This summary review of the causes which have made the currents of Spanish-American and Teutonic-American history run in different and divergent channels may be closed by enquiring what the two divisions of the New World have in common to-day.
They are alike in being (always excepting Canada) republican in the outward forms of their governments; that is to say, there is nowhere any official called a king. How far the governments of most Spanish-American states are from being republican in spirit and working everybody knows. To most men's minds, however, the form means a great deal. In Spanish America itself people who acquiesce in transitory dictatorships would be horrified at the idea of a hereditary sovereign, however constitutional. And there are still many people in the United States who find some virtue in the mere name of republic.
The two divisions are also alike in belonging to a New World; that is to say, they have shaken loose from many ideas and habits that belonged, and still more or less belong, to the Old World of Europe. Spanish America has done this more completely than has Teutonic America, because even in colonial days the ties of thought and feeling which bound the colonists to Spain were really less strong than those which connected the English of the United States with their mother country, and because the latter were, when the separation came, in a higher stage of institutional and intellectual development. The most signal instance of the general American breach with the Old World is the sense of social equality that now prevails alike in the English-speaking and the Spanish-speaking peoples. The forms in which this sense appears are not quite the same. Among the Spanish Americans there is more external deference on the part of the humbler to the higher placed, and the pure Indian is treated, and submits to be treated, as a social inferior. In Chile, for instance, the roto, or half-breed peasant, stands far more distinctly below the landowner than the North American day labourer stands below his employer; though it is his ignorance, not his mixed blood, that assigns this position to him. But in both continents the complete absence of any artificial and formal distinctions of rank is in striking contrast to the habits and ideas that still hold in most parts of Europe.132
It must be added that these republics of the West have, politically regarded, one important common characteristic. They constitute what German historians call a "States-System" of their own; i.e. they take no part in the politics of the Old World, but only in those of the New. This is no longer true as respects the United States, for though they do not interfere in questions purely European, and have touched those of Africa only slightly in the Congo, and more effectively in Liberia, which, indeed, they called into being, they have, by conquering the Philippine Islands, made themselves an Asiatic power, and by annexing Hawaii and one of the Samoan Islands, a Pacific power. Latin-American republics, however, have (so far as I know) intervened neither in European nor in Asiatic affairs, being content to attend strictly to their own business, which is sufficiently absorbing.
Latin America consists of two separate state-systems. One includes Mexico and the five small Central American republics, two of which, Costa Rica and Salvador, are peaceful within and seldom embroiled abroad, while the other three have had more chequered careers. Members of this group have had plenty to do with the United States, but seldom come into contact with the South American countries. The little republic of Panama, which is virtually under the protection of the United States, may now be deemed a "buffer state," between Colombia and the republics to the north, nor does any Central American republic possess a navy. The larger group is composed of the eleven South American states. It presents some analogies to the Europe of the eighteenth century in which there were several great powers "playing the great game" against one another and against the smaller powers, nominally in the interest of that so-called Balance of Power which was to prevent any one from dominating the others, but often in reality for the sake of appropriating territory, whenever a dynastic pretext could be found. In this group there are three great powers, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile; and when these three stand together, they can keep all the rest quiet, especially if (as they may usually expect) the United States throws its influence into the scale of peace. At present these three are tolerably friendly, and there is no reason why they should not remain so. Between them there exist no longer such territorial controversies as disturb the repose of Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru.133 The politics of South America present an interesting field for study, but it is one upon which I cannot now and here enter.
Some publicists have suggested that troubles might arise to affect South America from without if Japan or China were to insist on flooding her with their emigrants, and that if this were attempted against one of the weaker South American republics, either the greater South American Powers, or the United States, or both, might be tempted to intervene. There are at present some Chinese and a very few Japanese on the Pacific coast, but no more seem to have been arriving in recent years. Any danger of this nature seems remote and improbable.
With these three things, however,—republican forms, social equality, and detachment from European politics,—the list of the things which the two Americas have in common ends. Far more numerous and more important are the points in which they stand contrasted.
Many causes have gone to the making of the contrast. Race and religion, climate and history have all had their share. The contrast appears both in ideas and in temperament. The Spanish American is more proud and more sensitive to any slight. He is not so punctilious in his politeness as is the Spaniard of Europe, and is, indeed, in some countries a little brusque or offhand in manners and speech. But he feels a slight keenly; and he knows how to respect the susceptibilities of his fellow-citizens. I will not say that he is more pleasure-loving than the North American, for the latter has developed of late years a passion for amusement which would have startled his Puritan ancestors. But he is less assiduous and less strenuous in work, being, in this respect, unlike the immigrant who comes from Old Spain, especially the Asturian and the Gallego, who is the soul of thrift and the steadiest of toilers. He is not so fond of commercial business, nor so apt for it, nor so eager to "get on" and get rich. The process of money making has not for him that fatal attraction which enslaves so many capable men in the United States and (to a less degree) in England and Germany, leading them to forget the things that make life worth living, till it is too late in life to enjoy them. In South America things are taken easily and business concerns are largely in the hands of foreigners. The South American—and here I include the Mexican—is an excitable being and prone to express his feelings forcibly, having absorbed from the Indians none of their stolid taciturnity. He is generally good natured and hospitable, and responds quickly to anything said or done which shews appreciation of his country and its ways. Private friendship or family relationship have a great effect on his conduct, and often an undue effect, for one is everywhere told that the difficulty of securing justice in these republics lies not so much in the corruptibility of judges, as in their tendency to be influenced by personal partiality. Things go by favour.
These contrasts of temperament between North and South Americans give rise to different tastes and a different view of life, so that, broadly speaking, the latter are not "sympathetic" either to the former or to Englishmen.134 To say that they are antipathetic would be going too far, for there is nothing to make unfriendliness, nor, indeed, is there any unfriendliness. But both North Americans and Englishmen are built on lines of thought and feeling so different from those which belong to South Americans that the races do not draw naturally together, and find it hard to appreciate duly one another's good qualities.135
The use of nicknames has a certain significance. In South America a North American or Englishman is popularly called a "Gringo," as in North America a person speaking Italian or Spanish or Portuguese is vulgarly called a "Dago." Neither term has any eulogistic flavour.
Thus we return to the question whence we started, and ask again whether there is any sort of unity or community in the two Americas. Are the peoples of these continents a group by themselves, nearer to one another than they are to other peoples, possessing a common character, common ties of interest and feeling? Or does the common American name mean nothing more than mere local juxtaposition beyond the Atlantic? Is it, in fact, anything more than a historical accident?
