Brazil was the latest country in the American continent to become a republic. This befell in 1888. In 1807, when the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte entered Portugal, the then reigning king, John, of the house of Braganza, crossed the Atlantic and reigned at Rio till the expulsion of the French enabled him to resume his European throne. In 1822 the people had become discontented under Portuguese misgovernment. Republican ideas, stimulated by the destruction of Spanish power that was proceeding on the Pacific coasts, were in the air, and the Regent, Dom Pedro, son of King John, proclaimed the independence of Brazil which was, after some fighting, conceded by the mother country in 1825. His action probably saved monarchical institutions, and when he abdicated in 1831, disgusted with the difficulties that surrounded him, and with the unpopularity to which his own faults had exposed him, he was succeeded by his son, who ruled as the Emperor Pedro the Second. This amiable and enlightened prince, a lover of natural science as well as of art and letters, devoted himself chiefly to European travel and to the economic and educational improvement of his country, interfering very little with politics. A military conspiracy and the resentment of the planters at the sudden abolition of slavery brought about the revolution of 1888, in which a republic was proclaimed and the Emperor shipped off to Europe. In 1891 a congress met and enacted a federal constitution modelled on that of the United States. The immense size of the country and its want of homogeneity suggested a federal system, the basis for which already existed in the legislative assemblies of the provinces. Since then Brazil has had its full share of armed risings and civil wars.
At first the states were allowed the full exercise of the large functions which the Constitution allotted to them, including the raising of revenue by duties on exports and the maintenance of a police force which in some states was undistinguishable from an army. Presently attempts were made to draw the reins tighter, and these attempts have continued till now. The national government has at its disposal the important field of financial and tariff legislation, the control of army and navy, and the opportunities of helping needy or slothful states by grants of money or by the execution of public works. Through the use of these powers it has latterly endeavoured to exert over the states a greater control than some of them seem willing to accept. Nor is this the only difficulty. While some of the states, and especially the southern, have an intelligent and energetic population, others remain far behind, their citizens too ignorant and lazy, or too unstable and emotional, to be fit for self-government. Universal suffrage in districts where the majority of the voters are illiterate persons of colour suggests, if it does not justify, extra-legal methods of handling elections. One illegality breeds another, and there is perpetuated a distrust of authority and a resort to violence. As one of the most recent and brilliant of European travelers100 observes, in a passage which conveys his admiration for the attractive qualities he finds in the Brazilians, "The Constitution enjoys a chiefly theoretic authority.... There is a lack of balance between the states which have already a highly perfected civilization and the districts which in theory are on a footing of equality, but whose black or Indian population can only permit of a nominal democracy stained by those irresponsible outbursts which characterize primitive humanity." That the authority of a constitution should be "theoretic rather than practical" must be expected where "a democracy is nominal"; for if institutions the working of which requires intelligence and public spirit are forced on Indians and negroes, their failure is inevitable.
In the Brazilian politics of to-day there are many factions, but no organized parties nor any definite principles or policies advocated by any group or groups of men. Federal issues are crossed and warped by state issues, state issues confused by federal issues, and both sets of issues turn rather on persons than on general doctrines or specific practical proposals. One source of dissension is, however, absent,—that struggle of the church and clericalism against the principles of religious equality which has distracted the Spanish-American republics. In Brazil the separation of church and state is complete, and though the diplomatic corps enjoys the presence of a papal Nuncio as one of its members, this adherence to tradition has no present political significance. Here, moreover, as in Argentina and Uruguay, the church and religion seem to have little influence upon the thought or the conduct of laymen. The absence or the fluidity of parties makes the executive stronger than the legislature both in national and state politics. There are many men of talent, especially oratorical talent, and many men of force, but not enough who shew constructive power and the grasp of mind needed to handle the enormous economic problems which a country so vast, so rich, and so various presents.
Among the economic issues of to-day may be reckoned that of protection, as against free trade. Brazilian policy is at present highly protectionist, and does not hesitate, when some powerful interest asks for further help, to double or more than double whatever protective duty it finds existing. The chief social questions are those relating to the extension of education and the enactment of better labour laws for the benefit of children and the security of workpeople. The chief constitutional question is the relations of the national and the state governments. European critics complain that upon none of these does any legislative group seem to put forward any definite and consistent policy. Yet such critics must be reminded that the country has been a republic only since 1891, and free from the taint of slavery only since 1888, and that her peace has been since those years frequently disturbed. It is too soon to be despondent.
Brazilian society seems to a passing observer to be in a state of transition, and may not for some time to come succeed in reconciling the contrasts between the old and the new, and between theory and practice, which it now displays. The old system was aristocratic not only because a number of respected families surrounding the imperial court enjoyed a pre-eminence of rank, but also because a newer class of rich men, chiefly landowners, had grown up. The aristocracy of rank is now almost gone, but the aristocracy of wealth remains and is in control of public affairs. In most parts of the country, it stands far above the labouring population, with little of a middle class between. Democratic principles have been proclaimed in the broadest terms, but thinking men see, and even unthinking men cannot but dimly feel, that no government, however good its intentions, can apply such principles in a country where seven-eighths of the people are ignorant, and half of them belong to backward races, unfit to exercise political rights. The conditions here noted may be thought to resemble those of the southern states in the North American Union. But there are two conspicuous differences. In Brazil no social "colour line" is sharply drawn, and the fusion of whites and blacks by intermarriage goes steadily on. In Brazil the pure white element, though it preponderates in the temperate districts of the south, is less than half of the whole nation, whereas in the United States it is eight-ninths. Yet in the southern United States nearly all the coloured population has been disfranchised and all declarations of democratic principles are understood to be subject to the now fundamental dogma that white supremacy must be absolutely assured.
