HIDALGO.
A priest who prepared for the independence of Mexico from the Spanish power.
ITS RISE AND PROGRESS
BY
F. GARCIA CALDERON
WITH A PREFACE BY
RAYMOND POINCARÉ
Of the French Academy, President of the French Republic
TRANSLATED BY BERNARD MIALL
WITH A MAP AND 34 ILLUSTRATIONS
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
597-599 FIFTH AVENUE
1915
[All rights reserved]
TO
MONSIEUR ÉMILE BOUTROUX
(of the Institute of France)
Permit me to offer you this book as a mark of admiration and gratitude. Often of an evening, in the sober hour of twilight, hearing you comment upon a page of Plato or a line of Goethe, or explain to me with unfailing geniality and marvellous lucidity the troubles of the present day, I have gained a fuller understanding of the magnificent radiance of the French genius; and always, on leaving you, I have found pleasure in repeating the thought of Emerson, of the Emerson whom you love, concerning the utility of great men: "They make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious."
F. G. C.
PARIS, November, 1911.
Here is a book that should be read and digested by every one interested in the future of the Latin genius. It is written by a young Peruvian diplomatist. It is full of life and of thought. History, politics, economic and social science, literature, philosophy—M. Calderon is familiar with all and touches upon all with competence and without pedantry. The entire evolution of the South American republics is comprised in the volume which he now submits to the European public.
M. Calderon, a pupil in the school of the best modern historians, seeks in the past the laws of the future development of the Latin republics. By means of a scholarly and painstaking analysis, he shows us, in the South American Creole, a Spaniard of the heroic age, slowly transformed by miscegenation and the influence of climate; he sees in him, modified by time and enfeebled by cross-breeding, the most ancient characteristics of the Iberian race; and he expounds, in a few pages, the heroic epoch in which the individualism of Spain broke out into the audacious adventure of the conquistadores and the savage mysticism of the Inquisitors.
Then comes the colonial phase, with its disappointments, its illusions, its abuses and errors; the domination of an oppressive theocracy, of crushing monopolies; the insolence of privileged castes, and the indignities of the Peninsular agents. A thirst for independence gradually possesses the Spanish and Portuguese colonies; they rebel not merely against the economic and fiscal tyranny which is crushing them, but also against the rigours of a political and {10} moral tutelage that leaves them no political liberty. It is a great and terrible crisis. The movement of liberation fulfils itself in three phases: firstly, the colonies seek to obtain reforms of the metropolis, still anxious to remain loyal; then they consider the question of submitting themselves to European monarchs; and, finally, the republican idea appears, develops, and is victorious.
A cycle of pioneers and a cycle of liberators: M. Calderon expounds this tragic history with a sense of gratitude. He examines with remarkable insight the fundamental causes of the Revolution—the excesses of Spanish absolutism; the influence of the Encyclopædia and the doctrines of 1789; the example of North America; the gold of England, and the intervention of Canning; the various converging forces whose fulminating combination created a new world, ill prepared for social life, fragmentary, and in travail.
M. Calderon transports us into certain of the portions of this newborn America. He makes this the occasion of setting before us a whole gallery of vigorously painted pictures. The field of vision is occupied successively by Paraguay, with the long dictatorship of its first caudillo, the gloomy, taciturn Francia, with his authoritative traditions and warlike instincts; Uruguay, with its intensely national life; Ecuador, bearing the heavy imprint of Garcia Moreno; Peru, with its tormented history, the powerful but fortunate dictatorship of Don Ramon Castilla and Manuel Pardo and the epidemic of speculation, the insanity of the saltpetre and guano booms, the abuse of loans, warfare and anarchy, and the present effort towards economic recovery and national stability; Bolivia, with the cold and crafty ambition of Santa-Cruz; Venezuela, with the gross and material audacity of Paez, and the empirical despotism of Guzman-Blanco, that politician without doctrines, avid of power, but a patriot and a paternal {11} ruler. As M. Calderon says, the history of these Republics is difficult to distinguish from that of their caudillos, those representative men who personify, at any given moment, the virtues and vices of their peoples.
After the magnificent epic of Simon Bolivar, which M. Calderon recalls with the enthusiasm of gratitude, there commenced a troublous era of military anarchy. The ambition of the caudillos rent South America and multiplied her states. But the soul of germinating nationalities was steeped in the blood of battles, and in the heart of each people a national conscience was awakened. This was the troublous epoch of wars and revolutions.
The South American lived a life of danger, like the Florentine of the Renaissance or the Frenchman of the Terror; but presently, in the shadow of military power, wealth was evolved and order established; property became more secure, and existence more tame and normal; it was the advent of industry, commercialism, and peace. It seems to me that M. Calderon rather regrets having been born too late into a world already too old. What he terms the twilight of the caudillos fills him with a melancholy nostalgia for the bygone days. The tyrants, who were as a rule supported by the negroes and half-castes, helped to destroy racial differences and oligarchies. They have thus founded democracies which the liberal mind of M. Calderon cannot regard without goodwill, but which, to his mind, are too far lacking in the sense of solidarity; they are clumsy, inorganic, incapable of associating human effort; the rivalry of families and the hatred of factions absorbs and disturbs them, as it did the mediæval republics, and under the brilliant polish of French ideals they mask a confused medley of Europeans and Indians, Asiatics and Africans.
In these turbulent republics, however, M. Calderon is able clearly to perceive the reassuring symptoms {12} of a powerful vitality, and he does not despair of seeing them profit in the near future by the influence of Latin discipline. From the scholastic erudition of the colonial epoch, he attentively follows the intellectual evolution of the South American populations, through the troublous mists of political ideology, to the hitherto pallid imitations of European philosophies. Despite the diversity of races intermingling in the southern continent, he is convinced that the constant and secular action of the Roman law, a common religion, and French ideals, has given these young republics a Latin conscience, intangible and sacred. And he expresses the hope, very wisely and reasonably, that the peoples of South America will continue in the path of self-improvement without breaking with the traditions that are natural to them, and without subjecting themselves to alien influences.
He goes on to review the German peril, the North American peril, and the Japanese peril. He does not fail to realise the extent of the first named, and he complains of the progress of the commercial immigration of Germans, especially in the southern provinces of Brazil; but he considers that the German element, in the very process of fecundation, will disappear amidst the mass of the nation. He is, on the other hand, very keenly concerned with the North American peril. Not that he fails to do justice to the marvellous qualities of the Anglo-Saxon race; not that he is indifferent to the prestige of the great northern Republic, or that he is forgetful of its services to the cause of American autonomy; but he feels the increasing weight of a tutelage originally beneficent, and anxiously demands, Quis custodiet custodem? He is not oblivious of the fact that the Monroe doctrine is changing, that it has insensibly passed from the defensive to intervention, and from intervention to conquest, and this metamorphosis gives him food for reflection. Whatever the qualities of Yankee civilisation, it is not Latin civilisation, and {13} M. Calderon would not have the latter sacrificed to the former. He implores South America to defend itself against the danger of a Saxon hegemony, to enrich itself by means of European influences, to encourage French and Italian immigration, and to purify its races by an influx of new blood.
In the Japanese, as in the German, M. Calderon sees an indefatigable emissary of the Imperialist idea. According to him, no antagonism is more irreducible than that of America and Japan. Japanese artisans are invading the shipyards and foundries of Chili, Peru, and Brazil. They form a refractory element which will never be assimilated. He foresees that the supremacy of Japan may shortly extend over the entire Pacific, and that the whole of America will find it no trivial task to oppose this formidable power. From beginning to end of this book we hear the rallying-cry of the Latin republics. I believe that at heart M. Calderon regrets the excessive division of the states of South America. But the problem of unity, often brought to the fore in congresses and conferences, appears to him insoluble, and in default of this he would be content with intellectual alliances, with economic or fiscal unions, which would still permit the various republics to draw nearer to one another, to know one another better, and in time and on occasion to associate their defensive efforts.
I do not feel competent to criticise the advice which M. Calderon offers his compatriots.
In particular I cannot speak of his opinions concerning the presidential system in the republics of South America, and their constitutional methods, which differ so sensibly from our French parliamentary methods.
I would only remark that M. Calderon is right in warning the American states against a plague of which we in France know something, but which in young societies, deficient in established traditions, and without ancient and well-tried organisations, may {14} well be exceptionally dangerous—the invasion of a parasitical bureaucracy, which would increasingly develop itself at the expense of the healthy portions of the nation, and which would gradually infect the soundest and most vital tissues.
Finally, without indiscretion, I may perhaps express my approval of M. Calderon's stern requisition against the policy of excessive loans. It is by running into debt over unlicensed extravagances that certain of the South American republics have gained in Europe the reputation of being financially unsound or dishonest, and have thereby, by mere force of proximity, injured the repute of wiser and more economical states.
Since the republics of South America have need of European money, they would be greatly at fault did they alienate it by excessive or reckless budgets.
