Although races, unlike in character and differing in the scale of upward progress, must have come into contact from the earliest times, it is only in recent years that the phenomena attending that contact have been carefully observed and studied. From the end of the fifteenth century European nations have been conquering the backward races. In some countries they enslaved, in others they extirpated, these races. They have now portioned out the whole world of savagery, barbarism, and semicivilization among themselves, so that, as the result of discoveries, wars, and treaties, six great and three smaller powers107 have now appropriated all the extra-European world, except three or four ancient Asiatic states. In our own day the questions connected with race contact have obtained both a new moral interest, because the old methods of killing off the so-called lower branches of mankind by the sword or by slavery have fallen into discredit, and also a new scientific interest, because we have become curious to know what are the effects of a mixture of markedly dissimilar racial stocks. Such mixture raises some of the most obscure problems in the doctrine of heredity. Does the blending of one race with another tend to weaken or to improve the breed, and how far are any marked qualities of one parent stock transmissible by blood to a mixed progeny which is placed in and powerfully affected by a different environment? Spanish America offers a large and varied field for the study of these and other similar questions, and a field which has been, so far, little examined. My own knowledge does not go far enough to enable me to do more than state a few broad facts and suggest to those who have better opportunities for enquiry some of the problems which the subject presents.
When the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors began to occupy the New World they found it peopled everywhere by native tribes whose physical characteristics and, to some extent, their languages also, indicated that although they had inhabited America during countless ages, they probably all had the same, and that an east Asiatic, origin. No part of the two continents from Behring's Straits to Cape Horn (except a few hopelessly barren deserts) was quite untenanted, but some regions were far more populous than others. These regions were the high plateaus of Anahuac (Mexico) with the adjoining lower regions of Yucatan and Guatemala, the plateau of Bogotá, and the plateau of Peru. It was in these that the greatest progress had been made toward civilization and a settled agricultural life; while the lower woodlands and the more or less arid prairies, such as those of the Missouri and of southern Argentina, were more thinly inhabited. There may well have been in Anahuac and Yucatan as many people as in all the rest of North America, and in the Peruvian realm of the Incas as many people as in all the rest of South America.
Now the existence of this aboriginal population has been and still is a factor of the first magnitude in all parts of the continent (except Argentina and Uruguay, where it hardly exists), and in this fact lies one of the most striking contrasts between the northern and southern halves of the Western Hemisphere. The importance of the native Indian element in South America—and the same thing holds true of Mexico and Central America—resides partly in the fact that it furnishes the bulk of the labouring people and a large part of the army, partly in the influence which it has exerted, and still exerts, on the whites, commingling its blood with theirs and affecting their habits and life in many ways.
When the Spaniards came to the New World, they came mainly for the sake of gold. Neither the extension of trade, the hope of which prompted the Dutch, nor the acquisition of lands to be settled and cultivated, thereby extending the dominion of their crowns, which moved most of the English and French, nor yet the desire of freedom to worship God in their own way, which sent out the Pilgrims and Puritans of New England,—none of these things were uppermost in the minds of the companions of Columbus and Ponce de Leon, of Vasco Nuñez and Cortes and Pizarro. No doubt they also desired to propagate the faith, but their spiritual aims were never suffered to interfere with their secular enterprises. Few settlers came from Spain to till the land. The first object was to seize all that could be found of the precious metals, much to the astonishment of the natives, who thought that gold must be to them a sort of fetich. The next was to discover mines of those metals and make the Indians work them. The third was to divide up the more fertile districts into large estates, allotting to each adventurer his share of labourer-natives along with his share of the lands. No settlers came out to clear the ground from wood and build homes upon it, as did the colonists of New England, and those also who sought to create a New France on the St. Lawrence. No Spaniard thought of tilling the soil himself. Why should he, when he could make others till it for him? Where it was already under cultivation by the native peasants, they were turned into serfs attached to the encomienda. Where there was forest, the conquerors seldom troubled themselves to fell it, and that which they found as wilderness remained wilderness in the hands of the savage tribes. Where it was open prairie, there was as little reason for disturbing the nomads who wandered over it. Accordingly, the invaders became a ruling caste, living on the labour of their Indian serfs, and for a long time they confined themselves to the lands on which the latter were already established. So it befell that the aborigines, who in the northern parts of North America were either destroyed or driven out to the west, continued to be in Spanish America one-half or more of the population, those who were already semicivilized being kept as labourers, those who were savages being left to themselves in their forests or half-desert prairies. No agricultural European population grew up in the settled districts. As there were aborigines on the spot to cultivate the land already improved, comparatively few negroes were transported from Africa, and these chiefly to the shores of the Caribbean and to Peru. It was only in the tropical regions of the Antilles and (somewhat later) of Brazil that negro slavery grew up on a large scale; and even there mining, rather than agriculture, was the first cause of their being brought from Africa. The need for negroes was not great in Mexico or Peru, because the native Indians were of a hardier stock than the feeble Arawaks of the Antilles, and lived on under their European masters, though ground down and reduced in numbers by ill treatment. Thus when at last the Spanish colonies asserted their independence, they started without that incubus of a mass of negro slaves which brought so much trouble upon the southern states of the North American Union.
Between the numerous aboriginal tribes there were the greatest differences not only in their degree of advancement toward civilization, but in intelligence, in virility, in fighting quality, and in that kind of resisting power which enables a people to survive under oppression. The best fighters seem to have been—I am not now including the tribes of eastern North America—the Aztecs of Mexico and the Mapoche or Araucanians of Chile. The Caribs in some of the Lesser Antilles and in Venezuela were fierce and tenacious, while their neighbours, the Arawaks of the other Antilles, seem to have become extinct under Spanish severities in half a century. We have no materials for even the vaguest guess at the numbers of these tribes, but it is evident that some disappeared altogether, and that others were greatly reduced. The Chibchas of Bogotá, who were estimated at a million when first reached by the Conquerors, are said by a Spanish annalist to have been almost exterminated in twenty years. Of the Mochicas or Yuncas on the Peruvian coast, still numerous at the coming of Pizarro, though many had perished during their conquest by the Incas, few were left after half a century, and their cities have long been heaps of ruins, perhaps partly because the irrigation works which brought water to them were allowed to perish. A census taken in Peru by the Viceroy Toledo in A.D. 1575 is said to have shewn eight millions of Indians in what is now Peru and Bolivia. Two centuries later there were less than half that number. So it is stated that the Indians round Panama rapidly declined in number when the Spaniards established themselves there. The natives of northeastern Brazil were killed off in the end of the sixteenth century, though the tale that two millions were destroyed in about twenty years is scarcely credible; and the less numerous tribes of central Argentina and Uruguay have entirely vanished. The process still goes on, though to-day the means are usually less violent. It is intoxicating liquors and European diseases, not any ill treatment by the Chileans, that have been reducing the stalwart Araucanians to a fourth or fifth part of what they were eighty years ago, and the Tehuelches and other Patagonian tribes, including the wretched Fuegians, are dying out largely from natural causes. But in the Amazonian forests along the Putumayo river—and that within the last few years—the cruelties and oppressions practised by the rubber gatherers upon the helpless Indians have destroyed many thousands of lives and apparently altogether blotted out some tribes.
