THE CONDITIONS OF POLITICAL LIFE IN SPANISH AMERICA
It is not my purpose to describe or discuss either the political
institutions or the practical politics of the South American states.
Even with a fuller knowledge of them than I was able to acquire in the
short time at my disposal it would have been difficult for me to treat
of them with the requisite freedom. But that which a traveller who has
been the recipient of many courtesies may do without offence, and that
which even a limited knowledge may qualify him to do, is to present a
summary account of those physical, economic, and social features of the
South American countries which are the basis of its political life,
and constitute the conditions under which that life has to be carried
on. Whoever has seen and understands these, realizing how altogether
different they are from those of any European country, will find
himself able to judge the troubled history and the present prospects
of these states more fairly than those can do who apply to them a
West European or a North American standard. The maxim, "To comprehend
everything is to pardon everything," goes too far, but such truth as
belongs to it is eminently applicable to these countries. One must know
their conditions before attempting to pass judgment on their defects.
When republican governments sprang up on Central and South American
soil as the authority of Spain was slowly swept away from one
region after another, those governments were eagerly welcomed by
European Liberals and still more effusively acclaimed by the people
of the United States. The latter found in them a double source
of satisfaction. Their appearance meant the disappearance of an
old enemy, and their democratic institutions were a tribute of
imitation to the success of popular government in the United States,
where people still believed that there could be no freedom under a
monarchy. Though this sympathy of the North Americans long continued
to be extended to the new republics, especially when they came into
collision with any European power, the friends of freedom in Europe
presently lost interest in communities which were not reflecting
credit upon democracy; and European writers of the opposite school
soon began to point to them as shocking examples of liberty that had
degenerated into license and violence. The last Spanish troops left
the American continent in 1826. Decade after decade passed with no
signs of improvement. Revolutions and dictators succeeded one another
so quickly, and seemed to mean so little, that after a while the
only Europeans who followed the fortunes of South America were the
bondholders whose loans remained unpaid. The financial credit as well
as the political character of the new states fell very low. Newspapers
ridiculed them. Conservative statesmen and cloistered political
philosophers drew warnings from them. Sir Henry Maine, one of the most
brilliant writers of the last generation, in his ingenious, but elusive
and unsatisfying, book on Popular Government, whenever he seeks to
supply a link or point an epigram in his long indictment of democracy,
constantly refers to the South American republics as instances of its
failure in this or that respect. Yet such a line of argument is really
no more legitimate than that of the enthusiastic North Americans who
were prepared to defend the government of any South American country
that called itself a republic. Both the assailant and the apologist
looked only at the name, and did not stop to enquire into the thing.
Sir Henry Maine's reasonings were valid against those who held, as did
the North Americans, that the name of republic is enough to ensure
good government, but valid against them only. There are always people
ready to assume that things are what they are called, because it is
much easier to deal with names than to examine facts. Paraguay under
the military tyrannies of Francia and the elder and younger Lopez was
called a republic and had a republican constitution.[141] The same was
true of Venezuela under the tyrannies of Guzman Blanco and of Castro.
Were Paraguay and Venezuela, therefore, true republics, entitled to
the sympathy which democrats give to "governments deriving their just
powers from the consent of the governed"? If they were, then arguments
drawn from the misdeeds of Lopez and Castro are good arguments against
the champions of republican or democratic government. If they were
not, then the sympathy felt by North Americans for these so-called
republics is groundless, and the incidents of their history prove
nothing either for or against democracy. It is a mere question of
names, and not of things.
Throwing names aside, let us go to the facts. I shall have to speak of
these states as republics, because they are so called, but the term is
meant not to describe, but only to denote. Europeans have been wont
until lately to lump all of them in a general condemnation. That was
always unjust, and is still more unjust now than it was formerly. There
is as great a difference between the best and the worst of them as
there is between the best and the worst of European monarchies. Some
of them are true republics in the European sense, countries in which
the constitutional machinery is a reality and not a sham. Others are
petty despotisms, created and maintained by military force. In the
fairly large class which lies between these two groups, the machinery
works, but more or less irregularly and imperfectly. The legislature
has some influence as an expression of public opinion; the rights of
individuals to personal safety and to property receive some respect;
the application and enforcement of the law, though uncertain, are not
subjected to the arbitrary will of the executive.
