South America Observations and Impressions

Climate has told for much in compelling the inhabitants of the colder regions to work hard and enabling those of the hotter to take life easily. The tropical states have on the whole lagged behind the temperate ones, and there is between them a perceptible difference in character and habits. In Bolivia the combined effect of the low temperature, thin air, extreme dryness, and poor food has not only made a large part of the plateau a sterile desert, but has also checked the advance of the aboriginal race, and has confined the population of Spanish origin to a small number of towns lying so far away from one another that common political action becomes difficult and social antagonisms remain acute.

While these physical differences have told upon all the divisions of Spanish America, they have been in some all the more efficient because they have been followed by economic consequences, and have induced certain forms of industrial life. Cattle and the horse have determined the habits of the Argentine and Uruguayan. Mining has had more to do with the Peruvian and the Mexican. No one of the nations has taken to a sea-faring life except the Chileans.

Whoever will compare Spanish America with Anglo-America (i. e. the United States and Canada) will be struck by the far greater differences of physical environment between the various parts of the former and those of the latter, where no section of the country, except Florida, Louisiana, and Texas is oppressively hot, even in summer, and where no section, till one reaches Labrador, suffers from severities of cold and wet such as check settlement in the far south of Chile and of Argentina. Nature does less to differentiate Anglo-American man into varieties than she does in the case of Spanish-American man.

Even more important than the influence of natural conditions has been the presence in Spanish America of the aboriginal tribes. These differed greatly in intelligence, courage, and a disposition to industry. In some regions they were both numerous and warlike, as in Mexico and Chile. In others they were numerous but easily conquered, as in the Peruvian highlands and Central America and Paraguay. In some they were too few to hold their ground, as in central Argentina and Uruguay, or so feeble as neither to offer serious resistance nor furnish servile labour. This was the case in Cuba and on some of the coasts of the Caribbean Sea. The differences in intellectual capacity were expressed in the degree of progress they had made towards civilization; the Mexicans and the subjects of the Peruvian Incas standing at the top, and the Amazonian savages in the east of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru at the bottom of the scale. As another chapter treats of their present relations to the European part of the population, it is enough to call attention here to the effect of the infusion of native blood in differentiating various parts of the old colonial population from one another. The volume of that infusion has been greater in some regions than in others, and the native blood has been unequal in quality. A half-Indian people tends to differ – whether for worse or for better is another question – from a white people; and a people mixed with Indians of a strong race, like the native Mexican, differs from one which has received a blend of weaker native blood. In persons of mixed race, the white element predominates, but less evidently in physical appearance than in mental attributes. The mestizos are all Christians and more generally educated; they draw their ideas and habits from their European rather than their native parentage, which, indeed, they prefer to ignore.

Besides this influence, which we may call physiological, we must further note, as a factor producing diversity, the social effect which the presence of a native semiservile class has upon the character of the ruling element in the population. Where such a class supplies labour, the ruling element generally despises and refuses manual work. Where the former is both numerous and ignorant, it usually lowers the moral and probably also the intellectual standard of the European inhabitants. In some republics the presence of this class has encouraged civil wars and revolutions by furnishing Indian soldiers who can be forced to fight and will fight well for causes in which they take no interest. It has moreover made the provisions of constitutions which confer universal suffrage seem hollow shams.

In some few Spanish-speaking countries, particularly along the Caribbean coasts and in some of the maritime towns of Colombia and Peru, the negro, imported after the Conquest, has become a race factor, mingling with the whites to produce an intermediate breed which is usually superior to the pure black, and mingling with the Indian to produce one which is deemed to have the faults of both parents and the merits of neither. But it was only the colony from Portugal which was formerly the Empire and is now the republic of Brazil that received slaves on a great scale. There are believed to be now at least eight millions of blacks and mulattoes in that country, probably two-fifths of the whole population. Such Indian blood as was mingled with the Portuguese settlers has become scarcely noticeable, except in Pará and along the banks of the Amazon. Brazil is, however, so different from the Spanish republics in other respects that one need not insist on this element of diversity.

From these physical and racial influences I pass on to those of a historical order. Chief among these were the long-protracted struggle for independence and the interminable civil wars that followed its attainment. Under the Crown of Spain the collective life both of the inhabitants of its dominions as a whole and of each section of those inhabitants had been stagnant. Independence quickened its pulses and accelerated the development of such latent forces as existed into new forms. The political events of the revolutionary epoch and of the ninety years that followed have done much not only to create new nations, but also to mould them, while they were growing up, into diverse shapes. In some republics the civil wars lasted longer than they did in others, and left the country more exhausted and distracted; in others again foreign intervention had the effect of consolidating the people and creating a stronger patriotism than had existed before. This was conspicuously the case in Mexico. The French invasion and the long struggle which ended in the dethronement and death of the unfortunate Maximilian of Hapsburg determined the fortunes of that country, extinguishing the power of the Church, and renewing the nation's confidence in itself which had been shattered by the war with the United States. So, too, the heroic efforts made by the Uruguayans under Artigas to shake off the yoke of Brazil and their subsequent conflict with Argentina, then ruled by the tyrant Rosas, left a permanent impress upon their character. In most of the Central American states, on the other hand, progress in education, in civil order, and in the turning to account of natural resources has been arrested by their incessant strife with one another as well as by internal convulsions.