How many aborigines now remain in Latin America, it is impossible to ascertain. Even in such advanced countries as Mexico and Peru, there are no trustworthy figures, not only because it is impossible to find means of counting the wild nomads of northwestern Mexico and the still wilder savages of eastern Peru, but also because, even in the civilized districts, it is hard to determine who is to be deemed an Indian and who a mestizo, or half-breed. However, any estimate, if clearly understood to be merely conjectural, is better than none at all, so I may say that in Mexico108 there are probably, out of fifteen millions of people, about eight millions of Indians, with at least six millions of mixed blood, and the rest Spaniards; while in Peru and Bolivia, out of a total of about six millions, three and a half millions are Indians, one and a half millions mestizos, and the rest more or less pure Spaniards.109 The one state which is almost wholly Indian, so that the Guarani language is the prevailing tongue, is the inland country of Paraguay, and the one which has no Indians at all is Uruguay, lying on the coast, not far from Paraguay. Of the total population of South America, estimated at forty-five millions, probably eight to nine millions may be pure Indians. Besides these there are, possibly, thirteen millions of mestizos or half-breeds, and fifteen of persons who deem themselves white, even if a good many have some infusion of aboriginal blood.110 But if we omit Argentina, almost entirely, and Uruguay entirely, white, as well as Brazil, and confine our view to the other eight republics in which the Indian element is larger, a probable estimate would put the number of pure Indians at more than double that of the whites, and a little less than that of the mestizos. Upon such a computation the total quantity of native blood would much exceed the European. Such an estimate, however, can make no claim to accuracy. I give it only because it seems, from all I could gather, to represent, in a rough sort of way, the proportions of the races. Anyone who chooses to consider all the more educated mestizos as whites, and all Indians with any touch of white blood as mestizos, would, of course, bring out different figures. The tendency of official statistics is in that direction, for everybody wishes to be reckoned as a white man, but such a method does not truly represent the racial facts.
Of the total of about nine millions of Indians, two or three millions may be wild, Indios bravos, as the South Americans call them, and in little contact with civilized whites or mestizos. To this class belong many of the aborigines in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, as well as most of the far smaller number still left in Argentina. Of the more or less civilized and settled Indians, more than one-half, about three and a half millions, are in Peru and Bolivia; and it is of these that I shall now proceed to speak, as I had opportunities in these countries of ascertaining their position, and as they are themselves more interesting, because they are the descendants of what was, before the Spanish Conquest, a comparatively advanced people. What is true of them is, moreover, true, in a general sense, as regards the settled aborigines of the northern republics. In those states, however, there is no such solid mass of sedentary agricultural Indians as dwell on the plateaux and inter-Andean valleys of Peru and Bolivia.
Though at the time of the Conquest there were probably in the Inca empire many different tribes speaking different languages, all have now been fused into two, the Quichuas to the north of Lake Titicaca, and the Aymarás, both around its shores and to the south of it in Bolivia. Having given some account of both races in earlier chapters,111 I need only add that the two languages are generally spoken all over the central Andes from the frontiers of Ecuador on the north to those of Chile and Argentina on the south. Comparatively few of these Indians, probably less than a fifth, are able to talk Spanish. Some few live in the towns and practise handicrafts. Three-fourths of the population of La Paz is Aymará, while in Cuzco at least one-third is Quichua. The vast majority, however, are country folk cultivating the soil as tenants or labourers or tending sheep and cattle as herdsmen for the landowners, who are, of course, either of Spanish or of mixed blood. Comparatively few Indians own small plots of their own. The landlords, who in the colonial times oppressed the peasants so atrociously as from time to time to provoke even this naturally submissive people to rebellion, no longer venture to practise the exactions and cruelties of those days. Authority is not feared as it was then, and could not be used to support such flagrant injustice. Neither do the clergy wring money from their flocks, as in those old bad days, though even now the fees charged for marriages are so high that the rite is commonly neglected. The ancient tribal system has melted away and the cacique, as the Spaniards called him, who was the head of a local community down till the end of the eighteenth century, is now gone, but the old organization of the dwellers in a village by brotherhoods, and resting, or supposed to rest, upon blood relationship, still exists, and local affairs are managed by the local officials mentioned in an earlier chapter.112 Thus, the Indian is left very much to himself, except that he pays rent to the landlord and is often bound to render him personal service at his residence during part of the year. This is called the Mita. His food is not very nutritious, consisting largely of chuño, i.e. frozen potatoes, usually ground into flour. His clothing is scanty, his mode of life hard and wretched, especially on the bleak plateaux. Yet he is not in that abject poverty which fears starvation; perhaps, indeed, not so near the minimum level of subsistence as are millions of the people in China and India. He does not contrast his own evil case with the luxury of the rich, as do the slum dwellers of European cities, nor does he feel his case to be evil, for it is no worse than his forefathers have borne for ten generations, and he knows no other.
