THE TWO AMERICAS AND THE RELATION OF SOUTH AMERICA TO EUROPE
Alexander Hamilton bade his fellow citizens to think continentally; and
Herodotus, in the short introduction prefixed to his history, explains
its theme as being an account of the relations of two great continents,
Europe and Asia, and of the reasons which produced such recurring
strife between them. Let us attempt to think a little of the southern
part of the Western world as a whole, in its relations as a continent
to the other continents, and especially to that continent with which it
is connected by a narrow neck of land, the Isthmus of Panama, and which
has drawn its name from the same navigator. The series of incidents
by which the name of a Florentine adventurer was given, first, to a
continent he probably did not discover, and then to another which he
never saw, is as curious as anything in geographical history.
Everybody knows that Christopher Columbus sailed out into the west in
search of new lands, expecting them to be a part of Asia, and that to
the day of his death, after four voyages, he believed that he had found
India.[124] In the last of those voyages, when he was wearily beating
up along the coast of Darien against the currents, he fancied himself
near the Straits of Malacca. It is natural, therefore, that neither he
nor his first successors in exploration should have given a name to
the new western land south of the Caribbean Sea, even when, some while
later, they had explored enough of it to recognize it for a continent.
They named particular regions, but a general name was not needed
because it was expected that the parts seen would turn out to be parts
of Asia. Then in 1497 other voyagers who sailed forth to explore said
that they found a new land, far off in the ocean to the southwest of
the Canary Islands. Next year Columbus discovered on the south side of
the Caribbean Sea the "Tierra Firma," which we call Venezuela. Americus
Vespuccius of Florence, one of the ship's company of the 1497 voyage,
wrote letters, giving an account of this (and of a later voyage, also)
to the new land far to the southwest, in which he described it as "a
New World, a New Fourth Part of the Globe," Europe, Asia, and Africa
being the other three. The letters made a great sensation; and one of
them was made the basis of a book called _Cosmographiæ Introductio_,
published in 1507, at St. Dié in France, by a certain Waldseemüller
(Hylacomylus), a professor there, who suggested that as Americus was
the discoverer of this Fourth Part of the World, it should be called
after him.[125] The book was read far and wide; the name took. It was
not intended to be applied to the lands west and south of the Caribbean
Sea, which between 1497 and 1507 had been discovered by Columbus and
others; still less to the lands discovered by John Cabot in the far
north, but to an entirely different piece of land much to the south and
east of what Columbus had discovered. But when all the lands bordering
on that part of the Atlantic had been sufficiently explored and the
records of the voyages compared, it appeared that the lands lying in
the part of the ocean to which the descriptions of Americus referred,
were, in fact, continuous with the coasts of the Caribbean and Gulf of
Mexico. Thereupon all the land from the Rio de la Plata (discovered in
1516) northward to the Isthmus of Panama, came to be included under the
name America, just because there was no other general name for what had
been, at least till 1513, when the Pacific was discovered by crossing
the Isthmus at Darien, still believed to be part of Asia. As soon as
the Pacific had been reached, and still more when the ever famous
voyage of Magellan had shewn that Asia lay thousands of miles further
away beyond the Pacific, a general name began to be wanted. Much later,
and again, just because there was no other competing name, the term
America was extended to include everything north of the Gulf of Mexico
up to the Arctic regions, and when the need was felt for distinguishing
the two parts, the words North and South were added. Although applied
earlier to the southern than to the northern continent, the name when
used alone now denotes to most Europeans the latter.
How much simpler and better it would have been if each continent had
received a name of its own. South America might have been called after
Columbus, as the first man who saw its _terra firma_, and North America
might have received the name of Cabotia or Pinzonia or Ponceana,
whichever navigator may be best entitled to be deemed its first and
true discoverer. How much trouble would have been saved and how many
mistakes avoided! Italian peasants would not have fancied that a cousin
who had gone to Buenos Aires was the near neighbour of another who
had gone to New York. Similarities would not have been imagined where
differences exist. The South Americans would not have resented the
assumption by the people of the United States of the name to which
they claim an equal right, and the people of the United States would
not have formed the habit of believing that the Spanish and Portuguese
speaking inhabitants of the southern continent are their affectionate
relatives, because they share in the same family name.
These, however, are vain regrets. The names have long been fixed,
though for a great while the Spaniards declined to talk of North
America. The thing is one instance among many to shew how much may
flow from a name which is itself the result of a mere accident.
Now let us turn from names to things, and consider in what respect the
two Americas, and their peoples, resemble and differ from one another,
and how far they constitute, politically or otherwise, one whole world
apart, and what are the relations of the southern, or Spanish and
Portuguese, continent to the other, now mainly Teutonic, continent,
and to the countries of Europe, and whether the term "Pan Americanism"
describes a fact or merely conveys an interesting aspiration. Some
points in the history of each continent may come out more clearly, and
become more significant when the two are compared, for the history of
each illustrates that of the other.
The physical structure of the two continents shews certain
similarities. Each is traversed from north to south by a great mountain
chain, sometimes breaking into parallel ridges and sometimes widening
out into high tablelands. In each this chain is much nearer to the
western than to the eastern coast, and in each there are volcanic
outbursts at various points along the lines of elevation, these being
more continuous and on a vaster scale in the southern continent. In
each there is, moreover, an independent mountain mass on the eastern
side, the Appalachian system in North America, the Brazilian highlands
in South America. Each has, nearer to its western than to its eastern
coast, a desert, and in that desert an inland river basin with lakes,
Great Salt Lake in Utah corresponding roughly to Lakes Titicaca and
Poopo in Bolivia. Each has two gigantic rivers, though the Mississippi
and St. Lawrence are not equal in volume to the Amazon and the Paraná.