The answer would seem to be that Teutonic Americans and Spanish Americans have nothing in common except two names, the name American and the name Republican. In essentials they differ as widely as either of them does from any other group of peoples, and far more widely than citizens of the United States differ from Englishmen, or than Chileans and Argentines differ from Spaniards and Frenchmen.
Nevertheless, juxtaposition has induced contact, though a contact which we shall find to have been rather political than intellectual or social. It is worth while to examine the attitude of each to the other.
When the Spanish colonies revolted136 against the Crown of Spain, the sympathy of the United States went out to them profusely, and continued with them throughout the war and long after. Their victories were acclaimed as victories won for freedom and for America, and children were called after the name of Simon Bolivar, whose exploits in Venezuela had early fixed upon him the attention of the world, and have given him a fame possibly beyond his merits.
The struggling colonists were cheered by this as by the similar sympathy that came to them from England. They were, as already observed, grateful for the support given them by the diplomacy of Canning and John Quincy Adams, and when they framed their constitutions, took that of the United States for their model. Their regard for the United States, and confidence in its purposes, never quite recovered the blow given by the Mexican War of 1846 and the annexation of California; but this change of sentiment did not affect the patronage and good-will extended to them by the United States, whose people, and for a time the English Whigs also, maintained their touching faith that countries called republics must needs be graced by republican virtues and were entitled to favour whenever they came into collision with monarchies. This tendency of mind, natural in the days when the monarchies of continental Europe were more or less despotic, has begun to die down of late years, as educated men have come to look more at things than at names, and as United States statesmen found themselves from time to time annoyed by the perversity or shiftiness of military dictators ruling Spanish-American countries. The big nation has, however, generally borne such provocations with patience, abusing its strength less than the rulers of the little ones abuse their weakness. For many years after the achievement by the Spanish colonies of their independence, a political tie between them and the United States was found in the declared intention of the latter to resist any attempt by European Powers either to overthrow republican government in any American state or to attempt annexation of its territory. So long as any such action was feared from Europe, the protection thus promised was welcome, and the United States felt a corresponding interest in their clients. But circumstances alter cases. To-day, when apprehensions of the old kind have vanished, and when some of the South American states feel themselves already powerful, one is told that they have begun to regard the situation with different eyes. "Since there are no longer rain-clouds coming up from the east, why should a friend, however well-intentioned, insist on holding an umbrella over us? We are quite able to do that for ourselves if necessary." In a very recent book by one of the most acute and thoughtful of North American travellers, there occurs a passage which presents this view:—
"Many a Chileno and Argentino resents the idea of our Monroe Doctrine applying in any sense to his country and declares that we had better keep it at home. He regards it as only another sign of our overweening national conceit: and on mature consideration it does seem as though the justification for the doctrine both in its original and in its present form had passed. Europe is no longer ruled by despots who desire to crush the liberties of their subjects. As is frequently remarked, England has a more democratic government than the United States. In all the leading countries of Europe the people have practically as much to say about the government as they have in America. There is not the slightest danger that any European tyrant will attempt to enslave the weak republics of this hemisphere. Furthermore, such republics as Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, Chile, and Peru, no more need our Monroe Doctrine to keep them from being robbed of their territory by European nations, than does Italy or Spain. If it be true that some of the others, like the notoriously lawless group in Central America, need to be looked after by their neighbours, let us amend our outgrown Monroe Doctrine, as already suggested by one of our writers on International Law, so as to include in the police force in the Western Hemisphere those who have shown themselves able to practise self-control."137
There is truth in this. The talk often heard in the United States about the Doctrine has injured and is injuring her influence in South America. It excites suspicion and alarm. It is taken to imply an intent to claim a sort of protectorate over the other American republics, than which nothing could more offend Spanish-American sentiment. The wisest among American foreign ministers, such as Mr. Hay and Mr. Root, are those who have least frequently referred to the Doctrine. To examine this subject, however, would lead me into the field of politics, and with politics I have nothing to do, seeking only to indicate the influences of interest, of intellectual affinity, and of temperamental sympathy which draw the peoples of Spanish America towards one or other of the great peoples of the Northern Hemisphere.138
As regards the United States there is a balance between attraction and suspicion. The South Americans desire good relations, and recognize the value of her diplomatic action in trying to preserve peace between those of their republics whose smouldering enmities often threaten to burst into flame. On the other hand, as already observed, they are jealous of their own dignity, not at all disposed to be patronized, and quick to resent anything bordering on a threat, even when addressed, not to themselves, but to some other republic. It is as the disinterested, the absolutely disinterested and unselfish, advocate of peace and good will, that the United States will have most influence in the Western Hemisphere, and that influence, gently and tactfully used, may be of incalculable service to mankind.
The matters in which these republics are wont to imitate or draw lessons from the United States are education, especially scientific and technical education, and engineering. Of the influence upon their constitutions of the North American Federal Constitution I have already spoken. Their publicists continue to follow with attention the decisions given upon the application of its principles to new conditions as they arise, and attach value to the opinions of North American international jurists. Otherwise, there is little intellectual affinity, and still less temperamental sympathy. The South Americans do not feel that the name "American" involves any closer community or co-operation with the great Teutonic republic of the north than it does with any other people or peoples. They are just as much a race or group of peoples standing by themselves as if the lands they occupy had been that entirely detached continent out in the southern seas, supposed to lie far away from all other continents, to which the name of Amerigo Vespucci was first applied.
With whom, then, have the Spanish Americans real affinities of mental and moral constitution? With the peoples of southern Europe. If anyone likes to call them the "Latin" peoples,139 there is no harm in the term so long as it does not seem to ignore the fact that there exist the greatest differences between Italians and Frenchmen and Spaniards, for whoever has studied the history and the literature of those peoples knows that it is only the existence of still more marked differences between them and the Teutonic peoples that makes them seem to resemble one another.