Not only the Quichuas and Aymarás, but the Indians of the northern republics and of southern Chile are quite illiterate, and, as respects education, just where they were under the Incas, perhaps rather farther back, because there was then a sort of national life which has been long since quenched. There seems to be among them little or no desire for instruction. Even should any seek to rise in life, he would find no means of doing so, unless perchance some kindly priest should give the rudiments of knowledge to a boy brighter than the rest. Religion does nothing to stir their minds. They are nominally Christians, but of many of them that may be said to-day which was said in 1746 by the humane and orthodox Spaniards, Antonio de Ulloa and Jorge Juan, whose secret report upon things in South America, and among others upon the condition of the Indians in Peru and Ecuador, made to the king of Spain, was published in England eighty years later. They say:—
"The religion of the Indians is no more like the Christian religion than it is to that which they had while they were pagans, for if the matter be well examined it will be found that notwithstanding the nominal conversion of these tribes, so small is the progress they have made in knowledge that it will be hard to discover any difference between the state in which they now find themselves, and that in which they were at the time of the Conquest."113
That the influence of the priesthood did not commend religion to the people nor relieve their misery may be gathered from this further extract from the same secret report:—
"The miserable state of the Indians is to be ascribed to the vices of the parish priests (curas), the extortions of the corregidores, and the bad treatment which they generally receive from all Spaniards. Unable to endure their sufferings, and longing to escape from slavery, many of them have risen up and moved off to unconquered districts, there to continue in the barbarous practices of heathenism.... In the community of Pimampiro in the province of Quito, which consisted of more than 5000 Indians, and was prosperous, the conduct of the parish priest drove the Indians to despair. Uniting in one body, they rose in rebellion and in one night passed to the Cordillera, where they joined themselves to the wild heathen Indians, with whom they have continued until now."114
It ought to be remembered that the avarice and moral faults charged upon the clergy in these reports, as well as in other accounts belonging to the eighteenth century are brought against the parish priests rather than the religious orders, although Ulloa describes the level of conduct as having sadly declined among these also. To some of the orders, most of all to the Jesuits, and in a less degree to the early Dominicans, much credit is due for their efforts not only to spread the gospel, often at the risk of their lives, but also to secure justice for the unfortunate Indians. The great Las Casas was only the most conspicuous among many admirable Spanish churchmen who threw their hearts into this campaign of humanity, though they seldom prevailed against the hard-hearted rapacity of the landowners and mine owners who wished to keep the Indians in serfdom and did not care how many perished under their hands. These worthy ecclesiastics sometimes secured good ordinances from the Council of the Indies in Spain, but the colonial governors found that the path of least resistance was to proclaim the ordinance and wink at its neglect. On many a law was the note made, "It is obeyed, but not executed" (Se obedece pero no se ejecuta). In Paraguay, where the population was almost wholly Indian, the reign of the Jesuits was generally beneficent. They could not do much for the education of the mass of their subjects, but while they trained some few of the promising youth, they impressed habits of industry and good conduct upon the rest. Perhaps it is to the excessive inculcation of obedience that the blind submissiveness of the later Paraguayans to such despots as Francia and Lopez may be partly attributed.115
The oppressions, both civil and ecclesiastical, referred to in the extracts given above, have long since ceased, but their consequences remain in the abject state of the aborigines and their ignorance of the truths and precepts of Christianity. As a learned student of Indian life observes, it is to them a kind of magic, more powerful for some purposes than their own ancient magic which was based on nature worship. "They believe in Dios (God)," says Mr. Bandelier,116 "but believe more in Nuestra Señora de la Luz (Our Lady of the Light) at Copacavana." They worship evil spirits and make offerings to the mountain Achachilas and to the Earth. Even in Mexico, where the Indians are, as a rule, much more subject to enlightening influences, I was told in 1901 that an archbishop, visiting the parishes of his diocese not long before, had found the ancient idols hidden away behind the altars and occasionally brought out at night to receive marks of reverence. The Peruvians had at the conquest hardly advanced to the stage of a regular mythology with images of the deities, so idols were less common and prominent, while the worship of the spirits immanent in natural objects was universal.
Where the church fails to stir the currents of intellectual life among the masses of such a people as this, what other influence is there to make for progress?
These Peruvian races were specially unfortunate because their natural leaders, the caciques or local chieftains who had formed a sort of aristocracy before the Conquest, were either slaughtered or, in some few cases, incorporated into the colonial upper class, so that they were lost, as protectors, to the subject class, who, having little force of character, sank unresistingly into serfdom. Once, in 1781–1783, under the leadership of Tupac Amaru, of whom I have spoken briefly in an earlier chapter, they rose in a revolt which lasted for three years. Being unwarlike and untrained, ill-armed and ill-led, they were defeated with great slaughter, after atrocious cruelties had been perpetrated on both sides. But they accomplished one feat rare in the annals of war in destroying, along with its Spanish garrison, the city of Sorata, which they had long besieged in vain, by damming up the course of a mountain torrent and turning its full stream on the place. Since those days, even the few chiefs that then remained have vanished, and the aboriginal race consists wholly of the poorest and most neglected part of the population. That which to them makes life tolerable is the incessant chewing of coca, a very old habit, but now less costly than in Inca days, because the leaf can be more easily imported from the hot country east of the Andes.
Their enjoyments are two. One is intoxication, mostly with chicha, the old native beverage, but now also with fiery alcohol, made from the sugar-cane. The other is dancing at their festivals. The priests, when they were converting the natives, thought it better not to disturb the ancient heathen dances, but to transfer them to the days which the church sets apart for its feasts, expunging, so far as they could, the more offensive features of the dance, though what remains is sufficiently repulsive. Such ceremonial performances are common among the Indians of North America, also, and used often to be kept up for days together before a declaration of war. The dances of the Hopi and other Indians which the visitor sees to-day in Arizona are dull and decorous affairs. A striking description of the dances which he saw at Tiahuanaco on Corpus Christi Day is given by Mr. Squier,117 and the much more recent account given by Mr. Bandelier of those he witnessed on another festival at Copacavana shew that things are much the same to-day.118 The music, of a drum-and-fife type, is loud, harsh, and discordant, but this does not imply that a taste for sweet sound is wanting, for the Indian often carries his simple flute or pipe with him on his journeys and enjoys the monotonous ditties which he makes it discourse.
Three other facts may be adduced to illustrate the condition of the aborigines. There is no recent literature in their languages, not even a newspaper or magazine. They seem to be very rarely ordained as priests, though I was told in Mexico that there are a good many Indian priests there; and it seldom happens that any Indian rises into the learned or even into the educated class. I heard of one such at Lima, who had a remarkable knowledge of natural history; there may have been others.
Whether owing to the character of the Indians, or to their fear of the white man, robberies and assaults are rare not only among the more gentle Quichuas, but also in Bolivia, where the Aymarás, a more dour and sullen race, frequently break the peace among themselves, village attacking village with sticks and slings, while the women carry bags of stones to supply ammunition for the men's slings. In fact, the safety of the solitary European traveller in most parts of South America is almost as remarkable as the like circumstance in India.
In respect of civil rights, there is no legal distinction between the Indian and the white. Both enjoy the same citizenship for all private and public purposes, to both is granted the equal protection of the laws, equal suffrage, equal eligibility to office. This is to some extent a guarantee to the Indian against ill treatment, but it does not raise him in the social scale. He seldom casts a vote; not, indeed, that it makes much difference in these countries whether the citizen votes or not, for a paternal government takes charge of the elections. He is never—so far as I could learn—a candidate for any national office. The laws of the two republics interfere very little with his life, which is regulated by ancestral custom. Even in revolutions he does not seem to come to the front. He is, however, willing to fight, and a good fighter both in foreign and in civil wars, however little interest he may take in the cause. But for this fact there would have been fewer and shorter revolutions. Thus the Indian is a member of the nation for military, if not for political, purposes. The former are at least nearer to his comprehension than the latter, for he cares, and thinks of caring, about politics no more than did the needy knife-grinder in Canning's verses. No one has yet preached to him the gospel of democracy; no one has told him that he has anything to gain from action as a citizen. The whole thing is as completely out of his sphere as if he were still living under the Spanish viceroys, or, indeed, under the rule of the Inca Huayna Capac. There is, therefore, not yet any "Indian question" in South America.119 There ought to be an Indian question: that is to say, there ought to be an effort to raise the Indians economically and educationally. But they have not yet begun to ask to be raised.
