to be
deemed a nation, one must distinguish two things which are apt to
be confounded. The one thing is the presence in the community of a
distinctive national character, the other is the presence of strong
national sentiment. The former consists in the possession by the
members of the community of certain attributes and certain qualities,
visible in its collective action, which are peculiar to it, and mark
it off from other communities. The latter is the consciousness of
political unity, taking shape in the spirit of self-assertion against
other communities, expressing itself in the effort to make good the
community's position in the world, to push its claims and to defend its
rights. The former is in practice usually accompanied by the latter;
that is to say, a community whose members feel themselves to be a
political entity, with distinctive ideas and traditions of their own,
naturally desires to prevent itself from being overridden or swamped by
other communities. The latter, however, does not necessarily imply the
former. A community may have little that is peculiar or distinctive;
may have no racial traits of its own, no literature, no special beliefs
or customs, and a history too short to have formed traditions. Yet the
circumstances of that short history, coupled with vanity (collective
and individual) and a combative spirit, may have created a sensitive
and inflammable patriotism which makes the community feel and act as a
Nation, however little there may be to distinguish it from surrounding
peoples beyond the fact that historical accidents have divided it from
them and started it on a course of its own. In this latter set of
cases, an observer who studies the community may discover nothing that
constitutes a distinctive national character. Its citizens may seem
much the same in ideas and habits as those of the other independent
branches of the same nationality around them. Yet they may be found
to hate those neighbours of the same speech just as bitterly as races
that have been secular enemies, like Turkomans and Persians, hate one
another.
Applying these tests to the Latin-American republics, it will appear
that by both tests several of the greatest are indisputably nations.
Chile and Argentina have each of them a distinctive national quality
which so marks them off from their neighbours that even the passing
traveller can discern it. They have national character as well as
national sentiment. So, too, have Mexico and Peru.[104] The same thing
is true of Uruguay, the people of which, originally the same as that
of Argentina, have developed, in the course of a tempestuous history,
a somewhat different type. Brazil, being Portuguese, has always had
a character of its own. These six republics may all be deemed to be
nations in the European sense of the word. I have not visited Paraguay,
but should suppose that in it the numerical preponderance of the native
Guarani stock brings about a result similar to that which an infusion
of coloured blood has had in Cuba, but more marked.
In most of the other republics there seems to be much less that can be
called distinctive of each. Colombians, Venezuelans, and Ecuadorians
inhabit regions generally similar, have had a similar history, and
have all received about an equal infusion of native blood, though
in each--and especially in Colombia--there are some few old Spanish
families who have remained unaffected. The average citizen of any of
these countries is said to be but slightly distinguishable from the
average citizen of either of the other two.[105] The same is the case
as regards Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. But in each and all
of these states there is a profusion of militant nationalist spirit,
which, in Central America, has been fostered by frequent wars. Ecuador
has been repeatedly on the point of taking up arms against Colombia on
one side and Peru on the other, over disputes about territory. So far
as national sentiment can make a nation, these republics have it to
overflowing. Their common Hispano-American nationality no more checks
aggressive displays of enmity than a common Tuscan origin mitigated the
strife of Florence and Siena, or a common Bœotian origin the hatred of
Thebes and Platæa.
The republic whose individuality has been most fully developed is
Chile. Its citizens are seen at first sight to be Chileans, just as in
Europe we recognize at once a member of any of the leading peoples.
Most Spanish Americans are good fighters, but the Chileans perhaps
the best; for they are the children of the most dogged of the native
races as well as of the most stalwart of the Spanish settlers. The same
combination of patriotism and pugnacity is seen in the Uruguayans.
In character as well as in speech, the Argentines are also beginning
to shew a character different from that of the other peoples; but the
mental and moral type, as is natural in a country rapidly growing and
deluged with immigrants, is not yet fully formed.
It may be asked whether the best evidence of the emergence of a genuine
and distinctively national life ought not to be found in the growth
of a national literature expressing, in whatever form, the ardour
and the aspirations of the people. Those who quote the age of Queen
Elizabeth and the age of Lewis the Fourteenth as instances to support
the doctrine that eras of successful war and growing power herald, or
coincide with, an epoch of literary creation, may expect to find that
the incessant strife which has kept hot the blood of the citizens in
some republics, and the rapid material progress of others, promise an
era of intellectual production in South America. Of this, however,
there has been so far no sign. National spirit seems little disposed
to flow in this channel. In the southern republics there is plenty
of energy, but not much of it is directed towards art or science or
letters. The long and fierce conflict of Chile and Peru was marked
on both sides by much valour and some heroism, but no poem like the
_Araucana_ followed. In the more backward states, incessant strife
has hindered instead of stimulating intellectual as well as economic
progress. In the prosperous ones, men's minds are bent upon the
development of natural resources, and in the very richest, where there
should be most leisure for mental cultivation, upon material pleasures
and luxuries.