Though the financial stability of Brazil is said to be hardly equal to that which Argentina was enjoying in 1910, and though the growth of national and individual wealth has been less rapid, there is a sense of abundance, and the upper classes live in an easy open-handed way. Slaveholding produces extravagant habits, especially among plantation owners, for what is the use of looking after the details of expenditure when one has thriftless labourers, whose carelessness infects all who are set over them? Like their Portuguese ancestors, the Brazilians are genial and hospitable, and they have the example and the excuse of a bounteous Nature around them. They seem less addicted to horse-racing and betting than are the Argentines and Chileans, but the gambling instinct finds plenty of opportunities in the fluctuations of exchange, as well as in the rapid changes of the produce markets.
The Brazilian is primarily a man of the country, not of the city. Rio, large as it is, is a less potent factor than Buenos Aires is in Argentina, or Santiago in Chile. The landowner loves his rural life, as did the Virginian planter in North America before the Civil War, and lives on the fazenda in a sort of semi-feudal patriarchal way, often with grown-up sons and daughters around him. Estates (except in the extreme south) are extensive; near neighbours are few; families are often large; the plantation is a sort of little principality, and its owner with his fellow-proprietors is allowed, despite all democratic theory, to direct the politics of the district just as in England, eighty years ago, the county families used to control local affairs and guide the choice of representatives in Parliament.
I have observed that the Brazilian, though modified in some parts of the country by Indian or negro blood, is primarily a Portuguese. Now the Portuguese, a people attractive to those who live among them, have also had a striking history. They are a spirited people, an adventurous people, a poetical people. For more than a century, when they were exploring the oceans and founding a dominion in India, they played a great part in the world, and though they have never quite recovered the position, wonderful for so small a country, which they then held, and have produced no later poet equal to Camoens, men of practical force and men of intellectual brilliance have not been wanting. Neither are they wanting in Brazil. A love of polite letters is common among the upper classes, and the power of writing good verse is not rare. The language has retained those qualities which it shewed in the Lusiads, and the possession of that great poem has helped to maintain the taste and talent of the nation. There are admirable speakers, subtle and ingenious lawyers, astute politicians, administrators whose gifts are approved by such feats as the extinction of yellow fever in Rio and Santos. The late Baron do Rio Branco was a statesman who would have been remarkable in any country. Yet it is strange to find that, both here and in other parts of South America, men of undoubted talent are often beguiled by phrases, and seem to prefer words to facts. Between the national vanities and self-glorifying habits of different nations, there is not much to choose, but in countries like England and the United States, the rhetoric of after-dinner speeches is known clearly and consciously by the more capable among the speakers, and almost as distinctly by the bulk of the audience, to be mere rhetoric. They are aware of their national faults and weaknesses and do not really suppose themselves more gifted or more virtuous than other peoples.
In Latin America, where eloquence comes by nature and seems to become a part of thought itself, the case is different. Exuberant imagination takes its hopes or predictions for realities, and finds in the gilded clouds of fancy a foundation on which to build practical policies. Proud of what they call their Democratic Idealism, they assume as already existing in their fellow-countrymen the virtues which the citizens of a free country ought to possess. To keep these unrealized ideals floating before one's eyes may be better than to have no ideals at all, but for the purposes of actual politics, the result is the same either way, for that which is secured for the principles embodied in the laws is what M. Clémenceau happily calls "an authority chiefly theoretic." Let us, nevertheless, remember that although the habit of mistaking words for facts and aspirations for achievements aggravates the difficulties of working constitutional government in South American countries, these difficulties would in any case exist. They inhere in the conditions of the countries. It is vain to expect a constitution closely modelled on that of the United States to work smoothly in Brazil, just as it is impossible to expect the British Cabinet and Parliamentary system to work smoothly in those small nations which have recently been copying it, without an incessant and often ludicrous contrast between doctrine and practice. A nation is the child of its own past, as Cervantes says that a man is the child of his own works.
The Brazilians, who never forget that they were for a time, during the French invasion of Portugal, their own mother country, and head of the whole Portuguese people, cherish their national literary traditions with more warmth than do the Spaniards of the New World, and produce quite as much, in the way of poetry and belles lettres, as do the writers of Portugal. They have a quick susceptibility to ideas, like that of Frenchmen or Russians, but have not so far made any great contributions to science, either in the fields of physical enquiry or in those of economics, philology, or history. One can hardly be surprised that learning and the abstract side of natural science are undervalued in a country which has no university, nothing more than faculties for teaching the practical subjects of law, medicine, engineering, and agriculture. This deficiency of a taste for and interest in branches of knowledge not directly practical is the more noticeable, because the Brazilians do not strike one as a new people. Less here than in Argentina or Uruguay, has one the feeling that the nation is still in the first freshness of youth, eagerly setting itself to explore and furnish its home and to develop resources the possession of which it has just begun to realize. Business and sport are not such absorbing topics of conversation here as they are in Argentina; there is neither such a display of wealth nor such a passion for spending it. Yet one doubts whether this freedom from the preoccupations of industry and commerce, the latter mainly left to foreigners, enures to the benefit of public life. Most of those who follow politics seem absorbed in personal intrigues. Comparatively few shew themselves sensible of the tremendous problems which the nation has to face, with its scattered centres of population to draw together, its means of communication to extend, its public credit to sustain, its revenues to be scrupulously husbanded and applied to useful purposes, above all, its mass of negro and Indian population to be educated and civilized. Nowhere in the world is there a more urgent need for a wise constructive statesmanship.
It is hard to convey the impression with which one sees the shores of Brazil sink below the horizon after coasting along them for three thousand miles from the Uruguayan border to Pernambuco, and coming to know something of the boundless wealth which Nature has lavished upon man in this vast land. Not even the great North American republic has a territory at once so large and so productive. What will be its future? Is the people worthy of such an inheritance?
