be founded. Another chair in arts was established in 1586, and further
chairs in law and grammar were added at the beginning of the sixteenth
century. The Spanish Crown was very much interested in Mexican
education, and King Philip II of Spain, who is usually mentioned in
English history for quite {327} other qualities than his interest in
culture and education, was especially liberal in his provision from
the Crown revenues of funds for the university. At the beginning of
the seventeenth century, according to Flores in his "History of
Medicine in Mexico from the Indian Times Down to the Present," the
total amount of income from the Crown allowed the University of Mexico
was nearly $10,000. This was about Shakespeare's time, and so we have
readily available calculations as to the buying power of money at that
time compared to our own. It is usually said that the money of
Elizabeth's time had eight to ten times the trading value of ours.
This would mean that the University of Mexico had nearly an income of
$100,000 apart from fees and other sources of revenue. This would not
be considered contemptible even in our own day for a university having
less than twenty professorships.
The number of students at the University of Mexico is not absolutely
known, but, as we have seen, Professor Bourne calculates that the
University of Lima had at the beginning of the eighteenth century more
than 2,000 students. The University of Mexico at the same time
probably had more than 1,000 students, and both of these universities
were larger in number than any institution of learning within the
boundaries of the present United States until after the middle of the
nineteenth century. After all, we began to have universities in the
real sense of {328} that word--that is, educational institutions
giving opportunities in undergraduate work and the graduate
departments of law, medicine and theology--not until nearly the end of
the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Our medical and law
schools did not, as a rule, become attached to our universities until
the second half of the nineteenth century, and even late in that. This
was to the serious detriment of post-graduate work, and especially
detrimental to the preliminary training required for it, and
consequently to the products of these schools.
Before a student could enter one of the post-graduate departments at
the University of Mexico in law or medicine, he was required to have
made at least three years of studies in the undergraduate departments.
When we contrast this regulation with the custom in the United States,
the result is a little startling. Until the last quarter of the
nineteenth century students might enter our medical schools straight
from the plow or the smithy or the mechanic's bench, and without any
preliminary education, after two terms of medical lectures consisting
of four months each, be given a degree which was a license to practise
medicine. The abuses of such a system are manifest, and actually came
into existence. They were not permitted in Mexico even in the
seventeenth century.
It might perhaps be thought that these magnificent opportunities in
education were provided {329} only for the higher classes, or
concerned only book learning and the liberal and professional studies.
Far from any such exclusiveness as this, their schools were thoroughly
rounded and gave instruction in the arts and crafts and recognized the
value of manual training. We have only come to appreciate in the last
few decades how much we have lost in education in America by
neglecting these features of education for the masses. While Germany
has manual training for over fifty per cent. of the children who go to
her schools, here in the United States we provide it for something
less than one per cent, of our children. They made no such mistake as
this in the Spanish-American countries. Indeed, Professor Bourne's
paragraph on this subject is perhaps the most interesting feature of
what he has to say with regard to education in Spanish America. The
objective methods of education, as he depicts them, the thoroughly
practical content of education, and the fact that the Church was one
of the main factors in bringing about this well-rounded education, is
of itself a startling commentary on the curiously perverted notions
that have been held in the past with regard to the comparative value
of education in Spanish and in English America and the attitude of the
Church toward these educational questions:
"Both the Crown and the Church were solicitous for education in the
colonies, and provisions were made for its promotion on a far
greater {330} scale than was possible or even attempted in the
English colonies. The early Franciscan missionaries built a school
beside each church, and in their teaching abundant use was made of
signs, drawings and paintings. The native languages were reduced to
writing, and in a few years Indians were learning to read and write.
Pedro de Gante, a Flemish lay brother and a relative of Charles V,
founded and conducted in the Indian quarter in Mexico a great
school, attended by over a thousand Indian boys, which combined
instruction in elementary and higher branches, the mechanical and
fine arts. In its workshops the boys were taught to be tailors,
carpenters, blacksmiths, shoemakers and painters."
If there was all this of progress in education in Spanish-American
countries in advance of what we had in the United States, people will
be prone to ask where, then, are the products of the Spanish-American
education? This is only a fair question, and if the products cannot be
shown, their education, however pretentious, must have been merely
superficial or hollow, and must have meant nothing for the culture of
their people. We are sure that most people would consider the question
itself quite sufficient for argument, for it would be supposed to be
unanswerable.
