The zambos have created nothing in America. On the other hand, the robust mestizo populations, the Mamelucos of Brazil, the Cholos of Peru and Bolivia, the Rotos of Chili, descendants of Spaniards and the Guarani Indians, are distinguished by their pride and virility. Instability, apathy, degeneration—all the signs of exhausted race—are encountered far more frequently in the mulatto than in the mestizo.
The European established in America becomes a Creole; his is a new race, the final product of secular unions. He is neither Indian, nor black, nor Spaniard. The castes are confounded and have formed an American stock, in which we may distinguish the psychological traits of the Indian and the negro, while the shades of skin and forms of skull reveal a remote intermixture. If all the races of the New World were finally to unite, the Creole would be the real American.
He is idle and brilliant. There is nothing excessive either in his ideals or his passions; all is mediocre, measured, harmonious. His fine and caustic irony chills his more exuberant enthusiasms; he triumphs by means of laughter. He loves grace, verbal elegance, quibbles even, and artistic form; great passions or desires do not move him. In religion he is sceptical, indifferent, and in politics he disputes in the Byzantine manner. No one could discover in him a trace of his Spanish forefather, stoical and adventurous.
But is unity possible with such numerous castes? Must we not wait for the work of many centuries before a clearly American population be formed? The admixture of Indian, European, mestizo, and mulatto blood continues. How form a homogeneous race of these varieties? There will be a period of painful unrest: American revolutions reveal the disequilibrium of men and races. Miscegenation often produces types devoid of all proportion, either physical or moral.
The resistance of neo-Americans to fatigue and disease is considerably diminished. In the seething retort of the future the elements of a novel synthesis combine and grow yet more complex. If the castes remain divided there will be no unity possible to oppose a probable invasion. "Three conditions are necessary," says M. Gustave Le Bon, "before races can achieve fusion and form a new race, more or less homogeneous. The first of these conditions is that the races subjected to the process of crossing must not be too inequal in number; the second, that they must not differ too greatly in character; the third, that they must be for a long time subjected to an identical environment."
Examining the mixed peoples of America in conformity with these principles we see that the Indian and the negro are greatly superior to the whites in numbers; the pure European element does not amount to 10 per cent. of the total population. In Brazil and the Argentine there are numbers of German and Italian immigrants, but in other countries the necessary stream of invasion of superior races does not exist.
We have indicated the profound differences which divide the bold Spaniard from the negro slave; we have said that the servility of the Indian race contrasts with the pride of the conquerors; that is to say, that the mixture of rival castes, Iberians, Indians, and negroes, has generally had disastrous consequences. Perhaps we may except the fortunate combinations of mestizo blood in Chili, Southern Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. Finally, the territory has not yet exercised a decisive influence upon the races in contact. The modern Frenchman and Anglo-Saxon are born of the admixture of ancient races subjected for centuries to the influences of the soil. The great invasions which modified the traditional stock took place a thousand years ago; they explain the terrible struggles of the Middle Ages. The new American type has not so long a history.
In short, none of the conditions established by the French psychologists are realised by the Latin-American democracies, and their populations are therefore degenerate.
The lower castes struggle successfully against the traditional rules: the order which formerly existed is followed by moral anarchy; solid conviction by a superficial scepticism, and the Castilian tenacity by indecision. The black race is doing its work and the continent is returning to its primitive barbarism.
This retrogression constitutes a very serious menace. In South America civilisation is dependent upon the numerical predominance of the victorious Spaniard, on the triumph of the white man over the mulatto, the negro, and the Indian. Only a plentiful European immigration can re-establish the shattered equilibrium of the American races. In the Argentine the cosmopolitan alluvium has destroyed the negro and mitigated the Indian. A century ago there were 20 per cent. of Africans in Buenos-Ayres; the ancient slave has now disappeared, and mulattos are rare. In Mexico, on the other hand, in 1810 the Europeans formed a sixth part of the population; to-day they do not form more than a twentieth part.
Dr. Karl Pearson, in his celebrated book National Life and Character, writes: "In the long run the inferior civilisations give proof of a vigour greater than that of the superior civilisations; the disinherited gain upon the privileged castes, and the conquered people absorbs the conquering people." He declared further that Brazil would quickly fall into the power of the negroes, and that while the Indians would multiply and develop in the inaccessible regions of the north and the centre, the white peoples, crowded out by the progress of these races, would be numerous only in the cities and the more salubrious districts. This painful prophecy will be accomplished to the letter if, in the conflict of castes, the white population is not promptly reinforced by the arrival of new colonists.
But crossing alone will not communicate the superior characteristics of the race to the mestizo in a lasting manner. "It is necessary that he should be the fruit of a union of the third, fourth, or fifth degree; that is, that there should have been as many successive crossings, with a father or a mother of the white race, before the mestizo can be in a condition to assimilate European culture," writes an Argentine sociologist. For this vast process of selection to be realised to the profit of the white man not only must the races subjected to admixture exist in certain proportions, but the mass of Europeans must prevail and impose their temper upon the future castes. In short, the problem of race depends upon the solution given to the demographic problem. Without the help of a new population there will be in America not merely a lamentable exhaustion but also a prompt recoil of the race. The phrase of Alberdi is still true: "In America to govern means to populate."
The colonists brought with them the traditions and manners of the disciplined races, a moral organisation which was the work of centuries of common life. People of rural extraction, when they reached America, upheld the established interests, the government, the law, and the peace; they worked, fought, and laid up treasure. Moreover, only the most enterprising of men emigrated, and they transmitted to the new democracies an element of vitality they had not before known. As early as the second generation the descendants of the foreign colonists were already Argentines, Brazilians, or Peruvians; their patriotism was as ardent and devoted and exclusive as that of their fathers. They completely adopted the local manners. They had been transformed by the action of the American environment.
Basques or Italians have already transformed the Argentine. They arrive as artisans, or labourers, or clerks and traders; they form agricultural colonies and become landowners. They soon break their fetters; their sons become merchants, financial agents, or wealthy plutocrats. Of 1,000 inhabitants there are 128 Italians and only 99 Argentines who own land. These Latins are prolific; in 1904 1,000 Argentine women gave life to 80 infants; 1,000 Spanish women to 123, and 1,000 Italian women to 175.[3] These immigrants thus increase the national wealth and people the desert.[4] Moreover, their descendants figure in politics and letters. Let us mention only a few Argentine names remarkable on one count or another: Groussac, Magnasco, Becher, Bunge, Ingegnieros, Chiappori, Banchs, and Gerchunoff.
[1] The Indianista Society in Mexico and the Pro Indigena in Peru were founded for the protection and rehabilitation of the Indians.