It might be supposed that the relations of the Spanish Americans would be most close with their motherland, Old Spain. But these relations are not intimate, and have never been so since the War of Independence. Even in those old colonial days when the ports were closed to all but Spanish vessels, in order to stop all trade, export and import, except with the mother country, the days when Englishmen and Dutchmen were detested as heretics, and Frenchmen as dangerous rivals, there was an undercurrent of anti-Spanish feeling. It was chiefly due to the practice of reserving all well-paid posts for natives of Spain. The criollos, as they were called, men born in the colonies, were naturally envious of the strangers, and resented their own exclusion and disparagement. They suffered in many ways, economic as well as sentimental, both from laws issued in Spain and from authority exercised on the spot by men from Europe who did not share their sentiments, treated them as socially inferior, and flouted their local opinion. Accordingly, when the separation came, there was less sense of the breaking of a family tie than there had been among the North American colonists in the earlier stages of their revolution. This antagonism to Spanish government was, of course, accentuated and envenomed by the long duration of the struggle for independence, which in Peru lasted for fifteen years, and in the course of which many severities were exercised by the governors and generals who fought for the Crown. As for the Indians, the oppressions they suffered and the memory of the hideous cruelties with which the rebellion of Tupac Amaru was suppressed, made the name of Spain hateful to them. After the flag of Castile had ceased to fly anywhere on the continent, and the last Spanish officials had departed, there were few occasions for communication of any kind. Spain herself was in a depressed and distracted state for many years after 1825. There is to-day little trade between her and the New World, nor is there, except to Mexico and Argentina, any large Spanish immigration. Where it does exist, it is valued, for the men who come from northern Spain (as most settlers do) are of excellent quality.
Family ties between colonists and the motherland had, moreover, become few or loose. Seldom in Spanish America does one hear anyone speak of the place his ancestors came from, as one constantly hears North Americans talk of the English village where are the graves of their forefathers. Seldom do South Americans or Mexicans seem to visit Spain, either to see her ancient cities and her superb pictures or to study her present economic problems. They do not feel as if they had much to learn from her governmental methods, and her modern literature has apparently little message for them. For the Spanish Americans there seems to be no Past at all earlier than their own War of Independence. In all these respects the contrast between the position of Spain towards South America and that of Britain towards North America strikes an Englishman with surprise. If that revival in Spanish literature and art, of which there have recently been signs, should continue, and if Spanish commerce should develop, the position may change, for the tie of language will always have its importance.
I may add in this connection that among the educated classes of Spanish America one finds few signs of that sort of interest in the history of Old Spain which the best North Americans take in the history of England. The former have no link of free institutions brought from the old soil to flourish in a new one. Is it because the Conquistadores were Spaniards, or because many of their deeds shock modern consciences, or because it is felt that to honour them would be an offence to Indian sentiment, faint as that sentiment is in Mexico and still fainter in Peru, that there are in Spanish America no statues or other honorific memorials of these brilliant and terrible figures? Even the statue of Queen Isabella the Catholic, which stood in Havana, was shipped back to Spain after the independence of Cuba had been declared in 1898. There is no monument to Cortes in Mexico, nor to Pizarro in Lima, nor (so far as I know) any statue of any of his companions except one of Pedro de Valdivia, set up on the hill of Santa Lucia in Santiago, where he built his fort and founded the capital of Chile. On the other hand, Cuahtémoc or Guatemozin, the last of the Aztec kings,140 has a fine statue in the park that lies between the city of Mexico and the castle palace of Chapultepec, and the name of Caupolican, the Araucanian chieftain whom the Spaniards shot to death with arrows, like St. Sebastian, is about to be commemorated by a charitable foundation at Temuco in Chile.
Between Italy and Latin America there never were any direct relations except, of course, ecclesiastical relations with Rome, until in recent years Italian immigrants began to pour into Argentina and southern Brazil. As many of these go backwards and forwards, and as swift lines of ocean steamers have been established between Buenos Aires and the ports of Italy, there is now a good deal of intercourse, but this has not so far led to any closer connection either political or intellectual. The Italian immigrants belong almost entirely to the scantily educated classes, and have brought with them little that is Italian except their language and their habits of industry. If, however, the Italians, who, in Argentina, are now nearly one-third of the population, do not too quickly lose their language and become assimilated to the native Argentines, these people may not only form an intellectual link between their old home and their new one, but may give an impetus to the progress of art and music, perhaps of literature also.
With England and Germany the commercial relations of most of the South American countries are close and constant. Nearly £300,000,000 sterling of British capital ($1,500,000,000) have been invested in railroads and otherwise in Argentina alone, besides very large sums in Uruguay, Brazil, and some of the lesser countries. Many Englishmen own ranches or farms in Argentina. Germans have done less in railroad construction and in the acquisition of landed properties, but they run lines of ocean steamers, and a great part of the commerce of the more progressive republics is now in their hands. They take more pains than do the English to master Spanish and understand the customs of the land. The German army and its arrangements are taken as a model for South American ministers and officers to follow, and a like deference is paid to the British navy and its methods. Upon thought and art and taste, however, neither of these countries exerts much influence. Though a certain number of Argentines, Chileans, and Brazilians can read English and a smaller number German, and though statesmen and serious students appreciate the English political system and the German administrative system, and follow the scientific work done in both countries, books in these languages are not widely read. The members of the English and German colonies in seaports like Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Rio, and Valparaiso are personally liked and respected, but they have not done much to popularize the ideas and habits and tastes of their countries. The mental quality and the views of life are essentially dissimilar. Between the peoples, there is little more than reciprocal good-will and what Thomas Carlyle calls the "cash nexus." English fashions are, however, followed in horse-racing and other branches of sport.
There remains France. Her influence may be traced to several causes. Though the North American Revolution of 1775–1783 had suggested to the Spanish Americans the idea of separation from their mother country, the French Revolution of 1789–1799 stirred their minds more deeply, and the literature produced in France, both before and during those years and still later, was the strongest and most novel intellectual force that had ever fallen on these previously backward countries, as well as upon those few colonists who visited Europe in the end of the eighteenth century. Severed by a violent shock from Spain, the Spanish Americans must needs turn elsewhere. French had for a century been the one foreign language which was learnt by men who learnt any foreign language. Whoever travelled to Europe needed it and the similarity of its vocabulary to their own made it easier for them than any Teutonic tongue. With England there was in those days very little intercourse, with Germany and the United States still less, for commerce was insignificant. Thus French established itself as what might be called the gateway to European thought. French literature has, moreover, a double attraction for the South Americans, including the Brazilians. It gratifies their fondness for graceful and pointed and rhetorical expression. Spaniards, like Frenchmen, love style, and French style has for them a peculiar charm. With a great liking for what they call "general ideas" they set less store by an accumulation of facts and an elaborate examination of them than do the Germans or the English, and prefer what may be called the French way of treating a subject. In short, they have an intellectual affinity for France, for the brightness of her ideas, the gaiety of her spirit, the finish of her literary methods, the quality of her sentiment.