The general result of the wars and revolutions which make up so much of Spanish-American history has undoubtedly been to differentiate the peoples and build up separate nations and strengthen the national consciousness of the inhabitants of almost every republic. Whether that strengthening has been a good thing or not, I do not attempt here to enquire. But apart from it, the other consequences of so long a period of struggle and bloodshed have been deplorable.

Effort and suffering do no doubt test and try a community. War, be it civil or foreign, never leaves men the same as it found them, though the common assumption that it makes them either stronger, or wiser in the exercise of their strength, is as false as it is dangerous. If war, apart from the pure aim and high spirit in and for which it conceivably may be, but seldom has been, undertaken, ennobles the soul as well as toughens the fibre of a nation, what virtues ought it not to have bred in these South American countries, where the lance was always glittering and the gun-shot always echoing?

Of the other formative and stimulative influences which the deliverance from Spanish rule might have set to work upon the peoples of the republics, of the development of science, art, and letters, and in particular of that part of intellectual life which goes deepest down into the soul of a people, theology and religious faith, of these things as influences in building up a national individuality, there is little to be said, because disturbed political conditions and the backward state of education checked all such development. Until the last thirty years it has had no fair chance, and in some republics has little even now. One may observe, however, that in such progress as can be recorded the Church has had scarcely any share. Both her claims to authority and her property have been at one time or another (though much less in recent years) a cause of political conflicts in most republics. But the unfavourable conditions referred to have told upon the Church itself, not to add that her ministers were under Spanish rule and have continued to be both less well instructed and (of course with many exceptions) less exemplary in life than the Roman Catholic priesthood of France or Germany or of the United States.

The recent economic development of some few of these countries, and especially the extension of their agriculture and their mining, have naturally tended to give a practical turn to thought and action, fixing men's minds on business, on the public improvements which wealth makes possible, and on the enjoyments to which it invites. If even old and highly cultivated nations, like the Germans and the Italians, are felt by themselves and seen by their neighbours to have been somewhat altered in spirit and aim under new conditions of industrial and commercial life, how much more must similar conditions tell upon communities intellectually younger and, so to speak, more fluid, less "set" in a definite mould. These causes have been increasing the differences between the more progressive and the more backward republics. They have been setting their stamp upon Argentina and Chile. A similar change, though it affected only a small class, was discernible in Mexico during the later years of the supremacy of Porfirio Diaz.

Immigration from Europe has not yet gone far enough to affect the "type" of any South American people, or bear a part in the process of national differentiation. It may, however, do so in the future, for in countries where prosperity has created a large demand for labour, and where public order is little disturbed, there begins to be an inflow of settlers from abroad. In Mexico and Cuba immigration is steady though not large, and is drawn almost entirely from Spain. In Peru it is small, for the Chinese and Japanese who come are too few to affect the character of the population. Some Germans entered Chile thirty years ago, and constitute a valuable though comparatively small element. A far greater number have settled in southern Brazil. Uruguay receives a considerable but at present (1912) declining immigration both from Italy and from Spain. To Argentina there come not only many Spaniards, but a still fuller stream of Italians, who now form so large an element that the Argentine of the future will be probably one-third Italian in blood.103 Into the other Spanish-speaking parts of the New World there is at present very little immigration, nor are the tropical regions fitted for agricultural settlers from Europe. Chinese or Japanese or Indian coolies might do better, and there are already plenty of Hindus in British Guiana. Should valuable minerals be discovered in places where, as in Colombia, Venezuela, and northern Brazil, labour is scarce, the temptation to introduce Asiatics would be strong.

II. We have now to enquire what have been the results of the process of nation-building. How many, and which, of the republics that were once parts of the great Spanish dominion have now grown to be true nations? But here a preliminary difficulty meets us. In speaking of the peoples of these republics, are we to think of all their inhabitants, or only of the ruling Hispano-American element, excluding the aborigines? Are the aborigines, and such collective character as they possess, to be taken into account when we seek to determine which communities deserve to be called nations, or are they rather to be deemed subject tribes standing outside and not sharing in genuine national life?