[2] The Bolivian sociologist, A. Argüedas, writes of the Aymara Indians: "They are hard, rancorous, egotistic, and cruel. The Indian herdsmen have no ambition other than to increase the number of the heads of cattle which they pasture."
[3] V. Gonnard, L'Emigration européenne au XIXe siècle, Paris, 1906, p. 220 et seq.
[4] To understand the significance of immigration, it is enough to remark that there are in Mexico 7 inhabitants per square kilometre, in Brazil 1.7, in the Argentine 1.6, while there are 72 in France, 105 in Germany, no in Italy, 120 in England, and 248 in Belgium.
CHAPTER III
THE POLITICAL PROBLEM
The caudillos: their action—Revolutions—Divorce between written Constitutions and political life—The future parties—The bureaucracy.
The development of the Ibero-American democracies differs considerably from the admirable spirit of their political charters. The latter include all the principles of government applied by the great European nations: the equilibrium of powers, natural rights, a liberal suffrage, and representative assemblies, but the reality contradicts the idealism of the statutes imported from Europe. The traditions of the prevailing race, in fact, have created simple and barbarous systems of government. The caudillo is the pivot of this political system: leader of a party, of a social group, or a family whose important relations make it powerful, he enforces his tyrannical will upon the multitude. In him resides the power of government and the law. On his permanent action depends the internal order of the State, its economic development, and the national organisation. His authority is inviolable, superior to the Constitution and its laws.
All the history of America, and the inheritance of the Spaniard and the Indian, has ended in the exaltation of the caudillo. Government by caciques, absolute masters, like the caudillos themselves, is very ancient in Spain, as was shown by Joaquin Costa in his analysis of the foundations of Spanish politics. In each province, in each city, was a central personage in whom justice and might were incarnated; admired by the crowd, obeyed by opinion, enforcing his manners and his ideas. The American Indians obeyed caciques, and the first conquerors quickly saw that by winning over the local chiefs they would at the same time subject the native populations. The existence of the caudillos may also be explained by territorial influences. It has been written that the desert is monotheistic; over its arid uniformity one imposing God reigns supreme. It is the same with the steppes, the pampas, and the table-lands of America; vast and monotonous tracts; Paez and Quiroga were divinities of such regions. No other force could limit their authority. Contrasted with the uniform level of mankind which is the work of the plains, their firm chieftainship assumed divine attributes. American revolutions are like the Moorish wars directed by mystic Kaids.
Señor Raphael Salillas writes that in Spain the cacique is a hypertrophy of the political personage; he symbolises the excess of power and of the ambition of Spanish individualism. In America the first conquistadors quarrelled for the supreme authority. The civil wars of the Conquest arose from conflicts between chiefs; none of them could conceive of power as real unless it was unlimited and despotic. After them the all-powerful viceroy, a demi-god in his powers, exercised a similar domination. The South American President, the heir to the traditions of the governors of the colonial epoch, also possesses the maximum of authority; the Constitution confers upon him powers like those of the Czars of Russia.
Power for its own sake is the ideal of such men. The less important chieftains are satisfied by the government of a province; the great leader aspires to rule a republic. Questions of personality are the prevailing characteristics of politics; and despotic rulers abound. When a "Regenerator" usurps the supreme power a "Restorer" appears to dispute it with him; then a "Liberator," and finally a "Defender of the Constitution." The lesser gods fight to their hearts' content, and the democracy accepts the victor, in whom it admires the representative leader, the robust creation of the race. Such a man is not like the character of Ibsen's, who is strong in his isolation; in the caudillo the average characteristics of the nation, its vices and its qualities, are better defined and more strongly accentuated; he obeys his instincts and certain fixed ideas; he conceives of no ideals; he is impressionable and fanatical.
Señor Ayarragarray distinguishes two varieties of caudillo; the cunning and the violent. The latter was above all peculiar to the military period of Ibero-American history. The leader of a band that ravaged like the Huns, he ruled by terror and audacity, enforcing the discipline of the barracks in civil life. The caudillo of the cunning type exercised a more prolonged moral dictatorship; he belongs to a period of transition between the military period and the industrial period. This new master retained the supreme power by lies and subterfuges. A half-civilised tyrant, he used wealth as others used force, and instead of brutally thrusting himself on the people he employed a system of tortuous corruption.
The rule of the caudillos led to presidential government. The Constitutions established assemblies; but tradition triumphed in spite of these theoretical structures. Since the colonial period centralisation and unity have been the American forms of government.
In the person of the President of these democracies resides all the authority which usually devolves upon the public functionaries. He commands the army, multiplies the wheels of administration, and surrounds himself with doctors of law and Prætorian soldiers. The Assemblies obey him; he intervenes in the course of elections, and obtains the Parliamentary majorities that he requires. The upper magistracy is sometimes indocile to the desires of the Government, but in the life of the provinces the judges depend absolutely upon the political leaders. The supreme direction of the finances, the army, the fleet, and the administration in general rests with the President, as before the republican era it belonged to the viceroy.
The parties fight among themselves, not only for power, but to obtain this omnipotent presidency. They realise that the chief of the Executive is the effective agent of all political changes; that ministers and parliaments are only secondary factors in political life. An Argentine sociologist, Señor Joaquin Gonzalez, has said very justly that "each governmental period is characterised by the condition and the worth of the man who presides over it. This presidential system, in default of a solid and elevated political education, has in great measure favoured the return to the personal régime."
To this system correspond the political groups without programmes; men do not struggle for the triumph of ideas, but for that of certain individuals. The consecrated terms lose their traditional meaning. There are civilists who uphold militarism; liberals who strive to increase the presidential authority; nationalists who favour cosmopolitanism; constitutionalists who violate the political charter. The personal system groups conservatives and liberals together. Even in Chili, where the activity of the parties has been unusually continuous, the older parties have split up into shapeless factions. The President establishes his despotic authority over the confusion of these rival groups; he tries to dissolve the small factions, to divide them, in order to rule them.