The first thought that rises in the mind of those who are possessed, as in this age we all more or less are, by the passion for the development of natural resources, is a feeling of regret that a West European race, powerful by its numbers and its skill, say the North American or German or English, has not, to use the familiar phrase, "got the thing in hand." The white part of the Brazilian nation—and it is only that part that need be considered—seems altogether too small for the tasks which the possession of this country imposes. "How men from the Mississippi would make things hum along the Amazon and the Paraná!" says the traveller from the United States. In thirty years, Brazil would have fifty millions of inhabitants. Steamers would ply upon the rivers, railways would thread the recesses of the forests, and this already vast dominion would almost inevitably be enlarged at the expense of weaker neighbours till it reached the foot of the Andes. Second or third thoughts suggest a doubt whether such a consummation is really in the interests of the world. May not territories be developed too quickly? Might it not have been better for the United States if their growth had been slower, if their public lands had not been so hastily disposed of, if in their eagerness to obtain the labour they needed they had not drawn in a multitude of ignorant immigrants from central and southern Europe? With so long a life in prospect as men of science grant to our planet, why should we seek to open all the mines and cut down all the forests and leave nothing in the exploitation of natural resources to succeeding generations? In the long run doubtless the lands, like the tools, will go to those who can use them. But it may be well to wait and see what new conditions another century brings about for the world; and the Latin-American peoples may within that time grow into something different from what they now appear to the critical eyes of Europe and North America.
In A.D. 1808, when Napoleon Bonaparte, the true Liberator of Spanish America, moved his armies into Spain, the dominions of the Spanish Crown stretched south eight thousand miles from the bay of San Francisco to the Straits of Magellan. The population that was scattered thinly over that vast region was mostly native Indian, but there may possibly have been a million of pure Spanish stock and many times that number of mixed Spanish and Indian blood. All except the Indians spoke Spanish; all except the wild heathen tribes were Roman Catholics, and the white men were orthodox Catholics, with universal and genuine horror of heresy. All who were of pure European or of mixed blood followed customs and held ideas generally similar; all had been ruled by governors sent from Spain under laws and an administrative system drawn up and carried out on similar lines. In every region the Roman Church was powerful and monasteries abounded. There were no sharp local distinctions among this Spanish and Indo-Spanish population. Intercolonial trade was indeed forbidden, and permission to travel from one colony to another had to be obtained. But as all were subjects of one king and members of one Church, there was no political separation beyond that which was involved in the existence of various local jurisdictions. A native of Mexico was not a stranger on the banks of the Orinoco or the Paraná any more than the Bostonian Benjamin Franklin had been a stranger when he came to settle in Philadelphia. They could hardly be said to form one nation, for they had no national organization, but they all alike belonged to the same Hispano-American nationality.
In A.D. 1908 there were in the same area, but now between the Rio Grande Del Norte and Cape Horn (the territories now known as California, Arizona, and New Mexico having by this time become annexed to the United States) sixteen independent republics,101 all of which had freed themselves from the Spanish Crown between 1810, when the first risings took place in Mexico and Argentina, and 1826, when the flag of Spain was finally lowered on the fortress of Callao, the last stronghold on the American mainland of the successor of Charles the Fifth. That which had been one widely scattered and loosely connected people had become divided into many distinct communities, each with its own government, its separate historical traditions, its local prides and local antagonisms, its more or less definite and sharp-cut national consciousness. From the amorphous mass of protoplasm, so to speak, of 1808, each part of which was generally similar to every other part, there had emerged sixteen separate organisms, some markedly different and no two alike, although those distinctive features which make up national character had become much more fully developed in some than in others. That is to say, there are now instead of one people sixteen new nations.
But can we describe these sixteen republics as Nations?
What is a Nation?
It is dangerous to offer a definition which may not correspond to usage, for usage is the only true master and interpreter of words; and usage is in this case loose and varying. But it might be not far wide of the mark to say that while a nationality is a population held together by certain ties, as, for example, language and literature, ideas, customs, and traditions, in such wise as to feel itself a coherent unity, distinct from other populations similarly held together by like ties of their own, a Nation is a nationality, or a subdivision of a nationality, which has organized itself into a political body, either independent or desiring to be independent. This description would encounter some doubtful cases. The Athenians in antiquity and the Florentines in the Middle Ages were hardly nations, though they were independent states, for they were parts of a wider Greek and Italian people. The Swiss, Alemannian Germans to begin with, grew slowly into a nation, and were scarcely so to be described before A.D. 1648. Now, though they speak three languages and spring from at least three nationalities, they are as united a nation as there is in the world. The Magyars did not cease to be a nation because their constitutional freedom and rights of self-government were overthrown in 1849 and not regained till nearly twenty years later. Were the thirteen American colonies before 1776 a nation, or did they become so in that year, or not till the union of all of them was finally assured in 1791? Tuscany, though independent under its local rulers till 1859, was not a nation, and still less were the States of the Church. But is Bavaria to-day to be deemed a nation? Ireland and Scotland figure as nations in after-dinner speeches on the days of their respective saints: are they so at other times also? and if they are, is Wales a nation? Were the Transvaal and the Orange Free State nations before the South African war of 1899? They were certainly parts of a Dutch South African nationality. If Canada and Australia are nations, is the Union of South Africa one also? or does the whole British people all over the world constitute a nation?
Without multiplying doubtful cases, however, the description presented above, and any description which tries to represent current usage, would recognize the fact, that wherever a community has both political independence and a distinctive character recognizable in its members, as well as in the whole body, we call it a nation. Applying such a test to the Spanish-American republics, some of them, such as Mexico, Argentina, and Chile, are undeniably nations, while even some at least of the smaller, such as Cuba, Ecuador, and Paraguay, have attained sufficient individuality and consciousness of corporate unity to make them feel and act together and desire to preserve their independence.102 If they maintain that consciousness and that independence for another fifty years, their nationhood will be indisputable. The bud is opening, even if the form and colours of the petals are not yet fully visible.