Never, I believe, shall we see the dismal hour which M. Calderon's imagination hears already striking; when, expelled by Slavs and Teutons, the Latins of the old world will be forced to take refuge on the shores of the blue sea that bore their floating cradle; and a Frenchman may be forgiven for refusing to believe that the capital of classic culture will ever pass from Paris to Buenos-Ayres, as it has passed from Rome to Paris. But without lingering over such alarming anticipations as these we may delight our eyes with brighter and more immediate prospects. May South America, while remaining herself, while cultivating, as M. Calderon advises her to cultivate, the American ideal, grow ever more and more hospitable to the literature, the arts, the commerce, and the capital of France. Thereby the great Latin family can only gain in material prosperity and moral authority.
RAYMOND POINCARÉ
(of the French Academy).
(M. Poincaré wrote this Preface in December, 1911, before he became President of Council and Minister of Foreign Affairs.)
There are two Americas. In the north, the "Outre-Mer" of Bourget, is a powerful industrial republic, a vast country of rude energies, of the "strenuous life." In the south are twenty leisurely states of unequal civilisation, troubled by anarchy and the colour problem. The prestige of the United States, their imperialism, and their wealth, have cast a shade over the less orderly Latin republics of the south. The title of America seems to be applied solely to the great imperial democracy of the north.
Yet among these American nations are wealthy peoples whose domestic organisation has been greatly improved, such as the Argentine, Brazil, Chili, Peru, Bolivia, and Uruguay. They must not be confounded with the republics of Central America, with Hayti or Paraguay. French writers and politicians, such as M. Anatole France, M. Clemenceau, and M. Jaurès, who have visited the Argentine, Brazil, and Uruguay, have remarked there not only an established Latin culture, but noble efforts in the direction of augmenting the internal peace of the nations, and extraordinary riches. They are agreed in declaring that these young countries possess economic forces and an optimism which will yield them a brilliant future.
Several of these states have lately celebrated their first centenary. Their independence was won during the first decade of the nineteenth century. The year {16} 1810 was the beginning of a new epoch, during which autonomous republics were formed, not without tragedy, upon the remnants of the Spanish power.
The time has come, it would seem, to study these peoples, together with their evolution and progress, unless we are willing to take it as proved that the United States of North America are the sole focus of Transatlantic civilisation and energy.
We propose to draw up the balance-sheet of these South American republics. This is the object of this book. We must seek in the history of these states the reason of their inferiority and the data which relate to their future.
First of all we must study the conquering race which discovered and colonised America. We must analyse the Spanish and Portuguese genius, the Iberian genius, half European, half African. After the conquest new societies sprang up under the stern domination of Spain and Portugal. They were over-seas theocracies, jealously guarded from all alien trade. Unlike Saxon America, where the Dutch and English immigrants held themselves sternly apart from the Indians, pursuing them and forcing them westward, in South America conquerors and conquered intermingled. The half-castes became the masters by force of numbers, conceiving a thirst for power and a hatred of the proud and overbearing Spaniards and Portuguese. War broke out between the Iberians and the Americans; it was a civil war. Then new states were rapidly formed, without traditions of government or established social classification.
These states were dominated by military chieftains, by caudillos. From barbarism and periodic anarchy proceeded the Dictators. We shall be able to study some of the representative personalities of this period, and to disentangle from the monotonous development of events the history of certain nations, such as {17} Brazil, in which the social medley has been dominated by the principle of authority. In the Argentine, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and Chili we shall perceive a new industrial order, by means of which political life grows less disturbed and the caudillos lose their authority (Books I. and II.).
The study of intellectual evolution shows us how great is the power of ideology in these rising democracies. They imitate the French Revolution; they submit themselves to the influence of the ideas of Rousseau and the Romantics, and of the doctrines of the individualists. America, Spanish and Portuguese by origin, is becoming French by culture (Book III.).
Here we proceed to the study of the part played by the Latin spirit in the formation of these peoples, and the perils which threaten them, whether these proceed from the United States, from Germany, or from Japan, and to consider the faults and the qualities of this spirit (Book IV.). Then follows an analysis of the problems and the future of Latin America (Book V.).
The conclusion to be drawn from this examination is that the political life of the Ibero-American peoples is as yet chaotic, but that some of them have already cast off the fetters of an unfortunate heredity. Across the ocean liberty and democracy are steadily becoming realities. In the battles of the future the support of America will be valued by the great peoples of the Mediterranean who are struggling for the supremacy of the Latin race.
CONTENTS
THE CONQUERING RACE
Its psychological characteristics—Individualism and its aspects—The sentiment of equality—African fanaticism.
THE COLONIES OVERSEA
The conquerors—The conquered races—The influence of religion in the new societies—Colonial life.
THE STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE
I. Economic and political aspects of the struggles—Monarchy and the Republic—The leaders: Miranda, Belgrano, Francia, Iturbide, King Pedro I., Artigas, San Martin, Bolivar—Bolivar the Liberator: his ideas and his deeds.
II. Revolutionary ideology—Influence of Rousseau—The rights of man—The example of the United States—English ideas in the constitutional projects of Miranda and Bolivar—European action: Canning—Nationalism versus Americanism.
MILITARY ANARCHY AND THE INDUSTRIAL PERIOD
Anarchy and dictatorship—The civil wars: their significance—Characteristics of the industrial period.
VENEZUELA: PAEZ—GUZMAN-BLANCO
The moral authority of Paez—The Monagas—The tyranny of Guzman-Blanco—Material progress.
PERU: GENERAL CASTILLA—MANUEL PARDO—PIEROLA
The political work of General Castilla—Domestic peace—The deposits of guano and saltpetre—Manuel Pardo, founder of the anti-military party—The last caudillo—Pierola: his reforms.
BOLIVIA: SANTA-CRUZ
Santa-Cruz and the Confederation of Peru and Bolivia—The tyrants Belzu, Molgarejo—The last caudillos: Pando, Montes.
URUGUAY: LAVALLEJA—RIVERA—THE NEW CAUDILLOS
The factions: Reds and Whites—The leaders: Artigas, Lavalleja, Rivera—The modern period.
THE ARGENTINE: RIVADAVIA—QUIROGA—ROSAS
Anarchy in 1820—The caudillos: their part in the formation of nationality—A Girondist, Rivadavia—The despotism of Rosas—Its duration and its essential aspects.
MEXICO: THE TWO EMPIRES—THE DICTATORS
The Emperor Iturbide—The conflicts between Federals and Unitarians—The Reformation—The foreign Emperor—The dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz—Material progress and servitude—The Yankee influence.
CHILI: A REPUBLIC OF THE ANGLO-SAXON TYPE
Portales and the oligarchy—The ten-years' Presidency—Montt and his influence—Balmaceda the reformer.
BRAZIL: THE EMPIRE—THE REPUBLIC
The influence of the Imperial régime—A transatlantic Marcus Aurelius—Dom Pedro II.—The Federal Republic.
PARAGUAY: PERPETUAL DICTATORSHIP
Dr. Francia—The opinion of Carlyle—The two Lopez—Tyranny and the military spirit in Paraguay.
COLOMBIA
Conservatives and Radicals—General Mosquera: his influence—A statesman: Raphael Nuñez, his doctrines political.
ECUADOR
Religious conflicts—General Flores and his political labours—Garcia Moreno—The Republic of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
THE ANARCHY OF THE TROPICS—CENTRAL AMERICA—HAYTI—SAN-DOMINGO
Tyrannies and revolutions—The action of climate and miscegenation—A republic of negroes: Hayti.
POLITICAL IDEOLOGY
Conservatives and Liberals — Lastarria — Bilbao — Echeverria — Montalvo — Vigil — The Revolution of 1848 and its influence in America—English ideas: Bello, Alberdi—The educationists.
THE LITERATURE OF THE YOUNG DEMOCRACIES
Spanish classicism and French romanticism—Their influence in America—Modernism—The work of Ruben Dario—The novel—The conte or short story.
THE EVOLUTION OF PHILOSOPHY
Bello—Hostos—The influence of England—Positivism—The influence of Spencer and Fouillée—-The sociologists
ARE THE IBERO-AMERICANS OF LATIN RACE?
Spanish and Portuguese heredity—Latin culture—The influence of the Roman laws, of Catholicism, and of French thought—The Latin spirit in America: its qualities and defects.
THE GERMAN PERIL
German Imperialism and the Monroe doctrine—Das Deutschtum and Southern Brazil—What the Brazilians think about it.
THE NORTH AMERICAN PERIL
The policy of the United States—The Monroe doctrine: its various aspects—Greatness and decadence of the United States—The two Americas, Latin and Anglo-Saxon.
A POLITICAL EXPERIMENT: CUBA
The work of Spain—The North-American reforms—The future.
THE JAPANESE PERIL
The ambitions of the Mikado—The Shin Nippon in Western America—Pacific invasion—Japanese and Americans.