The shores of both are washed by mighty ocean currents, but while the
Gulf Stream warms the east coast of the northern, the Antarctic current
chills the west coast of the southern, continent.[126] Their climates
are so far similar that in both the east side of the continent receives
more rain than the west, but South America, having its greatest breadth
in the tropics, lies more largely within the torrid zone.
It is, however, with the settlement and subsequent history of the two
continents that the real interest of the comparison begins. There are
three remarkable points of similarity, but the points of difference are
more numerous and instructive, and, in noting them, we shall see how
potent each point of difference has been in directing the course of
events and in forming the character of the communities that have grown
up.
The points of similarity are these. Both continents were when
discovered inhabited by races entirely unlike those of Europe, who over
the greater part of this area were in the savage state, but had in a
few regions favoured by nature made some progress towards civilization.
Both were conquered by Europeans, and easily conquered, owing to the
superiority of the invaders in arms and discipline. The peoples of both
(with one important exception in the northern and three unimportant
exceptions in the southern continent) ultimately revolted against the
kingdoms whence the European part of their population had come and have
ever since managed their own affairs as republics, seven republics in
North, eleven in South America.
Having noted these general resemblances in the fortunes of the two, let
us enquire what were the differences, natural and political, which made
the lines of their subsequent development diverge.
At this point, however, it is proper to leave off talking of North
and South America, for the southern part of the former continent
belongs historically and to some extent physically also, to the latter
continent. As Alexandre Dumas said in writing of his journey to Spain,
"Africa begins at the Pyrenees,"--it is a saying which the Spaniards
have never forgiven,--so we may say, "South America begins at the Rio
Grande del Norte." Mexico and the states of Central America down to the
Isthmus of Panama were parts of the Spanish colonial Empire, conquered,
settled, and administered in much the same way as the still larger
part of that Empire which lay farther south. We must, therefore, group
the regions that once belonged to that Empire under the general name
of Spanish, or, when it is desired to include Brazil (a Portuguese
country), "Latin" America, referring to the other parts of the northern
continent as "Teutonic America."[127]
The aboriginal tribes with which the English and French came in contact
when they settled the Atlantic coasts of North America were scattered
over a vast wooded region, lived mainly by the chase, and had formed no
habits of regular industry. They were mostly fierce fighters, proud and
dogged, unwilling to bear any control, and it was found impracticable
to make slaves of them, or use them for any kind of regular labour.
They were unfitted for it, and it would have cost the settlers more
effort to compel the Indians to cut down trees and till the ground than
to do the same things themselves. There was, accordingly, never any
question of Indian slavery or serfdom, either on the Atlantic coasts or
when the march of colonization advanced further inland, nor was there
more than a scanty intermarriage between the settlers and the natives.
Other reasons besides those connected with labour prevented any
admixture in these regions of the white with the native races. There
was little social intercourse, because the Indians, even the majority
of the less warlike tribes of Virginia and the regions south of
Virginia, were driven out, or retired, or died out. Their barbarous
way of life drew a sharp line between them and the white intruders.
The latter, moreover, brought their women with them, and had less
temptation to seek wives among the Indians. Thus it was only among the
French voyageurs and trappers of the region round and beyond the Great
Lakes that any mixed race grew up, half white, half Indian, and this
race has now almost disappeared.
In Spanish America, the case was quite different. Both in Mexico, in
parts of Central America, and in Peru there was a large sedentary
population of aborigines, cultivating the soil and trained to industry
during many generations. The Conquerors immediately turned them into
serfs, parcelling them out among the persons who received land grants,
and who thereafter lived on the produce of this semiservile labour.
The result was that whereas in Teutonic America there grew up, slowly
at first, a white agricultural population and ultimately a white
manufacturing population also, in Spanish America agriculture was
left almost entirely to the aborigines, and the pure white population
increased hardly at all, because few new settlers came. There appeared,
however, and that within two or three generations, a considerable
mestizo or half-breed population, which has come, after three
centuries, to constitute most of the upper class and practically the
whole of the middle class in all but two of the republics.
This was the beginning of the divergent careers of the two sets of
European colonists, Spaniards and Englishmen, a divergence which
ultimately gave to the social system of each set its own peculiar
structure. Two other circumstances helped to deepen the divergence.
One was the hot climate of most parts of Spanish America, which made
field labour, or, indeed, any kind of manual labour, more distasteful
to men of European stock than such labour was in the northern parts of
Teutonic America. The same cause, it need hardly be said, had much to
do with the importation of negroes on a vast scale into the southern
parts of the British North American colonies. Such an expedient was
less needed in Mexico and Peru, because they possessed (as already
remarked) a native population that could be reduced to serfdom. In
Spanish America, accordingly, all forms of labour connected with
land were left by the European settlers to the natives, and no white
peasantry grew up.