By what process, then, and through the working of what forces did this more or less uniform common substance, this raw material for the making of states, which a century ago was spread over the vast Spanish colonial empire, become differentiated into the sixteen nations that exist to-day?
There is nothing in history more interesting than the study of the process by which nations are evolved from races or tribes. The widest range of phenomena are those supplied by the formation of the kingdoms of modern Europe through the admixture or contact of the peoples comprised in the Roman Empire with the barbarian tribes which entered it or received civilization from it. The growth of France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, England, Scotland, and (by contact with little mixture) of Poland, Russia, and the Scandinavian states, and in more recent times the creation of Greece and Belgium and Rumania and the re-creation as nations of Servia and Bulgaria, are all instances of the process. But in the case of the greater and older nations this process occupied many centuries, and its earlier stages are obscure. Here in Spanish America it has been going on under the eyes of the civilized world in an age when everything is or can be known, and it has taken only a hundred years. In all probability, nothing like this, no creation of new national entities coming about over so large an area in so short a time, can ever occur again. The causes which have produced these divergences from one type into many, turning the colonial Spaniard, who was in essentials much the same kind of man wherever he lived, into a Mexican or Uruguayan, a Peruvian, Chilean, or Argentine (to take a few of the more marked new national forms), are as interesting a subject for enquiry and reflection as could engage the thoughts of a philosophic historian.
All I can do here is to suggest some of these causes which occur to the mind of one who travels in Spanish America. To work the subject out in detail would need years of reading as well as many a journey. Hitherto few of those who have read have travelled, and few of those who have travelled have read. I have done so much less of either than the magnitude of the subject demands, that I must ask indulgence for even throwing out suggestions which are meant to urge others, better equipped than myself, to prosecute the enquiry.
The primary factor which determined the territorial limits of each republic is to be found in the existence in colonial days of certain administrative divisions. The Viceroyalties and Captaincies General constituted so many governmental areas, the inhabitants of each of which felt a sort of community among themselves, although they had no share in the government. In a few of these areas there existed what might be called the rudiments of a distinctive character belonging to the inhabitants of that area and marking them off from those who dwell in other divisions. In the larger number of areas there was not yet anything of the sort. When the insurrections broke out and as the War of Independence proceeded, the dwellers in each Viceroyalty or Captaincy General fought for themselves (with more or less help from insurgent bands elsewhere), and when they set up a revolutionary government, they tried to make the old provincial capital the seat of that government, so that in this way the boundaries of the old areas tended to remain, and that which had been an administrative division passed into a Republic. Yet it was still only a body of inhabitants in an area, not a nation. What we have to ask is—How did these groups of inhabitants occupying each its own territory, in only some few of whom did there exist the rudiments of a distinctive national character—how did they grow into Nations in the proper sense of the word?
The aim of this chapter will accordingly be:—
I. To indicate the main influences which have differentiated the inhabitants of Spanish America into distinct Nations. These influences are partly physical, partly racial, partly historical.
II. To enquire how far the process of differentiation has gone in making the people of any, and which, of the republics into true Nations, i.e. in giving them both distinctive traits of character and a strong national self-consciousness.
III. To ascertain to what extent there remains among the peoples of these republics any common Hispano-American sentiment, any sense of kinship linking them together in spite of political separation, possibly even underlying political hostility.
I. Among the causes or influences which have tended to differentiation, the first place may be assigned to geographical position. Where one part of a nationality is cut off from the other parts by the sea, or by deserts, or by dense forests, any peculiarities that already belonged to it tend to develop further and become intensified, because they are not affected by contact from without; and such a part, moreover, being isolated, attains a stronger consciousness of itself as a separate social and political entity. Two island republics, Cuba and Santo Domingo, were thus destined by nature to stand apart from those of the mainland as soon as their connection with the European sovereign had been broken. The people of Chile, severed from Peru by a wide and waterless desert, drew farther and farther apart from those of that country. The Chileans and the Argentines are divided from one another by a lofty mountain range, passable at a few points only, and at those points with difficulty, so the differences between them, which more frequent intercourse might have lessened, grew more pronounced. Paraguay stands almost alone in her forests, and till steamships began to ply on the great Paraná, could be reached from the coast only by a tedious upstream voyage or an even more toilsome land journey.
Not less important is the influence of physical environment in modifying both the race itself and the economic conditions of its life. In Mexico, for instance, the existence of a compact area of fertile soil around the lakes on whose shores the semi-civilization of the men of Tezcuco and Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) arose, created in that area a comparatively large population of pure Spanish blood and a still larger one of mixed blood which ultimately became the core of the Mexican republic and enabled it not only to hold together the outlying territories, but, also, when it got a strong ruler, to set up a strong centralized administration. Peru is cut up by the lofty and barren Andean ranges into a number of valleys, each more or less isolated. Some of its cities, like Arequipa, stand in solitary oases surrounded by deserts, while the eastern towns are severed from the capital by so many ridges and gorges that the formation of an active and homogeneous public opinion has been retarded. Chile, on the other hand, had till recently nearly all her inhabitants gathered in a comparatively small cultivable area, favourable to the growth of a united people, and similar conditions have accelerated the material progress and intensified the patriotism of Uruguay. In the vast territories of Colombia and Venezuela where, besides three or four cities lying far apart, there are only small settlements scattered through a region of mountain and forest, political cohesion and the sense of national life must needs advance far more slowly than in a level and cultivated land like Argentina, covered with a network of railways.
Climate has told for much in compelling the inhabitants of the colder regions to work hard and enabling those of the hotter to take life easily. The tropical states have on the whole lagged behind the temperate ones, and there is between them a perceptible difference in character and habits. In Bolivia the combined effect of the low temperature, thin air, extreme dryness, and poor food has not only made a large part of the plateau a sterile desert, but has also checked the advance of the aboriginal race, and has confined the population of Spanish origin to a small number of towns lying so far away from one another that common political action becomes difficult and social antagonisms remain acute.