THE PROBLEM OF UNITY
The foundations of unity: religion, language, and similarity of development—Neither Europe, nor Asia, nor Africa presents this moral unity in the same degree as Latin America—The future groupings of the peoples: Central America, the Confederation of the Antilles, Greater Colombia, the Confederation of the Pacific, and the Confederation of La Plata—Political and economical aspects of these unions—The last attempts at federation in Central America—The Bolivian Congress—The A.B.C.—the union of the Argentine, Brazil, and Chili.
THE PROBLEM OF RACE
The gravity of the problem—The three races, European, Indian, and negro—Their characteristics—The mestizos and mulattos—The conditions of miscegenation according to M. Gustave Le Bon—Regression to the primitive type.
THE POLITICAL PROBLEM
The caudillos: their action—Revolutions—Divorce between written Constitutions and political life—The future parties—The bureaucracy.
THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM
Loans—Budgets—Paper money—The formation of national capital.
AMERICA AND THE FUTURE OF THE LATIN PEOPLES
The Panama Canal and the two Americas—The future conflicts between Slavs, Germans, Anglo-Saxons, and Latins—The role of Latin America.
GENERAL FRANCISCO DE MIRANDA (VENEZUELA)
OPENING OF CONGRESS, LA PAZ, BOLIVIA
PASEO DE LA REFORMA, CITY OF MEXICO, ON INDEPENDENCE DAY
THE CATHEDRAL, SANTIAGO, CHILE
RUFINO BLANCO FOMBONA (VENEZUELA)
MAP
[Transcriber's note: The above map (of South America) was omitted from this ebook, being too large (approximately 18"x24") and fragile to scan.]
THE FORMATION OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLES
When the Iberians arrived in America they found either tribes or peoples of semi-civilised inhabitants. These natives differed from the Spanish and Portuguese invaders to such a degree that their conquest was a true creation of new societies on the ruins of ancient barbarian states. Before analysing the various aspects of American history we must therefore know something of the genius of the conquering race.
Conquerors and vanquished intermingled; territorial possession modified the spirit of the conquerors; and the colonies began to dream of conquering their independence. After twenty years of warfare the republic became the political type of these societies, which were exhausted by Spanish tyranny. Two periods, one of military anarchy, the other of domestic order, wealth, and industrialism, succeeded in the new States.
HIDALGO.
A priest who prepared for the independence of Mexico from the Spanish power.
LATIN AMERICA
Its psychological characteristics—Individualism and its aspects—The sentiment of equality.—African fanaticism.
Travellers and psychologists find in modern Greece the craft of Ulysses, the rhetorical ability of the Athenian sophists, and the anarchy of the brilliant democracies once grouped about the blue Mediterranean. Though its purity has been tainted by the onset of Africa and the Turks, the old Hellenic spirit survives in the race. A similar vitality is to be observed in America. The transatlantic Creole is a Spaniard of the heroic period, enervated by miscegenation and climate. It is impossible to understand or explain his character unless we take into account the genius of Spain. The wars of independence gave the Latin New World political liberty, and a deceptive novelty of forms and institutions, but beneath these the spirit of race survives: the Republic reproduces the essential traits of the colonial empire. In the cities, despite the invasion of cosmopolitanism, the old life persists, silent and monotonous, flowing past the ancient landmarks. The same little anxieties trouble mankind, which no longer has the haughty moral rigidity of the old hidalgos. Belief, conversation, intolerance—all retain the {30} imprint of the narrow mould imposed upon them by three centuries of the proudly exclusive spirit of Spain. To study the political and religious history of the last century in the American democracies is to add a chapter to the history of Iberian evolution. Beyond the ocean and the fabled columns which were overthrown by the pikes of the conquistadors is another Spain, tropical, and divided against itself, in which the grace of Andalusia has vanquished the austerity of Castile.[1]
If the troublous existence of the metropolitan state could be reduced to the simplicity of a formula, that formula would also explain the troublous history of a score of American republics, just as the deep root will reveal the germ of the vicious development of a tropical tree. But nothing would be more impossible than to reduce to an abstract and enforced unity the disturbed evolution of Spain, full as it is of anarchy and bloodshed. The Peninsula, divided into hostile regions, the refuge of inimical races, presents in its past such contradictions as defy synthesis. Amid this theocratic people the development of municipal liberties was premature. While feudality still imposed its authority upon the rest of Europe, Spain saw the rise of the free cities. Beside the eternal Quixotism which renounces the vulgar kingdom of the useful in order to give itself only to the ideal the wise refrains of the people express a dense, prosaic, positive realism. The Catholic nation par excellence furnished the Duke of Alba with the troops that were to conquer Rome. After long years of absolute monarchy the old democratic spirit was reborn in the Peninsular juntas which opposed the {31} French invasion. From Cantabria to Cadiz we discover, beneath the unity of Castile, a splendid variety of provincial types. The Asturian hardness contrasts with the rhythm of Andalusia, the impetuosity of Estremadura with the dryness of Catalonia, the tenacity of the Basques with the proud idleness of the Castilian.
From this territorial complexity arises a turbulent life: the secular struggle in favour of national unity, the generous epic of the Catholic crusade against Islam, and the gloomy pursuit of religious unity by means of inquisitorial holocausts. European history is transformed south of the Pyrenees. Feudality is arrested; the crusade against the infidel lasts eight centuries; religion and empire are established in magnificence like that of the Oriental theocracies. In the wealth of this national development persist the racial characteristics which we wish to determine: individualism, democracy, the local spirit so inimical to great unities, and the African fanaticism which is satisfied only with excessive sensations and extreme solutions—in short, the heritage of a grave and heroic race, in a state of perpetual moral tension, proud in the face of God and king and fate.
Individualism is the fundamental note of the Spanish psychology. An Iberian characteristic, it has all the force of an imperious atavism. It exalts any form of action, of self-affirmation; it inspires an unreasonable confidence in self and the powers of self; it tends to develop human energy, to preserve the national independence from external pressure, to defend it against the rigour of the law, the moral imperative, and the rigidity of duty; and it creates in exalted spirits an ardent desire of domination.
Strabo observed among the primitive Iberians, who were divided into hostile tribes, an immense pride, inimical to union and discipline. In his life and {32} attitude the Spaniard reveals all the outward and inward aspects of individualism. The austerity and arrogance revealed by the very folds of the hidalgo's mantle, by his majestic port, his sonorous speech, and his lordly gesture, the personal valour which turns history into an epic, the audacity, the love of adventure, and the isolation, are forms of personal exaltation. "The Spaniards, in their simplicity," says the squire Marcos de Obregon, "persuade themselves that they are the absolute masters of all."
Individualism explains the analogies between Iberian and English history: the civilisation of the Peninsula recalls, in some of its characteristics, that of the Anglo-Saxons. In both we find the premature affirmation of liberty, an excessive pride, and a long struggle against invasions. From this arises an aggressive imperialism: commercial in the north, religious in the south. In England the climate and the territory gave individualism a utilitarian bent; in Spain the conflict with Islam gave it a warlike tendency. Idealism, the inward life, and imaginative exaltation created the Puritans in England; in Spain the mystics and the inquisitors. But in the conquest of hostile circumstances the Saxon acquires a sense of realism; while the Iberian, under a fiery sun, becomes in Spain as in America a hunter of chimeras. A symbol will express the resemblance between the two histories: Ariel and Caliban, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza represent the same eternal dualism of idealism and realism. Caliban has given England a vast empire; the knight-errant has returned to his native La Mancha, exhausted by his barren adventure.
Spanish evolution, and the moral and religious aspects of Peninsular life, are to be explained by this perpetual exaltation of the individual. Stoicism is the moral aspect of individualism. It preaches virility (esto vir. says Seneca): it develops the human {33} will as opposed to Destiny; it is a gospel of austerity in the face of suffering, of silent heroism in the face of death. Seneca is for Roman Spain the teacher of energy; from his teaching proceeds that tenacious faith in character which touches Peninsular history with a grave virility. Christianity, which proclaims human dignity, becomes the national religion south of the Pyrenees. According to the Stoics, all men are equal before Destiny; according to Christ, they are equal before God; and of these two doctrines a formidable pride is born. Finally, in mysticism, the original expression of the religious genius of Spain, there is nothing to recall the pantheism of the Orient, nor the annihilation of man before the Absolute. The Peninsular mystics exalt their individuality, draw strength from the visit of their Friend, become divine through ecstasy, and aspire with the ardour of conquerors to the possession of God. To the German Reformation, which preached predestination, the theologians of Spain opposed free human choice, the efficacy of action, and the dignity and merit of effort. The Spanish religion was by no means satisfied with speculation; it made for action and preached energy. The struggles of Spain have a religious significance; the heroes are mystics and the mystics "knights of the Divine order." Ignatius Loyola and Saint Teresa dream of heroic undertakings and read the romances of chivalry. Mysticism inspires the warriors; faith purifies the covetousness of the conquerors.