The other circumstance was that whereas in Teutonic America few or no
mines were discovered or worked for a long time after the country had
begun to be occupied, the Spaniards, having hit upon regions rich, some
of them in gold, many of them in silver, began greedily to exploit this
natural wealth and forced the natives to toil for them in this (to the
native particularly odious) kind of work. The destruction of human
life was terrible, but in those days life was little regarded. So was
the slave-trade terrible in the deaths it caused and the suffering it
inflicted, but the conscience of England was not stirred against it
till the end of the eighteenth century. The development of mining in
Spanish America, immense for the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth
centuries, when comparatively little was going on elsewhere, had many
effects for Spain and for the world. For Mexico and Peru the most
direct effect was to enrich a good many persons without any industrial
efforts put forth by themselves,[128] and to lead the settlers as
a whole to rely less upon agriculture than men did in the English
colonies. A luxurious style of living established itself in the city
of Mexico and in Lima, most unlike the frugal simplicity of Boston or
Providence, or even of Philadelphia or New York, in the eighteenth
century.
It has often been observed that whereas the men who went to the
northern English colonies were mostly small farmers or townsfolk of
the trading or artisan classes, the Spanish emigrants were mainly
adventurers, making gold and silver their first object, the acquisition
of plantations or mines to be worked by natives the second. This
stamped on Spanish colonial society what can hardly be called an
aristocratic character, for many of the emigrant-adventurers, like
the Pizarro brothers, sprang from a humble social stratum, but yet a
character which lacked both the sentiment of equality and a respect for
industry.
Not less marked than these social differences were those which belonged
to the sphere of government and administration. The English colonies
were for the most part left to govern themselves. Each had not only its
colonial assembly, but also local assemblies for towns and counties,
along with the English arrangements for securing justice in civil and
criminal matters by juries. Even the governors sent out from England,
where such there were, interfered but little with the power of the
colonists to regulate their own affairs. The Crown did occasionally
assert its prerogative, but these instances and the resistance which
arbitrary intervention evoked bear witness to the general adherence
to the principles of local self-government. In the Spanish colonies,
on the other hand, all power remained in the Crown, and was exercised
either directly from Spain by ordinances made or orders issued there,
or else through the viceroy or captain-general of each colony.
Lucrative posts were reserved for persons of Spanish birth, who
obtained them by court favour at home, or perhaps from a viceroy,
who had brought them out in his suite. In the field of religion the
contrast was even greater. Ecclesiastical power had in Spanish America
been almost equal to civil. Although the Crown of Spain yielded less
authority to the Pope in its transatlantic than it did in its European
dominions, the church as a whole, archbishops and bishops, the Orders
and the Holy Office, were, in America, an immense and omnipresent
force, with whom even viceroys had to reckon, for their influence was
great in the Court at home as well as over the minds and conduct of
the colonists. Society was saturated with clericalism, and a taint of
heterodoxy was more dangerous than one of disloyalty.
Putting all these things together, it can be seen how little in common
Teutonic America and Spanish America had when the colonial period ended
for each of them by its severance from the mother country. They were,
in fact, unlike in everything, except their position in the Western
Hemisphere. Few, and far from friendly, had been their relations.
There had been very little commercial intercourse but a great deal of
fighting. English and American buccaneers and pirates--the two classes
were practically the same--had been wont to prey upon Spanish colonial
commerce and pillage Spanish colonial cities. There probably remained
more aversion between the two races in America than in Europe, for in
their hostility to France during the eighteenth century the people
of Britain had almost forgotten their hostility to Spain. To the New
Englander or Virginian the colonial Spaniard had been a Papist and a
persecutor, to the colonial Spaniard his neighbours on the north were
pirates and heretics.
What change was made by the two wars against the two mother countries
and the independence which followed? It might have seemed likely that
now, when both parts of the New World were disconnected from the Old
and both had republican forms of government, they might begin to draw
together. Independence, though it came nearly forty years later to
Spanish America, made more difference there than it had done to the
English colonies. Those who had been kept in leading strings by Spain
were now left to their own devices. Ill-built and ill-steered had been
the vessel that carried their fortunes, but now they began to drift and
be tossed about with neither compass nor pilot. An era of civil wars
and military revolutions set in, which lasted in Mexico nearly half a
century, in Peru and Argentina still longer, and which seems to have
become chronic in some of the more backward states. While Teutonic
America was making enormous strides in population and prosperity,
intestine strife checked all progress, educational and material, in the
Spanish lands during two generations. It is to the last thirty years
of the nineteenth century that the development of Mexico, Argentina,
Chile, and Uruguay belongs. After the Latin-American countries had
become independent, there was no more commercial intercourse between
them and the United States than there had been in colonial days and
no more community of feeling. Warm sympathy had been expressed by the
latter with the colonies in their struggle against Spain, and the
declaration made by John Quincy Adams in concert with the English
George Canning against any interference by the Holy Alliance to support
the cause of monarchy in the New World, was gratefully welcomed
by the insurgents. But no friendship between English-speaking and
Spanish-speaking men grew up, and the war of the United States against
Mexico in 1846, undertaken not so much because there were grievances
against Mexico as from a desire to extend the area of slavery in the
United States, and strengthen the Slave Power itself, exposed United
States policy to suspicions that sank deep into the Spanish-American
mind.