To enquire into the causes which have determined the history of the
Spanish-American states as a whole, and prevented them from realizing
the hopes that gilded their birth ninety years ago, would be a long and
serious undertaking, too large for this book. What may, however, be
done concisely is to indicate the conditions under which independent
political life had to begin in the lands that had thrown off the
dominion of Spain. I will place these conditions in five classes:--
I. Physical or geographical conditions.
II. Racial conditions.
III. Economic and social conditions.
IV. Historical conditions belonging to the Colonial period.
V. Historical conditions attending the struggle for independence.
I. _Physical Conditions._--In nearly all the republics the population
was and is small in proportion to the area, and in most of them
communication across this thinly peopled area is hindered by mountains
or deserts or forests. Colombia, for instance, with a territory of
435,000 square miles (more than twice the size of France) has only ten
persons to the square mile (whereas France has nearly two hundred),
and is so intersected by lofty and heavily wooded ranges that most
parts of it are accessible only by long and difficult journeys along
mule paths. Bolivia, three times the size of France, has only three
and a half persons to the square mile, and its few towns, only one of
which has more than twenty-five thousand inhabitants, are separated by
long spaces of wilderness. Peru is cut up by the numerous chains of
the Andes into narrow valleys, each of which has little intercourse
with the others. In such countries--and this applies to nearly all of
them--there is, and there can be, very little public opinion common
to the nation, because the means of intercommunication are defective
and slow. Officials representing the central government cannot easily
be supervised or controlled. When local discontent exists, it may
find no constitutional vent, because the legislature is distant and
cannot be got to understand the situation. When a revolt breaks out,
it may spread fast, and become formidable before any adequate force
can be collected and despatched to the spot to suppress it. All these
conditions also prevent the growth of a press capable of informing
and aiding the growth of opinion. Nothing but an efficient system of
popular local self-government could secure good administration under
such conditions, and the rule of such a public opinion as England and
the United States possess becomes almost impossible, because people
know little either of one another, or of current questions, or of the
conduct of their representatives sent to the capital. Patriotism there
may be, and passion may be excited far and wide over the country by
some event touching the honour or the supposed interest of the nation,
but there can hardly be that controlling influence of the whole people
which is needed in free governments to keep the rulers steady and to
impress upon them a sense of responsibility.
II. _Racial Conditions._--It has been shewn in an earlier chapter
that in all the republics, except Argentina and Uruguay, the native
Indians and the mestizos form a large element in the population. In
Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Paraguay, the pure Indians are a majority
of the whole. In Chile the poorer class is practically all mestizo;
in Venezuela and Colombia and Panama, there are few pure Europeans.
Speaking little or no Spanish, the Indians constitute a practically
distinct nation. They have nothing to do with the white people, except
in so far as they pay rent or work for employers. By the constitution
they are, in many states, citizens and have votes. But they have never
heard of the constitution and they never think of voting, having,
although free, no more to do with the government than the slaves had in
the southern United States before the Civil War.