Wilful and mystical, the Spanish temperament is active, and expresses itself externally in conflict; it manifests itself in comedy and tragedy. The Peninsular genius is dramatic. Adventure, movement, and the shock of passions are developed in an ample theatre which expresses all the aspects of aggravated individualism. The struggle is not only for independence, but for fame, to preserve the integrity of honour in the general eye. Jealous and {34} revengeful, this preoccupation in respect of honour, which is profoundly Spanish, inspires innumerable tragedies. Antagonisms, ruptures, theses, and antitheses abound in Iberian history; the positivism of Sancho Panza, the idealism of Don Quixote; obstinacy and idleness; sloth and violence; parasitism and adventure; gloom and solemnity such as we find in the paintings of Zurbaran and Ribera, together with the frivolity of harmonious dance and festival and light-headed madness in the hot sunlight; faith in the will and acceptation of destiny; the ardour of mystics and conquerors and the cynicism of rogues and beggars; heroic disinterestedness and passionate covetousness: these are the irreducible contradictions of the Spanish mind, which explain the long conflict, the intensity of the internal drama. On the stage we find the reflection of these conflicts, these indurated wills; subtle passions, grandiose pride, lofty character; tragedies with a touch of farce and comedies with a mystic background. The literature of Chivalry—the immense crop of romances, the rude primitive poetry, the Cid, the Children of Lara—is a commentary upon individualism and action. The great literary types—the hero, the adventurer, the mystic, the noble chieftain, the knight, the lover—are exalted individualities. The picaro himself belongs to this hardy family; he is proud as any knight, and a goodly number of knights are picaresque. Subtle and sceptical, the picaro employs both cunning and heroism in the daily struggle for life. Of "Gongorism," a school of Spanish literature, Martinez-Ruiz has written that it is the expression of movement in language, a dynamic poetry for men of action. Dramas and romances of energy, violent epics, with nothing of the antique serenity: these form the true literature of Spain.
In art and philosophy and literature there are {35} really no schools, but writers, philosophers, and painters; such as El Greco, who left no imitators; solitary individuals such as Gratian and Quevedo. But in Spain we see the triumph of those military and political organisations in which the individual finds the greatest freedom: the people, the tribe, the guerilla band, the battalion. The cult of rebellious and exuberant energy is general. In the relations of king and subject the same Peninsular individualism appears.
"For besar mano de rey
No me tengo por honrado,
Porque la besó mi padre
Me tengo por afrentado."
says a Spanish rhyme. Obedience to the king is conditional; it is based upon the monarch's respect for the supreme order of justice, and his submission to a tacit or explicit contract between king and people. Charters, traditions, and usages limit the absolutism of the monarch. In the Cortes of Orcana in 1469 it is declared that the king is the "mercenary" of the people, who pay him a "salary."[2] All Spanish obedience is steeped in this kind of pride; the nobles of Aragon feel themselves individually the equals of the king, and collectively his superior. The cities, federated into hermandades or unions, treat with the monarch; they form a State within the State; they oppose the Government and force it to recognise their privileges. In 1226 the cities of Aragon and Catalonia demand of Jaime II. the grant of a charter of popular rights. Insurrections are frequent, and are incarnated in a hero of the rude national epic: the Cid. Mariana, a historian, authorises any violence directed against royal tyranny.
This individualism upholds a strict justice against the narrowness of the laws and the Byzantine debates of lawyers; against sentences, penalties, and tribunals. Poems and proverbs express this continual clash between the juridic ideal and the law; the Peninsular conscience condemns the partial and precarious justice of the codes. Joaquin Costa writes: "Of all the epics known to me—whether national or racial—the Spanish has done most to elevate the principle of justice, and has rendered the cult of justice most fervent." Austere and inviolable, the law represents a category of eternal relations, beside which all individualities are insignificant, even that of the king, and all institutions fragile, even the Church.
Stoical because it believed in pure justice; nourished by rude heroisms, inward visions, romances, and legends; exalted by mystic dialogues, and hardened by centuries of religious wars; the Spanish spirit, full of enthusiasm, entered upon the Renaissance, that sixteenth century which was to reveal the new continents across the ocean, the laws of Nature behind her mystery, and to create imperious personalities which opposed themselves to Fate. Then Spanish individualism broke out into mysticism, audacity, and adventure: it was the epoch of conquistadors, of politicians, of inquisitors, of Jimenez and Pizarro, Torquemada, Loyola, and Cortez. Spain broke through the circle of the Old World, fought in defence of Christian civilisation at Lepanto, and of Catholicism in Germany and Flanders; coveted the Mediterranean countries; colonised an immense and unknown continent; threatened Europe with the religious imperialism of Charles V. and Philip II., and, thanks to the legions of the Duke of Alba, imposed her will on the Pope. Her policy had the old Roman majesty and force; literature had found its "golden age"; philosophy proposed the vast harmonious solutions of Fox {37} Morcillo, and laid down the bases of natural and national law by the pens of Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto. It was a splendid prodigality of energy, creation, conquest, and heroism—the last stage of a history of violent stoicism, which announced a long and majestic decadence.
Distrustful of hierarchies, Spanish individualism created social and democratic forms. Traditions, doctrines, customs, and laws denoted an exact sense of human equality. "Monachal democracy," said Menendez-Pelayo, in speaking of Spain, because the levelling of all classes offered certain conventual characteristics, and because there was a Christian basis to the fervour of the equalitarians; a "picaresque" democracy, wrote Salillas, alluding to the equality of the knight and the picaro, to the double phenomenon of a proud people making pretensions to nobility and a careless aristocracy continually drifting into democracy by reason of the lack of middle classes and the traditional idleness of the hidalgo. An anarchical democracy, inimical to hierarchy, proud and undisciplined, according to the analysis of Unamuno, in his profound work, En torno al Casticismo; a democratic Cæsarism, thought Oliveira Martins, for the absolutism of the monarch was not feudal royalty, but rather a principality of the Roman type. The king presided over a democracy of knights, mystics, adventurers, and rogues. This spirit of equality may be observed even in the formation of the Spanish aristocracy; the Gothic and hereditary nobility is foreign to the evolution of the Peninsular. The national aristocracy is to be found in the bosom of the Church; it is elective, subject to the current popular vicissitudes, to such a degree that the ecclesiastical councils are more truly national than the military councils and assemblies. Servitude is less rude in mediæval Spain than in the rest of Europe; the cultivator progresses, but disappears {38} from the other side of the Pyrenees before the invasion of feudalism, and the hired or leasehold cultivator is almost free. There are tributary nobles: between the democracy and the nobility there are no irreducible divisions.
This equalitarian development is especially notable in the political world. In Spain feudalism is not a national institution, and the spirit of Gothic kingship becomes transformed under Iberian influences. In Leon and Castile the nobility are less powerful than in France or other parts of Spain, Catalonia, Navarre, and Aragon.[3] The social classes are not superimposed in rigorous order; cities acquire franchises, and "popular seigneuries" are formed.
The monarchy, too, undergoes this process of levelling or democratisation. The Emperor aims at equilibrium in equality; he destroys the excessive privileges of the aristocracy and the people; in the political conflict he leans to one side or the other alternately. The popular tongue consecrates the equality of the social classes: "In a hundred years a king becomes a thrall; in a hundred and six a thrall becomes a king." "All are equal to the king, except in wealth."
The Spanish commune lasts, because it is the centre of this great democracy. From the beginnings of Peninsular history we see the cities struggling for their independence. They reproduce the djemaa of the Atlas, beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, amid the Berbers, the parents of the Iberians; the djemaa is the African progenitor of the Spanish commune; both make an equal distribution of goods, and endeavour to avoid poverty. The djemaa, or municipality, or commune, isolated and autonomous, constitutes the political unit: the State is a confederation of free cities. The Spanish towns defend their {39} liberties against every form of artificial unity, whether Phoenician, Greek, or Roman. Rome reigns for seven hundred years; but because she partially recognises the autonomy of the municipalities, the Spanish democracy; she increases civil rights, founds small republics, which elect their own magistrates, administer the communal finances, and discuss the payment of imposts and the distribution of lands in their ward. Thus Spanish individualism is satisfied. Rome, absorbing and centralising under the Cæsars, destroys local liberty; but a deep-seated current re-establishes the autonomy of the peoples when the Roman power decays. Assemblies of free citizens govern the cities; the Visigoth monarchy, at the suggestion of the national Church, respects the municipal organisation. Thus a hybrid system springs up, feudal in the Germanic character of the predominant aristocracy, democratic by virtue of the Councils, the Church, and the tenacious power of the cities. In the struggle against the Moors the kings compound with the proud, free cities, conceding charters and municipal privileges in exchange for a tribute of gold or flesh and blood.
