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.
It may seem natural to assume that such mixed nations will, in respect of their aboriginal blood, be inferior to their European relatives. But this is a mere assumption. No one has yet investigated scientifically the results of race fusion. History throws little light on the subject, because wherever there has been a mixture of races there have been also concomitant circumstances influencing the people who are the product of the mixture which have made it hard to determine whether their deterioration (or improvement) is due to this or to some other cause. So in these countries there may be reservoirs of dormant strength in the ancient native races waiting to be opened by conditions better than fortune has given them since the days of the Conquest. Who knows whether when the fusion is complete the Bolivian of two or three centuries hence, who will be nine-tenths, or the Paraguayan, who will be nineteen-twentieths, of Indian blood, will be inferior to his neighbours with a smaller aboriginal infusion? The Chilean peasant to-day, who is at least half Indian, is not inferior to the Argentine peasant, who is almost pure white.
In speaking of the future South American type as likely to be in the main "Spanish-colonial," I do not suggest that it will be uniform. Already there are variations in character between the peoples of the several republics; and these are more likely to be accentuated than to disappear. The different extent to which aboriginal elements become absorbed, and the differences in those aboriginal elements themselves, will be among the factors which will produce what may be called national "sub-types" of character. But apart from such causes it seems to be a general – I will not say universal – law of social growth that an independent political community, even if originally the same in race, religion, and habits as its neighbours, tends to draw apart from them, and to form an individuality of its own, creating a national type and impressing that type upon its members.
Were there any forces compelling these various republics to close political alliances, such as the fear of attacks by a Power outside their continent, they might suppress their jealousies and ally themselves close with one another and realize better than they do now all that they have in common. But they are not, and are not likely to be, so threatened. Holland, France, and England all at one time meddled in South America, but all three, while each retaining a foothold in Guiana, have long ago drawn apart and left Latin America to itself. Politically its republics live in a little world of their own; they have their own alliances, their own wars and bitternesses, with which strangers do not intermeddle. Of wars they have had, since 1825, their full share; nor is the danger of war yet extinct. No states seem likely to unite with one another of their own free will, but it is possible that smaller states may be annexed by or partitioned among some of the larger ones, their weakness and internal disorders furnishing to powerful neighbours, as in the famous case of the partition of Poland, at once the temptation and the pretext.
As the Old World no longer interferes with the South American states, so they are unlikely to interfere with the Old World. They have never proclaimed any such self-denying ordinance, and have not hitherto been strong enough to make it seem needed. But even if any among them becomes a first-class power, small is the chance that it can acquire interests in other parts of the globe that would collide with those of other nations. Were Colombia and Venezuela strong states owning strong navies, there might be Caribbean questions to embroil them with neighbouring maritime states. But the three leading powers of South America belong to its southern half, and there are now no unoccupied countries left to be acquired as colonies.
To what has been said in a preceding chapter regarding the internal political conditions and political prospects of the South American republics little need here be added. He who studies their history since Independence, with a knowledge of what they were when it was assured in A.D. 1825, will find nothing surprising in the storms that have buffeted them, nor anything to discourage a hope that they may eventually reach a smoother sea. The moral of that history is that nations have to be trained to self-government, just as individual men have to be trained to every work requiring patience and skill. The error into which the victorious colonists fell when they expected freedom and prosperity to follow at once on their deliverance from Spain was not their error only. It was shared by their friends in Europe and even more fully by their friends in North America. The latter had succeeded in establishing efficient state governments and thereafter an efficient federal government. They attributed this partly to liberty, i. e. to their having broken their tie with a European monarchy, partly to the benign influences of a new Continent, free from the evil traditions of the Old World. Many among them made the mistake, which no intelligent North American makes now, of thinking that their history began in 1776, the mistake of ignoring the centuries during which their ancestors had been learning the principles of self-government in England and the century and a half during which they had been putting those principles into practice in the older colonies. In this state of mind and attaching a magic significance to the name of a republic, the people of the United States did not see why Spanish America, which had imitated them in rejecting a European king and was placed, like them, in a new land, should not repeat their happy experiences. Liberal enthusiasts in England and France and Italy were scarcely less sanguine. None of them realized that Spanish America belonged, in 1825, to an age which England and North America had long left behind. Most of the land was wilder than England or Germany had been in the twelfth century, a thin population, no roads, settlements scattered here and there in forests or deserts. The peasantry were further back than those of western Europe in the fifteenth century, not merely rude and ignorant, but speaking native languages and soaked in primeval superstitions. The upper class were further back than those of Europe in the seventeenth century, for few of them had received any sort of higher education and none of them had any personal knowledge of free institutions, or any experience in civil administration. Thus both classes wanted the foundation on which free governments must be erected. The humbler class did not know and could not know how to elect representatives or supervise those whom they elected. The upper class did not know how to legislate or govern. They tried to erect a superstructure of complicated political institutions when there was no solid foundation to build on, when only a few of the choicest minds knew what order meant and what liberty meant and what was the relation between the two. Such experiments were foredoomed to failure.