So much for the Indian as he is in Peru and Bolivia; and, apparently, also in those settled parts of northwestern Argentina where Indians still remain. In Paraguay the position is so far different that the Indians form not the lowest class, but the bulk of the nation. In the forest-covered regions of the Amazon and its tributaries, the Indios bravos are outside civilization altogether.
To understand the social relations of the white and Indian races one must begin by remembering that there is in Spanish and Portuguese countries no such sharp colour line as exists where men of Teutonic stock are settled in countries outside Europe. As this is true of the negro, it is even more true of the Indian. He may be despised as a weakling, he may be ignored as a citizen, he may be, as he was at one time, abominably oppressed and ill treated, but he excites no personal repulsion. It is not his race that is against him, but his debased condition. Whatever he suffers, is suffered because he is ignorant or timid or helpless, not because he is of a different blood and colour. Accordingly the Spanish Americans do not strive to keep off and keep down the Indian in such wise as the North Americans and the Dutch and the English—I do not mean the governments, but the individuals—treat their black subjects. There is not even such aversion to him as is shewn in California and in Australia to the Chinese, Japanese, and Hindus. The distinction between the races is in Spanish America a distinction of rank or class rather than of colour. Against intermarriage there is, therefore, no more feeling than that which exists against any union palpably below a man's or woman's own rank in life. If it is rare for a pure white to espouse a pure Indian, that is because they are of different ranks, just as it is rare for a well-born Englishman to marry a peasant girl. There is nothing in the law to oppose such a union, and though whites seldom marry pure Indians, because the classes come little into contact, the presence of an unmistakable Indian strain in a suitor makes no difference to his acceptability to a white woman of the same rank. Whether this contrast between the Spanish attitude towards the Indian and the Anglo-American attitude to the negro is due to differences between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism,120 or to the fact that the Indian was never legally a slave, or to the fact that the aboriginal American races shew a less marked divergence in colour and features from the white than does the negro, is a question which need not be here discussed. Possibly all three causes may contribute to the result; and probably the circumstance that most of the early Spaniards, having brought no wives with them, treated their numerous children by Indian women as being legitimate and belonging to their own race, was also a factor. Such a usage, established in the days of the Conquest, would naturally continue to affect men's attitude. The result is anyhow one of great significance, and makes the racial problem here quite different from what it is in the southern states of North America.
The most salient point of difference lies in the position of the half-breed or mestizo. In North America a mulatto, a quadroon, even an octoroon who is only one-eighth black, counts as a negro. Here, except perhaps in a few of the oldest cities, a mestizo counts as a white. His half-Indian blood is no disparagement to his social standing, no obstacle to his reaching any public position. One may remark of such and such a person that he has evidently a strong infusion of Indian blood, of such another that he looks a Spaniard through and through, and the latter doubtless cherishes a secret satisfaction in his pure Iberian stock. But for the practical purposes of business and politics, the two, supposing them to belong to the same educated class, stand upon the same level. The families which value their lineage so highly that they would deem the marriage of a child to a person of mixed blood, otherwise desirable, to be a mésalliance, must be now few, and hardly exist outside five or six cities—such as Bogotá, Lima, Arequipa, and Santiago.
Thus one may say that there is no "colour question" in South America. Its republics have political and economic problems enough, but they are spared a source of embarrassment and danger constantly present to the minds of thoughtful North Americans, and present also (though less painfully) to the minds of South Africans. Although, therefore, both in Spanish America and in the United States there are social distinctions which coincide with race distinctions, the character of those distinctions is different. In both countries there are two sections. But in the United States everyone who is not white is classed as coloured, however slight the trace. In Spanish America everyone who is not wholly Indian is classed as white, however marked the Indian tinge.121 Thus the mixed population, which in the United States swells the negro element, is in Spanish America a part of the white nation, and helps to give that element its preponderance. And a further difference appears in the fact that whereas in the United States the man of colour is discriminated against for social purposes, irrespective of his wealth, education, or personal qualities, in Spanish countries race counts for so little that when he emerges out of the poverty and ignorance which mark the Indian, his equality with the white man is admitted. So rarely, however, does he emerge that one may broadly say that the Nation consists in these republics of white men and mestizos only, the Indian constituting, if not another nation, yet a separate nationality, marked off not merely by poverty, but by its language and the adherence of its members to ancient superstitions. They have nothing, except the worship of the saints and a fondness for liquor, in common with the class above them, for they speak a different language, think differently, feel differently, have their own amusements, and cherish, in a dim way, faint memories of a time when their forefathers were masters of the land. They are not actively hostile to the white people, and, indeed, get on better with their landlords than some European peasantries have done with theirs. But they live apart, inside the nation, but not of it. The Aymarás are silent, suspicious, sullen. The Quichuas are more kindly, but hardly less reserved. This reserve and suspicion characterize the Mexican Indian also, who is generally more intelligent than the Peruvian.122 Both Aymarás and Quichuas are tenacious of their customs, and do not seek to assimilate any of that modern life and lore which has found its slow way even into the recesses of the Andes. No one from without tries to give it to them, no one rises from among themselves stirred by a desire to acquire it and then impart it to his fellows.
This want of leading, and want not only of light but of a wish for light, is the feature of the Indian population which most surprises the traveller, because he knows of no parallel to it among the subject races of Europe in the past or those of western Asia to-day. The Greek and Armenian in Turkey have at times suffered as much from the Turk as the Quichua has suffered from his conquerors in Peru, but in intelligence and capacity for progress they have been the superiors of the Turk; and had there been more of them, they would before now have shaken off his control.
If it is asked how the presence of this solid Indian mass, unassimilated by the white nation, has affected that nation and the progress of the country as a whole, the answer is that in the first place it prevented all chance of the growth of a free European agricultural population, even in those high valleys where Europeans could work and thrive. Had the hardy and laborious peasantry of Galicia, Asturias, and Aragon settled in these regions, how much more robust, mentally and physically, might the nation have been! How much might agriculture have been improved had there been intelligent labour! But besides this want, and besides the weakening of the state by the lack of national spirit in half of its population, the presence of a large mass of ignorance and superstition has operated to reduce the general intellectual level. There have been countries where a small rich and ruling class, living on the toil of inferiors, has cultivated art and letters with brilliant success, but we find nothing of the sort here. The ignorant mass has depressed the whole, as a glacier chills the air of its valley.