Bolivia, though its population is not so preponderatingly aboriginal
as that of Paraguay, furnishes a good instance. The Indians,
mostly Aymarás, are either tillers of the soil, or engaged in the
transportation of goods by mule or llama, or are artisans of the ruder
sort. They are entirely illiterate. Nominally Catholics, their religion
is the primitive spirit worship of their ancestors with a varnish of
Christian forms and the cult of Christian saints. Politics are left
entirely to a few Spaniards and mestizos living in four or five towns,
each of which, in default of a common interest and general public
opinion, is obliged to try to get as much as it can for itself. Thus,
politically regarded, the Bolivian nation of two millions shrinks to
some thousands. A few thousands gathered into one city may give a
vigorous life to a genuine republic, as happened in many a city of
ancient Greece and mediæval Italy; but where citizens are scattered
over many thousands of square miles, without railways to bring them
together and newspapers to convey the ideas of each group to the other,
democratic government becomes scarcely possible. What all sections of
such a population can do is to fight, for defects that unfit them to be
voters do not unfit them to be soldiers. The aboriginal races of the
central and northern Andes have not that love of fighting for its own
sake which the Aztecs or the Araucanians had. But they have little fear
of death and can be readily forced or tempted to swell the forces of
a revolting general. Although in Venezuela, Colombia, and Panama, the
proportion of whites and mestizos is larger, the general result is the
same, for the vast majority of the people are illiterate and qualified
only for the fighting side of public life.[142]
Some may conceive that the racial facts of the country are unfavourable
in a further way. That an admixture of the blood of a backward race
must injure the white element, is a view which suggests itself
naturally to European pride. There are even persons who assume that
the Indo-European or so-called Aryan races are superior to others--a
gratuitous assumption, for there are three non-Aryan races in Europe,
the average members of which are equal in talent and character to the
average members of the other peoples among whom they dwell.[143] It is,
of course, possible that the Spanish race has suffered by intermarriage
with Indians, but who can tell how much of the difference between the
Spaniards of Old Spain and those of Peru or Venezuela is due to blood,
how much to climatic and other local conditions? One high Chilean
authority thinks his countrymen all the better for having reinforced
their stock from the hardy Indians of the south.[144]
There are also those who carry race disparagement still further
and hold that the Spanish or "Iberian" races are unfitted for
constitutional government, in company, it would appear, with the
Celtic and Slavonic and all others except the favoured Teutons. This
doctrine is not worth discussing, because it cannot be brought to
any test of history, and it is history alone that enables us to test
such theories. The collapse in the sixteenth century of that free
constitutional government for which there seemed at one time to be
almost as good a chance in Spain as there was in contemporary England,
can be explained by causes altogether irrespective of race. It is not
in the hypothetical inferiority of any pure or any mixed race that
the importance of race questions for South America lies, but in the
fact that the existence in the same state of different races, speaking
different languages, prevents that homogeneity and solidarity of the
community which are almost indispensable conditions to the success of
democratic government.[145]
III. _Economic and Social Conditions._--Economic phenomena and social
phenomena may be considered together, because the latter depend
largely on the former. All the republics except Argentina, Chile, and
Brazil, of which I shall speak presently, are poor countries, not that
natural resources are wanting, but that these have been so imperfectly
developed as to bring little wealth to the native population.
Almost the only fortunes made in them are made by foreigners or
foreign companies who have got concessions for mines, or have bought
plantations, because there is very little native capital and not much
talent or experience to work mines or develop estates.[146] The land,
it is true, belongs to large proprietors, but they do not form a
class of men who, having a common and solid interest in the country,
constitute a sort of natural aristocracy, concerned to preserve order,
and make the government stable. Similarly, there is only a small native
class of substantial business men, with a like interest in public
tranquillity and good administration. The want of local capital has
left the larger industrial and financial enterprises to foreigners.
It is better that the country should be developed by foreign capital
than that it should not be developed at all, yet we may regret that
what is gained in the way of experience as well as of money is not
gained for the people of the country. That which Europeans call a
"lower middle class," composed of shopkeepers and skilled artisans,
is small, and the towns in which it exists are so few and far apart
from one another, that it has been hitherto a feeble political factor.
Lastly, the agricultural population consists in some states largely, in
others almost entirely, of those ignorant aborigines who have no sense
of their interest in progress or good government. The absence of that
class of intelligent small landowners, which is the soundest and most
stable element in the United States and in Switzerland, and is equally
stable, if less politically trained, in France and parts of Germany,
is a grave misfortune for South and Central America. What is wanting
in these countries is a sufficient number of citizens who have no
personal ends to secure, and nothing to get out of government, except
good administration, but whose interest in such administration is
intelligent enough and strong enough to rouse them to their civic duty.
Public spirit and an active participation in public life without the
prospect of such private gains as professional politicians make out of
politics,--that and nothing else is what provides in every country the
public opinion needed to guide and control the ruling authorities of a
state.
It may be said that nowhere in the world can we expect ideal conditions
for popular governments. Such governments have existed and have
attained creditable results in countries where both physical conditions
and racial conditions might have seemed unfavourable, because the
people possessed the gifts and the training that enable the rule of the
people to succeed.