Liberty and democracy are of more ancient date in Spain than in England. The charter of Leon, dated 1020, anterior to the great English charter, grants the municipalities an administrative and judicial jurisdiction; it recognises the hereditary rights of the serf in the soil which he tills, and his full liberty to change his seigneur; herein we see a modified feudalism. The first charters of Castile recognised the rights of the cities. In the councils of Burgos in 1169 and of Leon in 1188 the delegates of the municipalities figured; even in the Cortes of Aragon, where the Germanic tradition was predominant, representatives of the cities were admitted as early as the twelfth century. The overlord, who extended his protectorate over a city, did not despoil {40} it of its former sovereignty; the Behetrias were cities or groups of cities which chose as their guardian a baron or warrior chief, without losing anything of their autonomy. The cities, proud of their privileges, united with the royal power in struggling against the nobility; thirty-four of them, in 1295, constituted the Hermandad (brotherhood, guild) of Castile, which eventually numbered as many as a hundred cities. In ancient Spain we are always discovering something of the nature of a contract, a concert of free wills, a perpetual concordat between governors and governed. From the Iberian tribe to the Roman city, from the city with its franchises to the villages grouped in hermandades, and from these to the popular juntas which defend Spain against the power of France and organise an epic resistance, there is an obvious historical continuity. Local patriotism is inimical to ambitious constructive policies. Many peoples invade the Peninsula—Semites, Berbers, Arabs, Copts, Touaregs, Syrians, Kelts, Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Franks, Suabians, Vandals, Goths: they become superimposed like geological strata, draw apart from one another in the mountainous parts of Spain, and convert the quarrels of provinces and the rivalries of cities into regional conflicts and racial antagonisms.
In the clash of Spanish individualities, in the rude assertion of municipal prerogatives, in the democratic developments which are so hostile to any hierarchy, an African or Semitic patriotism is revealed, which converts history into a bloody tragedy. In the arid Castilian plain, confined by its glaring horizons, under its burning sun, we see the spectacle of a proud people defending absolute principles with aggressive faith. Religion is dry and fiery as the desert. Señor de Unamuno, writing of Spain,[4] calls her "a nation fanatical rather than superstitious, to {41} whom the Semitic monotheism is better adapted than the Aryan polytheism." Jews and Moors are expelled from the Peninsula in the name of simple and rigid ideals, by an intolerance at once religious and political. Thus the spiritual integrity of Spain is achieved; but industry decays, poverty increases, decadence appears, and in a Spain drained of its blood by autodafés and emigrations a solitary cross is raised, the symbol of an African Christianity, to which the love of mankind is a stranger.
Spain is African, even from the prehistoric ages. The Iberian is like the men of the Atlas; like them, he is brown and dolicocephalous. The Kabyle douar and the Spanish village present remarkable analogies. An early geological change separates, by a narrow strait, two similar countries; two successive invasions spread an infusion of African blood throughout the Peninsula. Phoenicians and Carthaginians found colonies in maritime Spain; in 711 seven thousand Berbers establish themselves in the south; and the invasion of the Almohades in 1145 still further unites Iberians and Africans. During the long centuries of conflict between Christians and Arabs the two races intermingle under the cultivated tolerance of the Khalifs. The Gothic kings seek the aid of Arab chieftains in their quarrels; the Cid is a condottiere who fights alternately in the Mussulman and Christian armies, serving, with his troop of heroes, under the highest bidder. The Spanish monarchs in turn intervene in the quarrels of the Khalifs, and Alfonso VI., in 1185, allies himself with the Moorish king of Seville in order to conquer Toledo. The Arabs study under the masters of the Spanish capitals, while the Spaniards study Arabic, and are initiated into Oriental science. The language still preserves traces of the commerce between the two races. The Arabs, sceptical and refined, overlords already enervated by the grace {42} and luxury of Andalusia, rule without fanaticism; they leave the vanquished their religion and their usages, their laws, authorities, and judges; they free such Christian slaves as are converted to Islam. The Mozarabs, Christians who live in the Mussulman States, without renouncing their faith and customs, pave the way for the fusion of the hostile races. In spite of a continual warfare, under the indifferent and alien rule of the Arab both victors and vanquished become subject, as did the first Gothic kings, to the national influence. It seems as though the gradual action of a common life were about to reconstitute the primitive type of man who once peopled Iberia from the Pyrenees to the Atlas.
The originality of Spain, contrasting, in her development, with the Indo-European nations, comes from Africa, from the atavism of the Iberians, from the long domination of the Moors, and from the Semitic Orient.
The anarchy of the tribe persists; the clergy are all-powerful, as are the African marabouts. To the feudal nobility and the European parliament the Peninsula opposes the Councils; to the struggles between Pope and Emperor, the Oriental fusion of religion and the monarchy, the Inquisition, and the omnipotence of the clergy; to the Reformation, the coalition of Catholics with Protestants, and the league of the princes of Christendom with the Sultan, a fanatical Christianity which realises the ideal of national unity by expelling Jews and Moors, and burning sorcerers and heretics in the crackling flames of autodafés. When Spain enters upon her decadence her ancient characteristics—individualism, the municipal spirit, and the democratic fervour—disappear, and the African and Semitic influences predominate. Under the theocracy the nation of conquerors degenerates; at Villalar the monarchy conquers the free cities and the arrogant nobility. {43} The clergy reign in school and palace; as in the East, they form a superior caste. Rogues and ruffians—the picaros—succeed to the heroes and adventurers of the days of old; an Oriental parasitism invades the Peninsula, and legions of arrogant beggars people the highways of Castile. It is the final crisis of heroic Quixotism. The Moors are revenged for their defeat, imposing their African fanaticism on an impoverished Peninsula. New Spains across the ocean rise against the decadent mother-country. Exhausted with creating new nations, the conquering race sinks into repose, and a score of democracies prepare to enjoy its moral heritage.
[1] Of the Portuguese conquerors we may say that in their individualism and their love of adventure they resembled the Spaniards. Their fanaticism was certainly less bitter, perhaps because they had not been forced to struggle against the enemies of their faith.
[2] See Joaquín Costa, Concepto del Derecho en la Poesia española (Estudios jurídicos y politicos, Madrid 1884)
[3] Altamira, Historia de España y de la Civilizatión española, vol. i. p. 229 et seq.
[4] En torno al Casticismo, Madrid, 1902, p. 115.
The conquerors—The conquered races—The influence of religion in the new societies—Colonial life.
In the sixteenth century the Spanish race conquered the various kingdoms of America. It founded new societies, destroyed ancient empires, and created cities in the wilderness; and in the following century it made innumerable laws and sent forth innumerable warlike expeditions. Between one period and the next—the rude epic of conquest and the tame existence of the civilised colonies—a strange contrast is to be observed.
In the first period cupidity may be said to be the deus ex machina of the great epic acted by the conquerors: there is a bloody and barbarous conflict with the unknown territory, the hostile Indians, the mysterious forests, the enormous rivers, and the desert that swallows whole legions. This marvellous age is followed, in the silent cities, by a monotonous, pious, puerile existence. Exhausted by heroism, the race declines, mingles itself with the Indians, imports black slaves from Africa, and obeys its Inquisitors and viceroys. The obscure events of its lamentable existence take place in a veritable wilderness. Grey and unrelieved is this period, the period known as "the Colony," for the unstable societies of America reflect the life of Spain; while the first, that of the Conquest, is an age of greed and bloodshed, in {45} which the impetuous adventurers of the Peninsula roam from Mexico to Patagonia, realising, in the words of de Heredia's sonnet, their "brutal and heroic dream."
The Spaniard and the Portuguese of the sixteenth century were men of the Renaissance; of that age which was perturbed by the restored spectacle of the life of the world. Voyages, discoveries, Greek myths and classic poems, which filled the past with legends and heroic deeds, gave the Latins of the Mediterranean the longing to explore lands and seas unknown. Individuality developed with an energy that often merged in crime. Tyrants or conquerors longing for power and adventure lived in regions far removed from ideals of good and evil. Mystics—for the mediæval gloom still hung over Europe—they joined cupidity to faith, and renounced a life of contemplation in order to push back the limits of the world. Heirs of the Phoenician ambition, the Portuguese encircled Africa before discovering America; and many a Spanish captain, before invading the regions oversea, had fought in Flanders, pillaged Rome, and repeated the journey of Don Quixote across La Mancha.
The soul of the conquistador combined audacity with covetousness, superstition with cruelty, the pride of the hidalgo with the rigour of the ascetics, a rigid individualism and a thirst for glory with an infallible faith in the greatness of its own destiny. The adventurers of the Peninsula were professors of energy: like the Italian condottieri, like the captains of the Napoleonic epic. A group of adventurers enslaved the empire of Mexico, destroyed the power of the Incas, and defeated the indomitable Araucan. Cortez burned his ships when his companions spoke of renouncing the difficult enterprise of conquest. Pizarro, with twelve of his lieutenants, resolved, in a desert island, to invade Peru.