Then there is Paris. When South Americans began to be rich enough to travel to Europe and enjoy themselves there, Paris became the Mecca of these pilgrims of pleasure. Many a wealthy Argentine landowner, many a Brazilian coffee planter, every dictator of a Caribbean republic who, like Guzman Blanco of Venezuela, has drawn from the public revenues funds to invest in European securities, goes to the metropolis of fashion and amusement to spend his fortune there. All the young literary men, all the young artists who can afford the journey, flock thither. There is a large South American colony in Paris, and through it, as well as through books and magazines, the French drama and art, French ideas and tastes dominate both the fashionable and the intellectual world in the cities of South America. The writers of France have often claimed that there is something in the "French spirit," in their way of thinking and their way of expressing thought, which, distinctive of themselves as it is, has, nevertheless, a sort of universality, or an adaptability to the minds of all men, that has more than once in history given it an empire such as no other modern literature has enjoyed. In and for South America this claim has been made good, for here French influence reigns supreme.
All this has, of course, no more to do with the political relations of these republics to foreign powers than has the ownership of Argentine railways by British shareholders. But it is a further illustration of the fact that South America has nothing in common with Teutonic North America beyond the name and the form (in some countries an empty form) of institutions called republican. She is much nearer to being an Ibero-Celtic West European group of nations, planted far out in the midst of southern seas.
But can the South Americans really be classed among south or west European peoples? May they not be—if one can speak of them as a whole, ignoring the differences between Chileans, Argentines, and Brazilians—a new thing in the world, a racial group with a character all its own?
This is their own view of themselves. It would need more knowledge than I possess either to deny or to affirm it. They are all, except Argentines and Uruguayans, largely Indian or (in Brazil) African in blood. Even the Uruguayans and Argentines strike one as differing at least as much from Spaniards as North Americans differ from Englishmen. They give the impression of being still nations in the making, whose type or types, both the common type of all Spanish America and the special types of each nation, will grow more sharp and definite as the years roll on and as life becomes for them more rich and more intense.
When this happens and the world of A.D. 2000 recognizes a definite South American type (or types), may there be thence expected any distinctively new contribution to the world's stock of thought, of literature, of art? Each nation is in the long run judged and valued by the rest of the world more for such contributions than for anything else. There is a sense in which Shakespeare is a greater glory to England than the empire of India. Homer and Virgil, Plato and Tacitus are a gift made by the ancient world to all the ages, more precious, because more enduring, than any achievements in war, or government, or commerce. The opportunities for the growing up of new nations with creative gifts specifically their own seem to be getting few because the world is getting full; there is no more room for new nations.
That there is vitality and virility in the Spanish-American peoples appears from the number of strong, bold, forceful men who have figured in their history, including one the Mexican Juarez, of pure, and many of mixed, Indian blood. Few, indeed, have shewn that higher kind of greatness which lies in the union of large constructive ideas with decisive energy in action, the Napoleonic or Bismarckian gift. In most of the republics, political conditions have been so unstable as to give little scope for constructive statesmanship. Still there is no want of vigour, and it is something to have produced in San Martin one truly heroic figure in whom brilliant military and political talents were united to a lofty and disinterested character.
If Latin America has not yet produced any thinker or poet or artist even of the second rank, this will not surprise anyone who knows what was her condition before the War of Independence and what it has been from that time till recent years. Could any one of those ancient sages whom Dante heard in Limbo, speaking with voices sweet and soft, have been brought back to earth and permitted to survey Europe as it was in the welter of the tenth century, such an one might have thought that art and letters, as well as freedom and order, had forever vanished from the earth. Yet out of that welter what glories of art and letters were to arise.
It is not my purpose to describe or discuss either the political institutions or the practical politics of the South American states. Even with a fuller knowledge of them than I was able to acquire in the short time at my disposal it would have been difficult for me to treat of them with the requisite freedom. But that which a traveller who has been the recipient of many courtesies may do without offence, and that which even a limited knowledge may qualify him to do, is to present a summary account of those physical, economic, and social features of the South American countries which are the basis of its political life, and constitute the conditions under which that life has to be carried on. Whoever has seen and understands these, realizing how altogether different they are from those of any European country, will find himself able to judge the troubled history and the present prospects of these states more fairly than those can do who apply to them a West European or a North American standard. The maxim, "To comprehend everything is to pardon everything," goes too far, but such truth as belongs to it is eminently applicable to these countries. One must know their conditions before attempting to pass judgment on their defects.
When republican governments sprang up on Central and South American soil as the authority of Spain was slowly swept away from one region after another, those governments were eagerly welcomed by European Liberals and still more effusively acclaimed by the people of the United States. The latter found in them a double source of satisfaction. Their appearance meant the disappearance of an old enemy, and their democratic institutions were a tribute of imitation to the success of popular government in the United States, where people still believed that there could be no freedom under a monarchy. Though this sympathy of the North Americans long continued to be extended to the new republics, especially when they came into collision with any European power, the friends of freedom in Europe presently lost interest in communities which were not reflecting credit upon democracy; and European writers of the opposite school soon began to point to them as shocking examples of liberty that had degenerated into license and violence. The last Spanish troops left the American continent in 1826. Decade after decade passed with no signs of improvement. Revolutions and dictators succeeded one another so quickly, and seemed to mean so little, that after a while the only Europeans who followed the fortunes of South America were the bondholders whose loans remained unpaid. The financial credit as well as the political character of the new states fell very low. Newspapers ridiculed them. Conservative statesmen and cloistered political philosophers drew warnings from them. Sir Henry Maine, one of the most brilliant writers of the last generation, in his ingenious, but elusive and unsatisfying, book on Popular Government, whenever he seeks to supply a link or point an epigram in his long indictment of democracy, constantly refers to the South American republics as instances of its failure in this or that respect. Yet such a line of argument is really no more legitimate than that of the enthusiastic North Americans who were prepared to defend the government of any South American country that called itself a republic. Both the assailant and the apologist looked only at the name, and did not stop to enquire into the thing. Sir Henry Maine's reasonings were valid against those who held, as did the North Americans, that the name of republic is enough to ensure good government, but valid against them only. There are always people ready to assume that things are what they are called, because it is much easier to deal with names than to examine facts. Paraguay under the military tyrannies of Francia and the elder and younger Lopez was called a republic and had a republican constitution.141 The same was true of Venezuela under the tyrannies of Guzman Blanco and of Castro. Were Paraguay and Venezuela, therefore, true republics, entitled to the sympathy which democrats give to "governments deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"? If they were, then arguments drawn from the misdeeds of Lopez and Castro are good arguments against the champions of republican or democratic government. If they were not, then the sympathy felt by North Americans for these so-called republics is groundless, and the incidents of their history prove nothing either for or against democracy. It is a mere question of names, and not of things.