From this consideration of the past relations of the two American
continents, let us return to the divergence of their fortunes. At the
time of the Discovery, the regions which passed under the rule of Spain
were richer, more advanced in the arts of life, and far more populous
than those whose settlement began with the expeditions of Champlain
and Raleigh. We have no data for guessing at the population of the New
World either in 1500 or in 1600, but at both dates there evidently
were in Mexico and Central America far more inhabitants than in all
the rest of the Northern Continent taken together. As regards South
America, the empire of the Incas alone probably contained from nine to
eleven millions[129] of persons, a number many times greater than that
of all the aborigines that at any one time dwelt between the Arctic
circle and the Gulf of Mexico. Even in 1800 the population of Mexico
alone, without counting South America, was far larger than that of the
United States and Canada. But from 1810, when the revolt of the Spanish
colonies began, down till 1860, the growth of those colonies was slow,
and in some there was even retrogression. Meanwhile the United States,
and latterly, Canada also, have been advancing with unexampled speed,
so that now their population, about 108 millions, far exceeds that of
all the Spanish republics in both continents. The hotter countries were
at one time more populous than the temperate; now the reverse holds.
If we regard wealth, there is, of course, no comparison at all between
Teutonic America, as it stands to-day, and the southern regions. Yet
Spain was long supposed to have got by far the best parts of the New
World, not so much because they had tropical productiveness, as in
respect of the quantity of the precious metals they contained. The
economic change from the sixteenth century to the twentieth which the
progress of natural science and mechanical invention has brought about
can hardly be better illustrated than by the changed importance which
coal, iron, and copper have for our time when compared with that which
gold and silver had in the days of Charles the Fifth.
When the North American colonies separated from England, they were a
small nation of less than three millions on the Atlantic coast. Thence
they spread out over the vast space beyond the Alleghany Mountains,
then across the Mississippi, finally over the Rocky Mountains to
the Pacific, remaining one nation over a territory thirty times
greater than that which had been actually settled at the time of the
Revolution. The same process happened later and on a smaller scale in
the dominion which remained to England in the north. The Canadians have
spread out from the banks of the St. Lawrence to Vancouver Island, also
remaining one people. Thus Teutonic America now consists of two nations
only.[130] How different the fate of the Spanish colonies. Scattered
over a space eight thousand miles long from San Francisco to Magellan's
Straits, in days before railways existed and with even steam navigation
in its infancy, they did not think of trying to maintain political
connection across vast distances, and naturally fell apart into many
independent states, roughly corresponding to the administrative
divisions of colonial days. The number of these states has varied from
time to time. At present there are six on the North American continent,
and ten on the South American, without counting Portuguese Brazil and
the three island republics of Cuba, San Domingo, and Hayti. Out of the
lands that obeyed Charles the Fifth, nineteen states have grown, all
(except Hayti) speaking Spanish, while the English-speaking peoples are
but two. Although the size of the territory occupied by these nineteen
is the primary cause of this multiplication of small nations, there are
other causes, also, political and social, which have been discussed in
an earlier chapter.[131] One bond of union they had, one solid basis
of common sentiment which, nevertheless, did not avail to hold them
together. They all professed the Roman Catholic faith and all obeyed
one spiritual sovereign at Rome, whereas among the men of English
speech in Teutonic America there were, and are, not only many Roman
Catholics, but also among the larger mass of Protestants many forms of
Protestantism, and no common ecclesiastical authority at all.
This summary review of the causes which have made the currents of
Spanish-American and Teutonic-American history run in different and
divergent channels may be closed by enquiring what the two divisions of
the New World have in common to-day.
They are alike in being (always excepting Canada) republican in
the outward forms of their governments; that is to say, there is
nowhere any official called a king. How far the governments of most
Spanish-American states are from being republican in spirit and working
everybody knows. To most men's minds, however, the form means a great
deal. In Spanish America itself people who acquiesce in transitory
dictatorships would be horrified at the idea of a hereditary sovereign,
however constitutional. And there are still many people in the United
States who find some virtue in the mere name of republic.
The two divisions are also alike in belonging to a New World; that
is to say, they have shaken loose from many ideas and habits that
belonged, and still more or less belong, to the Old World of Europe.
Spanish America has done this more completely than has Teutonic
America, because even in colonial days the ties of thought and feeling
which bound the colonists to Spain were really less strong than those
which connected the English of the United States with their mother
country, and because the latter were, when the separation came, in
a higher stage of institutional and intellectual development. The
most signal instance of the general American breach with the Old
World is the sense of social equality that now prevails alike in the
English-speaking and the Spanish-speaking peoples. The forms in which
this sense appears are not quite the same. Among the Spanish Americans
there is more external deference on the part of the humbler to the
higher placed, and the pure Indian is treated, and submits to be
treated, as a social inferior. In Chile, for instance, the _roto_, or
half-breed peasant, stands far more distinctly below the landowner than
the North American day labourer stands below his employer; though it
is his ignorance, not his mixed blood, that assigns this position to
him. But in both continents the complete absence of any artificial and
formal distinctions of rank is in striking contrast to the habits and
ideas that still hold in most parts of Europe.[132]
It must be added that these republics of the West have, politically
regarded, one important common characteristic. They constitute what
German historians call a "States-System" of their own; _i.e._ they take
no part in the politics of the Old World, but only in those of the New.
This is no longer true as respects the United States, for though they
do not interfere in questions purely European, and have touched those
of Africa only slightly in the Congo, and more effectively in Liberia,
which, indeed, they called into being, they have, by conquering the
Philippine Islands, made themselves an Asiatic power, and by annexing
Hawaii and one of the Samoan Islands, a Pacific power. Latin-American
republics, however, have (so far as I know) intervened neither in
European nor in Asiatic affairs, being content to attend strictly to
their own business, which is sufficiently absorbing.
Latin America consists of two separate state-systems. One includes
Mexico and the five small Central American republics, two of which,
Costa Rica and Salvador, are peaceful within and seldom embroiled
abroad, while the other three have had more chequered careers.