Without ideals or unity of action the parties are transformed into greedy cliques, which are distinguished by the colour of their favours. As in Byzantium, so in Venezuela, the Blues struggle against the Yellows, while in Uruguay the Whites oppose the Reds, red being the distinctive colour of the Argentine federalists. An aggressive intolerance divides these groups; they gather round their gonfaloniere and their party symbol in irreducible factions. No common interest can reconcile them, not even that of their native country. Each party supports a leader, an interest, a dogma; on the one side a man beholds his own party, the missionaries of truth and culture; the other are his enemies, mercenary and corrupt. Each group believes that it seeks to retain the supremacy in the name of disinterested virtue and patriotism. Rosas used to call his opponents "infamous savages." For the gang in possession of power, the revolutionaries are malefactors; for the latter the ruling party are merely a government of thieves and tyrants. There are gods of good and evil, as in the Oriental theogonies. Educated in the Roman Church, Americans bring into politics the absolutism of religious dogmas; they have no conception of toleration. The dominant party prefers to annihilate its adversaries, to realise the complete unanimity of the nation; the hatred of one's opponents is the first duty of the prominent politician. The opposition can hardly pretend to fill a place of influence in the assemblies, or slowly to acquire power. It is only by violence that the parties can emerge from the condition of ostracism in which they are held by the faction in power, and it is by violence that they return to that condition. Apart from the rule of the caudillos the political lie is triumphant; the freedom of the suffrage is only a platonic promise inscribed in the Constitution; the elections are the work of the Government; there is no public opinion. Journalism, almost always opportunist, merely reflects the indecision of the parties. Political statutes and social conditions contradict each other; the former proclaim equality, and there are many races; there is universal suffrage, and the races are illiterate; liberty and despotic rulers enforce an arbitrary power. By means of the prefects and governors the President directs the elections, supports this or that candidate, and even chooses his successor. He is the supreme elector.
The representative assemblies become veritable bureaucratic institutions; deputies and senators accept the orders of the President. According to Señor L. A. de Herrera, two castes are in process of formation, "on the one hand the oligarchies, which possess the supreme power in defiance of the public will, and on the other the citizens, who are deprived of all participation in the government." Frequent revolutions and pronunciamentos, according to Spanish tradition, disturb the ruling class in the exercise of power; these superficial movements cannot be compared to the great crises of European history, which result in the disappearance of a political system or bring about the advent of a new social class. They are merely the result of the perpetual conflict between the caudillos; the leaders and the oligarchies change, but the system, with its secular vices, remains.
The South American revolutions may be regarded as a necessary form of political activity: in Venezuela fifty-two important revolts have broken out within a century. The victorious party tries to destroy the other groups; revolution thus represents a political weapon to those parties which are deprived of the suffrage. It corresponds to the protests of European minorities, to the anarchical strikes of the proletariat, to the great public meetings of England, in which the opposing parties attack the Government. It is to the excessive simplicity of the political system, in which opinion has no other means of expression than the tyranny of oligarchies on the one hand and the rebellion of the vanquished on the other, that the interminable and sanguinary conflicts of Spanish America are due. These internal wars continually retard the economic development of the State and decrease its stability; they ruin the foreign credit of the republics, prepare the way for humiliating interventions, and give rise to tyrannies; but it must not be forgotten that revolution, in these democracies without law and without real suffrage, has often been the only means of defending liberty. Against the tyrants even conservative spirits have revolted, and rebellion has become reaction.
For the rest, the civil wars have lost their former character. They used to symbolise the return to primeval chaos; vagabond multitudes, armed bands, desolated the fields and burned the towns. Assassination, theft, the devastation of property and estates, war without mercy, fire, and all the powers of destruction were in revolt against the feeble foundations of nationality.
As by the inverse selection of the Spanish Inquisition, the most intelligent and the most cultivated perished. Brutal horsemen occupied the cities in which Spanish civilisation had attained its apogee. Sarmiento has described the assault on the nomad wagons which bore the national penates across the Argentine pampas in a sort of Tartar Odyssey amid the infinite desolation of the plains. Even when the social classes were organised and the economic interests defined the rivality of the leaders continued, and politics remained personal. However, civil war is already no longer the brutal onset of men with neither law nor faith, no longer an irruption of outlaws. The drama has replaced the epic; the conflict of passions and interests succeeds to the battles of semi-divine personages, proud of their tragic mission. Men buy votes; electoral committees falsify the suffrage, as in the United States, by force of money.
Thus the plutocracy conquers the benches of Congress.
If the continent spontaneously creates dictators then is all the ambitious structure of American politics—parliaments, ministers, and municipalities—merely a delusive invention?
In some States in which the economic life is intense, as in the Argentine, Chili, Brazil, and Uruguay, benevolent despotism does not mark the high-water limit of national development; there new parties are forming themselves, and the caudillos will soon disappear. Dr. Ingegnieros foresees the creation in the Argentine of new political groups, with financial tendencies. The rural class which rules in the provinces and possesses the great mass of the national wealth, which is derived from stock-raising and agriculture, and the commercial and industrial middle-class of the cities, will form, like the Tories and Whigs in England, the two parties of the future. Once the secondary parties have disappeared, the two great political organisations will prevail alone.
This transformation of the old groups is logical. In the colonial period the conflict for the possession of power took place within the narrow limits of public life; the Spaniards were in the majority in the audiencas, the courts, and the Creoles in the cabildos, the municipalities. The former upheld religious intolerance, economic monopoly, and the exclusive and universal empire of the metropolis; the latter endeavoured to obtain economic and political equality, the abolition of privileges, and a national government. After the revolution these divisions grew more complex; federalism and unity, religious quarrels, and sometimes the mutual hostility of the different castes, divided men into shifting groups. Politics became the warfare of irreducible clans. In the organised nations of the south the dissensions gradually lost their importance, and a general indifference succeeded to the old theological hatreds. Federals and municipalists were still fighting, but the original bitterness of their antagonism was dead. On the other hand, the castes were progressively becoming confounded by intermarriage.
However, the economic factors persisted, and their importance has increased as towns and industries have developed. Financial questions will in future divide the citizens of those democracies which have become plainly industrial; the agrarians will oppose the manufacturers and the free-traders the protectionists. Like the republicans and democrats of the United States, certain groups will favour imperialism and others neutrality. The group which would stimulate Yankee or German influence will be opposed by another, the partisan of Italian or French activity.
Already in Cuba there are some who favour annexation by the United States, while others demand complete autonomy. Some politicians would agree to immigration without reserve or restriction, while others, the nationalists, would defend the integrity of their inheritance against foreign invasion. America, like modern France, will have its métèques; they will be the Europeans, the Yankees, and the yellow races.
Apart from the southern nations there has as yet been no formation of classes or social interests. None of the problems which agitate Europe—extension of the suffrage, proportional representation, municipal autonomy—have any immediate importance among them. The State is the necessary guardian, a kind of social providence whence derive riches, strength, and progress. To weaken this influence would be to encourage internal disorder; only those Constitutions have been of use in America which have reinforced the central power against the attacks of a perpetual anarchy.
The progress of these democracies is the work of foreign capital, and when political anarchy prevails credit collapses. Governments which ensure peace and paternal tyrants are therefore preferable to demagogues. A young Venezuelan critic, Señor Machado Hernandez, having studied the history of his country, rent as it has been by revolutions, considers that the best form of government for America is that which reinforces the attributions of the executive and establishes a dictatorship. In place of the Swiss referendum and the federal organisation of the United States autocracy is, it seems to us, the only practical practical means of government.