Cortez conquered Mexico; Pizarro and Almagro, Peru; Valdivia and Almagro, Araucania; Jimenez de Quesada and Benalcazar, the territories of Colombia; Pedro de Alvarado, Guatemala; Martinez de Irala, Paraguay; Juan de Garay, the province of La Plata; Martin Affonso, the Souzas and others, Brazil. Others brought from Italy the spirit of the Renaissance; such was Pedro de Mendoza, enriched by the sack of Rome, who, in 1554, organised an expedition to the Rio de la Plata. The sixteenth century, the age of discoveries, was also the age of conquest. From all the provinces of Spain and Portugal adventurers poured into America. The energetic Basques led the way; but there were fiery Estremadurans, austere Castilians, meditative Portuguese, and witty Andalusians. Triumph lay before them; they advanced to conquest over the ruins of cities and the bodies of Indians. Their incredible prowess often ended in their death upon the soil they trod as intruders and invaders.
The America conquered by the Spaniards and Portuguese was peopled by various races and occupied by many different civilisations. The invaders unified all these regions, imposing uniform laws, customs, and religion. In Brazil they found scattered tribes: Tupis, Tupinambas, Caribs; in Paraguay, the Guaranis; in Uruguay, the Charruas. The organisation of these peoples of hunters and fishers was simple; in time of war as in peace they obeyed their chiefs. These vast territories presented many different tongues, and an infinite variety of tribes, clans, and societies; ranging from cannibalism and savagery, through the primitive forms of culture, to nomadism and the sedentary state. The Araucanians of Chili, a warlike people, held assemblies to decide upon war, joined in confederations, and obeyed a cacique, who was the strongest and bravest man of the tribe. They lived in isolation the better to preserve their independence.
Three barbaric monarchies—the Chibchas or Muiscas in Colombia, the Incas in Peru, and the Aztecs in Mexico—which boasted of laws, majestic cities, social classes, colleges of priests, reigning dynasties, organised armies, academic myths, and even hieroglyphs and astrologers (not unlike those of Assyria)—differed profoundly in their complex political organisation from the tribes of America. Although the Incas were not the liberal princes of Marmontel's dream, and although the history of their rule was not an idyll, their meticulous and beneficent tyranny did after long wars of conquest erect in the ancient Tahuantisuyu a great empire of silent obedience, an anticipation of the ideals of State Socialism. Property was collective, and existence subject to strict regulations. The Incas made labour obligatory, supervised all agricultural operations, and respected, when they extended their domains, the rites and customs of vanquished races.
If the Inca monarchy recalls the great empires of Asia, China, and Assyria, Mexico, on the other hand, appears to have been a feudal kingdom in which caciques, governors of vast provinces, ruled beside the absolute monarch. "There is no general overlord," observed Cortez. There was a central authority, as in Peru, but the Mexican despotism was more rude and barbarous than that of the Incas; the blood of human victims dripped from its smoking altars. The social organism had not reached the degree of perfection attained by the Inca monarchy.
The Spanish and Portuguese conquerors, with their mediæval ideas, their African fanaticism, their marvellous ships, and their powerful weapons, terrified these peoples who were still dwelling in the age of bronze and polished stone. Historians report the surprise of these hungry adventurers before the treasures of Mexico and Peru. Atahualpa offered to fill with gold the chamber in which Pizarro held {48} him prisoner. The court of Montezuma displayed an Asiatic luxury: surrounded with women, buffoons, idols, and strange birds, under a resplendent canopy loaded with gold and jewels, the Aztec monarch advances like a king in an Oriental tale. His escort is of haughty princes. The imperial city abounds in temples, lakes, and causeways; it is melancholy and sumptuous, the capital of Mexico. The chroniclers of the time tell us how the cupidity of the conquistadors was awakened: men who had left a ruined Spain to find these immense treasures in America; they are writing for impoverished hidalgos, and fear that they will not be believed when they speak of this fabulous abundance of gold. Since the days of Ophir and the Queen of Sheba, says one of these historians, "no ancient writing had ever stated that gold, silver, and jewels" had ever been discovered in such vast quantities as those which Castile was about to receive from her new colonies.
The soldiers of the conquest pillaged these treasures, sacked temples and palaces, and quarrelled over their wealth in a series of tragic struggles. Around the mines cities sprang up and parties were formed; at Potosi Vicuñas and Biscayans, excited by the sight of the metal which delighted their cupidity, prolonged the savagery of the first conflict. Where minerals existed the colonial life was unstable, harsh, and brutal; in poor countries, such as Chili and the Argentine, societies were slowly formed which cultivated the soil: tenacious oligarchies bound to the new country by solid interests.
The vanquished races and the victors differed greatly from one another; hence amidst the political and moral unity of the new societies arose different characteristics and incipient antagonisms. Spaniards and Portuguese took Indian wives or women; the leaders married princesses of Mexico and Peru; the soldiers founded provisional homes in the colonies. {49} The Andalusians settled in the tropics; the Basques in the temperate regions; and the Castilians swarmed in the towns. A curious affinity of race, as between the Basques and the Araucanians, and analogies of climate and landscape, and, apart from these factors, the erratic wanderings of the conquerors, explain this original diversity of the American provinces. Why should they be similar: the offspring of the gentle Indian Quechuas and the fiery Andalusians; the children of the virile Araucanians and the calm, reasonable Basques? Wherever the native population was more abundant, and the political organisation more complicated, as in Mexico and Peru, its influence on miscegenation was more potent than in colonies from which the Indian was disappearing (as the Charruas of Uruguay or the nomadic tribes of Brazil) before the onset of civilisation. The climate, severe on the plateaux, and favourable to an energetic existence, warm and enervating on the coast, contributed to the variety of human types. The first families sprung of the sensuality of the conquerors already revealed the elements of future developments.
It was an age of creation: races and cities, new rites and customs; all were sprung of the crossing of Iberian and Indian. The diversity of the elements whose fusion was paving the way for a new caste gave mankind an interesting variety. The negro, imported by the Spaniard for the cultivation of the tropical soil, added yet another complication to the first admixture of castes. Grotesque generations with every shade of complexion and every conformation of skull were born in America from the unions stimulated by the kings of Spain. In the Anglo-Saxon provinces of North America the climate only changed the invaders; in the Iberian colonies the conquered race, the land itself, the air they breathed, all modified the conquerors. Creation, the synthesis of human elements, action and reaction between the country and {50} the men who ruled it, a crucible continually agitated by unheard-of fusions of races; all this gave the process of evolution the intensity and the aspect of a continual conflict. From the negro bozal recently imported from Africa to the quinteron, the offspring of slaves purified by successive unions with the whites; from the Indian who mourned his monotonous servitude in the solitude of the mountains, to the coloured student of the universities, we find, in the seventeenth century as in the twentieth, in the colonies as in the republics, every variety of this admixture of Iberians, Indians, and Africans. From a social point of view the rank of the individual corresponded generally with the shade of his epidermis. "In America," wrote Humboldt at the beginning of the nineteenth century, "the more or less white skin determines the position which a man holds in society."
The Spaniard degenerated in the colonies. The passage from a period of violence to one of conventual quietude betrayed this slow decadence of the invader, under the pressure of the climate and in contact with the conquered races. The Creole, the Spaniard born in America, has lost the prickly characteristics of the hidalgo: the proud individualism, the love of bloody adventure, the stoicism, the tenacity in resistance and conflict, and the rigidity of faith.
In flexibility, brilliance, and grace he has surpassed the rude Iberian; but his effort is transitory, his will weak; his hatred is as ephemeral as his love. The new race produces neither mystics nor men of action, but poets, orators, admirable intriguers, superficial scholars, brilliant commentators of exotic ideas; from the seventeenth century onwards they succeed to the first generation of audacious colonists, heroic monks, and warlike captains.
To extend the domains of the monarch, to "cause the Indians to live in the knowledge of our Catholic {51} faith," they conquered America, and they brought to the New World a religion, a political régime, universities, an economic system—all the elements, in short, of a traditional civilisation. Absolutism in government, monopoly in matters of commerce and finance, intolerance in questions of dogma and morality, tutelage and rigorous isolation; these were the foundations of Spanish colonisation. The methods practised by the Dutch and the English in their colonies were not essentially different. Toqueville and Boutmy have studied the effects, in the United States, of Calvinistic intolerance and commercial monopoly. They have remarked upon the slavery of negroes in the agricultural districts of Virginia, and the cupidity of the emigrants who pursued the Indians with a truly Puritan ardour.
The viceroy, the representative of the monarch, exercised full powers of government in the colonies. He presided over the Real Audiencia, the king's tribunal, was superintendent of finances, protector of the Church, and chief of the army. To him all power was subordinate, whether ecclesiastical, military, or civil. A luxurious court surrounded him, the flattery of courtiers intoxicated him, and subornation had its way with him. Sometimes the viceroys represented the real aspirations of the colonists, and were serious legislators, such as Francisco de Toledo, in Peru; or they defended the colonists from the expeditions of filibusters with such energy that their fiercely contested battles evoked the sentiment of nationality. At other times they enriched themselves by the sale of posts, and drained the treasury, or passed in progress through the cities of their state, haughty overlords surrounded with luxury and gold.