Throwing names aside, let us go to the facts. I shall have to speak of these states as republics, because they are so called, but the term is meant not to describe, but only to denote. Europeans have been wont until lately to lump all of them in a general condemnation. That was always unjust, and is still more unjust now than it was formerly. There is as great a difference between the best and the worst of them as there is between the best and the worst of European monarchies. Some of them are true republics in the European sense, countries in which the constitutional machinery is a reality and not a sham. Others are petty despotisms, created and maintained by military force. In the fairly large class which lies between these two groups, the machinery works, but more or less irregularly and imperfectly. The legislature has some influence as an expression of public opinion; the rights of individuals to personal safety and to property receive some respect; the application and enforcement of the law, though uncertain, are not subjected to the arbitrary will of the executive.
To enquire into the causes which have determined the history of the Spanish-American states as a whole, and prevented them from realizing the hopes that gilded their birth ninety years ago, would be a long and serious undertaking, too large for this book. What may, however, be done concisely is to indicate the conditions under which independent political life had to begin in the lands that had thrown off the dominion of Spain. I will place these conditions in five classes:—
I. Physical or geographical conditions.
II. Racial conditions.
III. Economic and social conditions.
IV. Historical conditions belonging to the Colonial period.
V. Historical conditions attending the struggle for independence.
I. Physical Conditions.—In nearly all the republics the population was and is small in proportion to the area, and in most of them communication across this thinly peopled area is hindered by mountains or deserts or forests. Colombia, for instance, with a territory of 435,000 square miles (more than twice the size of France) has only ten persons to the square mile (whereas France has nearly two hundred), and is so intersected by lofty and heavily wooded ranges that most parts of it are accessible only by long and difficult journeys along mule paths. Bolivia, three times the size of France, has only three and a half persons to the square mile, and its few towns, only one of which has more than twenty-five thousand inhabitants, are separated by long spaces of wilderness. Peru is cut up by the numerous chains of the Andes into narrow valleys, each of which has little intercourse with the others. In such countries—and this applies to nearly all of them—there is, and there can be, very little public opinion common to the nation, because the means of intercommunication are defective and slow. Officials representing the central government cannot easily be supervised or controlled. When local discontent exists, it may find no constitutional vent, because the legislature is distant and cannot be got to understand the situation. When a revolt breaks out, it may spread fast, and become formidable before any adequate force can be collected and despatched to the spot to suppress it. All these conditions also prevent the growth of a press capable of informing and aiding the growth of opinion. Nothing but an efficient system of popular local self-government could secure good administration under such conditions, and the rule of such a public opinion as England and the United States possess becomes almost impossible, because people know little either of one another, or of current questions, or of the conduct of their representatives sent to the capital. Patriotism there may be, and passion may be excited far and wide over the country by some event touching the honour or the supposed interest of the nation, but there can hardly be that controlling influence of the whole people which is needed in free governments to keep the rulers steady and to impress upon them a sense of responsibility.
II. Racial Conditions.—It has been shewn in an earlier chapter that in all the republics, except Argentina and Uruguay, the native Indians and the mestizos form a large element in the population. In Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Paraguay, the pure Indians are a majority of the whole. In Chile the poorer class is practically all mestizo; in Venezuela and Colombia and Panama, there are few pure Europeans. Speaking little or no Spanish, the Indians constitute a practically distinct nation. They have nothing to do with the white people, except in so far as they pay rent or work for employers. By the constitution they are, in many states, citizens and have votes. But they have never heard of the constitution and they never think of voting, having, although free, no more to do with the government than the slaves had in the southern United States before the Civil War.
Bolivia, though its population is not so preponderatingly aboriginal as that of Paraguay, furnishes a good instance. The Indians, mostly Aymarás, are either tillers of the soil, or engaged in the transportation of goods by mule or llama, or are artisans of the ruder sort. They are entirely illiterate. Nominally Catholics, their religion is the primitive spirit worship of their ancestors with a varnish of Christian forms and the cult of Christian saints. Politics are left entirely to a few Spaniards and mestizos living in four or five towns, each of which, in default of a common interest and general public opinion, is obliged to try to get as much as it can for itself. Thus, politically regarded, the Bolivian nation of two millions shrinks to some thousands. A few thousands gathered into one city may give a vigorous life to a genuine republic, as happened in many a city of ancient Greece and mediæval Italy; but where citizens are scattered over many thousands of square miles, without railways to bring them together and newspapers to convey the ideas of each group to the other, democratic government becomes scarcely possible. What all sections of such a population can do is to fight, for defects that unfit them to be voters do not unfit them to be soldiers. The aboriginal races of the central and northern Andes have not that love of fighting for its own sake which the Aztecs or the Araucanians had. But they have little fear of death and can be readily forced or tempted to swell the forces of a revolting general. Although in Venezuela, Colombia, and Panama, the proportion of whites and mestizos is larger, the general result is the same, for the vast majority of the people are illiterate and qualified only for the fighting side of public life.142
Some may conceive that the racial facts of the country are unfavourable in a further way. That an admixture of the blood of a backward race must injure the white element, is a view which suggests itself naturally to European pride. There are even persons who assume that the Indo-European or so-called Aryan races are superior to others—a gratuitous assumption, for there are three non-Aryan races in Europe, the average members of which are equal in talent and character to the average members of the other peoples among whom they dwell.143 It is, of course, possible that the Spanish race has suffered by intermarriage with Indians, but who can tell how much of the difference between the Spaniards of Old Spain and those of Peru or Venezuela is due to blood, how much to climatic and other local conditions? One high Chilean authority thinks his countrymen all the better for having reinforced their stock from the hardy Indians of the south.144
There are also those who carry race disparagement still further and hold that the Spanish or "Iberian" races are unfitted for constitutional government, in company, it would appear, with the Celtic and Slavonic and all others except the favoured Teutons. This doctrine is not worth discussing, because it cannot be brought to any test of history, and it is history alone that enables us to test such theories. The collapse in the sixteenth century of that free constitutional government for which there seemed at one time to be almost as good a chance in Spain as there was in contemporary England, can be explained by causes altogether irrespective of race. It is not in the hypothetical inferiority of any pure or any mixed race that the importance of race questions for South America lies, but in the fact that the existence in the same state of different races, speaking different languages, prevents that homogeneity and solidarity of the community which are almost indispensable conditions to the success of democratic government.145