Members of this group have had plenty to do with the United States,
but seldom come into contact with the South American countries. The
little republic of Panama, which is virtually under the protection
of the United States, may now be deemed a "buffer state," between
Colombia and the republics to the north, nor does any Central American
republic possess a navy. The larger group is composed of the eleven
South American states. It presents some analogies to the Europe of the
eighteenth century in which there were several great powers "playing
the great game" against one another and against the smaller powers,
nominally in the interest of that so-called Balance of Power which was
to prevent any one from dominating the others, but often in reality
for the sake of appropriating territory, whenever a dynastic pretext
could be found. In this group there are three great powers, Argentina,
Brazil, and Chile; and when these three stand together, they can
keep all the rest quiet, especially if (as they may usually expect)
the United States throws its influence into the scale of peace. At
present these three are tolerably friendly, and there is no reason why
they should not remain so. Between them there exist no longer such
territorial controversies as disturb the repose of Ecuador, Colombia,
and Peru.[133] The politics of South America present an interesting
field for study, but it is one upon which I cannot now and here enter.
Some publicists have suggested that troubles might arise to affect
South America from without if Japan or China were to insist on flooding
her with their emigrants, and that if this were attempted against
one of the weaker South American republics, either the greater South
American Powers, or the United States, or both, might be tempted to
intervene. There are at present some Chinese and a very few Japanese
on the Pacific coast, but no more seem to have been arriving in recent
years. Any danger of this nature seems remote and improbable.
With these three things, however,--republican forms, social equality,
and detachment from European politics,--the list of the things which
the two Americas have in common ends. Far more numerous and more
important are the points in which they stand contrasted.
Many causes have gone to the making of the contrast. Race and religion,
climate and history have all had their share. The contrast appears
both in ideas and in temperament. The Spanish American is more proud
and more sensitive to any slight. He is not so punctilious in his
politeness as is the Spaniard of Europe, and is, indeed, in some
countries a little brusque or offhand in manners and speech. But he
feels a slight keenly; and he knows how to respect the susceptibilities
of his fellow-citizens. I will not say that he is more pleasure-loving
than the North American, for the latter has developed of late years a
passion for amusement which would have startled his Puritan ancestors.
But he is less assiduous and less strenuous in work, being, in this
respect, unlike the immigrant who comes from Old Spain, especially the
Asturian and the Gallego, who is the soul of thrift and the steadiest
of toilers. He is not so fond of commercial business, nor so apt
for it, nor so eager to "get on" and get rich. The process of money
making has not for him that fatal attraction which enslaves so many
capable men in the United States and (to a less degree) in England
and Germany, leading them to forget the things that make life worth
living, till it is too late in life to enjoy them. In South America
things are taken easily and business concerns are largely in the hands
of foreigners. The South American--and here I include the Mexican--is
an excitable being and prone to express his feelings forcibly, having
absorbed from the Indians none of their stolid taciturnity. He is
generally good natured and hospitable, and responds quickly to anything
said or done which shews appreciation of his country and its ways.
Private friendship or family relationship have a great effect on his
conduct, and often an undue effect, for one is everywhere told that the
difficulty of securing justice in these republics lies not so much in
the corruptibility of judges, as in their tendency to be influenced by
personal partiality. Things go by favour.
These contrasts of temperament between North and South Americans give
rise to different tastes and a different view of life, so that, broadly
speaking, the latter are not "sympathetic" either to the former or to
Englishmen.[134] To say that they are antipathetic would be going too
far, for there is nothing to make unfriendliness, nor, indeed, is there
any unfriendliness. But both North Americans and Englishmen are built
on lines of thought and feeling so different from those which belong to
South Americans that the races do not draw naturally together, and find
it hard to appreciate duly one another's good qualities.[135]
The use of nicknames has a certain significance. In South America a
North American or Englishman is popularly called a "Gringo," as in
North America a person speaking Italian or Spanish or Portuguese is
vulgarly called a "Dago." Neither term has any eulogistic flavour.
Thus we return to the question whence we started, and ask again whether
there is any sort of unity or community in the two Americas. Are the
peoples of these continents a group by themselves, nearer to one
another than they are to other peoples, possessing a common character,
common ties of interest and feeling? Or does the common American name
mean nothing more than mere local juxtaposition beyond the Atlantic?
Is it, in fact, anything more than a historical accident?
The answer would seem to be that Teutonic Americans and Spanish
Americans have nothing in common except two names, the name American
and the name Republican. In essentials they differ as widely as either
of them does from any other group of peoples, and far more widely than
citizens of the United States differ from Englishmen, or than Chileans
and Argentines differ from Spaniards and Frenchmen.
Nevertheless, juxtaposition has induced contact, though a contact
which we shall find to have been rather political than intellectual or
social. It is worth while to examine the attitude of each to the other.
When the Spanish colonies revolted[136] against the Crown of Spain,
the sympathy of the United States went out to them profusely, and
continued with them throughout the war and long after. Their victories
were acclaimed as victories won for freedom and for America, and
children were called after the name of Simon Bolivar, whose exploits in
Venezuela had early fixed upon him the attention of the world, and have
given him a fame possibly beyond his merits.
