South America Observations and Impressions

CHAPTER XVI

SOME REFLECTIONS AND FORECASTS

Whether it is well to rejoice that the population of our planet has grown so fast during the last century, even as the inhabitants of a city rejoice when a decennial census reveals a rapid growth in their city, is a question which may be deemed a branch of the larger one whether life is worth living. The fact, however, being unquestionable, raises a practical question. If the present rate of growth should continue for a few centuries, there presently will be little room left on the planet. What will then happen? During the nineteenth century the surface of the earth has been explored sufficiently to enable us to know how much of it is available for the production of food. Of that part which was available and unused in 1800 a great deal had been settled by 1900. In Europe there is no more land to be occupied, because the waste spaces of southern Russia have now been almost filled by settlers from the rest of that country. In the temperate parts of Asia, though there has been considerable Russian immigration into western Siberia and considerable Chinese immigration into Manchuria, there still remain in those countries large tracts unoccupied and not too dry for cultivation. In Australia it is still doubtful how much of the land whose aridity has discouraged settlement can be turned to account either for tillage or for pasture. In North America the immense rush to the West, which began after 1830 with the building of railways, has now filled nearly the whole of the United States, and a very large part of Canada, so that another forty or fifty years may see the country filled up as far as the frozen north. In Africa there are parts of Tunisia and Algeria which irrigation might reclaim, there are parts of Morocco which could support a larger population than now dwells in them, and there is also a limited highland area on the eastern side of the continent fit to be inhabited by men of European stock. The rest, including not only the Sahara, but most of the country south of the Tropic of Capricorn, is either arid desert, or else so hot and humid that it must be given up to the black races, who have so far shewn no capacity for settled industry when left to themselves. Thus, if we omit the tropical countries inhabited by savage peoples (central Africa and the islands of southeastern Asia), it will appear that, should the present increase of the civilized peoples be maintained, the rest of the world will not suffice for their agricultural expansion for more than a short period, that is to say, a period shorter than the four centuries which have elapsed since the outward movement of the European peoples began with the discovery of the New World.

What then of South America? Before dealing with it, let me advert to two considerations which may modify the conclusions suggested by any review of the total area now available to meet a continued growth of population.

May not intensive cultivation and the further developments of chemical science greatly increase the food-producing power of lands already occupied? Doubtless they may. They are doing so already. But such an increase cannot be expected to go on indefinitely. The urgency of the problem may be postponed, but the problem will remain ahead of us.

May not the rate of increase of the world's population decline, and perhaps go on declining until an equilibrium between that increase and food production has been reached? This is possible. Observations made during the last thirty years have already thrown grave doubts upon the propositions advanced by Malthus three generations ago which were for a long time taken as irrefragable. That the signs of decreasing birth-rate are so far visible only among some of the most advanced peoples is not a cheering circumstance, for what we must desire in the interests of mankind at large is that the more highly civilized races should increase faster than the more backward, so as to enable the former to prevail not merely by force, but by numbers and amicable influence. All these considerations, however, regarding birth-rate are still too uncertain to be allowed to affect any enquiries regarding future food supply and the regions from which it is to come. Whatever light the next few decades may throw upon the former question, the latter deserves to be investigated as a subject of growing significance.

And now we may return to South America, the only continent containing both a large temperate and a large tropical area capable of cultivation which still remains greatly underpeopled. It is, therefore, the chief resource to which the overpeopled countries may look as providing a field for their emigration, and to which the world at large may look as capable of reinforcing its food supply. That it has not been sooner occupied is due partly to the political disorders which have given it a bad name, partly to its being less accessible than North America. Both these adverse conditions no longer apply to its temperate regions.

Considered as a field for emigration, South America may be divided into three sections. There are, first, the tropical and forest-covered regions of Colombia, Venezuela, Guiana, and eastern Brazil; secondly, the temperate and grassy or wooded regions of Argentina, Uruguay, and southern Brazil outside the tropics; and lastly, the great central plain of the Amazon and its tributaries which the Brazilians call the Selvas (woods). I exclude altogether the mountainous parts of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, because they are already as well inhabited as they deserve to be. A very small part of them is fit for stock or for agriculture, and the climatic conditions (except in a few valleys) are repellent to persons not accustomed to great altitudes. Not even Italians can be expected to cultivate fields twelve thousand feet above sea-level.