Admitting this to be true, it raises the question whether those who
were summoned to govern the new republics that emerged from the War
of Independence did possess, and could have been expected to possess,
the requisite gifts and the training. Such gifts are not natural. They
are the result of a people's previous career and of experience gained
therein. What, then, had been the history of the colonial dominion of
Spain and what sort of practice in government had the Crown allowed to
its Spanish-American subjects?
This brings us to a fourth branch of the enquiry,--viz.:--
IV. _Historical Conditions during the Colonial Period._--The Spanish
Conquerors of the New World were men of extraordinary audacity and
energy. No such forcible individualities had been seen in the world
since the Norsemen of the tenth century and their children, the
Normans, of the eleventh. They were, however, loyally submissive to
the Spanish Crown and never thought of asking for, or of setting up
for themselves, any self-governing institutions. Neither did the
Spanish Crown ever think of granting such institutions. Those which
existed in Castile had just disappeared; but even had they continued,
it is improbable that any idea of reproducing them in the colonies
would have been entertained. The English Crown granted charters to
the companies which undertook colonization in North America, and the
settlers themselves were soon organized by counties in Virginia, by
townships and counties in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Forms of
local self-government more effective than those which then existed
in England were in full working order in those colonies, all through
the eighteenth century, until they separated from the mother country.
But everywhere in Spanish America the authority of the viceroy, or
captain-general, or _Audiencia_ and their subordinate officers,
was paramount, and covered the whole field. There were no elected
assemblies or elected officials. All power came from above; the people
had nothing to do with administration, and were not enough permitted
to subject it to public criticism. The only exception was furnished
by the sort of municipal council in the towns which was called a
_Cabildo_ or _Ayuntamiento_, and the members of which, while in a
few towns freely elected by the householders, or perhaps by the more
substantial householders, were in others nominated, and often nominated
because they had bought the nomination. The despotic power of a viceroy
or other governor was, of course, restrained by the instructions he
received and by the laws which the Crown enacted for the colonies, and
to some extent also both by the ecclesiastical magnates and by local
sentiment. But there were no responsibilities devolved on the people,
and no machinery in and by which they could acquire any training in
public affairs. In the English North American colonies the management
of church affairs belonged to the laity as well as to the clergy; and
the New England Congregational churches in particular, founded on the
principles of liberty, became direct exponents of popular feeling.
In the Spanish colonies the Roman Church represented the principle
of authority, and impressed it on the minds of the laity by all the
sanctions she possessed. All books and publications of every kind were
subjected to a searching ecclesiastical censorship; and the right of
freely expressing opinion either by speech or in writing was steadily
denied.
V. _Historical Conditions at the Close of the War of
Independence._--Thus, when the revolt from Spain threw all power into
the hands of the people, the people were unfit to exercise it. It was
easy to frame constitutions modelled on that of the United States. But
who were the people and what did they know about the working of free
governments? What was the capacity of the citizens whose votes were to
choose legislatures, and of what sort of persons were the legislatures
to be composed?
Ten or twelve years of fighting against Spanish troops, years in
which there had been many severities and cruelties perpetrated on
each side, had accustomed everybody to violence and had made soldiers
the only leaders. Everyone's mind was full of dreams of liberty, but
no one knew how to secure it by coupling liberty with law. Even in
the United States the first years after the acknowledgment of the
independence of the thirteen colonies had been marked by so many
errors and so much legislative weakness that the constitutional
convention of 1787 was regarded by the wisest men of the time as a
last chance for saving the nation. Yet the North American states were
carrying on governments which had existed for several generations
and following principles which their forefathers had established in
England five centuries before. Small wonder that among the Spanish
Americans, who had no experience at all in the most complicated of
all human undertakings,--the conducting of government by the will of
the majority, but according to settled law and with due respect to
the rights of the minority,--small wonder that legislatures were not
honestly elected, that, when elected, they wasted time in vain debates
and neglected business, that each party in turn drove out its opponents
or cowed them by violence, that debts were recklessly contracted and
left unpaid, that the government remained one not of laws, but of men,
and those men mostly military adventurers at the head of armed bands.