The struggling colonists were cheered by this as by the similar
sympathy that came to them from England. They were, as already
observed, grateful for the support given them by the diplomacy
of Canning and John Quincy Adams, and when they framed their
constitutions, took that of the United States for their model. Their
regard for the United States, and confidence in its purposes, never
quite recovered the blow given by the Mexican War of 1846 and the
annexation of California; but this change of sentiment did not affect
the patronage and good-will extended to them by the United States,
whose people, and for a time the English Whigs also, maintained their
touching faith that countries called republics must needs be graced by
republican virtues and were entitled to favour whenever they came into
collision with monarchies. This tendency of mind, natural in the days
when the monarchies of continental Europe were more or less despotic,
has begun to die down of late years, as educated men have come to look
more at things than at names, and as United States statesmen found
themselves from time to time annoyed by the perversity or shiftiness of
military dictators ruling Spanish-American countries. The big nation
has, however, generally borne such provocations with patience, abusing
its strength less than the rulers of the little ones abuse their
weakness. For many years after the achievement by the Spanish colonies
of their independence, a political tie between them and the United
States was found in the declared intention of the latter to resist any
attempt by European Powers either to overthrow republican government
in any American state or to attempt annexation of its territory. So
long as any such action was feared from Europe, the protection thus
promised was welcome, and the United States felt a corresponding
interest in their clients. But circumstances alter cases. To-day, when
apprehensions of the old kind have vanished, and when some of the South
American states feel themselves already powerful, one is told that
they have begun to regard the situation with different eyes. "Since
there are no longer rain-clouds coming up from the east, why should a
friend, however well-intentioned, insist on holding an umbrella over
us? We are quite able to do that for ourselves if necessary." In a very
recent book by one of the most acute and thoughtful of North American
travellers, there occurs a passage which presents this view:--
"Many a Chileno and Argentino resents the idea of our Monroe
Doctrine applying in any sense to his country and declares that we
had better keep it at home. He regards it as only another sign of
our overweening national conceit: and on mature consideration it
does seem as though the justification for the doctrine both in its
original and in its present form had passed. Europe is no longer
ruled by despots who desire to crush the liberties of their subjects.
As is frequently remarked, England has a more democratic government
than the United States. In all the leading countries of Europe the
people have practically as much to say about the government as they
have in America. There is not the slightest danger that any European
tyrant will attempt to enslave the weak republics of this hemisphere.
Furthermore, such republics as Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, Chile, and
Peru, no more need our Monroe Doctrine to keep them from being robbed
of their territory by European nations, than does Italy or Spain. If it
be true that some of the others, like the notoriously lawless group in
Central America, need to be looked after by their neighbours, let us
amend our outgrown Monroe Doctrine, as already suggested by one of our
writers on International Law, so as to include in the police force in
the Western Hemisphere those who have shown themselves able to practise
self-control."[137]
There is truth in this. The talk often heard in the United States
about the Doctrine has injured and is injuring her influence in South
America. It excites suspicion and alarm. It is taken to imply an intent
to claim a sort of protectorate over the other American republics, than
which nothing could more offend Spanish-American sentiment. The wisest
among American foreign ministers, such as Mr. Hay and Mr. Root, are
those who have least frequently referred to the Doctrine. To examine
this subject, however, would lead me into the field of politics, and
with politics I have nothing to do, seeking only to indicate the
influences of interest, of intellectual affinity, and of temperamental
sympathy which draw the peoples of Spanish America towards one or other
of the great peoples of the Northern Hemisphere.[138]
As regards the United States there is a balance between attraction and
suspicion. The South Americans desire good relations, and recognize
the value of her diplomatic action in trying to preserve peace between
those of their republics whose smouldering enmities often threaten to
burst into flame. On the other hand, as already observed, they are
jealous of their own dignity, not at all disposed to be patronized,
and quick to resent anything bordering on a threat, even when
addressed, not to themselves, but to some other republic. It is as the
disinterested, the absolutely disinterested and unselfish, advocate of
peace and good will, that the United States will have most influence
in the Western Hemisphere, and that influence, gently and tactfully
used, may be of incalculable service to mankind.
The matters in which these republics are wont to imitate or draw
lessons from the United States are education, especially scientific
and technical education, and engineering. Of the influence upon their
constitutions of the North American Federal Constitution I have
already spoken. Their publicists continue to follow with attention
the decisions given upon the application of its principles to new
conditions as they arise, and attach value to the opinions of North
American international jurists. Otherwise, there is little intellectual
affinity, and still less temperamental sympathy. The South Americans
do not feel that the name "American" involves any closer community or
co-operation with the great Teutonic republic of the north than it does
with any other people or peoples. They are just as much a race or group
of peoples standing by themselves as if the lands they occupy had been
that entirely detached continent out in the southern seas, supposed to
lie far away from all other continents, to which the name of Amerigo
Vespucci was first applied.
With whom, then, have the Spanish Americans real affinities of mental
and moral constitution? With the peoples of southern Europe. If anyone
likes to call them the "Latin" peoples,[139] there is no harm in the
term so long as it does not seem to ignore the fact that there exist
the greatest differences between Italians and Frenchmen and Spaniards,
for whoever has studied the history and the literature of those peoples
knows that it is only the existence of still more marked differences
between them and the Teutonic peoples that makes them seem to resemble
one another.
It might be supposed that the relations of the Spanish Americans would
be most close with their motherland, Old Spain. But these relations are
not intimate, and have never been so since the War of Independence.
Even in those old colonial days when the ports were closed to all
but Spanish vessels, in order to stop all trade, export and import,
except with the mother country, the days when Englishmen and Dutchmen
were detested as heretics, and Frenchmen as dangerous rivals, there
was an undercurrent of anti-Spanish feeling. It was chiefly due to
the practice of reserving all well-paid posts for natives of Spain.
