South America Observations and Impressions

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.

CHAPTER XV

THE CONDITIONS OF POLITICAL LIFE IN SPANISH AMERICA

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.