To increase the duration of the presidency in order to avoid the too frequent conflicts of parties; to simplify the political machine, which transforms the increasingly numerous parliaments into mere bureaucratic institutions; to prolong the mandate of senators and deputies, so that the life of the people shall not be disturbed by continual elections; in short, to surrender the ingenuous dogmas of the political statutes in favour of concrete reforms: such would appear to be the ideal which in Tropical America—in Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia—would arrest the destructive action of revolutions.
It is obvious that a president furnished with a strong authority may quickly become a tyrant, but in these nations is not political power always a semi-dictatorship which is tolerated? The head of the State governs for four years according to the term of the Constitution, but his action is continued by his successor. The real duration of his political action is twenty years.
If a tutelary president is necessary it is none the less essential to oppose his autocracy by a moderative power which would recall, in its constitution, the life-Senate of Bolivar. One may even conceive of a Senate which would represent the real national interests: a stable body, the union of all the forces of social conservation; a serene assembly untroubled by democratic cravings, in which the clergy, the universities, commerce, the industries, the army, the marine, and the judiciary, might defend the Constitution and tradition against the assaults of demagogy, against too audacious reformers. Garcia-Moreno wished to see the mandate of the senators extended to a term of twelve years.
The quality of the legislative chambers is ineffective in America. In fact, both being elected by the popular vote, and having like electoral majorities, the Lower Chamber always gets its way with the Senate, which represents neither interests nor traditions. There is in reality one uniform assembly artificially divided into two independent bodies. The whole is dominated, there being no conservative institutions as a useful corrective, by the anonymous or Jacobin will of the multitude, which is moved by all sorts of divided interests: the craving for power, provincial pride, and a passion for cabal and intrigue.
A factor of American politics which is as serious as the periodical revolutions is the development of the bureaucracy.
In the still simple life of the nation the organs of the public administration are complicated in the most exaggerated manner. The budget supports a sterile class recruited principally among the Creoles, who prefer the security of officialism to the conquest of the soil. Energy and hope diminish with the almost infinite increase of the "budgetivores."
Foreigners monopolise trade and industry, and thus acquire property in the soil which has been inherited by a race of Americans without energy.
A North American observer[1] writes that the great fortunes of the Argentines of American extraction have been made by the ever-increasing value of real estate, and are due to the natural development of the country rather than to their own initiative or enterprise. But the South Americans are on the way to waste these fortunes, and the fortunate colonists from Spain and Italy are gradually replacing them in the social hierarchy.
According to a Mexican statesman, Señor Justo Sierra, the government in South America is an administration of employés, protected by other employés, the army. These nations, which are being invaded by active immigrants, are thus directed by a group of mandarins, and if the young men of these countries are not encouraged in commercial and industrial vocations by a practical education the enriched colonists will expel the Creole from his ancient position. A few writers defend the bureaucracy as the refuge, in the face of the cosmopolitan invasion, of the choice spirits of the nation: writers, artists, and politicians. "If foreigners dispose of the material fortune of the country," says a distinguished young observer, Señor Manuel Galvez, "it is just that we others, Argentines, should dispose of its intellectual fortune." A noble idealism, satisfied by an unreal wealth! But from the point of view of the national life this lack of equilibrium is disturbing. In face of the progress of the victorious foreigners who are making themselves masters of the soil, to shut oneself up in a tower of ivory would be the most complete of renunciations.
In the organisation of the America of the future we must not forget the suggestions of Caliban. Among the innumerable bureaucrats who devour the budgets there will not always be writers worthy of official protection; they will rather be recruited among an indolent youth, restive under any sustained effort.
The encouragement of "choice spirits" must not be confounded with the unjustifiable maintenance of a legion of parasites. The caudillo multiplies functions in order to reward his friends; nepotism prevails in the world of politics.
The great political transformations of the future will be due to the development of the common wealth; new parties will appear and the bureaucracy will have to be considerably diminished.
[1] Cited by J. V. Gonzalez in La Nación, Buenos-Ayres, May 25, 1910.
CHAPTER IV
THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM
Loans—Budgets—Paper money—The formation of national capital.
Unexploited wealth abounds in America. Forests of rubber, as in the African Congo; mines of gold and diamonds, which recall the treasures of the Transvaal and the Klondyke; rivers which flow over beds of auriferous sand, like the Pactolus of ancient legend; coffee, cocoa, and wheat, whose abundance is such that these products are enough to glut the markets of the world. But there is no national capital. This contrast between the wealth of the soil and the poverty of the State gives rise to serious economic problems.
By means of long-sustained efforts, an active race would have won financial independence. The Latin-Americans, idle, and accustomed to leave everything to the initiative of the State, have been unable to effect the conquest of the soil, and it is foreign capital that exploits the treasure of America.
Since the very beginnings of independence the Latin democracies, lacking financial reserves, have had need of European gold. The government of Spain used to seize upon the wealth of her colonies to satisfy the needs of a prodigal court, and to prevent its own bankruptcy. The independence of America was won with the aid of English money, hence the first of the necessary loans. Canning encouraged the South American revolutionaries, and the English bankers gave their support to their plans, in the shape of loans to the new governments. Colombian, Argentine, and Peruvian agents solicited heavy loans in the City of London, without which assistance the Spanish power could never have been defeated.
The republican régime thus commenced its career by assuming imperious financial responsibilities. Before commencing to practise a policy of fiscal economy, it was necessary to accept the conclusion of the most urgent loans, but once the European markets were open the financial orgy commenced. In 1820 Señor Zea concluded the first Colombian loan; in 1821 the government of that country declared that it could not ensure the service of the debt. The necessities of the war with Spain and the always difficult task of building up a new society demanded the assistance of foreign gold; loans accumulated, and very soon various States were obliged to solicit the simultaneous reduction of the capital borrowed and the rate of interest paid. The lamentable history of these bankrupt democracies dates from this period.
Little by little these financial contracts lost all semblance of serious business. In the impossibility of obtaining really solid guarantees the bankers imposed preposterous conditions, and issue at a discount became the rule with the new conventions. A series of interventions in Buenos-Ayres, Mexico, San Domingo, and Venezuela, diplomatic conflicts, and claims for indemnity resulted from this precarious procedure. Moreover, thanks to the protection accorded by their respective countries, foreigners acquired a privileged position. The Americans were subjected to the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts, before which they could demand the payment of their claims on the State; foreigners enjoyed exceptional treatment. A statute was enacted in their favour, and their governments supported them in the recovery of unjustifiable claims. Sir Charles Wyke, English minister to Mexico, wrote to the Foreign Office in 1862: "Nineteen out of twenty foreigners who reside in this unfortunate country have some claim against the government in one way or another. Many of these claims are really based on the denial of real justice, while others have been fabricated throughout, as a good speculation, which would enable the claimant to obtain money for some imaginary wrong; for example, three days' imprisonment which was intentionally provoked with the object of formulating a claim which might be pushed to an exorbitant figure."[1]
In face of the string of debts which arose from the loans themselves, or from claims for damages suffered during the civil wars, the governments could only succumb. The immorality of the fiscal agents and the greed of the foreigner will explain these continual bankruptcies, which constitute the financial history of America.