The _criollos_, as they were called, men born in the colonies, were
naturally envious of the strangers, and resented their own exclusion
and disparagement. They suffered in many ways, economic as well
as sentimental, both from laws issued in Spain and from authority
exercised on the spot by men from Europe who did not share their
sentiments, treated them as socially inferior, and flouted their
local opinion. Accordingly, when the separation came, there was less
sense of the breaking of a family tie than there had been among the
North American colonists in the earlier stages of their revolution.
This antagonism to Spanish government was, of course, accentuated and
envenomed by the long duration of the struggle for independence, which
in Peru lasted for fifteen years, and in the course of which many
severities were exercised by the governors and generals who fought
for the Crown. As for the Indians, the oppressions they suffered and
the memory of the hideous cruelties with which the rebellion of Tupac
Amaru was suppressed, made the name of Spain hateful to them. After
the flag of Castile had ceased to fly anywhere on the continent, and
the last Spanish officials had departed, there were few occasions
for communication of any kind. Spain herself was in a depressed and
distracted state for many years after 1825. There is to-day little
trade between her and the New World, nor is there, except to Mexico and
Argentina, any large Spanish immigration. Where it does exist, it is
valued, for the men who come from northern Spain (as most settlers do)
are of excellent quality.
Family ties between colonists and the motherland had, moreover, become
few or loose. Seldom in Spanish America does one hear anyone speak
of the place his ancestors came from, as one constantly hears North
Americans talk of the English village where are the graves of their
forefathers. Seldom do South Americans or Mexicans seem to visit Spain,
either to see her ancient cities and her superb pictures or to study
her present economic problems. They do not feel as if they had much
to learn from her governmental methods, and her modern literature has
apparently little message for them. For the Spanish Americans there
seems to be no Past at all earlier than their own War of Independence.
In all these respects the contrast between the position of Spain
towards South America and that of Britain towards North America strikes
an Englishman with surprise. If that revival in Spanish literature and
art, of which there have recently been signs, should continue, and if
Spanish commerce should develop, the position may change, for the tie
of language will always have its importance.
I may add in this connection that among the educated classes of
Spanish America one finds few signs of that sort of interest in the
history of Old Spain which the best North Americans take in the
history of England. The former have no link of free institutions
brought from the old soil to flourish in a new one. Is it because the
Conquistadores were Spaniards, or because many of their deeds shock
modern consciences, or because it is felt that to honour them would
be an offence to Indian sentiment, faint as that sentiment is in
Mexico and still fainter in Peru, that there are in Spanish America no
statues or other honorific memorials of these brilliant and terrible
figures? Even the statue of Queen Isabella the Catholic, which stood in
Havana, was shipped back to Spain after the independence of Cuba had
been declared in 1898. There is no monument to Cortes in Mexico, nor
to Pizarro in Lima, nor (so far as I know) any statue of any of his
companions except one of Pedro de Valdivia, set up on the hill of Santa
Lucia in Santiago, where he built his fort and founded the capital of
Chile. On the other hand, Cuahtémoc or Guatemozin, the last of the
Aztec kings,[140] has a fine statue in the park that lies between the
city of Mexico and the castle palace of Chapultepec, and the name of
Caupolican, the Araucanian chieftain whom the Spaniards shot to death
with arrows, like St. Sebastian, is about to be commemorated by a
charitable foundation at Temuco in Chile.
Between Italy and Latin America there never were any direct relations
except, of course, ecclesiastical relations with Rome, until in recent
years Italian immigrants began to pour into Argentina and southern
Brazil. As many of these go backwards and forwards, and as swift
lines of ocean steamers have been established between Buenos Aires
and the ports of Italy, there is now a good deal of intercourse, but
this has not so far led to any closer connection either political or
intellectual. The Italian immigrants belong almost entirely to the
scantily educated classes, and have brought with them little that
is Italian except their language and their habits of industry. If,
however, the Italians, who, in Argentina, are now nearly one-third
of the population, do not too quickly lose their language and become
assimilated to the native Argentines, these people may not only form an
intellectual link between their old home and their new one, but may
give an impetus to the progress of art and music, perhaps of literature
also.
With England and Germany the commercial relations of most of the
South American countries are close and constant. Nearly £300,000,000
sterling of British capital ($1,500,000,000) have been invested in
railroads and otherwise in Argentina alone, besides very large sums
in Uruguay, Brazil, and some of the lesser countries. Many Englishmen
own ranches or farms in Argentina. Germans have done less in railroad
construction and in the acquisition of landed properties, but they run
lines of ocean steamers, and a great part of the commerce of the more
progressive republics is now in their hands. They take more pains than
do the English to master Spanish and understand the customs of the
land. The German army and its arrangements are taken as a model for
South American ministers and officers to follow, and a like deference
is paid to the British navy and its methods. Upon thought and art and
taste, however, neither of these countries exerts much influence.
Though a certain number of Argentines, Chileans, and Brazilians can
read English and a smaller number German, and though statesmen and
serious students appreciate the English political system and the German
administrative system, and follow the scientific work done in both
countries, books in these languages are not widely read. The members
of the English and German colonies in seaports like Buenos Aires,
Montevideo, Rio, and Valparaiso are personally liked and respected,
but they have not done much to popularize the ideas and habits and
tastes of their countries. The mental quality and the views of life are
essentially dissimilar. Between the peoples, there is little more than
reciprocal good-will and what Thomas Carlyle calls the "cash nexus."