Whether the Spanish stock has deteriorated through the mixture of Indian blood is a more difficult matter to determine. The Peruvians and Bolivians of to-day, both whites and mestizos—and the same thing is true of Venezuelans and Ecuadoreans—differ much from the Spaniards of the sixteenth century and from the European Spaniards of to-day. They are probably more excitable; they are naturally less industrious because they live in hot countries and have Indians to work for them. But in Spain itself there are great differences between the peoples of the north and the south and the east. The Catalans are more energetic than the Andalusians, the Gallegos more industrious than the Valencians. The conditions of colonial life in the presence of a large aboriginal population, coupled with long misgovernment and intellectual stagnation, account for a good deal of the variation from the Spanish type. It is a sound maxim never to lay weight upon uncertain causes when certain causes are available as explanations. Moreover our knowledge of heredity in its influence on race development is still imperfect. The Argentines, who are of an almost pure white stock, also differ much from the modern Spaniard.
It might seem natural to assume a priori that men of pure European race would continue to hold the foremost place in these countries, and would shew both greater talents and a more humane temper than those in whose veins Indian blood flows. But I doubt if the facts support such a view. Some of the most forceful leaders who have figured in the politics of these republics have been mestizos. I remember one, as capable and energetic and upright a man as I met anywhere in the continent, who looked at least half an Indian, and very little of a Spaniard. Nor have there been any more sinister figures in the history of South America since the days of Pedro de Arias the infamous governor of Darien who put to death Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, than some who were pure Spaniards. No half-breeds have shewn more ruthlessness than the Spanish Carbajal in the days of Pizarro, or than Rosas, the Argentine dictator of seventy years ago. And in this connection it deserves to be noticed that the ancient Peruvian Indians, though they thought nothing of indiscriminate slaughter and occasionally tortured captive enemies, did not generally shew the same taste for blood as the Aztecs shewed in their sacrifices nor the same propensity to methods of elaborate and long-drawn-out cruelty as did the Red men of North America.
As I have so far been speaking chiefly of Peru and Bolivia, where the Indian population is larger and more civilized than elsewhere, a few observations ought to be added regarding the other republics in which a considerable aboriginal population remains. I omit Uruguay, because it has none at all. In Argentina there are some civilized Indians in the northwestern districts round the cities of Jujuy and Tucuman, and to these the remarks made regarding their neighbours, the Bolivian Indians, apply. There are also wild Indians, perhaps one hundred thousand, perhaps more, on the Gran Chaco of the far north,123 and the scattered remnants of nomad Patagonians in the far south and in Tierra del Fuego. These seem to be disappearing. The Onas in that island have been freely killed off by the ranchmen on whose flocks they preyed, and tubercular disease is destroying the rest. In Chile, besides the Araucanians, described in Chapter VI, there are a few small tribes, in a low state of barbarism, left in the archipelago of wet and woody isles along the Pacific coast. The rural population of the republic—indeed, nearly all of the poorer and less educated part of it—is mestizo, a bold and vigorous race, good workers and fine fighters. Paraguay is an almost purely Indian country.
Of the four northern republics, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador, I have seen only the first. In each of these the number of purely Spanish families is small. It is probably largest in Colombia. In Venezuela the Indians have been more largely absorbed into the general population than has happened in Colombia and Ecuador. In all four states such of the Indians as remain wild forest dwellers are passive, and practically outside the nation, which is, as a social and political entity, predominantly mestizo. What has been said of Peru and Bolivia is true of these states also: there is no colour line; the mestizos are treated as white and are not, as a class, intellectually inferior to the white. The Indian forms the lowest stratum, and seldom rises out of it.
There remains Brazil, distinguished from the other republics by the fact that in addition to her small mestizo population and her pure Indian population, most of it wild, she has a great mass of negroes and a still larger mass of mulattoes and quadroons. It is hardly too much to say that along the coast from Rio to Bahia and Pernambuco, as well as in parts of the interior behind these two cities, the black population predominates. In character and habits it somewhat resembles the negroes of the British West Indies and Santo Domingo, being superior to the Haytians, but inferior in education and enterprise to the coloured people of the southern states of North America. High as is its fecundity, its death-rate is also so high, owing to the general neglect of sanitary precautions, that it does not appear to be increasing relatively to the general population. It is well treated—slavery was seldom harsh among the kindly natured, easy-going Portuguese—and bears no ill-will to its former masters. Neither do they feel towards it that repulsion which marks the attitude of the whites to the negroes in North America and South Africa. The Brazilian lower class intermarries freely with the black people; the Brazilian middle class intermarries with mulattoes and quadroons. Brazil is the one country in the world, besides the Portuguese colonies on the east and west coasts of Africa, in which a fusion of the European and African races is proceeding unchecked by law or custom. The doctrines of human equality and human solidarity have here their perfect work. The result is so far satisfactory that there is little or no class friction. The white man does not lynch or maltreat the negro: indeed, I have never heard of a lynching anywhere in South America except occasionally as part of a political convulsion. The negro is not accused of insolence and does not seem to develop any more criminality than naturally belongs to any ignorant population with loose notions of morality and property.
What ultimate effect the intermixture of blood will have on the European element in Brazil I will not venture to predict. If one may judge from a few remarkable cases, it will not necessarily reduce the intellectual standard. One of the ablest and most refined Brazilians I have known had some colour; and other such cases have been mentioned to me. Assumptions and preconceptions must be eschewed, however plausible they may seem.
The chief conclusions which the history of the relations of races in the South American continent suggests are the three following. The first may be thought doubtful. It is negative rather than positive, and though it seems worth stating, I state it with diffidence.
The fusion of two parent stocks, one more advanced, the other more backward, does not necessarily result in producing a race inferior to the stronger parent or superior to the weaker. The mestizo in Peru is not palpably inferior in intellect to the Spanish colonial of unmixed blood, but seems to be substantially his equal. The mestizo in Mexico is not palpably superior—some doubt if he is at all superior either physically, morally, or intellectually—to the pure Tarascan or Zapotec Indian, who is, no doubt, a stronger human being than the South American Quichua or Aymará.
The second conclusion is this: Conquest and control by a race of greater strength have upon some races a depressing and almost ruinous effect. The Peruvian subjects of the Incas had reached a state of advancement which, though much below that of the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians, was remarkable when one considers that their isolation deprived them of the enormous benefit of contact with other progressive peoples, and when one considers also the disadvantage of living at a great altitude, the absence of milk-yielding animals, and the paucity both of animals capable of domestication and of cereal plants. The impact of Spanish invasion not only shattered their own rudimentary civilization to pieces, but so took all the heart and spirit out of them that they have made practically no advances during four centuries, and have profited hardly at all by the western civilization of their masters. The aborigines of Mexico, having more stamina of intellect and will, have suffered less by the shock, but have done almost as little to assimilate the arts and ideas of Europe.