III. Economic and Social Conditions.—Economic phenomena and social phenomena may be considered together, because the latter depend largely on the former. All the republics except Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, of which I shall speak presently, are poor countries, not that natural resources are wanting, but that these have been so imperfectly developed as to bring little wealth to the native population. Almost the only fortunes made in them are made by foreigners or foreign companies who have got concessions for mines, or have bought plantations, because there is very little native capital and not much talent or experience to work mines or develop estates.146 The land, it is true, belongs to large proprietors, but they do not form a class of men who, having a common and solid interest in the country, constitute a sort of natural aristocracy, concerned to preserve order, and make the government stable. Similarly, there is only a small native class of substantial business men, with a like interest in public tranquillity and good administration. The want of local capital has left the larger industrial and financial enterprises to foreigners. It is better that the country should be developed by foreign capital than that it should not be developed at all, yet we may regret that what is gained in the way of experience as well as of money is not gained for the people of the country. That which Europeans call a "lower middle class," composed of shopkeepers and skilled artisans, is small, and the towns in which it exists are so few and far apart from one another, that it has been hitherto a feeble political factor. Lastly, the agricultural population consists in some states largely, in others almost entirely, of those ignorant aborigines who have no sense of their interest in progress or good government. The absence of that class of intelligent small landowners, which is the soundest and most stable element in the United States and in Switzerland, and is equally stable, if less politically trained, in France and parts of Germany, is a grave misfortune for South and Central America. What is wanting in these countries is a sufficient number of citizens who have no personal ends to secure, and nothing to get out of government, except good administration, but whose interest in such administration is intelligent enough and strong enough to rouse them to their civic duty. Public spirit and an active participation in public life without the prospect of such private gains as professional politicians make out of politics,—that and nothing else is what provides in every country the public opinion needed to guide and control the ruling authorities of a state.
It may be said that nowhere in the world can we expect ideal conditions for popular governments. Such governments have existed and have attained creditable results in countries where both physical conditions and racial conditions might have seemed unfavourable, because the people possessed the gifts and the training that enable the rule of the people to succeed.
Admitting this to be true, it raises the question whether those who were summoned to govern the new republics that emerged from the War of Independence did possess, and could have been expected to possess, the requisite gifts and the training. Such gifts are not natural. They are the result of a people's previous career and of experience gained therein. What, then, had been the history of the colonial dominion of Spain and what sort of practice in government had the Crown allowed to its Spanish-American subjects?
This brings us to a fourth branch of the enquiry,—viz.:—
IV. Historical Conditions during the Colonial Period.—The Spanish Conquerors of the New World were men of extraordinary audacity and energy. No such forcible individualities had been seen in the world since the Norsemen of the tenth century and their children, the Normans, of the eleventh. They were, however, loyally submissive to the Spanish Crown and never thought of asking for, or of setting up for themselves, any self-governing institutions. Neither did the Spanish Crown ever think of granting such institutions. Those which existed in Castile had just disappeared; but even had they continued, it is improbable that any idea of reproducing them in the colonies would have been entertained. The English Crown granted charters to the companies which undertook colonization in North America, and the settlers themselves were soon organized by counties in Virginia, by townships and counties in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Forms of local self-government more effective than those which then existed in England were in full working order in those colonies, all through the eighteenth century, until they separated from the mother country. But everywhere in Spanish America the authority of the viceroy, or captain-general, or Audiencia and their subordinate officers, was paramount, and covered the whole field. There were no elected assemblies or elected officials. All power came from above; the people had nothing to do with administration, and were not enough permitted to subject it to public criticism. The only exception was furnished by the sort of municipal council in the towns which was called a Cabildo or Ayuntamiento, and the members of which, while in a few towns freely elected by the householders, or perhaps by the more substantial householders, were in others nominated, and often nominated because they had bought the nomination. The despotic power of a viceroy or other governor was, of course, restrained by the instructions he received and by the laws which the Crown enacted for the colonies, and to some extent also both by the ecclesiastical magnates and by local sentiment. But there were no responsibilities devolved on the people, and no machinery in and by which they could acquire any training in public affairs. In the English North American colonies the management of church affairs belonged to the laity as well as to the clergy; and the New England Congregational churches in particular, founded on the principles of liberty, became direct exponents of popular feeling. In the Spanish colonies the Roman Church represented the principle of authority, and impressed it on the minds of the laity by all the sanctions she possessed. All books and publications of every kind were subjected to a searching ecclesiastical censorship; and the right of freely expressing opinion either by speech or in writing was steadily denied.
V. Historical Conditions at the Close of the War of Independence.—Thus, when the revolt from Spain threw all power into the hands of the people, the people were unfit to exercise it. It was easy to frame constitutions modelled on that of the United States. But who were the people and what did they know about the working of free governments? What was the capacity of the citizens whose votes were to choose legislatures, and of what sort of persons were the legislatures to be composed?
Ten or twelve years of fighting against Spanish troops, years in which there had been many severities and cruelties perpetrated on each side, had accustomed everybody to violence and had made soldiers the only leaders. Everyone's mind was full of dreams of liberty, but no one knew how to secure it by coupling liberty with law. Even in the United States the first years after the acknowledgment of the independence of the thirteen colonies had been marked by so many errors and so much legislative weakness that the constitutional convention of 1787 was regarded by the wisest men of the time as a last chance for saving the nation. Yet the North American states were carrying on governments which had existed for several generations and following principles which their forefathers had established in England five centuries before. Small wonder that among the Spanish Americans, who had no experience at all in the most complicated of all human undertakings,—the conducting of government by the will of the majority, but according to settled law and with due respect to the rights of the minority,—small wonder that legislatures were not honestly elected, that, when elected, they wasted time in vain debates and neglected business, that each party in turn drove out its opponents or cowed them by violence, that debts were recklessly contracted and left unpaid, that the government remained one not of laws, but of men, and those men mostly military adventurers at the head of armed bands.