While these physical differences have told upon all the divisions of Spanish America, they have been in some all the more efficient because they have been followed by economic consequences, and have induced certain forms of industrial life. Cattle and the horse have determined the habits of the Argentine and Uruguayan. Mining has had more to do with the Peruvian and the Mexican. No one of the nations has taken to a sea-faring life except the Chileans.
Whoever will compare Spanish America with Anglo-America (i.e. the United States and Canada) will be struck by the far greater differences of physical environment between the various parts of the former and those of the latter, where no section of the country, except Florida, Louisiana, and Texas is oppressively hot, even in summer, and where no section, till one reaches Labrador, suffers from severities of cold and wet such as check settlement in the far south of Chile and of Argentina. Nature does less to differentiate Anglo-American man into varieties than she does in the case of Spanish-American man.
Even more important than the influence of natural conditions has been the presence in Spanish America of the aboriginal tribes. These differed greatly in intelligence, courage, and a disposition to industry. In some regions they were both numerous and warlike, as in Mexico and Chile. In others they were numerous but easily conquered, as in the Peruvian highlands and Central America and Paraguay. In some they were too few to hold their ground, as in central Argentina and Uruguay, or so feeble as neither to offer serious resistance nor furnish servile labour. This was the case in Cuba and on some of the coasts of the Caribbean Sea. The differences in intellectual capacity were expressed in the degree of progress they had made towards civilization; the Mexicans and the subjects of the Peruvian Incas standing at the top, and the Amazonian savages in the east of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru at the bottom of the scale. As another chapter treats of their present relations to the European part of the population, it is enough to call attention here to the effect of the infusion of native blood in differentiating various parts of the old colonial population from one another. The volume of that infusion has been greater in some regions than in others, and the native blood has been unequal in quality. A half-Indian people tends to differ—whether for worse or for better is another question—from a white people; and a people mixed with Indians of a strong race, like the native Mexican, differs from one which has received a blend of weaker native blood. In persons of mixed race, the white element predominates, but less evidently in physical appearance than in mental attributes. The mestizos are all Christians and more generally educated; they draw their ideas and habits from their European rather than their native parentage, which, indeed, they prefer to ignore.
Besides this influence, which we may call physiological, we must further note, as a factor producing diversity, the social effect which the presence of a native semiservile class has upon the character of the ruling element in the population. Where such a class supplies labour, the ruling element generally despises and refuses manual work. Where the former is both numerous and ignorant, it usually lowers the moral and probably also the intellectual standard of the European inhabitants. In some republics the presence of this class has encouraged civil wars and revolutions by furnishing Indian soldiers who can be forced to fight and will fight well for causes in which they take no interest. It has moreover made the provisions of constitutions which confer universal suffrage seem hollow shams.
In some few Spanish-speaking countries, particularly along the Caribbean coasts and in some of the maritime towns of Colombia and Peru, the negro, imported after the Conquest, has become a race factor, mingling with the whites to produce an intermediate breed which is usually superior to the pure black, and mingling with the Indian to produce one which is deemed to have the faults of both parents and the merits of neither. But it was only the colony from Portugal which was formerly the Empire and is now the republic of Brazil that received slaves on a great scale. There are believed to be now at least eight millions of blacks and mulattoes in that country, probably two-fifths of the whole population. Such Indian blood as was mingled with the Portuguese settlers has become scarcely noticeable, except in Pará and along the banks of the Amazon. Brazil is, however, so different from the Spanish republics in other respects that one need not insist on this element of diversity.
From these physical and racial influences I pass on to those of a historical order. Chief among these were the long-protracted struggle for independence and the interminable civil wars that followed its attainment. Under the Crown of Spain the collective life both of the inhabitants of its dominions as a whole and of each section of those inhabitants had been stagnant. Independence quickened its pulses and accelerated the development of such latent forces as existed into new forms. The political events of the revolutionary epoch and of the ninety years that followed have done much not only to create new nations, but also to mould them, while they were growing up, into diverse shapes. In some republics the civil wars lasted longer than they did in others, and left the country more exhausted and distracted; in others again foreign intervention had the effect of consolidating the people and creating a stronger patriotism than had existed before. This was conspicuously the case in Mexico. The French invasion and the long struggle which ended in the dethronement and death of the unfortunate Maximilian of Hapsburg determined the fortunes of that country, extinguishing the power of the Church, and renewing the nation's confidence in itself which had been shattered by the war with the United States. So, too, the heroic efforts made by the Uruguayans under Artigas to shake off the yoke of Brazil and their subsequent conflict with Argentina, then ruled by the tyrant Rosas, left a permanent impress upon their character. In most of the Central American states, on the other hand, progress in education, in civil order, and in the turning to account of natural resources has been arrested by their incessant strife with one another as well as by internal convulsions.
The general result of the wars and revolutions which make up so much of Spanish-American history has undoubtedly been to differentiate the peoples and build up separate nations and strengthen the national consciousness of the inhabitants of almost every republic. Whether that strengthening has been a good thing or not, I do not attempt here to enquire. But apart from it, the other consequences of so long a period of struggle and bloodshed have been deplorable.
Effort and suffering do no doubt test and try a community. War, be it civil or foreign, never leaves men the same as it found them, though the common assumption that it makes them either stronger, or wiser in the exercise of their strength, is as false as it is dangerous. If war, apart from the pure aim and high spirit in and for which it conceivably may be, but seldom has been, undertaken, ennobles the soul as well as toughens the fibre of a nation, what virtues ought it not to have bred in these South American countries, where the lance was always glittering and the gun-shot always echoing?