English fashions are, however, followed in horse-racing and other
branches of sport.
There remains France. Her influence may be traced to several causes.
Though the North American Revolution of 1775-1783 had suggested to the
Spanish Americans the idea of separation from their mother country,
the French Revolution of 1789-1799 stirred their minds more deeply,
and the literature produced in France, both before and during those
years and still later, was the strongest and most novel intellectual
force that had ever fallen on these previously backward countries, as
well as upon those few colonists who visited Europe in the end of the
eighteenth century. Severed by a violent shock from Spain, the Spanish
Americans must needs turn elsewhere. French had for a century been the
one foreign language which was learnt by men who learnt any foreign
language. Whoever travelled to Europe needed it and the similarity of
its vocabulary to their own made it easier for them than any Teutonic
tongue. With England there was in those days very little intercourse,
with Germany and the United States still less, for commerce was
insignificant. Thus French established itself as what might be called
the gateway to European thought. French literature has, moreover, a
double attraction for the South Americans, including the Brazilians.
It gratifies their fondness for graceful and pointed and rhetorical
expression. Spaniards, like Frenchmen, love style, and French style
has for them a peculiar charm. With a great liking for what they call
"general ideas" they set less store by an accumulation of facts and
an elaborate examination of them than do the Germans or the English,
and prefer what may be called the French way of treating a subject.
In short, they have an intellectual affinity for France, for the
brightness of her ideas, the gaiety of her spirit, the finish of her
literary methods, the quality of her sentiment.
Then there is Paris. When South Americans began to be rich enough to
travel to Europe and enjoy themselves there, Paris became the Mecca
of these pilgrims of pleasure. Many a wealthy Argentine landowner,
many a Brazilian coffee planter, every dictator of a Caribbean
republic who, like Guzman Blanco of Venezuela, has drawn from the
public revenues funds to invest in European securities, goes to the
metropolis of fashion and amusement to spend his fortune there. All the
young literary men, all the young artists who can afford the journey,
flock thither. There is a large South American colony in Paris, and
through it, as well as through books and magazines, the French drama
and art, French ideas and tastes dominate both the fashionable and
the intellectual world in the cities of South America. The writers
of France have often claimed that there is something in the "French
spirit," in their way of thinking and their way of expressing thought,
which, distinctive of themselves as it is, has, nevertheless, a sort
of universality, or an adaptability to the minds of all men, that has
more than once in history given it an empire such as no other modern
literature has enjoyed. In and for South America this claim has been
made good, for here French influence reigns supreme.
All this has, of course, no more to do with the political relations of
these republics to foreign powers than has the ownership of Argentine
railways by British shareholders. But it is a further illustration of
the fact that South America has nothing in common with Teutonic North
America beyond the name and the form (in some countries an empty form)
of institutions called republican. She is much nearer to being an
Ibero-Celtic West European group of nations, planted far out in the
midst of southern seas.
But can the South Americans really be classed among south or west
European peoples? May they not be--if one can speak of them as a
whole, ignoring the differences between Chileans, Argentines, and
Brazilians--a new thing in the world, a racial group with a character
all its own?
This is their own view of themselves. It would need more knowledge
than I possess either to deny or to affirm it. They are all, except
Argentines and Uruguayans, largely Indian or (in Brazil) African in
blood. Even the Uruguayans and Argentines strike one as differing at
least as much from Spaniards as North Americans differ from Englishmen.
They give the impression of being still nations in the making, whose
type or types, both the common type of all Spanish America and the
special types of each nation, will grow more sharp and definite as the
years roll on and as life becomes for them more rich and more intense.
When this happens and the world of A.D. 2000 recognizes a definite
South American type (or types), may there be thence expected any
distinctively new contribution to the world's stock of thought, of
literature, of art? Each nation is in the long run judged and valued
by the rest of the world more for such contributions than for anything
else. There is a sense in which Shakespeare is a greater glory to
England than the empire of India. Homer and Virgil, Plato and Tacitus
are a gift made by the ancient world to all the ages, more precious,
because more enduring, than any achievements in war, or government,
or commerce. The opportunities for the growing up of new nations with
creative gifts specifically their own seem to be getting few because
the world is getting full; there is no more room for new nations.
That there is vitality and virility in the Spanish-American peoples
appears from the number of strong, bold, forceful men who have figured
in their history, including one the Mexican Juarez, of pure, and many
of mixed, Indian blood. Few, indeed, have shewn that higher kind of
greatness which lies in the union of large constructive ideas with
decisive energy in action, the Napoleonic or Bismarckian gift. In most
of the republics, political conditions have been so unstable as to give
little scope for constructive statesmanship. Still there is no want of
vigour, and it is something to have produced in San Martin one truly
heroic figure in whom brilliant military and political talents were
united to a lofty and disinterested character.
If Latin America has not yet produced any thinker or poet or artist
even of the second rank, this will not surprise anyone who knows what
was her condition before the War of Independence and what it has been
from that time till recent years. Could any one of those ancient sages
whom Dante heard in Limbo, speaking with voices sweet and soft, have
been brought back to earth and permitted to survey Europe as it was in
the welter of the tenth century, such an one might have thought that
art and letters, as well as freedom and order, had forever vanished
from the earth. Yet out of that welter what glories of art and letters
were to arise.