Without anticipating what will be said in a later chapter, it is enough to remark here that from the United States frontier at El Paso in latitude 32° north, down to the Tropic of Capricorn (latitude 23° south) a very large, though unascertained and at present unascertainable part of the population – possibly a majority – consists of Indians, most of whom speak their native languages, and some of whom are mere savages. Even those who, like the Quichuas and Aymarás of the Andean plateau, are in a fashion civilized, lead a life apart, and, though in most republics legally citizens, have practically nothing to do with the government of the countries they inhabit, except as combatants in its foreign or civil wars. In Argentina the question scarcely arises, because nearly all the population is of European stock, while in Chile the Araucanians are practically the only pure Indians left. We must, therefore, restrict our view to the two other elements, the European and the mixed, these forming, for nearly all practical purposes, one body. It is of them, not of the Indians, that we have to think when we ask how far the inhabitants of each republic have advanced into true nationhood.

For the purpose of determining whether any community ought to be deemed a nation, one must distinguish two things which are apt to be confounded. The one thing is the presence in the community of a distinctive national character, the other is the presence of strong national sentiment. The former consists in the possession by the members of the community of certain attributes and certain qualities, visible in its collective action, which are peculiar to it, and mark it off from other communities. The latter is the consciousness of political unity, taking shape in the spirit of self-assertion against other communities, expressing itself in the effort to make good the community's position in the world, to push its claims and to defend its rights. The former is in practice usually accompanied by the latter; that is to say, a community whose members feel themselves to be a political entity, with distinctive ideas and traditions of their own, naturally desires to prevent itself from being overridden or swamped by other communities. The latter, however, does not necessarily imply the former. A community may have little that is peculiar or distinctive; may have no racial traits of its own, no literature, no special beliefs or customs, and a history too short to have formed traditions. Yet the circumstances of that short history, coupled with vanity (collective and individual) and a combative spirit, may have created a sensitive and inflammable patriotism which makes the community feel and act as a Nation, however little there may be to distinguish it from surrounding peoples beyond the fact that historical accidents have divided it from them and started it on a course of its own. In this latter set of cases, an observer who studies the community may discover nothing that constitutes a distinctive national character. Its citizens may seem much the same in ideas and habits as those of the other independent branches of the same nationality around them. Yet they may be found to hate those neighbours of the same speech just as bitterly as races that have been secular enemies, like Turkomans and Persians, hate one another.

Applying these tests to the Latin-American republics, it will appear that by both tests several of the greatest are indisputably nations. Chile and Argentina have each of them a distinctive national quality which so marks them off from their neighbours that even the passing traveller can discern it. They have national character as well as national sentiment. So, too, have Mexico and Peru.104 The same thing is true of Uruguay, the people of which, originally the same as that of Argentina, have developed, in the course of a tempestuous history, a somewhat different type. Brazil, being Portuguese, has always had a character of its own. These six republics may all be deemed to be nations in the European sense of the word. I have not visited Paraguay, but should suppose that in it the numerical preponderance of the native Guarani stock brings about a result similar to that which an infusion of coloured blood has had in Cuba, but more marked.

In most of the other republics there seems to be much less that can be called distinctive of each. Colombians, Venezuelans, and Ecuadorians inhabit regions generally similar, have had a similar history, and have all received about an equal infusion of native blood, though in each – and especially in Colombia – there are some few old Spanish families who have remained unaffected. The average citizen of any of these countries is said to be but slightly distinguishable from the average citizen of either of the other two.105 The same is the case as regards Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. But in each and all of these states there is a profusion of militant nationalist spirit, which, in Central America, has been fostered by frequent wars. Ecuador has been repeatedly on the point of taking up arms against Colombia on one side and Peru on the other, over disputes about territory. So far as national sentiment can make a nation, these republics have it to overflowing. Their common Hispano-American nationality no more checks aggressive displays of enmity than a common Tuscan origin mitigated the strife of Florence and Siena, or a common Bœotian origin the hatred of Thebes and Platæa.

The republic whose individuality has been most fully developed is Chile. Its citizens are seen at first sight to be Chileans, just as in Europe we recognize at once a member of any of the leading peoples. Most Spanish Americans are good fighters, but the Chileans perhaps the best; for they are the children of the most dogged of the native races as well as of the most stalwart of the Spanish settlers. The same combination of patriotism and pugnacity is seen in the Uruguayans. In character as well as in speech, the Argentines are also beginning to shew a character different from that of the other peoples; but the mental and moral type, as is natural in a country rapidly growing and deluged with immigrants, is not yet fully formed.

