South America Observations and Impressions

When the North American colonies separated from England, they were a small nation of less than three millions on the Atlantic coast. Thence they spread out over the vast space beyond the Alleghany Mountains, then across the Mississippi, finally over the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, remaining one nation over a territory thirty times greater than that which had been actually settled at the time of the Revolution. The same process happened later and on a smaller scale in the dominion which remained to England in the north. The Canadians have spread out from the banks of the St. Lawrence to Vancouver Island, also remaining one people. Thus Teutonic America now consists of two nations only.130 How different the fate of the Spanish colonies. Scattered over a space eight thousand miles long from San Francisco to Magellan's Straits, in days before railways existed and with even steam navigation in its infancy, they did not think of trying to maintain political connection across vast distances, and naturally fell apart into many independent states, roughly corresponding to the administrative divisions of colonial days. The number of these states has varied from time to time. At present there are six on the North American continent, and ten on the South American, without counting Portuguese Brazil and the three island republics of Cuba, San Domingo, and Hayti. Out of the lands that obeyed Charles the Fifth, nineteen states have grown, all (except Hayti) speaking Spanish, while the English-speaking peoples are but two. Although the size of the territory occupied by these nineteen is the primary cause of this multiplication of small nations, there are other causes, also, political and social, which have been discussed in an earlier chapter.131 One bond of union they had, one solid basis of common sentiment which, nevertheless, did not avail to hold them together. They all professed the Roman Catholic faith and all obeyed one spiritual sovereign at Rome, whereas among the men of English speech in Teutonic America there were, and are, not only many Roman Catholics, but also among the larger mass of Protestants many forms of Protestantism, and no common ecclesiastical authority at all.

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.