The inhabitants, accustomed to be ruled by others in State and
in Church, had never been given a chance of learning to think of
government as their own business nor of themselves as responsible for
public order. When a long and sanguinary war had destroyed the habit of
obedience to constituted authority, they were remitted--constitution
or no constitution--to that primitive state of things in which force
prevails. There being often either no authority _de iure_, or one too
feeble to protect those who appealed to it, authority _de facto_ had to
be recognized, and the notion of legal right and legal duty vanished.
It must be remembered that these were small and scattered communities,
in each of which there were but few men who were at once law-abiding
and intelligent, able to impose some check on the partisans of one or
the other of the adventurers who were fighting for power. The parties
were usually factions following the banner of a particular chief.
Only one set of controversies raising questions of principle emerged
from time to time in one republic or another, those that turned on the
property and claims of the Church. Other issues were usually either
local or personal, seldom economic, hardly ever racial.
Several thoughtful South Americans in the days of the Revolution
perceived that their countries were not fit for democracy. The
illustrious San Martin favoured a republican government based on a
limited suffrage; and Bolivar himself desired to be life president
of a confederation of states. Apart, however, from the difficulty of
proposing constitutions which would have excluded a large part of those
whose arms had secured independence, the enthusiasm for liberty that
prevailed and the rapturous belief that liberty was enough to secure
peace and prosperity, prescribed democratic arrangements, and it was
only in later struggles between rival parties that some leader would
enact qualifications calculated to exclude his opponents. Everywhere
the system of vesting executive power in a president holding office
for a term of years was adopted. It seemed the simplest plan, and
was recommended by the example of the United States, but it set up a
tempting prize for ambition and generally led straight to dictatorship.
Bad men abused it to enrich themselves or their friends, good men found
that the quickest and possibly the only way to carry out the reforms
which the country needed was to stretch their constitutional authority.
High-minded and public-spirited rulers were not wanting, but they
could not, with the best will in the world, create the materials for a
true democracy.
Whoever travels through these countries,--I include Mexico and
Central America, but not Chile or Argentina, of which more anon,--and
whoever, having thus obtained some knowledge of their physical and
racial character, studies their history, finds himself driven to three
conclusions. The first is that these states never have been democracies
in any real sense of the word. The second is that they could not have
been real democracies. To expect peoples so racially composed, very
small peoples, spread over a vast area, peoples with no practice in
self-government, to be able to create and work democratic institutions
was absurd, though the experience which their history has furnished to
the world was needed to demonstrate the absurdity. The third conclusion
is that injustice is done to the Spanish Americans by censures and
criticisms which ignore these fundamental facts. There is no more
Original Sin among them than there is in other peoples. Many of their
statesmen and generals were honest patriots, who loved liberty and
sought to give their country as much liberty as it was capable of then
receiving. It was neither their fault nor the fault of the people that
the conditions then existing made real representative and responsible
government impracticable. The constitutions did not suit the facts, and
the facts had to prevail against the constitutions, sometimes against
their letter, usually against their spirit. When voters were obviously
unfit to elect, and when fair elections could not be secured, it
was not wonderful that power should be seized without legal title,
or that an election should be so controlled by force or arranged and
put through by fraud, that while the form of it was respected, it did
not express any popular will. When one party had done these things,
the other party repeated the process as soon as it had a chance, and
thereafter things moved round in the same vicious circle.
Why does the machinery of constitutional government work smoothly in
Switzerland and the United States and England? Because its forms,
being consecrated by tradition and supported by public opinion, are
respected by the officials who have to work them. In these South
American republics, there were no traditions, and very little public
opinion; and this was due not to any inborn defects of the people, but
to historical causes which had deprived them of such advantages as the
Swiss possess and had given them constitutions quite unfitted to their
case.