The other three sections just mentioned are much underpeopled. The first is better fitted for negro or Indian labour than for that of whites, yet there are many parts of it where men of south European stock can work in the open air and thrive. In an area of about two millions of square miles, it has about seven and a half million inhabitants, of whom a small minority are pure whites, the rest Indians or negroes or mixed. Four or five times that number could easily find accommodation.

The second section is the one pre-eminently fitted to receive white men. Its area may be roughly conjectured at a million and a half of square miles, but so much of the Argentine part of it is desert that it would not be safe to reckon more than two-thirds of it as available for settlement. As there are now only twelve millions of people in this million of square miles, there is evidently plenty of room for more.

This is the part of South America which has drawn most immigrants during the last sixty years, southern Brazil leading the way, Argentina and Uruguay following. It is also the region which will chiefly continue to attract Europeans for many years to come.

In Argentina and most of Uruguay, as in the prairie states of North America and the Canadian Northwest, there are no trees to be felled, so the land, extremely fertile, can be brought under crops immediately. The estates are at present large, but if there were settlers with enough capital to buy small lots, these could soon be had, and already some Italians are establishing themselves as peasant cultivators.149 It is a country where the labour is at present small in proportion to the area utilized, partly because much of the land is in pasture, partly because its flatness makes the use of agricultural machinery specially easy, partly because the harvests are largely reaped by migratory Europeans who return home for part of the year. Nevertheless, after making all allowances, both Argentina and the other tracts I have referred to are capable, supposing immigration to continue at the present rate, of providing work and homes for immigrants for at least sixty or seventy years to come. Locusts are said to destroy the crop once in three or four years, but this plague is deemed likely to diminish as settlement and civilization extend northwards to the regions whence it now comes. The estimate that before the end of the century Argentina may have fifty, Uruguay ten, and southern Brazil thirty millions of people (assuming the birth-rate to be maintained) need not seem extravagant to anyone who knows how rapidly settlement has advanced in North America and who realizes that before long the stream of agricultural immigration will cease to flow into the United States and may slacken in its flow towards Canada.

The cultivable areas of Chile are relatively small; and the Chileans themselves seem to think they need more land for their national development. To one who travels through southern Chile there seems, however, to be still room for a greatly increased population in its well-watered valleys, which enjoy a delightful climate. The future of these four countries is assured, so far as the gifts of nature can assure it. The world will always want what they produce.

Far more doubtful is the future of the third section, the Selvas, or forest-covered Amazonian plain. It includes nearly all the western half of Brazil, and the eastern parts of Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. An estimate of its area at 2,300,000 square miles, including the basin of the Tocantins river, might not be extravagant. It is an almost absolute level 1200 miles long, from north to south, and 1500 wide. Those parts which lie along the great river and its larger tributaries are so low that these rivers when they rise in the rainy season spread out their waters for from sixty to eighty miles or more on each side, and immense stretches of country not actually flooded become impassable morasses. But away back from the rivers there are higher grounds, flat, but raised sufficiently to be above the inundations; and on its western margin the great plain is bordered by a stretch of undulating country before the foot of the Andes is reached. All the country, whether level or undulating, is covered with forest. The trees grow so close that there is no way of travelling except by boat along the streams. Intense heat and abundant moisture combine to make vegetation so profuse and rank that ground cleared of trees is, after three or four years, covered thick again.

In this vast area there are, except in a few trading stations along the river, only one of them a considerable town,150 practically no inhabitants, perhaps not a human being to a square mile. The few and scattered inhabitants outside these stations are Indians, nearly all savages, most of them heathens. Some are warlike, and skilful in the use of their bows and of the long blow pipe from which they discharge poisoned darts, but the greater number are timid and feeble, an easy prey to the rubber gatherers, who have in some places shewn themselves more cruel than the wildest Indian.151 Here and there in Peru and Bolivia there are a few cultivated districts in the undulating ground along the base of the Andes, where some sugar, coffee, and cocoa are raised. But the only product of any commercial importance is rubber, collected from several kinds of trees, and exported in vast quantities down the tributary rivers into the Amazon and thence to the sea. The whole region, however, appears to be of extreme fertility, and to this the size of the trees, as well as the profusion of the vegetation, bears witness. Most of it is covered with vegetable soil accumulated during many thousands of years, and has never been touched by human hand. As many of the woods are valuable, there might be a considerable trade in timber, but the cost of getting out great logs is practically prohibitive, for the trees are of so many different kinds that it is hard to obtain a large supply of the same kind on any given area, and there has hitherto been no means of transport, except by water.