Thirdly, the ease with which the Spaniards have intermingled by marriage with the Indian tribes—and the Portuguese have done the like, not only with the Indians, but with the more physically dissimilar negroes—shews that race repugnance is no such constant and permanent factor in human affairs as members of the Teutonic peoples are apt to assume. Instead of being, as we Teutons suppose, the rule in this matter, we are rather the exception, for in the ancient world there seems to have been little race repulsion; there is very little to-day among Mohammedans; there is none among Chinese. This seems to suggest that since the phenomenon is not of the essence of human nature, it may not be always as strong among the Teutonic peoples as it is to-day. Religion has been in the past almost as powerful a dissevering force as has racial antagonism. In the case of Spaniards and Portuguese, religion, so soon as the Indians had been baptized, made race differences seem insignificant. Islam has always done this in the East and in Africa.
As touching the future, it seems as certain as anything in human affairs can be that the races now inhabiting South America, aboriginal, European, and African, will be all ultimately fused. The Spanish republics (except the purely white Argentina and Uruguay) will be Ibero-American, Brazil will be Ibero-American-African. All present facts point that way, and that any hitherto unfelt repulsion will arise seems most improbable. When, however, will the process be complete? In the Spanish republics, hardly before two centuries, probably not even then. It seems not much nearer now than it was in 1810, when the revolutionary struggles began, though anything which stirred up the Andean population, such as the discovery of a large number of new and rich mines, bringing in foreign labour and increasing the demand for domestic labour, or anything that roused a spirit of economic and political change, might accelerate the consummation.
Still less predictable is the quality of the mixed race that will emerge. One cannot but fear that the Portuguese of tropical Brazil may suffer from the further infusion of an element the moral fibre of which is conspicuously weak, though there are those who argue that the blood of the superior race must ultimately transmute the whole. But we need not assume that the peoples of the Spanish republics will necessarily decline, for the present degradation of the Indians may be due as much to their melancholy history as to inherent defects. It is still too soon to be despondent. There may be in the Indian stock a reserve of strength, dormant, but not extinct, ready to respond to a new stimulus and to shoot upwards under more inspiriting conditions.
Alexander Hamilton bade his fellow citizens to think continentally; and Herodotus, in the short introduction prefixed to his history, explains its theme as being an account of the relations of two great continents, Europe and Asia, and of the reasons which produced such recurring strife between them. Let us attempt to think a little of the southern part of the Western world as a whole, in its relations as a continent to the other continents, and especially to that continent with which it is connected by a narrow neck of land, the Isthmus of Panama, and which has drawn its name from the same navigator. The series of incidents by which the name of a Florentine adventurer was given, first, to a continent he probably did not discover, and then to another which he never saw, is as curious as anything in geographical history.
Everybody knows that Christopher Columbus sailed out into the west in search of new lands, expecting them to be a part of Asia, and that to the day of his death, after four voyages, he believed that he had found India.124 In the last of those voyages, when he was wearily beating up along the coast of Darien against the currents, he fancied himself near the Straits of Malacca. It is natural, therefore, that neither he nor his first successors in exploration should have given a name to the new western land south of the Caribbean Sea, even when, some while later, they had explored enough of it to recognize it for a continent. They named particular regions, but a general name was not needed because it was expected that the parts seen would turn out to be parts of Asia. Then in 1497 other voyagers who sailed forth to explore said that they found a new land, far off in the ocean to the southwest of the Canary Islands. Next year Columbus discovered on the south side of the Caribbean Sea the "Tierra Firma," which we call Venezuela. Americus Vespuccius of Florence, one of the ship's company of the 1497 voyage, wrote letters, giving an account of this (and of a later voyage, also) to the new land far to the southwest, in which he described it as "a New World, a New Fourth Part of the Globe," Europe, Asia, and Africa being the other three. The letters made a great sensation; and one of them was made the basis of a book called Cosmographiæ Introductio, published in 1507, at St. Dié in France, by a certain Waldseemüller (Hylacomylus), a professor there, who suggested that as Americus was the discoverer of this Fourth Part of the World, it should be called after him.125 The book was read far and wide; the name took. It was not intended to be applied to the lands west and south of the Caribbean Sea, which between 1497 and 1507 had been discovered by Columbus and others; still less to the lands discovered by John Cabot in the far north, but to an entirely different piece of land much to the south and east of what Columbus had discovered. But when all the lands bordering on that part of the Atlantic had been sufficiently explored and the records of the voyages compared, it appeared that the lands lying in the part of the ocean to which the descriptions of Americus referred, were, in fact, continuous with the coasts of the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Thereupon all the land from the Rio de la Plata (discovered in 1516) northward to the Isthmus of Panama, came to be included under the name America, just because there was no other general name for what had been, at least till 1513, when the Pacific was discovered by crossing the Isthmus at Darien, still believed to be part of Asia. As soon as the Pacific had been reached, and still more when the ever famous voyage of Magellan had shewn that Asia lay thousands of miles further away beyond the Pacific, a general name began to be wanted. Much later, and again, just because there was no other competing name, the term America was extended to include everything north of the Gulf of Mexico up to the Arctic regions, and when the need was felt for distinguishing the two parts, the words North and South were added. Although applied earlier to the southern than to the northern continent, the name when used alone now denotes to most Europeans the latter.
How much simpler and better it would have been if each continent had received a name of its own. South America might have been called after Columbus, as the first man who saw its terra firma, and North America might have received the name of Cabotia or Pinzonia or Ponceana, whichever navigator may be best entitled to be deemed its first and true discoverer. How much trouble would have been saved and how many mistakes avoided! Italian peasants would not have fancied that a cousin who had gone to Buenos Aires was the near neighbour of another who had gone to New York. Similarities would not have been imagined where differences exist. The South Americans would not have resented the assumption by the people of the United States of the name to which they claim an equal right, and the people of the United States would not have formed the habit of believing that the Spanish and Portuguese speaking inhabitants of the southern continent are their affectionate relatives, because they share in the same family name.
These, however, are vain regrets. The names have long been fixed, though for a great while the Spaniards declined to talk of North America. The thing is one instance among many to shew how much may flow from a name which is itself the result of a mere accident.
Now let us turn from names to things, and consider in what respect the two Americas, and their peoples, resemble and differ from one another, and how far they constitute, politically or otherwise, one whole world apart, and what are the relations of the southern, or Spanish and Portuguese, continent to the other, now mainly Teutonic, continent, and to the countries of Europe, and whether the term "Pan Americanism" describes a fact or merely conveys an interesting aspiration. Some points in the history of each continent may come out more clearly, and become more significant when the two are compared, for the history of each illustrates that of the other.