The troubles of these ninety years have, accordingly, nothing in them that need dishearten either any friend of Spanish America or any friend of constitutional freedom. The person who ought to reconsider his position is the man who holds that any group of human beings called "the people" are always right, that the best and sufficient way to fit men for political power is to give it to them, and that the name of Republic has the talismanic gift of imparting virtue and wisdom to the community which adopts it. The mistaking of names for things is an old error, and has sometimes proved a fatal one.
Yet there was something noble in the over-sanguine confidence of the North American and European liberals, as well as of some of the finest minds among the South Americans themselves when they expected freedom to work miracles. The ideal of liberty that these men set up, though rarely realized, has never been lost. Servility and obscurantism have never resumed their old sway in South America. And as it is true that men need to be trained to self-government, so it is also true that men never become fit for the work till they try it. The ninety years of turmoil have not been altogether wasted. Two real constitutional republics have already emerged from it and their example cannot but tell on those others who, oppressed by less favourable conditions, still lag behind. That sort of progress which consists in getting rid of the old ideas and old habits of thinking and acting and replacing them by better ones must needs be a slow process. Something has already been done, and the closer and more frequent contact with Europe and North America into which these Spanish-American states are being brought ought to accelerate the process. So ought the additional motives for desiring order which the growth of material prosperity brings with it. Already the presence of foreigners imposes a certain check, and their property is generally respected in revolutions. The more the citizens acquire capital and themselves enter on commercial undertakings, and form business habits, and get to look at things with a practical eye, the stronger and more general will grow the public sentiment that insists on replacing the reign of force by the reign of law. When force has been eliminated, the task of making governments pure and rooting out fraudulent methods will become less difficult. It is a fair conclusion from European history that violence is, of all the evils that afflict a state, the evil which must be first extinguished. In England, a period of corruption set in after the great Civil War had ended, and the forms of constitutional government were often grossly perverted, but corruption and perversions ultimately disappeared with the growth of a higher sentiment.
Those South American states which have a large aboriginal population, even if they cannot become – and is it desirable that with such a population they should become? – democracies of the modern type, may at least try to secure order and such material prosperity as will bring them into closer touch with the outer world, and enable their peoples to learn, and be influenced by, the ideas and the methods of government that prevail among the great nations.
Intellectual and social progress were both in the ancient world and in the Middle Ages largely due to the reciprocal influences of nations on one another. As the want of these influences retarded the movement towards civilization of the Peruvians and Mexicans before the Conquest, so the isolation of the Spanish Americans has retarded their development ever since. They stood almost entirely outside the current of European thought and had little personal contact with Europeans till English and German merchants and English railway men, and North American mining engineers began to come among them from about 1860 onwards, and till somewhat later, the wealthy Argentines and Brazilians found their way to Paris. Although this contact has brought capital in its train, and given a start to material development, it has been a force rather among the people than of the people. It comes from without and is pumped into them like oxygen from a tube. It touches only one section of the inhabitants, and one side of their life. It is teaching them business methods and all that is therein implied, but it affects them only slightly on the literary, or scientific, or artistic side. This is of course less true of countries like Argentina and Chile than of the smaller northern republics, yet even in the former it is material interests that are dominant. This is, no doubt, in our day true of all European countries as well as of North America. In Europe, however, and also in the United States and Canada, the number of men who occupy themselves with science and letters is far larger in proportion to the population than it is in the South American countries, and the provision made for higher education incomparably more ample. Argentina has, indeed, not only the University of Buenos Aires, already staffed by able and energetic teachers, but the older and more ecclesiastically coloured University of Cordova and the new University of La Plata and its excellent military school, as Chile has its university in Santiago, and as Uruguay has the University of Montevideo. But these stand almost alone. Isolation, as well as poverty, has been a cause of the weakness of these organs of national life, a deficiency which order and prosperity ought presently to remove in other states as they have in Argentina.
One cause of the isolation I have referred to is found in the fact that there has been comparatively little literary production during the last two centuries in the language which these nations speak. Spanish is no doubt what the Germans call a "World Speech." It is now used by sixty millions of people in the New World as well as by twenty millions in Old Spain. But Old Spain never supplied to her colonies through books anything approaching the volume of that perennial stream of instruction and stimulation which English-speaking writers have for nearly four centuries supplied to those who can read English all over the world, and which France has likewise supplied to all who can read her language. In South America, men now learn French in increasing numbers, but they are still a small percentage of the educated population of Spanish America.