Can these Amazonian Selvas, which form the largest unoccupied fertile space on the earth's surface, be reclaimed for the service of man?

This question is not a practical one for our generation, and I mention it only because it raises an interesting problem, the solution of which will one day be attempted, since so vast and so fertile an area cannot be left forever useless. Since men have begun to make railways through mountains and deserts, and to build bridges across arms of the sea like the Firth of Forth, and most of all since the cutting of the Panama Canal, it has become an accepted doctrine that every work is only a question of cost.

If ever, when the world is fuller than it is now, it becomes worth while to attempt the reclamation of this vast region, the process would probably begin by placing colonists on the more elevated grounds above the annual inundation and setting them to clear away the wood and cultivate the soil. Hard work would be needed to keep down the efforts of Nature to hold her own against man by her tremendous vegetative power, but those who know the country believe that this could be done, and that the difficulties of transport through the lower parts of the forest to the banks of navigable streams might also be overcome. Hundreds of thousands of square miles might be in this way rendered habitable and cultivable, assuming that capital and the proper kind of labour could be obtained. To reclaim the lower land along the banks of the rivers by constructing embankments or levees like those along the lower Mississippi would be a more arduous undertaking, and might involve an expenditure disproportionate to the results.

Whence would come the capital? If the country belonged to some great and wealthy nation, in which there were many enterprising men seeking employment for their wealth, the thing might be attempted on a great scale, perhaps even by the nation itself. Whether capitalists from other countries will embark on such an enterprise, which could hardly be carried out except by the aid of a government, is doubtful. If attempted at all, it must be on a large scale, for such gradual colonization by settlers coming in small groups, as would be the natural process in temperate regions, is scarcely possible in a country where man has so powerful a nature to overcome.

Supposing the capital provided, the question of labour would remain. Who would do the work? and when the work was done, who would inhabit and cultivate the lands reclaimed? Thirty years ago the fear of tropical diseases would have made these regions seem impossible for white men, even as foremen or overseers. To-day the discovery that insects are the chief poison carriers of disease has reduced our fears. But to-day it still remains doubtful whether the men of any European race can retain health and vigour in a climate so moist and so hot, and so far away from sea or mountain breezes, as are the central parts of the Selvas. It is at any rate unlikely that they could do continuous open-air work there. If white men cannot be employed, what other labour would be available? As the native Indians are too few and too feeble to be worth regarding, it would be necessary to bring in some race native to the tropics which had already formed habits of steady industry. If the world were to-day what it was a century ago, this would be a simple matter. Negroes would be kidnapped in Africa and taken up the rivers to work under white or mulatto overseers. Nowadays, compulsion being impossible, persuasion alone remains. Negroes abound on the east side of Brazil, but they have plenty of land there and are masters of the situation, seeing that the planters are more eager to get them than they are to work for the planters. Nowhere in South America is there a problem of the unemployed. Whether Chinese or Indian coolies could be brought into the Selvas, and whether if brought they would remain under the control of the white employers who had imported them, are questions which may one day arise. Nothing is being done now to exploit these regions except as sources of wild rubber supply. But it seems certain that coming generations will endeavour to turn to the service of man the largest unused piece of productive soil that remains anywhere on the earth's surface.

Leaving this forest wilderness out of account, and confining our view to the near future, can any estimate be made of the probable growth of population in South America generally, and of the total it may reach by the end of the present century?

As respects the temperate regions, there exist some data for a conjecture: Should the influx of immigrants belonging, as do the Italians, to a prolific stock be maintained, the countries south of the Tropic of Capricorn may in A.D. 2000 contain at least one hundred millions of people.

As respects the equatorial regions, which now receive hardly any immigrants and in which the natural growth of population is slow, no such data exist. Considering, however, the material development which is going on in some, and may be expected in all, of them, they also may probably increase in population which would bring them from twenty-eight up to at least forty millions.152 Were this to happen, the continent would have by A.D. 2000 a population not far short of one hundred and fifty millions. At present, with only about forty-five millions, it has much less than half the population of North America, now about one hundred and twenty millions. The rapid growth of North America, likely to continue for two generations at least, may make the proportion between the two much the same in A.D. 2000 as it is to-day.