If the democratic frames of government they adopted were unsuitable,
what other frames would have been suitable? Bolivar desired a sort
of elective life monarchy, to be sure with himself as monarch. San
Martin (as already observed) preferred an oligarchic republic. Either
might have been better than what was actually taken. An "honest"
oligarchy, _i.e._ one professing to be what it really is; may
be--doubtless is--better than a sham democracy. In a country where only
a minority--perhaps a small minority--of the citizens are capable of
taking part in the government, it may be safer legally to recognize
them as the governing class, and thus bring theory into accord with
facts, rather than that the divergence of facts from theory should
prove an irresistible temptation to force or fraud. This, however,
remains matter for speculation, since no country has permanently
established elective monarchy, and few have embodied oligarchical
provisions in their constitutions. Let it be added that the better
or worse political condition of these states has seldom turned upon
the extent to which the suffrage has been granted, for in those where
violent methods prevail, the result would be the same whether the
number of voting citizens were great or small.
Although for the sake of conciseness I have spoken of these republics
as a whole, the remarks made being more or less applicable to them all,
still there are marked differences between those which have advanced
and are advancing and others whose political health seems little better
now than it was fifty years ago. We may distinguish three classes of
states. The first consists of those in which republican institutions,
purporting to exist legally, are a mere farce, the government being,
in fact, a military despotism, more or less oppressive and corrupt,
according to the character of the ruler, but carried on for the benefit
of the Executive and his friends. The second includes countries where
there is a legislature which imposes some restraint upon the executive
and in which there is enough public opinion to influence the conduct
of both legislature and executive. In these states the rulers, though
not scrupulous in their methods of grasping power, recognize some
responsibility to the citizens and avoid open violence or gross
injustice. The third class are real republics, in which authority has
been obtained under constitutional forms, not by armed force, and
where the machinery of government works with regularity and reasonable
fairness, laws are passed by elected bodies under no executive
coercion, and both administrative and judicial work goes on in a duly
legal way.
Instances of the first class are too familiar to need mention. By far
the worst is Hayti. The most striking example of the second class was
Mexico under the government of President Porfirio Diaz. The government
of that statesman, one of the most remarkable men of our time, was
autocratic. His power had been won by fighting, but was maintained
under legal forms. The legislature obeyed him implicitly. Elections
were managed by his government, and that with little difficulty
because, until 1910, when his hold had begun to be shaken, no one
ventured to vote against him. His personal superiority to all the
vulgar temptations was recognized and admired. His ministers talked to
the Chambers, but took their orders from him alone. His policies were
directed to the material development of the country by the construction
of railways, the encouragement of manufactures, the opening up of mines
and extension of irrigation. Order was maintained by a rural police
formed out of former bandits, who by having been enrolled, disciplined,
and regularly paid became useful members of society. The lure to
conquest which the weakness of the republics to the south held out was
firmly resisted, and only a moderate army maintained. Under this régime
the country was advancing rapidly in wealth and a class of persons
interested in order and prosperity was being formed. Had the President,
when old age arrived, been able to find someone like himself to whom he
could have handed over the reins, prosperity and order would doubtless
have continued. The sort of government he gave the country was probably
what best suited it.[147] The Indian population, constituting a
majority, were (though naturally intelligent) obviously unfit for civic
functions. The uneducated mass of the mestizos were almost equally so.
An oligarchic government, formed out of the richer class, would have
furnished a less efficient administration, and would probably, after
some years of quarrelling, have given place to a military chief.
Of the third class good examples may be found in Chile and Argentina,
both of which are _bona fide_ republics. Chile is of all the
Latin-American states the one which best answers to European or North
American notions of a free constitutional commonwealth, one of the
chief reasons being that her population is unusually homogeneous and
unusually concentrated within a comparatively small area. Northern
Chile is an arid desert, southern Chile a forest wilderness, but in
the centre there is an area five hundred miles long by fifty wide
within which the large majority of her 3,300,000 citizens dwell.
The suffrage is limited, and governing power is practically in the
hands of a comparatively small landed aristocracy, and a few lawyers.
Government, including what we called the party game, is carried on with
the same spirit and by the same methods as it was in England during the
eighteenth century, allowing for the differences between a monarchy
and a republic. There are constant changes in the ministers, but the
machine works, and the general lines of national policy are preserved.