The inhabitants, accustomed to be ruled by others in State and in Church, had never been given a chance of learning to think of government as their own business nor of themselves as responsible for public order. When a long and sanguinary war had destroyed the habit of obedience to constituted authority, they were remitted—constitution or no constitution—to that primitive state of things in which force prevails. There being often either no authority de iure, or one too feeble to protect those who appealed to it, authority de facto had to be recognized, and the notion of legal right and legal duty vanished. It must be remembered that these were small and scattered communities, in each of which there were but few men who were at once law-abiding and intelligent, able to impose some check on the partisans of one or the other of the adventurers who were fighting for power. The parties were usually factions following the banner of a particular chief. Only one set of controversies raising questions of principle emerged from time to time in one republic or another, those that turned on the property and claims of the Church. Other issues were usually either local or personal, seldom economic, hardly ever racial.
Several thoughtful South Americans in the days of the Revolution perceived that their countries were not fit for democracy. The illustrious San Martin favoured a republican government based on a limited suffrage; and Bolivar himself desired to be life president of a confederation of states. Apart, however, from the difficulty of proposing constitutions which would have excluded a large part of those whose arms had secured independence, the enthusiasm for liberty that prevailed and the rapturous belief that liberty was enough to secure peace and prosperity, prescribed democratic arrangements, and it was only in later struggles between rival parties that some leader would enact qualifications calculated to exclude his opponents. Everywhere the system of vesting executive power in a president holding office for a term of years was adopted. It seemed the simplest plan, and was recommended by the example of the United States, but it set up a tempting prize for ambition and generally led straight to dictatorship. Bad men abused it to enrich themselves or their friends, good men found that the quickest and possibly the only way to carry out the reforms which the country needed was to stretch their constitutional authority. High-minded and public-spirited rulers were not wanting, but they could not, with the best will in the world, create the materials for a true democracy.
Whoever travels through these countries,—I include Mexico and Central America, but not Chile or Argentina, of which more anon,—and whoever, having thus obtained some knowledge of their physical and racial character, studies their history, finds himself driven to three conclusions. The first is that these states never have been democracies in any real sense of the word. The second is that they could not have been real democracies. To expect peoples so racially composed, very small peoples, spread over a vast area, peoples with no practice in self-government, to be able to create and work democratic institutions was absurd, though the experience which their history has furnished to the world was needed to demonstrate the absurdity. The third conclusion is that injustice is done to the Spanish Americans by censures and criticisms which ignore these fundamental facts. There is no more Original Sin among them than there is in other peoples. Many of their statesmen and generals were honest patriots, who loved liberty and sought to give their country as much liberty as it was capable of then receiving. It was neither their fault nor the fault of the people that the conditions then existing made real representative and responsible government impracticable. The constitutions did not suit the facts, and the facts had to prevail against the constitutions, sometimes against their letter, usually against their spirit. When voters were obviously unfit to elect, and when fair elections could not be secured, it was not wonderful that power should be seized without legal title, or that an election should be so controlled by force or arranged and put through by fraud, that while the form of it was respected, it did not express any popular will. When one party had done these things, the other party repeated the process as soon as it had a chance, and thereafter things moved round in the same vicious circle.
Why does the machinery of constitutional government work smoothly in Switzerland and the United States and England? Because its forms, being consecrated by tradition and supported by public opinion, are respected by the officials who have to work them. In these South American republics, there were no traditions, and very little public opinion; and this was due not to any inborn defects of the people, but to historical causes which had deprived them of such advantages as the Swiss possess and had given them constitutions quite unfitted to their case.
If the democratic frames of government they adopted were unsuitable, what other frames would have been suitable? Bolivar desired a sort of elective life monarchy, to be sure with himself as monarch. San Martin (as already observed) preferred an oligarchic republic. Either might have been better than what was actually taken. An "honest" oligarchy, i.e. one professing to be what it really is; may be—doubtless is—better than a sham democracy. In a country where only a minority—perhaps a small minority—of the citizens are capable of taking part in the government, it may be safer legally to recognize them as the governing class, and thus bring theory into accord with facts, rather than that the divergence of facts from theory should prove an irresistible temptation to force or fraud. This, however, remains matter for speculation, since no country has permanently established elective monarchy, and few have embodied oligarchical provisions in their constitutions. Let it be added that the better or worse political condition of these states has seldom turned upon the extent to which the suffrage has been granted, for in those where violent methods prevail, the result would be the same whether the number of voting citizens were great or small.
Although for the sake of conciseness I have spoken of these republics as a whole, the remarks made being more or less applicable to them all, still there are marked differences between those which have advanced and are advancing and others whose political health seems little better now than it was fifty years ago. We may distinguish three classes of states. The first consists of those in which republican institutions, purporting to exist legally, are a mere farce, the government being, in fact, a military despotism, more or less oppressive and corrupt, according to the character of the ruler, but carried on for the benefit of the Executive and his friends. The second includes countries where there is a legislature which imposes some restraint upon the executive and in which there is enough public opinion to influence the conduct of both legislature and executive. In these states the rulers, though not scrupulous in their methods of grasping power, recognize some responsibility to the citizens and avoid open violence or gross injustice. The third class are real republics, in which authority has been obtained under constitutional forms, not by armed force, and where the machinery of government works with regularity and reasonable fairness, laws are passed by elected bodies under no executive coercion, and both administrative and judicial work goes on in a duly legal way.
Instances of the first class are too familiar to need mention. By far the worst is Hayti. The most striking example of the second class was Mexico under the government of President Porfirio Diaz. The government of that statesman, one of the most remarkable men of our time, was autocratic. His power had been won by fighting, but was maintained under legal forms. The legislature obeyed him implicitly. Elections were managed by his government, and that with little difficulty because, until 1910, when his hold had begun to be shaken, no one ventured to vote against him. His personal superiority to all the vulgar temptations was recognized and admired. His ministers talked to the Chambers, but took their orders from him alone. His policies were directed to the material development of the country by the construction of railways, the encouragement of manufactures, the opening up of mines and extension of irrigation. Order was maintained by a rural police formed out of former bandits, who by having been enrolled, disciplined, and regularly paid became useful members of society. The lure to conquest which the weakness of the republics to the south held out was firmly resisted, and only a moderate army maintained. Under this régime the country was advancing rapidly in wealth and a class of persons interested in order and prosperity was being formed. Had the President, when old age arrived, been able to find someone like himself to whom he could have handed over the reins, prosperity and order would doubtless have continued. The sort of government he gave the country was probably what best suited it.147 The Indian population, constituting a majority, were (though naturally intelligent) obviously unfit for civic functions. The uneducated mass of the mestizos were almost equally so. An oligarchic government, formed out of the richer class, would have furnished a less efficient administration, and would probably, after some years of quarrelling, have given place to a military chief.