Such has been the state of mind created by history as it is written
for English-speaking people, that we are not at all prepared to think
that there {331} can possibly be in existence certain great products
of Spanish-American education that show very clearly how much better
educational systems were developed in Spanish than in English America.
The fact that we do not know them, however, is only another evidence
of the one-sidedness of American education in the North, even at the
present time. Our whole attitude toward the South American people, our
complacent self-sufficiency from which we look down on them, our
thoroughgoing condescension for their ignorance and backwardness, is
all founded on our lack of real knowledge with regard to them.
The most striking product of South American education was the
architectural structures which the Spanish-American people erected as
ornaments of their towns, memorials of their culture and evidences of
their education. The cathedrals in the Spanish towns of South America
and Mexico are structures, as a rule, fairly comparable with the
ecclesiastical buildings erected by towns of the same size in Europe.
As a rule, they were planned at least in the sixteenth century, and
most of them were finished in the seventeenth century. Their
cathedrals are handsome architectural structures worthy of their faith
and enduring evidence of their taste and love of beauty. The
ecclesiastical buildings, the houses of their bishops and archbishops
and their monasteries were worthy of their cathedrals and churches.
Most of them are beautiful, all of them are dignified, all of them had
{332} a permanent character that has made them endure down to our day
and has made them an unfailing ornament of the towns in which they
are. Their municipal buildings partook of this same type. Some of them
are very handsome structures. Of their universities we have already
heard that they were imposing buildings from without, handsomely
decorated within.
It must not be forgotten that the Spanish Americans practically
invented the new style of architecture. How effective that style is,
we had abundant opportunity to see when it was employed for the
building of the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo. That style is
essentially American. It is the only new thing that America has
contributed to construction since its settlement. How thoroughly
suitable it was for the climate for which it was invented, those who
have had experience of it in the new hotels erected in Florida, in the
last decade or so, can judge very well. Many of its effects are an
adaptation of classical formulae to buildings for the warm, yet
uncertain climate of many parts of South America. Some of the old
monasteries constructed after this style are beautiful examples of
architecture in every sense of the word. If the Spanish-American monks
had done nothing else but leave us this handsome new model in
architecture they would not have lived in vain, nor would their
influence in American life have been without its enduring effects.
This is a typical {333} product of the higher culture of the South
Spanish-American people.
With regard to the churches, it may be said that the spirit of the
Puritans was entirely opposed to anything like the ornamentation of
their churches, and that, indeed, these were not churches in the usual
sense of the word, but were merely meeting houses. Hence there was not
the same impulse to make them beautiful as lifted the Spanish
Americans into their magnificent expressions of architectural beauty.
On the other hand, there are other buildings in regard to which, if
there had been any real culture in the minds of the English Americans,
we have a right to expect some beauty as well as usefulness. If we
contrast for a moment the hospitals of English and Spanish America the
difference is so striking as to show the lack of some important
quality in the minds of the builders at the north. Spanish-American
hospitals are among the beautiful structures with which they began to
adorn their towns early, and some of them remain at the present day as
examples of the architectural taste of their builders. They were
usually low, often of but one story in height, with a courtyard and
with ample porticos for convalescents, and thick walls to defend them
from the heat of the climate. In many features they surpass many
hospitals that have been built in America until very recent years.
They were modelled on the old mediaeval hospitals, some of which are
very beautiful {334} examples of how to build places for the care of
the ailing.
Contrast for a moment with this the state of affairs that has existed
with regard to our church buildings and our public structures of all
kinds in North America, down to the latter half of the nineteenth
century. We have no buildings dating from before the nineteenth
century that have any pretension to architectural beauty. They were
built merely for utility. Some of them still have an interest for us
because of historical associations, but they are a standing evidence
of the lack of taste of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors. The English poet,
Yeats, said at a little dinner given to him just before he left this
country ten years ago, that no nation can pretend to being cultured
until the very utensils in the kitchen are beautiful as well as
useful. What is to be said, then, of a nation that erects public
buildings that are to be merely useful? As a matter of fact, most of
them were barracks. The American people woke up somewhat in the
nineteenth century, but the awakening was very slow. A few handsome
structures were erected, but it is not until the last decade or two
that we have been able to awaken public taste to the necessity for
having all our public buildings beautiful as well as useful.