Of the eight or nine millions of people in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay probably one-half are not only illiterate, but cannot speak even Spanish. These facts constitute no reproach on the peoples of these states. They are a result of the circumstances attending the Conquest in the sixteenth century and of the way in which Spain thereafter administered her colonial empire.
That political conditions will improve during the next century seems altogether probable, and although social advance must be slow, especially where the native population is very large, political progress is sometimes unexpectedly rapid. To anyone observing England during the Wars of the Roses civil strife might have seemed so ingrained a habit as to be likely to last for generations. Yet after the accession of the first Tudor there were only a few slight troubles down till 1641, when a really great issue appeared which had to be fought out and was fought out within four years. So in our own days we have seen a new country, Bulgaria, as soon as it was delivered from a foreign despotism, step forward towards settled government with a firm tread which surprised all Europe. Democracy in the North American sense may be still far distant, but a settled government, maintaining order, giving opportunities for educational and social as well as material improvement, and responsible to the opinion of the more educated classes, may be much nearer than the never-ending, still beginning, troubles of the last ninety years have led most Europeans to expect.
To forecast what one may call the intellectually creative future of the Spanish-Americans is far more difficult. Considering themselves not Spaniards, but a new people, or peoples, they hold that views or predictions about them based on the history and tendencies of Spaniards are beside the mark. Nevertheless, as the other race factors – the quality of the aboriginal element and the results of an intermingling of the aboriginal with the Spanish colonial stock – are obscure, it is only in the Spanish element that any sort of basis for speculation can be found. Now the Spanish, or so-called Iberian, race, more or less Latinized during the ages of Roman dominion, and slightly Teutonized by the Germanic invasions of the fifth century, has been always a strong race. It was strong when it fought against Rome, and strong when it resisted the Moors in its mountain fastnesses and drove them step by step backwards, and ultimately out of the peninsula. It produced in the Middle Ages and afterwards many warriors and statesmen of the first rank. But the genius of the race seems to have at all times run more to practical life than towards intellectual creation. Two or three writers are of world fame, and so are two or three artists, without reckoning the mostly unnamed or unknown mediæval architects who reared ecclesiastical buildings of unsurpassed beauty. Metaphysical talent, turned into theological channels, gave birth to some dogmatic and casuistical writings of unquestionable power. Still the total quantity of literary or artistic product of high excellence is small when compared with that of Italy or France. That this is more markedly true of the later seventeenth and the eighteenth than of earlier centuries may be explained by the extinction in the sixteenth of intellectual freedom. French literature still flourished while Spanish was sinking under ecclesiastical censure.
In Spanish America, where remoteness from European influences darkened the firmament still further, scarcely any literary or scientific work of permanent merit was accomplished, though the fountain of pleasing verse did not cease to flow.158 The stormy times of the War of Independence and the domestic turmoil that everywhere followed gave no opportunities for acquiring knowledge nor any leisure to use it. It is only recently, and chiefly in Mexico and in the southern South American states, that the day of more benignant conditions has seemed to be dawning. It is true that in them, as political conflicts subside, material interests come first to the front, and, like a rank growth, so cover the ground that not much room is left for the play of intellect upon matters promising no direct pecuniary gain to the nation or to individuals. This was to be expected at a time when the development of natural resources attracts foreign capital and fills the minds of enterprising men. It is the salient feature of the life to-day of Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, and to a slighter extent of Chile also. But it need not be permanent. Just as in North America there came, not long after the Civil War, a passionate eagerness to found universities and extend the range and improve the efficiency of the higher scientific and literary teaching, so the leading men in these more advanced states may realize the need for basing their civilization on the enlightenment of the people. The task before them is harder than that which the North Americans had, because their system of elementary and secondary education is far less complete. With this extension of higher instruction and the closer communion of the best minds with those of the northern hemisphere, there may at any time come an outburst of purely intellectual activity. Prediction is so much more difficult in this field than in the field of politics that one must abstain from venturing to enter it. Shrewd observers living in the middle of the eighteenth century were able to foretell some sort of political upheaval as approaching in France; but nobody foretold the flowering in Germany of the great literature which began with Kant and Lessing and continued in Goethe and Schiller, Fichte and Hegel.