Of the other formative and stimulative influences which the deliverance from Spanish rule might have set to work upon the peoples of the republics, of the development of science, art, and letters, and in particular of that part of intellectual life which goes deepest down into the soul of a people, theology and religious faith, of these things as influences in building up a national individuality, there is little to be said, because disturbed political conditions and the backward state of education checked all such development. Until the last thirty years it has had no fair chance, and in some republics has little even now. One may observe, however, that in such progress as can be recorded the Church has had scarcely any share. Both her claims to authority and her property have been at one time or another (though much less in recent years) a cause of political conflicts in most republics. But the unfavourable conditions referred to have told upon the Church itself, not to add that her ministers were under Spanish rule and have continued to be both less well instructed and (of course with many exceptions) less exemplary in life than the Roman Catholic priesthood of France or Germany or of the United States.
The recent economic development of some few of these countries, and especially the extension of their agriculture and their mining, have naturally tended to give a practical turn to thought and action, fixing men's minds on business, on the public improvements which wealth makes possible, and on the enjoyments to which it invites. If even old and highly cultivated nations, like the Germans and the Italians, are felt by themselves and seen by their neighbours to have been somewhat altered in spirit and aim under new conditions of industrial and commercial life, how much more must similar conditions tell upon communities intellectually younger and, so to speak, more fluid, less "set" in a definite mould. These causes have been increasing the differences between the more progressive and the more backward republics. They have been setting their stamp upon Argentina and Chile. A similar change, though it affected only a small class, was discernible in Mexico during the later years of the supremacy of Porfirio Diaz.
Immigration from Europe has not yet gone far enough to affect the "type" of any South American people, or bear a part in the process of national differentiation. It may, however, do so in the future, for in countries where prosperity has created a large demand for labour, and where public order is little disturbed, there begins to be an inflow of settlers from abroad. In Mexico and Cuba immigration is steady though not large, and is drawn almost entirely from Spain. In Peru it is small, for the Chinese and Japanese who come are too few to affect the character of the population. Some Germans entered Chile thirty years ago, and constitute a valuable though comparatively small element. A far greater number have settled in southern Brazil. Uruguay receives a considerable but at present (1912) declining immigration both from Italy and from Spain. To Argentina there come not only many Spaniards, but a still fuller stream of Italians, who now form so large an element that the Argentine of the future will be probably one-third Italian in blood.103 Into the other Spanish-speaking parts of the New World there is at present very little immigration, nor are the tropical regions fitted for agricultural settlers from Europe. Chinese or Japanese or Indian coolies might do better, and there are already plenty of Hindus in British Guiana. Should valuable minerals be discovered in places where, as in Colombia, Venezuela, and northern Brazil, labour is scarce, the temptation to introduce Asiatics would be strong.
II. We have now to enquire what have been the results of the process of nation-building. How many, and which, of the republics that were once parts of the great Spanish dominion have now grown to be true nations? But here a preliminary difficulty meets us. In speaking of the peoples of these republics, are we to think of all their inhabitants, or only of the ruling Hispano-American element, excluding the aborigines? Are the aborigines, and such collective character as they possess, to be taken into account when we seek to determine which communities deserve to be called nations, or are they rather to be deemed subject tribes standing outside and not sharing in genuine national life?
Without anticipating what will be said in a later chapter, it is enough to remark here that from the United States frontier at El Paso in latitude 32° north, down to the Tropic of Capricorn (latitude 23° south) a very large, though unascertained and at present unascertainable part of the population—possibly a majority—consists of Indians, most of whom speak their native languages, and some of whom are mere savages. Even those who, like the Quichuas and Aymarás of the Andean plateau, are in a fashion civilized, lead a life apart, and, though in most republics legally citizens, have practically nothing to do with the government of the countries they inhabit, except as combatants in its foreign or civil wars. In Argentina the question scarcely arises, because nearly all the population is of European stock, while in Chile the Araucanians are practically the only pure Indians left. We must, therefore, restrict our view to the two other elements, the European and the mixed, these forming, for nearly all practical purposes, one body. It is of them, not of the Indians, that we have to think when we ask how far the inhabitants of each republic have advanced into true nationhood.
For the purpose of determining whether any community ought to be deemed a nation, one must distinguish two things which are apt to be confounded. The one thing is the presence in the community of a distinctive national character, the other is the presence of strong national sentiment. The former consists in the possession by the members of the community of certain attributes and certain qualities, visible in its collective action, which are peculiar to it, and mark it off from other communities. The latter is the consciousness of political unity, taking shape in the spirit of self-assertion against other communities, expressing itself in the effort to make good the community's position in the world, to push its claims and to defend its rights. The former is in practice usually accompanied by the latter; that is to say, a community whose members feel themselves to be a political entity, with distinctive ideas and traditions of their own, naturally desires to prevent itself from being overridden or swamped by other communities. The latter, however, does not necessarily imply the former. A community may have little that is peculiar or distinctive; may have no racial traits of its own, no literature, no special beliefs or customs, and a history too short to have formed traditions. Yet the circumstances of that short history, coupled with vanity (collective and individual) and a combative spirit, may have created a sensitive and inflammable patriotism which makes the community feel and act as a Nation, however little there may be to distinguish it from surrounding peoples beyond the fact that historical accidents have divided it from them and started it on a course of its own. In this latter set of cases, an observer who studies the community may discover nothing that constitutes a distinctive national character. Its citizens may seem much the same in ideas and habits as those of the other independent branches of the same nationality around them. Yet they may be found to hate those neighbours of the same speech just as bitterly as races that have been secular enemies, like Turkomans and Persians, hate one another.
Applying these tests to the Latin-American republics, it will appear that by both tests several of the greatest are indisputably nations. Chile and Argentina have each of them a distinctive national quality which so marks them off from their neighbours that even the passing traveller can discern it. They have national character as well as national sentiment. So, too, have Mexico and Peru.104 The same thing is true of Uruguay, the people of which, originally the same as that of Argentina, have developed, in the course of a tempestuous history, a somewhat different type. Brazil, being Portuguese, has always had a character of its own. These six republics may all be deemed to be nations in the European sense of the word. I have not visited Paraguay, but should suppose that in it the numerical preponderance of the native Guarani stock brings about a result similar to that which an infusion of coloured blood has had in Cuba, but more marked.