There have been no revolutions within the living memory, but there was
once a civil war. President Balmaceda, finding that he could not carry
out his policies within the strict limits of his constitutional powers,
exceeded them and defied the legislature. Each party, like the English
Charles I and his Parliament, took up arms to fight out the question of
right. Balmaceda, defeated in battle, put an end to his own life. He
had the weaker legal case, but was a man with some ideas, quite above
the common type of ambitious adventurer. After him, Chilean politics
resumed their normal constitutional course. There were, in 1910,
six parties, one Conservative and five Liberal sections, the latter
sometimes acting together, sometimes divided. The level of capacity,
as well as of eloquence, is high, and so is the national spirit of the
people.
Argentina has had a more troubled and more sanguinary history than
Chile, and has more recently emerged from among the breakers into
smooth water. Sixty years ago she had in Rosas a tyrant as cruel as
Barrios of Guatemala and as bloodthirsty as Lopez of Paraguay, and even
later, civil wars raged between the people of Buenos Aires and those
of the northern states. But as the country began to be settled and
railroads were made and labour was provided by the influx of Italian
and Spanish immigrants and large cities sprang up, the effect of
general prosperity was felt in a growing sense of the value of order
and peace. Though the foreign merchants whose interests were involved
took no direct part in politics, their influence was felt not only in
promoting sounder finance, but in making the native men of substance
feel that frequent revolutions were retarding the development of their
properties. Thus, since 1893, there has been no armed civil strife
of the old kind and the public tranquillity is now disturbed only
by alarms similar to those which the spread and the violent methods
of anarchism have caused in some parts of Europe. That flavour of
militarism which was so strong in former years has now virtually
disappeared. The administration is conducted by civilians, and is
pervaded by a legal spirit. In short, Argentina is now, like Chile, a
constitutional republic, whose defects, whatever they may be, are the
defects of a republic, not of a despotism disguised under republican
forms.
The examples of these two countries prove that there is nothing in
South American air or Spanish blood to prevent republican institutions
from working. If the working is not perfect, neither is it perfect
anywhere else in the world. What these countries have shewn is that
with favouring conditions the true constitutional spirit can be
more and more infused into constitutional forms and the old habits
of violence eradicated. The case of Argentina in particular suggests
the process by which we may expect that other Latin-American states
will, by degrees, advance towards a more settled and genuinely legal
government. What is the first thing that is needed to enable any
community to prosper? Is it not the desire for order and the respect
for order, the sense that there must be a curb on the impulses and
passions of individuals, some law duly enforced, some means of checking
violence and of protecting life and property against physical force?
This sense grows with the growth of property and with the development
of industrial habits. The larger the number, and the greater the
influence in a community, of those who feel that revolutions injure
not only the country, but also themselves personally, the better is
the prospect of breaking the revolutionary habit, for a public opinion
grows up which condemns violence and actively opposes those who resort
to it. Moreover, the more property there is and the more industry there
is in a country, the smaller is the proportion of those who join in a
revolution either from a love of fighting or in the hope of bettering
their fortunes. In a prosperous country, more can be done and more is
likely to be done for public instruction, one of the most urgent needs
of these nations. Argentina's recent efforts in that direction are an
instance, and education, if it does not make men good citizens, makes
it at least easier for them to become so.
To speak of increasing wealth as a factor making for the political
progress of a country may sound strange to those who in Europe and
the United States see how the working of free institutions may be
endangered and perverted by the corrupting influences of money and the
money power. Nevertheless, according to the proverb, "One man's meat is
another man's poison," there are stages in a nation's growth when it is
so essential to establish security and give everybody a sense of the
need for it, that whatever makes for security makes for progress. The
heart is better than the pocket, but it is easier to fill the pocket
than to purify the heart. The love of liberty is a nobler thing than
the love of security, but sometimes the latter needs to be diffused
before the former can have its perfect work.
It is true that the desire for order and security may lead men to
submit willingly to arbitrary power. This has often happened since the
days of Julius Cæsar and his nephew. But it has usually happened not
because men have ceased to value liberty, but because, finding that
they are failing to secure either security or liberty, they think it
better to have one than to have neither.
There are, in Spanish America, some communities still so far from being
capable of genuine popular self-government that the best thing for them
is the strong rule of an able ruler which will give them prosperity
through peace, shew them how to develop their resources, make them,
by education and by better communications, a more homogeneous people.