To her political despotism corresponds the commercial monopoly which Spain established in her dominions. Humboldt defined the ancient ideal of {52} the colonising races in his "Essay on the Government of New Spain": "For centuries a colony was regarded as useful to the metropolis only inasmuch as it furnished a great number of raw materials and consumed plenty of goods and merchandise, which were borne by the vessels of the mother-country."[1] England, Holland, Spain, and Portugal acted upon the same exclusivist principles; the ordinances of Cromwell were as inflexible on this point as the schedules of Philip II. Commercial liberty and industrial competition were condemned on the same grounds as rebellion and heresy.
Politics and economics were subordinated to religion; the third combined the absolutism of the first and the monopoly of the second. The conquest of America was apostolic. The Spanish captains fought to convert the overseas infidels. The imperialism of Charles V. and Philip II. had a religious character. To preserve the colonies from heresy it closed the ports, prohibited all traffic with foreigners, and imposed a conventual seclusion upon a whole world. The Church was the centre of colonial life. She governed in the spiritual order; imposed punishments, flagellations, exile, and excommunication, and delivered unbelievers and sorcerers to the purifying care of the Inquisition. In the department of morals she kept a watchful eye upon the people; she defended the Indians, and often opposed the governors. Viceroy and cacique feared her equally. A formidable moral power, she helped to discipline the unruly Creoles, to unite classes and races, and to form nations. The cities were adorned by her chapels and convents, and to these convents, in pious mood, the hidalgos often left all their possessions.
Thus property became a monopoly of the convents. Hence a plethora of monks and nuns, and the {53} accumulation, in Mexico and at Lima, of enormous wealth. In Peru the annual income of the archbishop amounted to £8,000, and that of some bishops to £4,000. What with bishops and viceroys there was no lack of luxury. A pompous and sensual Catholicism satisfied the imagination of the Creoles, the superstitious fears of the Indians, and the cheerful materialism of the negroes. The Aztec, the quechua, accepted from the monks a strange, Byzantine dogma, mingled with aristocratic ideals and Oriental mysteries. The native soon confounded the two mythologies. In Mexico, so Humboldt reported, "the Holy Ghost is the sacred eagle of the Aztecs." Novel and sumptuous rites were added to the traditional religion. Processions and festivals, a kind of continual religious fair, united all races. The people loved the cult of religion, with its external manifestations, its virgins loaded with heavy ex-votos, its sorrowing Christs, its gorgeously-decked saints, and the glitter of gold and silk.
As confessor the priest influenced the family and directed the education of children; as preacher he condemned immorality and judged the governors. As in Byzantium, as in the Florence of Savonarola, the colonial monk, speaking in the name of the exploited populace, was an austere professor of virtue. The Creole admired his ecclesiastical learning, and his invincible attitude before the powers of this world; in him the Indian found a protector.
The American colonies differed in social composition. The negro abounded in Peru and Cuba, but soon disappeared in Chili and the Argentine. The poverty of Araucania contrasted with the opulence of Caracas, Lima, and Mexico. In the Aztec capital some territorial seigneurs drew forty thousand a year sterling in revenues. Frezier valued the jewels of a rich lady of Lima at 240,000 livres of silver. The melancholy Sierra, peopled by Indians, contrasted {54} with the life of the coast, where luxurious cities attracted the traveller. In the cities of the interior, Cordoba or Charcas, we find settled traditions, tenacity, and sobriety, but in the capitals of the coast all is luxury, instability, and licence.
Spain tended to destroy this variety by uniform laws.[2] Originality was as odious to her as heresy. Customs and beliefs, hierarchies and privileges, all must be uniform. Under such a régime the life of the colonies was dull and monotonous. The cities slumbered, lulled by the murmur of prayers and fountains. Idleness was the natural condition of the Creole; lengthy meals and daily siestas limited his inconsiderable activities. The empty streets and squares knew hours of silence; rejoicings were ordered, and the orders pasted on the hoardings; gaiety itself was imposed. It seemed as though time itself must stand still in these cities of parallel streets; that the ideal of all men must be absolute quietude.
The hidalgo of noble origin, the owner of vast domains, governed his sons and his slaves with the severity of a Roman patrician. He could be neither merchant nor manufacturer; commerce and industry were "low callings." He was attracted rather by the bar, the subtleties of the "doctors," the scholarship and poetry of the courts. Whether at the university or the cabildo (municipality), his life would be the same. He would sing the glory of viceroys in Gongoric rhymes, or commentate upon Duns Scotus, or meticulously construct acrostics or syllogisms. In the café, at social gatherings, in the literary salons, he would whisper criticisms of the governors and the bishops, or discuss the titles to nobility of a marquis of recent creation, or the purity {55} of blood of an enriched mulatto. A conventual chapter, or the quarrel of a bishop and a viceroy, or a bull-fight, would fill him with ecstasy. Attending mass in the morning, and in the evening driving through the stately streets in a luxurious calèche, the proud caballero would bear himself majestically. At night, in his gloomy house, he would find his wife telling her beads, surrounded by docile slaves.
Sensuality and mysticism were the pleasures of the colonists. The convents themselves, despite their high walls, were not able to shut out these violent delights. Licentious monks, nuns with lovers, sprightly abbés, figure in the chronicles of the period as in the Italian contes. The cloister, with its rich arabesques, the patio (courtyard) perfumed with orange-blossom, the murmuring jet of the fountain: these evoke the passion of Andalusia. A devout society pays the insatiable convents a tribute of gold and virgins; and love, fleeing the dead cities, takes refuge in cells quick with ambition and unruly desires.
The woman, guarded in the Oriental fashion, in houses strong as fortresses, attracts society to her salon by her Parisian grace; in a world of ponderous scholars she is famous for her amenity and subtlety. Her fidelity, for the hidalgo, is a question of his honour. The husband revenges himself for transgressions by terrible punishments, as in the Calderonian drama, while the heroic lover brings his exasperated desires to the Moorish balcony, where he awaits his lady in torment. Away from home, a host of illegitimate unions, of concubines, of clandestine amours.
Passion will be tragic and devotion voluptuous; in place of mystics we shall find illuminés. The devil is the essential personage of this religion of minutiæ; thanks to him the dreary colonial life is surrounded by mystery; his appearances and his manoeuvres thrill the Creole's blood. Hobgoblins, {56} sorcerers, spells, thefts of the consecrated host, and exorcisms occupy the Inquisition; tales of incubi and succubi, of pacts with Satan, of ghosts that expiate their old offences in long-abandoned houses; absurd miracles of saints; processions mingling with the dances of slaves; gaily decked temples and parasitic rights which stifle the traditional faith, deprive the Catholicism of Spain of its Semitic rigidity.
All through life the pious colonist is surrounded by marvels. He loves nature with an ingenuous faith, and attributes to the saints and demons a continual intervention in his placid existence. An unexpected sound reveals the presence of a soul in torment; a tremor of the earth, the divine wrath; sickness is a proof of diabolic influence; health, of the efficacy of an amulet. In the pharmacies chimerical products may be purchased—condor's grease, unicorn's horns, and the claws of the "great beast."
The monotonous hours are passed in devotions and futilities, prayers and conventual disputes, long ceremonies and useless entertainments. Sometimes the even course of life is interrupted by a startling feat of prowess, or a festival, all gold and servility; the royal seals have arrived, a princess is born in Spain, a treasure has been discovered, a port has been sacked by audacious pirates, or sorcerers or Portuguese Jews are to be burned in an imposing autodafé. Then the provincial cities, slowly threaded by sumptuous processions, are all astir, but the dazzling vision is only ephemeral, and the grey monotony returns, with its petty quarrels, its indolence, its exaggerated rites.
The royal seals arrive under a pallium, and a luxuriously appointed horse advances, bearing the treasure. The spectators kneel before the symbol of monarchical majesty, and incense, as at the feet of a Byzantine ikon, expresses the adoration of {57} believers. The viceroy also enters beneath a canopy, passing in solemn procession through the servile city, while the bells of a hundred churches celebrate his advent, and a solemn cohort of cabildantes in their robes, monks of all orders, and bedizened doctors, praise with courtier-like devotion the glory of the royal messenger. In the religious festivals the majestic altars which the devout, in token of penitence, carry upon their shoulders, bear virgins clad in velvets and glittering with jewels, or saints that bow to one another like courtly hidalgos, or Christs that weep before the wondering crowd. Around these gorgeous altars dance the slaves, and the monks chant a melancholy anthem. Seized by a sacred intoxication, men and women scourge their bodies till they bleed.
The cry of anguish mingles with the monotony of the prayers, amidst the tremulous excitement of the faithful.