It may be asked whether the best evidence of the emergence of a genuine and distinctively national life ought not to be found in the growth of a national literature expressing, in whatever form, the ardour and the aspirations of the people. Those who quote the age of Queen Elizabeth and the age of Lewis the Fourteenth as instances to support the doctrine that eras of successful war and growing power herald, or coincide with, an epoch of literary creation, may expect to find that the incessant strife which has kept hot the blood of the citizens in some republics, and the rapid material progress of others, promise an era of intellectual production in South America. Of this, however, there has been so far no sign. National spirit seems little disposed to flow in this channel. In the southern republics there is plenty of energy, but not much of it is directed towards art or science or letters. The long and fierce conflict of Chile and Peru was marked on both sides by much valour and some heroism, but no poem like the Araucana followed. In the more backward states, incessant strife has hindered instead of stimulating intellectual as well as economic progress. In the prosperous ones, men's minds are bent upon the development of natural resources, and in the very richest, where there should be most leisure for mental cultivation, upon material pleasures and luxuries.

III. We have still one more question to ask before closing this consideration of the process by which nations have been evolved out of the old administrative divisions of Spanish America, divisions originally due to the historical accidents, which had in colonial times placed different districts under the authority of different officials. How far does there exist among the peoples of these republics the sense of a common Hispano-American nationality? Do they feel their common Spanish origin, together with Spanish literature and the ideas and social customs which they share, to be a source of common pride and a bond of unity between them, linking them together despite political severances and antagonisms? Spaniards had a certain amount of common Spanish feeling before Castile and Aragon were united, and Italians, so far from ceasing to feel themselves Italians during the centuries before 1848, when they were cut up into many states, some of them ruled by foreign dynasties, were stirred by a more vehement nationalism in that year than ever before. Can one, then, for any and for what purposes, treat Spanish America as being one whole, either intellectually or sentimentally?

It has already been observed that to the traveller the differences between one republic and another seem comparatively slight, not greater than those which he would have noted in wandering leisurely through Germany before 1866 and 1870 when first the North German Confederation and then the new German Empire came into being. Not only is the language the same, with dialectic variations which are comparatively few when one considers the vast area and the large aboriginal element in the population, but manners and social usages are similar everywhere, though less polished in the wilder parts.

Similarity goes even deeper, for it is found in ideas and in mental habits. A Costa Rican and an Argentine differ less than a Texan does from a Vermonter, or a Caithness man from a Devonshire man. All remain in a sense Spanish; that is, they are much more like Spaniards and more like one another than they are like Frenchmen or Italians. They are nearer to one another than North Americans are to Englishmen. They have the broad features of Spanish character and temperament, – the love of sonorous phrases, the sensitiveness to friendliness or affront, the sense of personal dignity, steady courage in war, and the power of patient endurance. And among men of education and thought the basis of intellectual character and the sense of moral values seems to be substantially the same.

Nevertheless, the feeling of a common Hispano-American brotherhood is weak. In Old Spain there was before and during the sixteenth century a localism strong enough to make Catalonians and Castilians and Andalusians care more for their province than for Spain, unless, of course, a question of national union against the foreigner came in. The sentiment of racial fraternity expressed in the saying that "blood is thicker than water" is easily suspended or even overridden and for the time extinguished by political bitterness. The Thebans, according to the story, fined their great poet because he had consecrated two splendid lines to the praise of Athens. Not even the closest literary and commercial intercourse and the pride of an ancient and glorious stock prevented the people of New England from hating those of old England for more than a generation after the War of 1812. Among the Spanish Americans literature and historical traditions have not been forces making for cohesion, for there has been, in most of the republics, little literary production, and their traditions seldom go back further than the revolutionary war.

Were there then no memories of Spanish greatness? These may have had some power in colonial days while the struggle of Spain and Catholicism against England and Holland was at its height. But in later times the preference shewn by the viceroys to persons sent out from the mother country, and the habit of reserving for them all offices of profit, exasperated the criollos, as the native-born colonists were called. They were further alienated by the stupidly repressive character of colonial administration. These follies and abuses, and the cruelties which accompanied the long War of Independence, seem to have effaced the sense of any community based on the Spanish name. One might, indeed, have rather found a bond in the common aversion to Spain and in a sympathy with one another springing out of the struggle against her power. The war was, however, in the main, waged independently by each colony. The Argentine army of San Martin gave effective help to Chile, and with Chilean troops practically achieved the liberation of Peru, where the royal cause was strongest; and in that result the Venezuelan Bolivar had also a share. Colombia and Venezuela helped one another, and both helped Ecuador. But so far has this coöperation been from becoming a basis for friendship, that the bitterest of all South American antagonisms is that of Peru and Chile, and it is only recently that the danger of a conflict between Chile and Argentina has disappeared.