III. We have still one more question to ask before closing this
consideration of the process by which nations have been evolved out
of the old administrative divisions of Spanish America, divisions
originally due to the historical accidents, which had in colonial times
placed different districts under the authority of different officials.
How far does there exist among the peoples of these republics the
sense of a common Hispano-American nationality? Do they feel their
common Spanish origin, together with Spanish literature and the ideas
and social customs which they share, to be a source of common pride
and a bond of unity between them, linking them together despite
political severances and antagonisms? Spaniards had a certain amount
of common Spanish feeling before Castile and Aragon were united, and
Italians, so far from ceasing to feel themselves Italians during the
centuries before 1848, when they were cut up into many states, some
of them ruled by foreign dynasties, were stirred by a more vehement
nationalism in that year than ever before. Can one, then, for any and
for what purposes, treat Spanish America as being one whole, either
intellectually or sentimentally?
It has already been observed that to the traveller the differences
between one republic and another seem comparatively slight, not greater
than those which he would have noted in wandering leisurely through
Germany before 1866 and 1870 when first the North German Confederation
and then the new German Empire came into being. Not only is the
language the same, with dialectic variations which are comparatively
few when one considers the vast area and the large aboriginal
element in the population, but manners and social usages are similar
everywhere, though less polished in the wilder parts.
Similarity goes even deeper, for it is found in ideas and in mental
habits. A Costa Rican and an Argentine differ less than a Texan does
from a Vermonter, or a Caithness man from a Devonshire man. All remain
in a sense Spanish; that is, they are much more like Spaniards and more
like one another than they are like Frenchmen or Italians. They are
nearer to one another than North Americans are to Englishmen. They have
the broad features of Spanish character and temperament,--the love of
sonorous phrases, the sensitiveness to friendliness or affront, the
sense of personal dignity, steady courage in war, and the power of
patient endurance. And among men of education and thought the basis
of intellectual character and the sense of moral values seems to be
substantially the same.
Nevertheless, the feeling of a common Hispano-American brotherhood is
weak. In Old Spain there was before and during the sixteenth century
a localism strong enough to make Catalonians and Castilians and
Andalusians care more for their province than for Spain, unless, of
course, a question of national union against the foreigner came in.
The sentiment of racial fraternity expressed in the saying that "blood
is thicker than water" is easily suspended or even overridden and for
the time extinguished by political bitterness. The Thebans, according
to the story, fined their great poet because he had consecrated two
splendid lines to the praise of Athens. Not even the closest literary
and commercial intercourse and the pride of an ancient and glorious
stock prevented the people of New England from hating those of old
England for more than a generation after the War of 1812. Among the
Spanish Americans literature and historical traditions have not
been forces making for cohesion, for there has been, in most of the
republics, little literary production, and their traditions seldom go
back further than the revolutionary war.
Were there then no memories of Spanish greatness? These may have had
some power in colonial days while the struggle of Spain and Catholicism
against England and Holland was at its height. But in later times the
preference shewn by the viceroys to persons sent out from the mother
country, and the habit of reserving for them all offices of profit,
exasperated the _criollos_, as the native-born colonists were called.
They were further alienated by the stupidly repressive character of
colonial administration. These follies and abuses, and the cruelties
which accompanied the long War of Independence, seem to have effaced
the sense of any community based on the Spanish name. One might,
indeed, have rather found a bond in the common aversion to Spain and
in a sympathy with one another springing out of the struggle against
her power. The war was, however, in the main, waged independently by
each colony. The Argentine army of San Martin gave effective help to
Chile, and with Chilean troops practically achieved the liberation
of Peru, where the royal cause was strongest; and in that result the
Venezuelan Bolivar had also a share. Colombia and Venezuela helped
one another, and both helped Ecuador. But so far has this coöperation
been from becoming a basis for friendship, that the bitterest of all
South American antagonisms is that of Peru and Chile, and it is only
recently that the danger of a conflict between Chile and Argentina has
disappeared.
Neither has their common profession of the Roman Catholic faith
served to strengthen affection among the republics. As there was no
Protestantism in Spanish America, they were never called upon to rally
together in defence of the Church, and in some republics men united
to attack her privileges or her property. She has often brought not
peace, but a sword. The only thing that to-day would draw the republics
into line and knit them together would be any threat of aggression
from outside. They have long ceased to fear invasion, still less
subjugation, by any European power. But the enormous strength of the
United States and recollections both of the war she waged against
Mexico in 1846 and of some more recent events make them watch the
actions of that country with a sensitive suspicion which even the
correctness of her conduct in twice evacuating Cuba has not entirely
dispelled.
The observer who has realized that many of these states are not natural
political entities, but the creation of a series of accidents,
naturally wonders whether they are likely to remain as at present.