In most of the other republics there seems to be much less that can be called distinctive of each. Colombians, Venezuelans, and Ecuadorians inhabit regions generally similar, have had a similar history, and have all received about an equal infusion of native blood, though in each—and especially in Colombia—there are some few old Spanish families who have remained unaffected. The average citizen of any of these countries is said to be but slightly distinguishable from the average citizen of either of the other two.105 The same is the case as regards Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. But in each and all of these states there is a profusion of militant nationalist spirit, which, in Central America, has been fostered by frequent wars. Ecuador has been repeatedly on the point of taking up arms against Colombia on one side and Peru on the other, over disputes about territory. So far as national sentiment can make a nation, these republics have it to overflowing. Their common Hispano-American nationality no more checks aggressive displays of enmity than a common Tuscan origin mitigated the strife of Florence and Siena, or a common Bœotian origin the hatred of Thebes and Platæa.
The republic whose individuality has been most fully developed is Chile. Its citizens are seen at first sight to be Chileans, just as in Europe we recognize at once a member of any of the leading peoples. Most Spanish Americans are good fighters, but the Chileans perhaps the best; for they are the children of the most dogged of the native races as well as of the most stalwart of the Spanish settlers. The same combination of patriotism and pugnacity is seen in the Uruguayans. In character as well as in speech, the Argentines are also beginning to shew a character different from that of the other peoples; but the mental and moral type, as is natural in a country rapidly growing and deluged with immigrants, is not yet fully formed.
It may be asked whether the best evidence of the emergence of a genuine and distinctively national life ought not to be found in the growth of a national literature expressing, in whatever form, the ardour and the aspirations of the people. Those who quote the age of Queen Elizabeth and the age of Lewis the Fourteenth as instances to support the doctrine that eras of successful war and growing power herald, or coincide with, an epoch of literary creation, may expect to find that the incessant strife which has kept hot the blood of the citizens in some republics, and the rapid material progress of others, promise an era of intellectual production in South America. Of this, however, there has been so far no sign. National spirit seems little disposed to flow in this channel. In the southern republics there is plenty of energy, but not much of it is directed towards art or science or letters. The long and fierce conflict of Chile and Peru was marked on both sides by much valour and some heroism, but no poem like the Araucana followed. In the more backward states, incessant strife has hindered instead of stimulating intellectual as well as economic progress. In the prosperous ones, men's minds are bent upon the development of natural resources, and in the very richest, where there should be most leisure for mental cultivation, upon material pleasures and luxuries.
III. We have still one more question to ask before closing this consideration of the process by which nations have been evolved out of the old administrative divisions of Spanish America, divisions originally due to the historical accidents, which had in colonial times placed different districts under the authority of different officials. How far does there exist among the peoples of these republics the sense of a common Hispano-American nationality? Do they feel their common Spanish origin, together with Spanish literature and the ideas and social customs which they share, to be a source of common pride and a bond of unity between them, linking them together despite political severances and antagonisms? Spaniards had a certain amount of common Spanish feeling before Castile and Aragon were united, and Italians, so far from ceasing to feel themselves Italians during the centuries before 1848, when they were cut up into many states, some of them ruled by foreign dynasties, were stirred by a more vehement nationalism in that year than ever before. Can one, then, for any and for what purposes, treat Spanish America as being one whole, either intellectually or sentimentally?
It has already been observed that to the traveller the differences between one republic and another seem comparatively slight, not greater than those which he would have noted in wandering leisurely through Germany before 1866 and 1870 when first the North German Confederation and then the new German Empire came into being. Not only is the language the same, with dialectic variations which are comparatively few when one considers the vast area and the large aboriginal element in the population, but manners and social usages are similar everywhere, though less polished in the wilder parts.
Similarity goes even deeper, for it is found in ideas and in mental habits. A Costa Rican and an Argentine differ less than a Texan does from a Vermonter, or a Caithness man from a Devonshire man. All remain in a sense Spanish; that is, they are much more like Spaniards and more like one another than they are like Frenchmen or Italians. They are nearer to one another than North Americans are to Englishmen. They have the broad features of Spanish character and temperament,—the love of sonorous phrases, the sensitiveness to friendliness or affront, the sense of personal dignity, steady courage in war, and the power of patient endurance. And among men of education and thought the basis of intellectual character and the sense of moral values seems to be substantially the same.
Nevertheless, the feeling of a common Hispano-American brotherhood is weak. In Old Spain there was before and during the sixteenth century a localism strong enough to make Catalonians and Castilians and Andalusians care more for their province than for Spain, unless, of course, a question of national union against the foreigner came in. The sentiment of racial fraternity expressed in the saying that "blood is thicker than water" is easily suspended or even overridden and for the time extinguished by political bitterness. The Thebans, according to the story, fined their great poet because he had consecrated two splendid lines to the praise of Athens. Not even the closest literary and commercial intercourse and the pride of an ancient and glorious stock prevented the people of New England from hating those of old England for more than a generation after the War of 1812. Among the Spanish Americans literature and historical traditions have not been forces making for cohesion, for there has been, in most of the republics, little literary production, and their traditions seldom go back further than the revolutionary war.
Were there then no memories of Spanish greatness? These may have had some power in colonial days while the struggle of Spain and Catholicism against England and Holland was at its height. But in later times the preference shewn by the viceroys to persons sent out from the mother country, and the habit of reserving for them all offices of profit, exasperated the criollos, as the native-born colonists were called. They were further alienated by the stupidly repressive character of colonial administration. These follies and abuses, and the cruelties which accompanied the long War of Independence, seem to have effaced the sense of any community based on the Spanish name. One might, indeed, have rather found a bond in the common aversion to Spain and in a sympathy with one another springing out of the struggle against her power. The war was, however, in the main, waged independently by each colony. The Argentine army of San Martin gave effective help to Chile, and with Chilean troops practically achieved the liberation of Peru, where the royal cause was strongest; and in that result the Venezuelan Bolivar had also a share. Colombia and Venezuela helped one another, and both helped Ecuador. But so far has this coöperation been from becoming a basis for friendship, that the bitterest of all South American antagonisms is that of Peru and Chile, and it is only recently that the danger of a conflict between Chile and Argentina has disappeared.