The physical structure of the two continents shews certain similarities. Each is traversed from north to south by a great mountain chain, sometimes breaking into parallel ridges and sometimes widening out into high tablelands. In each this chain is much nearer to the western than to the eastern coast, and in each there are volcanic outbursts at various points along the lines of elevation, these being more continuous and on a vaster scale in the southern continent. In each there is, moreover, an independent mountain mass on the eastern side, the Appalachian system in North America, the Brazilian highlands in South America. Each has, nearer to its western than to its eastern coast, a desert, and in that desert an inland river basin with lakes, Great Salt Lake in Utah corresponding roughly to Lakes Titicaca and Poopo in Bolivia. Each has two gigantic rivers, though the Mississippi and St. Lawrence are not equal in volume to the Amazon and the Paraná. The shores of both are washed by mighty ocean currents, but while the Gulf Stream warms the east coast of the northern, the Antarctic current chills the west coast of the southern, continent.126 Their climates are so far similar that in both the east side of the continent receives more rain than the west, but South America, having its greatest breadth in the tropics, lies more largely within the torrid zone.
It is, however, with the settlement and subsequent history of the two continents that the real interest of the comparison begins. There are three remarkable points of similarity, but the points of difference are more numerous and instructive, and, in noting them, we shall see how potent each point of difference has been in directing the course of events and in forming the character of the communities that have grown up.
The points of similarity are these. Both continents were when discovered inhabited by races entirely unlike those of Europe, who over the greater part of this area were in the savage state, but had in a few regions favoured by nature made some progress towards civilization. Both were conquered by Europeans, and easily conquered, owing to the superiority of the invaders in arms and discipline. The peoples of both (with one important exception in the northern and three unimportant exceptions in the southern continent) ultimately revolted against the kingdoms whence the European part of their population had come and have ever since managed their own affairs as republics, seven republics in North, eleven in South America.
Having noted these general resemblances in the fortunes of the two, let us enquire what were the differences, natural and political, which made the lines of their subsequent development diverge.
At this point, however, it is proper to leave off talking of North and South America, for the southern part of the former continent belongs historically and to some extent physically also, to the latter continent. As Alexandre Dumas said in writing of his journey to Spain, "Africa begins at the Pyrenees,"—it is a saying which the Spaniards have never forgiven,—so we may say, "South America begins at the Rio Grande del Norte." Mexico and the states of Central America down to the Isthmus of Panama were parts of the Spanish colonial Empire, conquered, settled, and administered in much the same way as the still larger part of that Empire which lay farther south. We must, therefore, group the regions that once belonged to that Empire under the general name of Spanish, or, when it is desired to include Brazil (a Portuguese country), "Latin" America, referring to the other parts of the northern continent as "Teutonic America."127
The aboriginal tribes with which the English and French came in contact when they settled the Atlantic coasts of North America were scattered over a vast wooded region, lived mainly by the chase, and had formed no habits of regular industry. They were mostly fierce fighters, proud and dogged, unwilling to bear any control, and it was found impracticable to make slaves of them, or use them for any kind of regular labour. They were unfitted for it, and it would have cost the settlers more effort to compel the Indians to cut down trees and till the ground than to do the same things themselves. There was, accordingly, never any question of Indian slavery or serfdom, either on the Atlantic coasts or when the march of colonization advanced further inland, nor was there more than a scanty intermarriage between the settlers and the natives.
Other reasons besides those connected with labour prevented any admixture in these regions of the white with the native races. There was little social intercourse, because the Indians, even the majority of the less warlike tribes of Virginia and the regions south of Virginia, were driven out, or retired, or died out. Their barbarous way of life drew a sharp line between them and the white intruders. The latter, moreover, brought their women with them, and had less temptation to seek wives among the Indians. Thus it was only among the French voyageurs and trappers of the region round and beyond the Great Lakes that any mixed race grew up, half white, half Indian, and this race has now almost disappeared.
In Spanish America, the case was quite different. Both in Mexico, in parts of Central America, and in Peru there was a large sedentary population of aborigines, cultivating the soil and trained to industry during many generations. The Conquerors immediately turned them into serfs, parcelling them out among the persons who received land grants, and who thereafter lived on the produce of this semiservile labour. The result was that whereas in Teutonic America there grew up, slowly at first, a white agricultural population and ultimately a white manufacturing population also, in Spanish America agriculture was left almost entirely to the aborigines, and the pure white population increased hardly at all, because few new settlers came. There appeared, however, and that within two or three generations, a considerable mestizo or half-breed population, which has come, after three centuries, to constitute most of the upper class and practically the whole of the middle class in all but two of the republics.
This was the beginning of the divergent careers of the two sets of European colonists, Spaniards and Englishmen, a divergence which ultimately gave to the social system of each set its own peculiar structure. Two other circumstances helped to deepen the divergence. One was the hot climate of most parts of Spanish America, which made field labour, or, indeed, any kind of manual labour, more distasteful to men of European stock than such labour was in the northern parts of Teutonic America. The same cause, it need hardly be said, had much to do with the importation of negroes on a vast scale into the southern parts of the British North American colonies. Such an expedient was less needed in Mexico and Peru, because they possessed (as already remarked) a native population that could be reduced to serfdom. In Spanish America, accordingly, all forms of labour connected with land were left by the European settlers to the natives, and no white peasantry grew up.
The other circumstance was that whereas in Teutonic America few or no mines were discovered or worked for a long time after the country had begun to be occupied, the Spaniards, having hit upon regions rich, some of them in gold, many of them in silver, began greedily to exploit this natural wealth and forced the natives to toil for them in this (to the native particularly odious) kind of work. The destruction of human life was terrible, but in those days life was little regarded. So was the slave-trade terrible in the deaths it caused and the suffering it inflicted, but the conscience of England was not stirred against it till the end of the eighteenth century. The development of mining in Spanish America, immense for the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, when comparatively little was going on elsewhere, had many effects for Spain and for the world. For Mexico and Peru the most direct effect was to enrich a good many persons without any industrial efforts put forth by themselves,128 and to lead the settlers as a whole to rely less upon agriculture than men did in the English colonies. A luxurious style of living established itself in the city of Mexico and in Lima, most unlike the frugal simplicity of Boston or Providence, or even of Philadelphia or New York, in the eighteenth century.
It has often been observed that whereas the men who went to the northern English colonies were mostly small farmers or townsfolk of the trading or artisan classes, the Spanish emigrants were mainly adventurers, making gold and silver their first object, the acquisition of plantations or mines to be worked by natives the second. This stamped on Spanish colonial society what can hardly be called an aristocratic character, for many of the emigrant-adventurers, like the Pizarro brothers, sprang from a humble social stratum, but yet a character which lacked both the sentiment of equality and a respect for industry.