All such speculations are, however, subject to the possibility that the birth-rate, either in the temperate regions, or generally, may decrease. Such a decrease has, as respects Australia, thrown out the calculations made forty or fifty years ago.153

More important than the quantity of a population is its quality. Any enquiry as to what that of the South American countries will be when they are tolerably well filled up at the end of the present century can profitably address itself to one point only, viz. the several races and their relations to one another. There are now three races, Whites (of Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian origin),154 Indians, of many tribes speaking different languages, and Negroes. A very rough estimate of the racial elements in the whole continent155 might give some such results as these: —

Whites, 15,000,000 (more than half of them in Argentina and Uruguay).

Indians, 8,000,000.

Negroes,156 3,000,000.

Mixed whites and Indians (mestizos), 13,000,000.

Mixed whites and negroes (mulattoes and quadroons), 5,700,000.

Mixed negroes and Indians (zambos) (chiefly in Brazil) perhaps 300,000.

The reader will understand that these figures, based partly on a comparison of those given in various books and partly on enquiries addressed to competent observers, are given as only a rough approximation to the facts. There are no data for any exact estimate, and the difficulty of drawing any line between those who ought to be classed as pure whites and those who ought to be classed as mestizos or mulattoes, would be insuperable even if a regular and careful census were taken.157 In arriving at this conjectural estimate, those who have three-fourths or more of white blood are counted as whites, those who have less than three-fourths as mestizos, or mulattoes.

If these figures are somewhere near the truth it will be seen that if we deduct 8,000,000, representing the two purely white republics of Argentina and Uruguay, we shall find that in the other Spanish republics, taken together, the mestizo element is much larger, and the Indian element somewhat larger than the white element. To explain the practical significance of these figures let me repeat what was said in an earlier chapter, that the mestizos and whites are, for political and social purposes, practically one class and that the ruling class, the Indians being passive, and in a political sense outside the nation. Even in Paraguay, an almost purely Indian state, the comparatively few mestizos dominate politically. In Brazil it is the whites who rule, but many of them are tinged with negro, fewer with Indian, blood.

Four questions may be asked regarding the racial future: —

1. Which of the races is or are increasing?

2. Is the intermingling of races likely to continue?

3. Which type predominates in persons of mixed race?

4. What is likely to be the ultimate outcome of the mixture of races?

1. There are no official figures supplying an answer to this question as regards the northern and the Andean republics; but the traveller receives the impression that the Indians are more prolific than the whites, though their neglect of sanitary conditions gives a high death-rate, especially among children. It is rare to see an old man among them. If either they or the mestizos are now increasing, it is at no rapid rate. The pure whites in Argentina, Uruguay, and southern Brazil are certainly increasing, and thus the proportion of white to other blood in the continent as a whole is growing.

2. Everything points to a continuance of the process of race mixture. It is the rule in all parts of the world, except where religion or a strong feeling of race antagonism (such as exists in the United States) prevents it. Neither of these hindrances exists in South America. In Peru and Bolivia, however, the process is so slow that it may be centuries before the white and aboriginal elements have been so completely commingled as to form one race, and leave no pure Indians remaining.

3. In the mixed race (mestizo or mulatto) the white element seems usually to predominate. I do not state this as a physiological fact. It may or may not be so; nobody seems to have investigated the matter. But it is true as a social fact; that is to say, the mestizo deems himself a white, wishes to be a white, tries to live and think as a white, and is practically recognized by others as a white. This is not equally true of the negro, because he is, physically regarded, further off the white than is the Indian. But in Brazil, when the negro is able to take his stand, so far as education and property go, beside the white, he too thinks and acts like a white man and is so treated.

4. The facts just stated make it probable that the nations likely to emerge when the process of fusion is complete, perhaps at a very distant date, will be white much more than Indian nations. Blood is only one factor, and not the most important factor, in the making of men. Environment and the influence of the reigning intellectual type count for more. In the United States the child of the Polish or Rouman or Italian immigrant grows up as an American. He may be a more emotional and impulsive, a more violent or more criminal, a more artistic and sensitive American; but the stamp of the new country is on him. So apparently will it be, so at any rate it has been, with the Indian. Tinged however slightly by the blood of the higher race, he will become a Spanish-speaking man of the colonial kind, which differs from the European kind at least as much as an English-speaking North American differs from an Englishman. These mixed nations will, however, stand nearer, intellectually and socially, to the South European group of nations than to any other white peoples.