Of the third class good examples may be found in Chile and Argentina, both of which are bona fide republics. Chile is of all the Latin-American states the one which best answers to European or North American notions of a free constitutional commonwealth, one of the chief reasons being that her population is unusually homogeneous and unusually concentrated within a comparatively small area. Northern Chile is an arid desert, southern Chile a forest wilderness, but in the centre there is an area five hundred miles long by fifty wide within which the large majority of her 3,300,000 citizens dwell. The suffrage is limited, and governing power is practically in the hands of a comparatively small landed aristocracy, and a few lawyers. Government, including what we called the party game, is carried on with the same spirit and by the same methods as it was in England during the eighteenth century, allowing for the differences between a monarchy and a republic. There are constant changes in the ministers, but the machine works, and the general lines of national policy are preserved. There have been no revolutions within the living memory, but there was once a civil war. President Balmaceda, finding that he could not carry out his policies within the strict limits of his constitutional powers, exceeded them and defied the legislature. Each party, like the English Charles I and his Parliament, took up arms to fight out the question of right. Balmaceda, defeated in battle, put an end to his own life. He had the weaker legal case, but was a man with some ideas, quite above the common type of ambitious adventurer. After him, Chilean politics resumed their normal constitutional course. There were, in 1910, six parties, one Conservative and five Liberal sections, the latter sometimes acting together, sometimes divided. The level of capacity, as well as of eloquence, is high, and so is the national spirit of the people.
Argentina has had a more troubled and more sanguinary history than Chile, and has more recently emerged from among the breakers into smooth water. Sixty years ago she had in Rosas a tyrant as cruel as Barrios of Guatemala and as bloodthirsty as Lopez of Paraguay, and even later, civil wars raged between the people of Buenos Aires and those of the northern states. But as the country began to be settled and railroads were made and labour was provided by the influx of Italian and Spanish immigrants and large cities sprang up, the effect of general prosperity was felt in a growing sense of the value of order and peace. Though the foreign merchants whose interests were involved took no direct part in politics, their influence was felt not only in promoting sounder finance, but in making the native men of substance feel that frequent revolutions were retarding the development of their properties. Thus, since 1893, there has been no armed civil strife of the old kind and the public tranquillity is now disturbed only by alarms similar to those which the spread and the violent methods of anarchism have caused in some parts of Europe. That flavour of militarism which was so strong in former years has now virtually disappeared. The administration is conducted by civilians, and is pervaded by a legal spirit. In short, Argentina is now, like Chile, a constitutional republic, whose defects, whatever they may be, are the defects of a republic, not of a despotism disguised under republican forms.
The examples of these two countries prove that there is nothing in South American air or Spanish blood to prevent republican institutions from working. If the working is not perfect, neither is it perfect anywhere else in the world. What these countries have shewn is that with favouring conditions the true constitutional spirit can be more and more infused into constitutional forms and the old habits of violence eradicated. The case of Argentina in particular suggests the process by which we may expect that other Latin-American states will, by degrees, advance towards a more settled and genuinely legal government. What is the first thing that is needed to enable any community to prosper? Is it not the desire for order and the respect for order, the sense that there must be a curb on the impulses and passions of individuals, some law duly enforced, some means of checking violence and of protecting life and property against physical force? This sense grows with the growth of property and with the development of industrial habits. The larger the number, and the greater the influence in a community, of those who feel that revolutions injure not only the country, but also themselves personally, the better is the prospect of breaking the revolutionary habit, for a public opinion grows up which condemns violence and actively opposes those who resort to it. Moreover, the more property there is and the more industry there is in a country, the smaller is the proportion of those who join in a revolution either from a love of fighting or in the hope of bettering their fortunes. In a prosperous country, more can be done and more is likely to be done for public instruction, one of the most urgent needs of these nations. Argentina's recent efforts in that direction are an instance, and education, if it does not make men good citizens, makes it at least easier for them to become so.
To speak of increasing wealth as a factor making for the political progress of a country may sound strange to those who in Europe and the United States see how the working of free institutions may be endangered and perverted by the corrupting influences of money and the money power. Nevertheless, according to the proverb, "One man's meat is another man's poison," there are stages in a nation's growth when it is so essential to establish security and give everybody a sense of the need for it, that whatever makes for security makes for progress. The heart is better than the pocket, but it is easier to fill the pocket than to purify the heart. The love of liberty is a nobler thing than the love of security, but sometimes the latter needs to be diffused before the former can have its perfect work.
It is true that the desire for order and security may lead men to submit willingly to arbitrary power. This has often happened since the days of Julius Cæsar and his nephew. But it has usually happened not because men have ceased to value liberty, but because, finding that they are failing to secure either security or liberty, they think it better to have one than to have neither.
There are, in Spanish America, some communities still so far from being capable of genuine popular self-government that the best thing for them is the strong rule of an able ruler which will give them prosperity through peace, shew them how to develop their resources, make them, by education and by better communications, a more homogeneous people. Those things done, such communities will, like Argentina, find themselves fitter to work free institutions. At present, under the rule of selfish adventurers and corrupt legislatures who are the tools of the adventurer, the conditions of progress are absent. Two or three of the South American republics—they are not among those which I saw—are still in this condition. The rule of a man like Porfirio Diaz would seem to give them the best chance of emerging from it. At present they advance neither morally nor materially.
Nevertheless, taking the eleven South American states as a whole, their condition is better than it was sixty years ago. In most of them the civil element has tended to grow and the military element to decline. The lawyer-politician is not always a law-abiding politician, yet on the whole preferable to the soldier-politician. His methods are less brutal. May not even a perversion of the law be a trifle better than a disregard of all law? Revolutions and civil wars have become less sanguinary; the execution of political opponents less frequent. Political assassinations, which in Europe have unhappily been growing more frequent,148 are now more rare here. The sort of savagery that existed in the days when Artigas, fighting for the independence of his country, used (according to the story) to sew up prisoners in oxhides by batches and roll them downhill into the river has long since passed away. Nor is it to be forgotten that there is extremely little brigandage or insecurity in most of these states, far less than there was a few years ago in Sicily. The ordinary citizen is little affected even by the revolutions which, where they occur, are carried on by a small part of the population. Perhaps if the ordinary citizen suffered more, revolutions would be fewer.