The descendants of the prodigal Spanish conquerors, who knew nothing of labour or thrift, have incessantly resorted to fresh loans in order to fill the gaps in their budgets. Politicians knew of only one solution of the economic disorder—to borrow, so that little by little the Latin-American countries became actually the financial colonies of Europe.
Economic dependence has a necessary corollary—political servitude. French intervention in Mexico was originally caused by the mass of unsatisfied financial claims; foreigners, the creditors of the State, were in favour of intervention. England and France, who began by seeking to ensure the recovery of certain debts, finally forced a monarch upon the debitor nation. The United States entertained the ambition of becoming the sole creditor of the American peoples: this remarkable privilege would have assured them of an incontestable hegemony over the whole continent.
In the history of Latin America loans symbolise political disorder, lack of foresight, and waste; it is thanks to loans that revolutions are carried out, and it is by loans that the caudillos have enriched themselves. Old debts are liquidated by means of new, and budgetary deficits are balanced by means of foreign gold. When the poverty caused by political disorder becomes too great the American governments clamour feverishly in the markets of Europe for the hypothecation of the public revenues, and the issue of fresh funds, offering to pay a high interest, and recognising the rights of suspended creditors.
On the one hand the budget is loaded to create new employments in order to assuage the national appetite for sinecures, while the protective tariffs are raised to enrich the State. Thus the forces of production disappear, life becomes dearer, and poverty can only increase. America has until lately known little of productive loans intended for use in the construction of railways, irrigation works, harbours, or for the organisation of colonies of immigrants.
The product of the customs and other fiscal dues is not enough to stimulate the material progress of a nation. So application is made to the bankers of London or Paris; but it is the very excess of these loan operations and the bad employment of the funds obtained that impoverishes the continent. The excessive number of administrative sinecures, the greed of the leaders, the vanity of governments, all call for gold; and when the normal revenues are not sufficient to enrich these hungry oligarchies, a loan which may involve the very future of the country appears to all to be the natural remedy.
The budgets of various States complicate still further a situation already difficult. They increase beyond all measure, without the slightest relation to the progress made by the nation. They are based upon taxes which are one of the causes of the national impoverishment, or upon a protectionist tariff which adds greatly to the cost of life. The politicians, thinking chiefly of appearances, neglect the development of the national resources for the immediate augmentation of the fiscal revenues; thanks to fresh taxes, the budgets increase. These resources are not employed in furthering profitable undertakings, such as building railroads or highways, or increasing the navigability of the rivers. The bureaucracy is increased in a like proportion, and the budgets, swelled in order to dupe the outside world, serve only to support a nest of parasites. In the economic life of these countries the State is a kind of beneficent providence which creates and preserves the fortune of individual persons, increases the common poverty by taxation, display, useless enterprises, the upkeep of military and civil officials, and the waste of money borrowed abroad; such is the "alimentary politics" of which Le Play speaks. The government is the public treasury; by the government all citizens live, directly or indirectly, and the foreigner profits by exploiting the national wealth. A centralising power, the State forces a golden livery upon this bureaucratic mob of magistrates and deputies, political masters and teachers.
To sum up, the new continent, politically free, is economically a vassal. This dependence is inevitable; without European capital there would have been no railways, no ports, and no stable government in America. But the disorder which prevails in the finances of the country changes into a real servitude what might otherwise have been a beneficial relation. By the accumulation of loans frequent crises are provoked, and frequent occasions of foreign intervention.
A policy of thrift would have led to the establishment of economic equilibrium. Foreign gold has poured in continually, not only in the form of loans but in the shape of material works—railways, ports, industries, and industrial undertakings. It is in this way that English capital has accumulated in the Argentine, Uruguay, Brazil, and Chili, where it has become a prominent factor in the industrial development of the country. In the Argentine it amounts to 300 millions, in Brazil to 150 millions, in Chili to 51 millions, and in Uruguay to 46 millions of pounds sterling.
New problems arise from the relation between the size of the population and the amount of the capital imported. The increase of alien wealth in nations which are not fertilised by powerful currents of immigration constitutes a real danger. To pay the incessantly increasing interest of the wealth borrowed, fresh sources of production and a constant increase of economic exchanges are necessary; in a word, a greater density of population. The exhaustion of the human stock in the debitor nations creates a very serious lack of financial equilibrium, which may result, not only in bankruptcy but also in the loss of political independence by annexation.
The solution of the financial problem depends, then, upon the solution of the problem of population. Immigrants will solve it by increasing the number of productive units, by accumulating their savings, by irresistible efforts which lay the foundations of solid fortunes. It is true that the wealth which they will create will also be of foreign origin, but in the second or third generation the descendants of the enriched colonists will become true citizens of the country in which their fathers have established themselves. They will have forgotten their country of origin, and will mingle with the old families which conserve the national traditions.
The ideal of peoples whose economic condition is dependence is naturally autonomy; without it all liberty is precarious. A considerable stream of exports flows from America to Europe to pay for imports and the interest on foreign capital. Only this large exportation of products, as in the case of the Argentine, Mexico, and Brazil, can maintain a favourable commercial balance. The Argentine economist Alberto Martinez has demonstrated that as in his country there is neither an economic reserve nor a national capital, the diminution of exports causes serious financial disturbances; exchange is unstable, the rate rises, trade falls off, and credit is suspended.
In other countries the economic system is instability itself. It depends almost entirely on two or three agricultural products—coffee, cane-sugar, and rubber—and the incessant fluctuations in the prices of these products, which constitute the wealth of the country. One does not observe the regularity of the exports of the Argentine and Brazil, nor any important industrial development. To remedy the lack of equilibrium in the budget and to pay the interest on the foreign debt, the State, the guardian of the public fortune, once more resorts to loans. The creation of a national capital is thus an urgent necessity for these prodigal democracies.
By stimulating the development of agriculture, by creating or protecting industry, by diminishing the budgetary charges by the reduction of useless bureaucratic employments and sumptuary expenses, the Latin-American governments could gradually establish the necessary reserves.