The effect of this taste for structural beauty on the appearance of
the streets of their towns was an important element in making them
very different from our cramped and narrow pathways. {335} The late
Mr. Ernest Crosby once expressed this very emphatically in an
after-dinner speech, by detailing his experience with regard to
Havana. He had visited the Cuban capital some twenty years ago, and
found it very picturesque in its old Spanish ways. It is true the
streets were dirty and the death-rate was somewhat high, but the vista
that you saw when you came around the corner of a street, was not the
same that you had seen around every other corner for twenty miles; it
was different. It was largely a city of homes, with some thought of
life being made happy, rather than merely being laborious. It was a
place to live in and enjoy life while it lasted, and not merely a
place to exist in and make money. He came north by land. The first
town that he struck on the mainland, he said, reminded him of Hoboken.
Every other town that he struck in the North reminded him more and
more of Hoboken, until he came to the immortal Hoboken itself. The
American end of the Anglo-Saxon idea seemed to him to make all the
towns like Hoboken as far as possible. There is only one town in this
country that is not like Hoboken, and that is Washington; and whenever
we let the politicians work their wills on that--witness the Pension
Building--it has a tendency to grow more and more like Hoboken.
Perhaps we shall be able to save it. As for Havana, he said he
understood that the death-rate had been cut in two, and that yellow
fever was no longer {336} epidemic there, but he understood also that
the town was growing more and more like Hoboken, so that he scarcely
dared go back to see it.
The parable has a lesson that is well worth driving home for our
people, for it emphasizes a notable lack of culture among the American
people, which did not exist among the Spanish Americans, a lack which
we did not realize until the last decade or two, though it is an
important index of true culture. The hideous buildings that we have
allowed ourselves to live in in America, and, above all, that we have
erected as representing the dignity of city, and only too often even
of state, together with the awful evidence of graft, whenever an
attempt has been made to correct this false taste and erect something
worthy of us, the graft usually spoiling to a very great extent our
best purposes, proclaim an absence of culture in American life that
amounts to a conviction of failure of our education to be liberal in
the true sense of the word.
There were other products of Spanish-American education quite as
striking as the architectural beauties with which Mexicans and South
Americans adorned their towns. Quite as interesting, indeed, as their
architecture is their literature. Ordinarily we are apt to assume that
because we have heard almost nothing of Spanish-American literature,
there must be very little of it, and what little there is must have
very little significance. This is only another one of these examples
{337} of how ridiculous it is to know something "that ain't so."
Spanish-American literature is very rich. It begins very early in the
history of the Spanish settlement. It is especially noteworthy for its
serious products, and when the world's account of the enduring
literature of the past four centuries will be made up much more of
what was written in South America will live than what has been
produced in North America. This seems quite unpatriotic, but it is
only an expression of proper estimation of values, without any of that
amusing self-complacency which so commonly characterizes North
American estimation of anything that is done by our people.
South American literature, in the best sense of that much abused term,
begins shortly after the middle of the sixteenth century, with the
writing of the Spanish poet, Ercilla's, epic, "Araucana," which was
composed in South America during the decade from 1550 to 1560. This is
a literary work of genuine merit, that has attracted the attention of
critics and scholars of all kinds and has given its author a
significant place even in the limited field of epic poetry among the
few great names that the world cares to recall in this literary mode.
Voltaire considered this epic poem a great contribution to literature,
and in the prefatorial essay to his own epic, the "Henriade," he
praises it very highly. The poem takes its name from the Araucanos
Indians, who had risen in revolt against the Spaniards in Chile, and
{338} against whom the poet served for nearly ten years. He did not
learn to despise them, and while the literature which does justice to
the lofty sentiments which sometimes flowed from mouths of great
Indian chiefs, is supposed to be much more recent, Ercilla's most
enthusiastically extolled passage is the noble speech which he has
given to the aged chief, Colocolo, in the "Araucana."
The expedition against the Araucanos inspired two other fine
poems--that of Pedro de Ona, "Arauco Domado," written near the end of
the century, and "Araucana," written by Diego de Santisteban, whose
poem also saw the light before the seventeenth century opened. A
fourth poet, Juan de Castellanos, better than either of these, wrote
"Elegias de Varones Ilustres de Indias." He was a priest who had
served in America, and who remembered some of the magnificent traits
of the Indians that he had observed during his life among them, and
made them the subject of his poetry. This was only the beginning of a
serious Spanish-American literature, that has continued ever since.
Father Charles Warren Currier, in a series of lectures at the Catholic
Summer School three years ago, did not hesitate to say that the body
of Spanish-American literature was much larger and much more
important, and much more of it was destined to endure than of our
English-American literature. In the light of what these Spaniards had
done for education in their universities, and for the beauty of life
in {339} their cities by their architecture, this is not so surprising
a saying as it might otherwise be. All of these things stand together
and are confirmations one of the other.