Neither has their common profession of the Roman Catholic faith served to strengthen affection among the republics. As there was no Protestantism in Spanish America, they were never called upon to rally together in defence of the Church, and in some republics men united to attack her privileges or her property. She has often brought not peace, but a sword. The only thing that to-day would draw the republics into line and knit them together would be any threat of aggression from outside. They have long ceased to fear invasion, still less subjugation, by any European power. But the enormous strength of the United States and recollections both of the war she waged against Mexico in 1846 and of some more recent events make them watch the actions of that country with a sensitive suspicion which even the correctness of her conduct in twice evacuating Cuba has not entirely dispelled.
The observer who has realized that many of these states are not natural political entities, but the creation of a series of accidents, naturally wonders whether they are likely to remain as at present. May not the two or three greatest swallow up the weaker, or may not some of the smaller seek strength in a voluntary union, federal at first, and perhaps ultimately leading to a unitary state? This is not impossible. The three republics of Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador might renew the federal tie they dissolved in 1831. Some, or all, of the Central American republics might similarly form a confederation. Mr. Root, when Secretary of State of the United States, tactfully acting in conjunction with Mexico, succeeded in persuading all those republics to set up and promise to obey a sort of Federal Court of Justice for the determination of disputes between them, and the Court still exists, though the promise to use it has been generally forgotten when the time came. There are those who think that Bolivia, one of the least homogeneous among South American countries, may possibly be partitioned, like Poland, by her more powerful neighbours, but of this there seems no present risk. It is chiefly in Central America that the existing situation may be deemed to lack stability, for while Costa Rica and Salvador are comparatively peaceful and well-governed states, and Guatemala has latterly kept quiet, Nicaragua and Honduras have been in a state of constant disturbance, and any ambitious president attaining power in either might be tempted to attack his neighbours.
It is of more importance to enquire what are the prospects of a continued and durable peace in the continent of South America. Here three states stand out as far stronger than any of the others. Chile, Argentina, and Brazil have all of them considerable armies, and have now provided themselves with fleets, including powerful ironclads, not in any direct or immediate contemplation of war, nor because any one of them is threatened by any other naval power, but apparently in imitation of the United States and of the largest nations of the Old World. It seems to be thought nowadays that the dignity and status of great nations require a big navy, just as in the sixteenth century a nobleman of high degree was expected to travel about with and maintain a crowd of useless retainers. Each of these three nations is as strong as any two of the other republics. Next to them come Peru and Uruguay, while the northern states, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela, find their chief defensive strength in the difficult nature of their territories.
There has been no war (other than a civil war) in South America since 1883, when peace was made between Chile, Peru, and Bolivia. The tension over disputed boundaries between Argentina and Chile ended with the acceptance of the Delimitation Award made by the king of England in 1902. The friction between Argentina and Brazil which arose once or twice at a later date seems to have passed away, and the friendly relations now subsisting between these three, which one may call the Great Powers of the Continent, are of good augury for the averting of hostilities, more than once threatened, between Ecuador and Peru and between Colombia and Ecuador. The influence of the United States also has been usefully exerted towards the same end. Most of the causes to which European wars have been due are absent from this Continent. There are no religious differences. There are, as between states, no race questions, no nationalities held in bondage against their will and struggling to be free. There are no rival claims to lay hold of unoccupied or semicivilized territories in other parts of the world.
Fish, and the element in which fish live, have often been quarrelled over elsewhere, but in South America there are no fishing rights worth a quarrel (except perhaps the pearl fisheries of Panama), and the only water questions that have ever given trouble are those relating to the respective jurisdictions of Argentina and Uruguay in the river Plate estuary and regarding the navigation rights of Colombia and Venezuela in the river Orinoco. Boundary disputes remain. Some of them, like that of Chile and Argentina, that of Bolivia and Argentina, and that of Brazil and Peru, have been recently settled, but there are still outstanding not only the controversy between Peru and Chile regarding Tacna and Arica,106 but also the three-cornered quarrel of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru about their respective claims to the half-explored Amazonian region in which their territories meet on the eastern side of the Andes.
There remains an unclassifiable margin of other possible incidents which might precipitate into war the inhabitants of the more backward republics, men of an over-sensitive and explosive temper, a temper which holds every question to be one of honour, and even if it has been induced to accept a reference to arbitration, refuses to accept the award when rendered. Thus the danger of wars in this Continent cannot be deemed to have vanished, though it has so greatly diminished that its extinction seems to approach. Let us, nevertheless, remember one possible contingency. Now and then there has arisen in some republic a man of ruthless force whose unslaked ambition, after it has made him master of his own country, turns its arms against its neighbours. Though there are signs that the era of revolutions and tyrannies is passing away, such a man might again appear, rising by the favour of the populace and ruling by military force, and he might try to strengthen his domestic control by foreign conquest.
Of wars with European Powers there has for a long time past been no question, and as those Powers do not try to annex South American territories, and have no causes of quarrel except when their subjects complain of debts unpaid and injuries inflicted, so the South Americans have not taken a hand in the game of Old World politics. They need not now be tempted to do so, for there is at present plenty in the changeful relations of their own republics to engage the capacity of the ablest statesman. As to what may happen when one or two of the South American countries have reached the population and wealth of France or Italy, it is vain to speculate. Those who live to see that day will see a world wholly unlike our own.