On the other hand, fiscal agreements, commercial treaties, and railways must contribute to the solidarity of these nations among themselves. Europe has invested vast sums of capital in America; she sends thither large quantities of the products of her industries, but there are peoples more favoured than others by this invasion of capital. It should be possible by a series of practical conventions to lay the foundations of a Zollverein. The dependence of certain republics as compared with others should tend to make them commercially independent of Europe. Already a number of industries are being developed in America; in Brazil their yield attains the annual value of 46 million pounds; in 1909 the imports were diminished by 3 million pounds in consequence of this new economic factor. It may be supposed that in the still distant future the agricultural peoples of America will buy the products of their industrial neighbours, the Argentine, Brazil, and Uruguay. The unification of the monetary system will still further facilitate the development of this inter-state commerce, this trade between zones almost exclusively agricultural, and other regions both agricultural and industrial; thus closer economic relations will be the basis of a lasting political understanding. No American republic has yet reached the term of its economic development.
We may distinguish three periods in the evolution of the nations towards autonomy; during the first their dependence is absolute, in respect of ideas as much as of men and capital; such is the present situation of the majority of the Latin democracies. During the second period agriculture suffices for the national necessities and industry develops; the Argentine, Brazil, and Mexico are already in this state of partial liberty. Finally, the period of agricultural and industrial exportation commences, and the intellectual influence of the country makes itself felt beyond the frontiers. After France and England, Germany and the United States reached this glorious phase. Neither Mexico nor the Argentine nor Brazil is as yet flooding the world with its industrial products nor affecting it by its original intellectual activities; there is no culture or philosophy that we can properly term Argentine or Chilian. Europe is tributary to the Argentine for her wheat and meats, and to Brazil for her coffee, but ideas and machines come from Paris, London, and New York.
M. Limantour, who tried to save the Mexican railways from the Yankee capitalists, and the Argentine economists, who endeavoured to convert the foreign into a national debt, are preparing the way for the future reign of financial liberty; but this transformation depends on the increase of public or private wealth and the activity of immigrants, who in hospitable America soon become landed proprietors or merchants.
In the country districts, as in the cities, which are every day more numerous, the common wealth and the fiscal revenues are increasing, owing to the efforts of industrious men. Not only are foreign industrial undertakings being founded, but national institutions also, fed by national capital. When the necessary loans can be subscribed in the country itself, when railways and ports are constructed with State or private capital, or with the financial aid of other South American governments; when American multi-millionaires (there are already plenty of them in the Argentine) have effected the nationalisation of the public works now in the hands of foreigners, then the economic ideal of these democracies will be realised.
Latin America may already be considered as independent from the agricultural point of view; it possesses riches which are peculiar to it: coffee to Brazil, wheat to the Argentine, sugar to Peru, fruits and rubber to the Tropics. Its productive capacity is considerable. It may rule the markets of the world. The systematic exploitation of its mines will reveal treasures which are not even suspected. We may say, then, that even without great industries the American continent, independent in the agricultural domain, and an exporter of precious metals, may win a doubtless precarious economic liberty.
[1] Cited by F. Bulnes, El Verdadero Juarez, Paris, 1904, p. 29.
CONCLUSION
AMERICA AND THE FUTURE OF THE LATIN PEOPLES
The Panama Canal and the two Americas—The future conflicts between Slavs, Germans, Anglo-Saxons, and Latins—The role of Latin America.
A new route offered to human commerce transforms the politics of the world. The Suez Canal opened the legendary East to Europe, directed the stream of European emigration towards Australia, and favoured the formation, in South Africa, of an Anglo-Saxon Confederation. The Panama Canal is destined to produce profound perturbations in the equilibrium of the nations of the New World. Humboldt announced these changes in 1804:[1] "The products of China will be brought more than 6,000 miles nearer Europe and the United States; great changes will take place in the political condition of eastern Asia, because this tongue of earth (Panama) has for centuries been the rampart of the independence of China and Japan."
The Atlantic is to-day the ocean of the civilised world. The opening of the canal will thus displace the political axis of the world. The Pacific, an ocean separated from the civilising currents of Europe, will receive directly from the Old World the wealth and products of its labour and its emigrants. Until the present time the United States and Japan have shared in its rule as a mare clausum, and they are disputing the supremacy in Asia and Western America. Once the isthmus is pierced, new commercial peoples may invade with their victorious industries the enchanted lands of Asia and the distant republics of South America. New York will be nearer to Callao, but the distance between Hamburg and Havre and the Peruvian coast will be equally diminished. It has been calculated that by the new route the voyage between Liverpool and the great ports of the Pacific will be reduced by 2,600 to 6,000 miles, according to the respective positions of the latter, and the distance between New York and the same centres of commercial activity will be diminished by 1,000 to 8,400 miles. German, French, and English navigation companies will run a service of modern vessels direct to the great ports of Chili and China. The paths of the world's trade will be changed; Panama will form the gate of civilisation to Eastern Asia and Western America, as Suez is to Central Asia, Eastern Africa, and Oceania. The Atlantic will become the ocean of the Old World.
The trade of the new era must undergo unexpected transformations. The influence of Europe in China and Western America will be considerably increased. Germany should become the rival of the United States in the commercial supremacy in the East and in the republics of Latin America. Her vessels, messengers of imperialism, which now make long voyages through the Straits of Magellan to reach Valparaiso and Callao, will then employ the canal route. The vessels of Japan will bear to Europe, as formerly did the Phoenician navigators, the products of the exotic Orient; New York will dethrone Antwerp, Hamburg, and Liverpool; the English will lose their historic position as intermediaries between Europe and Asia. The United States, masters of the canal, will create in New York a great fair in which the merchandise of East and West will be accumulated: the treasures of Asia, the gold of Europe, and the products of their own overgrown industries. They will thus have won an economic hegemony over the Pacific, South America, and China, where they will be at least privileged competitors in the struggle between England and Germany. Between New York and Hong Kong, New York and Yokohama, and New York and Melbourne new commercial relations will be established. In approaching New York the East will recede from Liverpool and the ports of Europe, and the Panama route will favour the industries of the United States in Asia and Oceania. It may already be foreseen that the United States will be terrible competitors in Australia, and above all in New Zealand, where they will drive the English merchants from the markets. It is difficult to write, like Tarde, a "fragment of future history"; too many unknown forces intervene in the historical drama of the peoples. But no doubt, unless some extraordinary event occurs to disturb the evolution of the modern peoples, the great nations of industrial Europe and Japan, the champion of Asiatic integrity, will oppose the formidable progress of the United States.
The canal sets a frontier to Yankee ambition; it is the southern line, the "South Coast Line" of which a North American politician, Jefferson, used to dream. As early as 1809 he believed that Cuba and Canada would become incorporated, as States of the Union, in the immense Confederation; anticipating the rude lyrics of Walt Whitman, he dreamed of founding "an empire of liberty so vast that the like has never been seen." Heirs to the Anglo-Saxon genius, the Americans of the North wish to form a democratic federation.