May not the two or three greatest swallow up the weaker, or may not
some of the smaller seek strength in a voluntary union, federal at
first, and perhaps ultimately leading to a unitary state? This is not
impossible. The three republics of Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador
might renew the federal tie they dissolved in 1831. Some, or all, of
the Central American republics might similarly form a confederation.
Mr. Root, when Secretary of State of the United States, tactfully
acting in conjunction with Mexico, succeeded in persuading all those
republics to set up and promise to obey a sort of Federal Court of
Justice for the determination of disputes between them, and the Court
still exists, though the promise to use it has been generally forgotten
when the time came. There are those who think that Bolivia, one of
the least homogeneous among South American countries, may possibly be
partitioned, like Poland, by her more powerful neighbours, but of this
there seems no present risk. It is chiefly in Central America that the
existing situation may be deemed to lack stability, for while Costa
Rica and Salvador are comparatively peaceful and well-governed states,
and Guatemala has latterly kept quiet, Nicaragua and Honduras have
been in a state of constant disturbance, and any ambitious president
attaining power in either might be tempted to attack his neighbours.
It is of more importance to enquire what are the prospects of a
continued and durable peace in the continent of South America. Here
three states stand out as far stronger than any of the others. Chile,
Argentina, and Brazil have all of them considerable armies, and have
now provided themselves with fleets, including powerful ironclads,
not in any direct or immediate contemplation of war, nor because any
one of them is threatened by any other naval power, but apparently in
imitation of the United States and of the largest nations of the Old
World. It seems to be thought nowadays that the dignity and status of
great nations require a big navy, just as in the sixteenth century a
nobleman of high degree was expected to travel about with and maintain
a crowd of useless retainers. Each of these three nations is as strong
as any two of the other republics. Next to them come Peru and Uruguay,
while the northern states, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela, find their
chief defensive strength in the difficult nature of their territories.
There has been no war (other than a civil war) in South America since
1883, when peace was made between Chile, Peru, and Bolivia. The tension
over disputed boundaries between Argentina and Chile ended with the
acceptance of the Delimitation Award made by the king of England in
1902. The friction between Argentina and Brazil which arose once or
twice at a later date seems to have passed away, and the friendly
relations now subsisting between these three, which one may call the
Great Powers of the Continent, are of good augury for the averting of
hostilities, more than once threatened, between Ecuador and Peru and
between Colombia and Ecuador. The influence of the United States also
has been usefully exerted towards the same end. Most of the causes
to which European wars have been due are absent from this Continent.
There are no religious differences. There are, as between states, no
race questions, no nationalities held in bondage against their will
and struggling to be free. There are no rival claims to lay hold of
unoccupied or semicivilized territories in other parts of the world.
Fish, and the element in which fish live, have often been quarrelled
over elsewhere, but in South America there are no fishing rights worth
a quarrel (except perhaps the pearl fisheries of Panama), and the only
water questions that have ever given trouble are those relating to the
respective jurisdictions of Argentina and Uruguay in the river Plate
estuary and regarding the navigation rights of Colombia and Venezuela
in the river Orinoco. Boundary disputes remain. Some of them, like
that of Chile and Argentina, that of Bolivia and Argentina, and that
of Brazil and Peru, have been recently settled, but there are still
outstanding not only the controversy between Peru and Chile regarding
Tacna and Arica,[106] but also the three-cornered quarrel of Colombia,
Ecuador, and Peru about their respective claims to the half-explored
Amazonian region in which their territories meet on the eastern side of
the Andes.
There remains an unclassifiable margin of other possible incidents
which might precipitate into war the inhabitants of the more backward
republics, men of an over-sensitive and explosive temper, a temper
which holds every question to be one of honour, and even if it has been
induced to accept a reference to arbitration, refuses to accept the
award when rendered. Thus the danger of wars in this Continent cannot
be deemed to have vanished, though it has so greatly diminished that
its extinction seems to approach. Let us, nevertheless, remember one
possible contingency. Now and then there has arisen in some republic
a man of ruthless force whose unslaked ambition, after it has made
him master of his own country, turns its arms against its neighbours.
Though there are signs that the era of revolutions and tyrannies is
passing away, such a man might again appear, rising by the favour
of the populace and ruling by military force, and he might try to
strengthen his domestic control by foreign conquest.
Of wars with European Powers there has for a long time past been no
question, and as those Powers do not try to annex South American
territories, and have no causes of quarrel except when their subjects
complain of debts unpaid and injuries inflicted, so the South Americans
have not taken a hand in the game of Old World politics. They need
not now be tempted to do so, for there is at present plenty in the
changeful relations of their own republics to engage the capacity of
the ablest statesman. As to what may happen when one or two of the
South American countries have reached the population and wealth of
France or Italy, it is vain to speculate. Those who live to see that
day will see a world wholly unlike our own.