Those things done, such communities will, like Argentina, find
themselves fitter to work free institutions. At present, under the
rule of selfish adventurers and corrupt legislatures who are the tools
of the adventurer, the conditions of progress are absent. Two or three
of the South American republics--they are not among those which I
saw--are still in this condition. The rule of a man like Porfirio Diaz
would seem to give them the best chance of emerging from it. At present
they advance neither morally nor materially.
Nevertheless, taking the eleven South American states as a whole, their
condition is better than it was sixty years ago. In most of them the
civil element has tended to grow and the military element to decline.
The lawyer-politician is not always a law-abiding politician, yet
on the whole preferable to the soldier-politician. His methods are
less brutal. May not even a perversion of the law be a trifle better
than a disregard of all law? Revolutions and civil wars have become
less sanguinary; the execution of political opponents less frequent.
Political assassinations, which in Europe have unhappily been growing
more frequent,[148] are now more rare here. The sort of savagery that
existed in the days when Artigas, fighting for the independence of
his country, used (according to the story) to sew up prisoners in
oxhides by batches and roll them downhill into the river has long since
passed away. Nor is it to be forgotten that there is extremely little
brigandage or insecurity in most of these states, far less than there
was a few years ago in Sicily. The ordinary citizen is little affected
even by the revolutions which, where they occur, are carried on by a
small part of the population. Perhaps if the ordinary citizen suffered
more, revolutions would be fewer.
Ecclesiastical questions have been almost wholly eliminated from
politics in all the larger and some of the smaller states, and
religious liberty has been established on a basis not likely to be
shaken. A long-standing and bitter cause of strife has thus been
removed.
All the Spanish-American countries, even Paraguay, are now more open
to the world than they used to be; and the currents of its opinion
reach them in ever increasing volume. As few of them have peaceful
political traditions of their own to guide or inspire them--when they
invoke the past, it is the exploits of revolutionary heroes that are
recalled--they must needs look to the thought and practice of the
older nations for principles and precedents in the art of government;
so whatever brings them into intellectual touch with Europe and North
America is helpful. Already one discovers an increasing number of men
who perceive that for their nations the only path upward and forward is
through the creation of a spirit of self-control and a higher sense of
civic duty.
To understand these countries, one must think of them as having, under
the rule of the Spanish Crown and of the Church, dropped two centuries
behind the general march of civilized mankind. When they were finally
liberated in 1825, they were practically still in the seventeenth,
while Europe and the United States were in the nineteenth, century,
with the additional disadvantages of a large aboriginal population, a
thinly peopled land, fifteen years of bloodshed and disorder, such as
Europe had not seen for nigh three hundred years, and no preëxisting
constitutional forms or usages. A few of them, favoured by physical or
by racial conditions, have already overcome these difficulties. Their
example will tell upon and encourage the rest.
In the middle of last century, when European Liberals, disappointed
at the failure of their earlier hopes, had begun to pass a severe
judgment on the peoples of these republics because freedom had not made
them at once virtuous, happy, and prosperous, were not those Liberals
themselves misled by their own too sanguine temper? Had they not too
implicit a faith in the power of liberty? They ascribed all the faults
of existing governments to the monarchies or oligarchies of the past
and did not understand, having little experience of popular rule, how
many faults in governments have been, and will continue to be, due not
to their form, but to human nature itself. Since 1859, power has in
many countries passed from the hands of the few into the hands of the
many, but no millennium of virtue and peace has yet followed. There
is still bitterness and discontent, there are still complaints that
the law is not fair between classes, still a distrust of legislative
bodies, still demands for an extension of direct popular control over
the whole machinery of administration and, in North America, even over
the judiciary. No sensible man proposes to go back to the absolutism
and repression of the older time; but every sensible man feels that the
problems of government are far more difficult than our grandfathers
had perceived, and that men have still much to learn from a fuller
experience. These things being so, ought not the judgment passed on the
Spanish Americans to be more lenient? Their difficulties were greater
than any European people had to face, and there is no need to be
despondent for their future.