They have succeeded in doing in Cuba what Japan has done in Korea: first, the struggle for autonomy, then the necessary intervention, then a protectorate, and perhaps annexation. Thus the prophecy of Jefferson will be realised. Between Canada, an autonomous colony, and the United States, there are common economic interests, and commercial treaties have created such a plexus of interests that the evolution from these practical alliances to political union would seem to be a simple matter. The disintegration of the Anglo-Saxon Empire will be the work of the United States. American activities in Canada are steadily increasing; the Yankee capital employed in various Canadian industries amounts to £20,000,000. Trade is increasing, and by virtue of new conventions the United States will be even better situated than ever to dispute the Canadian markets with England. In this free colony there is a Far West which the States have peopled. The East is Anglo-Saxon, industrial, aristocratic; the West, barbarian and agrarian, desires union with the neighbouring democracy. Münsterberg reports that a Boston journal prints every day, in large letters, on the first page, that the first duty of the United States is the annexation of Canada.
The friendship of England, and the moral harmony of the English-speaking world, will perhaps check the progress of American imperialism northward; but the capital which develops and exploits the west of Canada is a competitor which cannot be resisted. Moreover, such men as Goldwin Smith, a moral authority in Canada, counsel union with the great Republican neighbour. Free trade, which the English radicals wish to maintain, relaxes the economic ties which might ensure the duration of the British Empire, and prevents the formation of a Zollverein, of that fiscal union between Great Britain and her colonies which was the great project of Chamberlain. It is to guarantee commercial and economic interests that Canada is approaching the United States and withdrawing from England.
Mexico, where £100,000,000 of American capital is invested; Panama, a republic subjected to the protectorate of the Anglo-Saxon North; the Canal Zone, which the Yankees have acquired as a remote southern possession; the Antilles, which they are gradually absorbing; Central America, where ever turbulent republics tolerate pacificatory intervention; and Canada, rich and autonomous, form, for the statesmen of Washington and the Yellow Press, a great and desirable empire. In two centuries the small Puritan colonies of the Atlantic seaboard will perhaps have come to govern the continent from the Pole to the Tropics; and will create, with the aid of all the races of mankind, a new Anglo-Saxon humanity, industrial and democratic. Thus the Roman Republic, from her narrow home between the Apennines, governed the world, as did Great Britain, peopled by a tenacious race, the sea.
To check the advance of the United States the South will lack a political force of the same weight. The conflict between the united Americans of the North and the divided inhabitants of the South will necessarily terminate fatally for the Latin New World.
The Pacific will be the theatre of racial wars and vast and transforming emigrations. Once the canal is open it is extremely probable that European emigrants will descend in large numbers upon the seaboard of Western America. Brazil and the Argentine attract the modern adventurer; their Eldorado is in the Argentine plains or the forests of Brazil. Venezuela, invaded by emigrants of Germanic race, will be born again; a dense population will fill her valleys, and Caracas will become a great Latin city. But in Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia, there is a great lack of centres of civilisation in the interior, and the sierra is largely wild and unpeopled; all progress is in the small towns of the coast, set amidst the aridity of the desert. Chinese and Japanese, who are content with low wages, are crushing the European worker by their competition. Japanese colonies will people the American West from Panama to Chili, and in these new countries the fusion of Japanese and Indian blood is by no means impossible.
There will always be two distinct regions in South America, separated by the Andes and divided by the Tropics. The Atlantic region will retain its liberty, and increase in wealth and in power. It is possible that the south of Brazil will become German, but the Argentine, Chili, Uruguay, and the great Brazilian States will defend the Latin heritage and European tradition. To the north and the west depopulated and divided nations will struggle against an invasion of peoples of similar races coming from the east and against a conquering people from the north. Thanks to the protection of Japan, they may be able to free themselves from the tutelage of the United States, or they may be able to hold off the subjects of the Mikado by submitting to the influence of North America. Only the federation of all the Latin republics under the pressure of Europe—that is to say, of England, France, and Italy, who have important markets in America—might save the nations of the Pacific, just as a century ago Great Britain was able to defend the autonomy of these peoples against the mystic projects of the Holy Alliance.
The Monroe doctrine, which prohibits the intervention of Europe in the affairs of America and angers the German imperialists, the professors of external expansion, like Münsterberg, may become obsolete. If Germany or Japan were to defeat the United States, this tutelary doctrine would be only a melancholy memory. Latin America would emerge from the isolation imposed upon it by the Yankee nation, and would form part of the European concert, the combination of political forces—alliances and understandings—which is the basis of the modern equilibrium. It would become united by political ties to the nations which enrich it with their capital and buy its products.
Japan has not lost her originality as an Asiatic nation, because she is united to England by a treaty which assures the status quo in the East. The Latin republics will not renounce their character as American nations because they may conclude understandings with the nations of the West. Already there are commercial treaties between these nations and Europe, as well as a harmony of economic and intellectual interests. Brazil and the Argentine, where British money and French ideals prevail, might themselves unite to form a vast combination of alliances with the group of European nations which conquered, civilised, and enriched America: that is, Spain, France, and England. Will not a community of interests in America give a new strength to the union of these peoples in Europe? Great political changes would result from these new influences: the American Latins, by entering into the combinations of European politics, would divide Italy, whose interests in the Argentine and Brazil are so great, from the Triple Alliance, and would strengthen the understanding between England and France against Germany, which disputes with them not only the hegemony of Europe but also the preponderance in America. Canning, who opposed the designs of the Holy Alliance, used to say a century ago that he had given the New World liberty in order to restore equilibrium to the Old World. Against the theocratic peoples who were seeking to overshadow the destinies of the earth he evoked the apparition of these free democracies destined to establish the benefits of liberty on a firm footing. His hope was premature, because it was hardly possible for perfect republics to rise from the ruins of Spanish absolutism. Even to-day, after a century of attempts at constitutional government, only a few Latin American States—the Argentine, Brazil, Chili, Peru, and Bolivia—seem capable of fulfilling the desires of Canning.