The most interesting product of Spanish-American education,
however,--the one which shows that it really stood for a higher
civilization than ours,--remains to be spoken of. It consists of their
treatment of the Indians. From the very beginning, as we have just
shown, their literature in Spanish America did justice to the Indians.
They saw his better traits. It is true they had a better class of
Indians, as a rule, to deal with, but there is no doubt also that they
did much to keep him on a higher level, while everything in North
America that was done by the settlers was prone to reduce the native
in the scale of civilization. He was taught the vices and not the
virtues of civilization, and little was attempted to uplift him. Just
as the literary men were interested in the better side of his
character, so the Spanish-American scientists were interested in his
folklore, in his medicine, in his arts and crafts, in his ethnology
and anthropology--in a word, in all that North Americans have only
come to be interested in during the nineteenth century. Books on all
these subjects were published, and now constitute a precious fund of
knowledge with regard to the aborigines that would have been lost only
for the devotion of Spanish-American scholars.
It is not surprising, then, that the Indian {340} himself, with all
this interest in him, did not disappear, as in North America, but has
remained to constitute the basis of South American peoples. If the
South American peoples are behind our own in anything, it is because
large elements in them have been raised from a state of semi-barbarism
into civilization, while our people have all come from nations that
were long civilized and we have none at all of the natives left.
Wherever the English went always the aborigines disappeared before
them. The story is the same in New Zealand and Australia as it is in
North America, and it would be the same in India, only for the teeming
millions that live in that peninsula, for whom Anglo-Saxon
civilization has never meant an uplift in any sense of the word, but
rather the contrary. The white man's burden has been to carry the
Indian, instilling into him all the vices, until no longer he could
cling to his shifty master and was shaken off to destruction.
This story of the contrast of the treatment of the Indian at the North
and the South is probably the best evidence for the real depth of
culture that the magnificent education of the Spaniards, so early and
so thoroughly organized in their colonies, accomplished for this
continent. Alone it would stand as the highest possible evidence of
the interest of the Spanish Government and the Spanish Church in the
organization not only of education, but of government in such a way as
to bring happiness and uplift for {341} both natives and colonists in
the Spanish-American countries. Abuses there were, as there always
will be where men are concerned and where a superior race comes in
contact with an inferior. These abuses, however, were exceptions and
not the rule. The policy instituted by the Spaniards and maintained in
spite of the tendencies of men to degenerate into tyranny and misuse
of the natives is well worthy of admiration. English-speaking history
has known very little of it until comparatively recent years. Mr.
Sidney Lee, the editor of the English Biographical Dictionary and the
author of a series of works on Shakespeare which has gained for him
recognition as probably the best living authority on the history of
the Elizabethan times, wrote a series of articles which appeared in
Scribner's last year on "The Call of the West." This was meant to undo
much of the prejudice which exists in regard to Spanish colonization
in this country and to mitigate the undue reverence in which the
English explorers and colonists have been held by comparison. There
seems every reason to think, then, that this newer, truer view of
history is gradually going to find its way into circulation. In the
meantime it is amusing to look back and realize how much prejudice has
been allowed to warp English history in this matter, and how, as a
consequence of the determined, deliberate efforts to blacken the
Spanish name, we have had to accept as history exactly the opposite
view to the {342} reality in this matter. Lest we should be thought to
be exaggerating, we venture to quote one of the opening paragraphs of
Mr. Sidney Lee's article as it appeared in Scribner's for May, 1907:
"Especially has theological bias justified neglect or facilitated
misconception of Spain's role in the sixteenth century drama of
American history. Spain's initial adventures in the New World are
often consciously or unconsciously overlooked or underrated in order
that she may figure on the stage of history as the benighted champion
of a false and obsolete faith, which was vanquished under divine
protecting Providence by English defenders of the true religion. Many
are the hostile critics who have painted sixteenth century Spain as
the avaricious accumulator of American gold and silver, to which she
had no right, as the monopolist of American trade, of which she robbed
others, and as the oppressor and exterminator of the weak and innocent
aborigines of the new continent who deplored her presence among them.
Cruelty in all its hideous forms is, indeed, commonly set forth as
Spain's only instrument of rule in her sixteenth century empire. On
the other hand, the English adventurer has been credited by the same
pens with a touching humanity, with the purest religious aspirations,
with a romantic courage which was always at the disposal of the
oppressed native.