Not less marked than these social differences were those which belonged to the sphere of government and administration. The English colonies were for the most part left to govern themselves. Each had not only its colonial assembly, but also local assemblies for towns and counties, along with the English arrangements for securing justice in civil and criminal matters by juries. Even the governors sent out from England, where such there were, interfered but little with the power of the colonists to regulate their own affairs. The Crown did occasionally assert its prerogative, but these instances and the resistance which arbitrary intervention evoked bear witness to the general adherence to the principles of local self-government. In the Spanish colonies, on the other hand, all power remained in the Crown, and was exercised either directly from Spain by ordinances made or orders issued there, or else through the viceroy or captain-general of each colony. Lucrative posts were reserved for persons of Spanish birth, who obtained them by court favour at home, or perhaps from a viceroy, who had brought them out in his suite. In the field of religion the contrast was even greater. Ecclesiastical power had in Spanish America been almost equal to civil. Although the Crown of Spain yielded less authority to the Pope in its transatlantic than it did in its European dominions, the church as a whole, archbishops and bishops, the Orders and the Holy Office, were, in America, an immense and omnipresent force, with whom even viceroys had to reckon, for their influence was great in the Court at home as well as over the minds and conduct of the colonists. Society was saturated with clericalism, and a taint of heterodoxy was more dangerous than one of disloyalty.
Putting all these things together, it can be seen how little in common Teutonic America and Spanish America had when the colonial period ended for each of them by its severance from the mother country. They were, in fact, unlike in everything, except their position in the Western Hemisphere. Few, and far from friendly, had been their relations. There had been very little commercial intercourse but a great deal of fighting. English and American buccaneers and pirates—the two classes were practically the same—had been wont to prey upon Spanish colonial commerce and pillage Spanish colonial cities. There probably remained more aversion between the two races in America than in Europe, for in their hostility to France during the eighteenth century the people of Britain had almost forgotten their hostility to Spain. To the New Englander or Virginian the colonial Spaniard had been a Papist and a persecutor, to the colonial Spaniard his neighbours on the north were pirates and heretics.
What change was made by the two wars against the two mother countries and the independence which followed? It might have seemed likely that now, when both parts of the New World were disconnected from the Old and both had republican forms of government, they might begin to draw together. Independence, though it came nearly forty years later to Spanish America, made more difference there than it had done to the English colonies. Those who had been kept in leading strings by Spain were now left to their own devices. Ill-built and ill-steered had been the vessel that carried their fortunes, but now they began to drift and be tossed about with neither compass nor pilot. An era of civil wars and military revolutions set in, which lasted in Mexico nearly half a century, in Peru and Argentina still longer, and which seems to have become chronic in some of the more backward states. While Teutonic America was making enormous strides in population and prosperity, intestine strife checked all progress, educational and material, in the Spanish lands during two generations. It is to the last thirty years of the nineteenth century that the development of Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay belongs. After the Latin-American countries had become independent, there was no more commercial intercourse between them and the United States than there had been in colonial days and no more community of feeling. Warm sympathy had been expressed by the latter with the colonies in their struggle against Spain, and the declaration made by John Quincy Adams in concert with the English George Canning against any interference by the Holy Alliance to support the cause of monarchy in the New World, was gratefully welcomed by the insurgents. But no friendship between English-speaking and Spanish-speaking men grew up, and the war of the United States against Mexico in 1846, undertaken not so much because there were grievances against Mexico as from a desire to extend the area of slavery in the United States, and strengthen the Slave Power itself, exposed United States policy to suspicions that sank deep into the Spanish-American mind.
From this consideration of the past relations of the two American continents, let us return to the divergence of their fortunes. At the time of the Discovery, the regions which passed under the rule of Spain were richer, more advanced in the arts of life, and far more populous than those whose settlement began with the expeditions of Champlain and Raleigh. We have no data for guessing at the population of the New World either in 1500 or in 1600, but at both dates there evidently were in Mexico and Central America far more inhabitants than in all the rest of the Northern Continent taken together. As regards South America, the empire of the Incas alone probably contained from nine to eleven millions129 of persons, a number many times greater than that of all the aborigines that at any one time dwelt between the Arctic circle and the Gulf of Mexico. Even in 1800 the population of Mexico alone, without counting South America, was far larger than that of the United States and Canada. But from 1810, when the revolt of the Spanish colonies began, down till 1860, the growth of those colonies was slow, and in some there was even retrogression. Meanwhile the United States, and latterly, Canada also, have been advancing with unexampled speed, so that now their population, about 108 millions, far exceeds that of all the Spanish republics in both continents. The hotter countries were at one time more populous than the temperate; now the reverse holds. If we regard wealth, there is, of course, no comparison at all between Teutonic America, as it stands to-day, and the southern regions. Yet Spain was long supposed to have got by far the best parts of the New World, not so much because they had tropical productiveness, as in respect of the quantity of the precious metals they contained. The economic change from the sixteenth century to the twentieth which the progress of natural science and mechanical invention has brought about can hardly be better illustrated than by the changed importance which coal, iron, and copper have for our time when compared with that which gold and silver had in the days of Charles the Fifth.
When the North American colonies separated from England, they were a small nation of less than three millions on the Atlantic coast. Thence they spread out over the vast space beyond the Alleghany Mountains, then across the Mississippi, finally over the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, remaining one nation over a territory thirty times greater than that which had been actually settled at the time of the Revolution. The same process happened later and on a smaller scale in the dominion which remained to England in the north. The Canadians have spread out from the banks of the St. Lawrence to Vancouver Island, also remaining one people. Thus Teutonic America now consists of two nations only.130 How different the fate of the Spanish colonies. Scattered over a space eight thousand miles long from San Francisco to Magellan's Straits, in days before railways existed and with even steam navigation in its infancy, they did not think of trying to maintain political connection across vast distances, and naturally fell apart into many independent states, roughly corresponding to the administrative divisions of colonial days. The number of these states has varied from time to time. At present there are six on the North American continent, and ten on the South American, without counting Portuguese Brazil and the three island republics of Cuba, San Domingo, and Hayti. Out of the lands that obeyed Charles the Fifth, nineteen states have grown, all (except Hayti) speaking Spanish, while the English-speaking peoples are but two. Although the size of the territory occupied by these nineteen is the primary cause of this multiplication of small nations, there are other causes, also, political and social, which have been discussed in an earlier chapter.131 One bond of union they had, one solid basis of common sentiment which, nevertheless, did not avail to hold them together. They all professed the Roman Catholic faith and all obeyed one spiritual sovereign at Rome, whereas among the men of English speech in Teutonic America there were, and are, not only many Roman Catholics, but also among the larger mass of Protestants many forms of Protestantism, and no common ecclesiastical authority at all.