These peoples would contribute to the defence of the Latin ideal. But is not this an excessive ambition for nations still semi-barbarous? The old races of the West contemplate their impetuous advance with much the same distrust as that which Rome experienced as she watched the turbulent migrations of Goths and Germans. And even if the Latin race could check its irremediable decadence by the aid of the wealth and youth of these American peoples, would it really be profitable to oppose the triumph of the Anglo-Saxons and the Slavs for the sake of saving a fallen caste? Seventy years ago Tocqueville visited the United States and divined their future greatness. To-day M. Clemenceau, a politician and a great admirer of the North American Republic, praises the Latin vigour, as he sees it in Buenos-Ayres, Uruguay, and Rio de Janeiro. The Yankee republic has realised the prophecies of the former critic, and it would not be strange if the southern democracies of America were to confirm the optimism of the latter. A new energy, undeniable material progress, and a fertile creative faith announce the advent, in the new continent, if not of the Eldorado of which the hungry emigrant dreams, at least of wealthy nations, rich in industry and agriculture; the advent of a world in which the glorious age of the exhausted Latin world may renew itself, as in the classic fountain. When Emerson visited England fifty years ago he declared that the heart of the Britannic race was in the United States, and that the "mother island," exhausted, would some day, like many parents, be satisfied with the vigour which she had bestowed upon her own children.[2] In speaking of Spain and Portugal, might not Argentines, Brazilians, and Chilians employ the same proud language?
The decadence of the Latins, which seems obvious to the sociologist, may really be only a long period of abeyance. The adventures in which such an exuberant force of heroism was expended might well result in a reaction, a weariness after creation. At the beginning of the modern period, in the sixteenth century, the English, undisciplined adventurers, were hostile to the regularity and monotony of industrial life; in the nineteenth century they built an empire, organised a powerful industrialism, and became slow and methodical; and in 1894 Dr. Karl Pearson was uneasy as to "the decadence of British energy which is revealed by the adoption of State socialism and by the poverty of mechanical invention."[3]
In the future the Latins may regain their old virility. The ricorsi which Vico saw in history cause certain peoples to recover the pre-eminence they have lost, while others, prosperous nations, fall back into decadence; no privilege is eternal, no reaction is irremediable and inevitable.
"Multa renascentur quæ jam cecidere, cadentque
Quæ nunc sunt in honore...."
The imperial policy of Charles V. and Philip II., the conquest of a continent by the Spaniards, Portuguese, and French, the glorious festival of the Renaissance, the triumph of Lepanto, the splendid empire of Venice, the political activity of Richelieu, the great century of French classicism, the Revolution which proclaimed the Rights of Man, and the Napoleonic epic, the liberation of Spanish America: this is the hymn of glory of the Latin race. To-day Belgium, Italy, and the Argentine give signs of a renaissance of that race, which men have supposed to be exhausted.
Heirs of the Latin spirit in the moral, religious, and political domain, the Ibero-American peoples are seeking to conserve their glorious heritage. The idea of race, in the sense of traditions and culture, is predominant in modern politics. Flourishing on every hand, we see Pan-Slavism, Pan-Islamism, Pan-Asianism, Pan-Germanism, Pan-Latinism—barbarous words which give an indication as to the struggles of the future. The Slavs of Dalmatia, Germany, Servia, and Bosnia would reconstitute, with the fragments of many divided nations, a State which would also be a race. Islam unites divers peoples by the ardour of a new fanaticism, under the inspiration of popular Khalifs or marabouts, from Soudan to Fez, from Bombay to Stamboul. Vast unions of scattered peoples are thus springing into formation, in the name of a religion or a common origin. Slavs, Saxons, Latins, and Mongols are contending for the possession of the world. It is thus that the drama of history becomes simplified; above the quarrels of precarious nations are rising the profound antagonisms of millennial races.
Onésime Reclus, in an excellent volume, the Partage du monde, has gone into the respective positions of each of these powerful groups. The conclusions of his analysis are full of hope; in spite of the Saxons and Slavs the Latins still hold vast territories, which they must people. Their geographical position, despite Anglo-Saxon imperialism and the immense surface of all the Russias of Europe and Asia, is certainly not inferior.
There are a hundred million Slavs scattered over an immense Asiatic and European territory, which stretches from Vladivostock to the Baltic Sea; two and a half milliards of hectares are waiting for the children of this prodigious race. By uniting the peoples of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland to the Germans of Austria, the German race, whether it propagates the gospel of Pan-Germanism by commercial penetration or by violence, possesses about 100 million hectares for 93 millions of men. The Anglo-Saxons, the natural enemies of German expansion, the rivals of the Deutschtum in Asia, Africa, and America, rule an almost unlimited area of milliards of hectares; India, Canada, the United States, South Africa, Egypt, Australia, conquered territories and kingdoms held in tutelage, peoples of all faiths and all races. More than 200 millions of Anglo-Saxons people this "greater Britain" without including India, which is not assimilable.
The territory occupied by the Latin peoples in Europe, America, and Africa is 3.9 million hectares, inhabited by 250 millions of men; the number of Latins is thus not really inferior to that of the Anglo-Saxons, nor are the territories open to Latin expansion inferior to those reserved for the rival race. With the French colonies in Asia they amount to 4 milliards of hectares.
Here we have a Latin superiority; by the extent of their territories and their numbers the Latins outnumber the Slavs and the Germans. They do not yield to the English either in human capital nor in wealth of exploitable territory. And England has reached the zenith of her industrial period, the maximum of her political development; the figures of the birth-rate in the industrial towns are diminishing, and emigration has almost ceased. The State is becoming the protector of a demagogic and decadent crowd. The United States seek to conquer new territories for their imperialist race. But the Latins possess in South America a rich and almost uninhabited continent, and in the north of Africa the French are in process of founding a colonial empire which will rival Egypt in wealth and importance, and will reach from Morocco to the Congo and from Dakar to Tunis.
Reclus calculates that Latin America could feed a hundred persons per square kilometre. While the natality of the Anglo-Saxon cities of the Atlantic seaboard in the United States remains stationary the Latin American population is increasing prodigiously; it is to-day 80 millions, and a century ago, when Humboldt visited the New World, it was approximately only 15 millions. It is possible that by the last years of the present century the number of South Americans will have reached 250 millions; the equilibrium between Latins and Anglo-Saxons will then be broken in favour of the former.
America is thus an essential factor of the future of the Latin nations. The destiny of France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy would be different if the 80 millions of Latin Americans were to lose their racial traditions; if in a century or two America were to pass under the sceptre of the United States, or if the Germans and Anglo-Saxons were to attack and oppress the nucleus of civilisation formed by the Argentine, Uruguay, and Southern Brazil. Economically America would lose markets; intellectually, docile colonies; practically, centres of expansion. To-day Anglo-Saxons, Germans, Slavs, and Neo-Latins are balancing forces which may develop in harmony in the framework of Christian civilisation without wars of conquest and without ambitions of monopoly. The moral unity of South America would contribute to the realisation of such an ideal. A new Anglo-Saxon continent running from Alaska to Cape Horn, built on the ruins of twenty Spanish republics, would be the presage of a final decadence. In the struggles of hundreds of years' duration between the Latin States and the barbarians, between Catholicism and Protestantism, between the French genius and the Teutonic spirit, between the Renaissance and the Reformation, the Latins would have lost the last battle.