The traveller in South America who confines himself, as many do, to the larger cities, finds them so like those of Europe and North America in their possession of the appliances of modern civilization, in their electric street cars and handsome parks, in their ably written press, in the volume of business they transact – I might add in the aspect of the legislatures and in the administrative machinery of their government – that he is apt to fancy a like resemblance in the countries as a whole. But the small towns and rural districts are very far behind, though least so in Chile and Argentina. If one regards these various nations as a whole, one is struck by the want of such an "atmosphere of ideas," if the phrase be permissible, as that which men breathe in Europe and in North America. Educated men are few, books are few, there is little stir of thought, little play of cultivated intelligence upon the problems of modern society. Most of these countries seem to lie far away from the stream of intellectual life, hearing only its distant murmur. The presence of a great inert mass of ignorance in the native population partly accounts for this; and one must remember the difficulty of providing schools and the thinness of a population scattered through mountainous or desert or forest-covered regions. These disadvantages may in years to come be lessened, but in the meantime those who are born with superior talents are born into an ungenial environment, ill-fitted to develop and polish such talents to their own and to the public benefit. The traveller finds, now and then in some of these states, gifted men who would be remarkable in any country. One whom I knew in Mexico years ago was as brilliant and as accomplished in many lines of knowledge as any person I have ever known. But it takes a large number of such men to influence a nation and guide the course of its opinion. Men of marked ability abound, but their talent, like the system of instruction of the country, is directed almost exclusively to practical ends, and does less than it ought either for political progress or for the expansion of the national mind. Their interest in science is almost entirely an interest in its applications, and their hero is the great inventor. Science and learning, pursued for their own sake, have not yet won the place they ought to hold. Those in whom a taste for philosophical speculation or abstract thought of any kind appears, seldom devote themselves to patient investigation. They are apt to be captured by phrases and formulas, perhaps of little meaning, which seem to give short cuts to knowledge and truth.159
Another fact strikes the traveller with surprise. Both the intellectual life and the ethical standards of conduct of these countries seem to be entirely divorced from religion. The women are almost universally "practising" Catholics, and so are the peasantry, though the Christianity of the Indians bears only a distant resemblance to that of Europe. But men of the upper or educated class appear wholly indifferent to theology and to Christian worship. It has no interest for them. They are seldom actively hostile to Christianity, much less are they offensive when they speak of it, but they think it does not concern them, and may be left to women and peasants. The Catholic revival or reaction of the first half of the nineteenth century did not touch Spanish America, which is still under the influence of the anti-Catholic current of the later eighteenth. The Roman Church in Spain and Portugal was then, and indeed is now, far below the level at which it stands in France, Germany, and Italy. Its worship was more formal, its pressure on the laity far heavier, its clergy less exemplary in their lives. In Spanish America the obscurantism was at least as great and the other faults probably greater. There was not much persecution, partly, no doubt, because there was hardly any heterodoxy, and the victims of the Inquisition were comparatively few. But the ministers of religion had ceased not only to rouse the soul, but to supply a pattern for conduct. There were always some admirable men to be found among them, some prelates models of piety and virtue, some friars devoted missionaries and humanely zealous in their efforts to protect the Indians. Still the church as a whole had lost its hold on the conscience and thought of the best spirits, and that hold it has never regained. In saying this I am comparing Catholic South America not with the Protestant countries of Europe, but with such Roman Catholic countries as France, Rhenish Prussia, and Bavaria, in all of which the Roman Church is a power in the world of thought and morals. In eastern Europe the Orthodox Church has similarly shrivelled up and ceased to be an intellectual force, but there it has at least retained the affection of the upper class, and is honoured for its fidelity during centuries of Musulman oppression. In the more advanced parts of South America it seems to be regarded merely as a harmless Old World affair which belongs to a past order of things just as much as does the rule of Spain, but which may, so long as it does not interfere with politics, be treated with the respect which its antiquity commands. In both cases the undue stress laid upon the dogmatic side of theology and the formal or external side of worship has resulted in the loss of spiritual influence. In all the Spanish countries, the church had trodden down the laity and taken freedom and responsibility from them more than befell anywhere else in Christendom, making devotion consist in absolute submission. Thus when at last her sway vanished, her moral influence vanished with it. This absence of a religious foundation for thought and conduct is a grave misfortune for Latin America.
The view which I am here presenting is based chiefly on what I saw in Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil, the three countries in which there is a larger educated class than in the less populous republics. It applies in a less degree to Chile; and there are, of course, exceptions in the three first-named republics also, though not numerous enough to affect the general truth of what I am trying to state. The phenomenon is all the more remarkable because in the days when America began to be settled there was no part of Europe where religion had so strong a hold on the people as it had in Spain and Portugal. The Conquistadores, whatever may be thought of the influence of their faith upon their conduct, were ardently pious in their own way. Even in the desire they professed for the propagation of the faith among the Indians, they were not consciously hypocritical, though they never allowed their piety to stand in the way of their avarice.