The autodafés were the supreme feast of blood. The chronicles of the time praise the "marvellous" spectacle. The funeral procession advanced towards the pyre, surrounded by burlesque and fanatical groups. Groaning monks hemmed in the sorcerers, the blasphemers, the heretics; some bearing a yellow and others a green veil, and lugubrious draperies on which were miniature paintings descriptive of the infernal torments; others wore dunces' caps, which excited the cruelty of the people. As the victims proceeded to the pyre a crowd thirsting for the sight and sound of martyrdom, drunken with the heat of the sun, acclaimed the holocaust beneath the impassive tribune of the Inquisitors. Farce and grotesque invention mingled with tragedy, Oriental luxury with a mystic terror; and the great lady who at night would be dancing the pavane in her salon now devoutly sniffed the acrid stench of charred flesh and blood.
[1] Vol. iv. p. 285; Paris, 1811.
[2] The Portuguese colonisation of Brazil was less rigid, and the commercial isolation less rigorous; and religion was neither fanatical nor so powerful as in the Spanish colonies.
I. Economic and political aspects of the struggles—Monarchy and the Republic—The leaders: Miranda, Belgrano, Francia, Iturbide, King Pedro I., Artigas, San Martin, Bolivar—Bolivar the Liberator: his ideas and his deeds.
II. Revolutionary ideology—Influence of Rousseau—The Rights of Man—The example of the United States—English ideas in the constitutional projects of Miranda and Bolivar—European action: Canning.
I. Oppressed by theocracy and monopoly, by privileged castes and Peninsular functionaries, the Spanish and Portuguese colonies aspired towards independence. The English provinces of the North separated themselves from England for practical reasons; in the struggles of the South we see a double economic and political motive. In some vice-royalties, such as that of La Plata, the struggle was due chiefly to an opposition of interests; in other provinces, as in Venezuela, ideas of political reform were predominant.
Writers have attempted to explain the unanimity of the liberative movement by a "historical materialism" analogous to that of Karl Marx and Labriola; but the reality, richer and more complex, does not submit itself to this logical simplicity. The revolution was not merely an economic protest; it nourished concrete social ambitions. An equalising movement, it aimed at the destruction of privileges, of the arbitrary Spanish hierarchy, and finally, when {59} its levelling instinct was aroused and irritated, the destruction of authority to the profit of anarchy. The Creoles, deprived of all political function, revolted; in matters of economics they condemned excessive taxation and monopoly; in matters of politics they attacked slavery, the Inquisition, and moral tutelage. Charles III. had recognised, in 1783, in spite of the counsels of his minister Aranda, the independence of the United States, which were to serve his own colonies as precedent, and he expelled the Jesuits from America, the defence of the Indians against the oppression of Spanish governors. The corruption of the courts, the sale of offices, and the tyranny of the viceroys, all added to the causes of discontent, disturbance, and poverty.
The Creoles opposed nationality to patriotism, the half-castes opposed democracy to the oligarchies. These were two phases of a great revolution. The first battle was over in 1830, and the conflict between the privileged class and the democracy commenced. It reached its culminating point about 1860, with the enfranchisement of the slaves, but it continued during the rest of the century and engendered an interminable civil discord.
The Spanish provinces, subjected to a political absolutism, transformed themselves into republics, a change of system that was not effected without a moral crisis. Even while fighting their battles the Creoles sought uneasily for a new mould into which to pour their liberalism. In the face of increasing disorder they had thoughts of a monarchy, of an oligarchic republic, of a permanent presidency: of various forms which might possess the necessary stability. Three phases may be distinguished in the movement of liberation: the colonial, the monarchical, and the republican.
During the first phase the colonists manifested their loyalty to the Peninsular monarchy.
The first colonial juntas, in 1809 and 1810, desired the Spanish suzerainty to be preserved. They invoked the feudal tie which bound them to the monarch, the imprisoned Ferdinand VII. The French were triumphant in the Peninsula, but they swore fidelity to the absent king. Vassalage having been destroyed by the foreign invasion, the colonies, in accordance with the law of las partidas, acquired the right of self-government; they were reserved for the king. The juntas disguised their radical ambitions under legal forms. Their effort towards traditionalism was perhaps sincere on some occasions, but the current of revolution, which was gathering itself together in the womb of history, destroyed these provisional vistas. Thus the cabildo of Buenos-Ayres declared that "no obligations would be recognised other than those due to his person" (the King's). Spaniards and Americans joined in taking an oath of fidelity to Ferdinand VII. The captain-general of Venezuela, deprived of his functions in 1810, was replaced by a "Supreme Junta," preserving the rights of the sovereign, and the oath of fidelity to the monarch was observed. In 1809 the Junta of La Paz, which emancipated the Creoles, and the revolt of Quito, recognised the same royal tutelage. The Chilian regulations of 1811 enacted that the executive power should govern in the name of the king. In 1821 Iturbide proclaimed his submission to the king upon founding the empire of Mexico.
It was an ephemeral loyalty, given to a king who had abdicated, who had suffered exile, and who, after the liberal Cortes of Cadiz, re-established a despotic government. These immense colonies did not revolt merely in order to restore an incapable prince to his throne. While newly-created generals were winning battles political autonomy was becoming a fact. The Creoles, who had directed the revolutionary movement, concealed their bold ambitions {61} from a populace that was passive, a slave to routine, and largely royalist.
GABINO BARREDA.
Great Mexican Educationalist
GENERAL JOSÉ ANTONIO PAEZ.
President of Venezuela (1831-1935 and 1838-1842)
The American élite were monarchists. In liberating a continent their generals and statesmen professed to endow the new nations with the stability of a monarchy. Iturbide was Emperor of Mexico. The lieutenants of Bolivar offered the latter a crown; Paez persistently held the imperial ambition before him. Belgrano, in 1816, at the Congress of Tucuman, stated that the best form of government for the Argentine was "a tempered monarchy"; and many deputies in that Assembly demanded the restoration of the throne of the Incas and of its traditional seat at Cuzco: in short, the creation of an American dynasty.
Bolivar wished to see Colombia and Spanish America constitutional monarchies with foreign princes. Ministers were to exercise a policy "of vigilance or defence, of mediation or influence, of protection or tutelage" on the part of the great European states in respect of the Colombian nation. Other partisans of the monarchy were Flores, Sucre, Monteagudo, Garcia del Rio, Riva-Agüero, and the Argentine director Posadas, who wished to establish that form of government "on solid and permanent foundations" in the provinces of La Plata; Dean Funes, the Colombians Nariño, Mosquera, Briceno Mendez, and others. The founders of South American independence understood that only a strong government could save the new nations from demagogy, anarchy, warfare between military chiefs, and untimely provincial ambitions. They wanted autonomy without licence, monarchy without despotism, and political solidity without Spanish suzerainty.
Despite this conviction on the part of the revolutionaries, South America saw the birth of the Republic. Alberdi wrote that its origin was involuntary, and that it was the result of European {62} indifference and Yankee egoism; more than involuntary, it was spontaneous. The demagogues and the crowd accepted it as the negation of monarchy. The latter symbolised the Gothic despotism, the old humiliating domination, the persistence of castes and municipal privilege. In the popular mind, naturally of a simplifying tendency, monarchy was slavery; anarchy and the republic were liberty; there was no distinction between the King of Spain and other princes, between the absolutism of Ferdinand VII. and the constitutional monarchy of England. A universal hatred condemned all kings. The republic was not so much an organisation or a political system as a negation, and indissolubly bound up with it were the cardinal ideas of country, equality, and liberty.
Monarchy offered America stability and independence; it would have prevented civil war and avoided half a century of anarchy. It was the sole American tradition. The battles of the Revolution gave the hegemony to ambitious generals; against these a central government, above the quarrels of parties, would have defended liberal institutions. A constitutional prince would have given these divided nations unity and continuity, under the pressure of which ambitions, parties, and classes would finally have found their places. The social elevation of half-castes and mulattos would have been less violent under such a system.
Finally, the American monarchy would have entered into the group of Occidental nations, and the Monroe doctrine would not have isolated her politically from the Europe that sent her men, money, and ideas.
But would it have been possible to found respectable and lasting dynasties in America? The fall of two empires, Mexico and Brazil, tells us that republicanism is obscurely implicated with the {63} destinies of the country. The new States had no nobles to surround a prince, nor could they have supported the luxury of a court.
The equalitarian instinct condemned all hierarchies in America, and there were no princes to become creators of nationality as in modern Europe. The viceroys and semi-feudal barons exercised an ephemeral empire and were not Americans; the colonies were used to frequent changes of authority. To these reasons in favour of a republic we must add the danger that foreign monarchies might have involved the continent in the diplomatic complications of Europe. Perhaps even the Holy Alliance would have led the colonies back to Spain, as a prodigal child is led back to its parents.
Bolivar expounded the defects of a foreign monarchy. To the imported king he would have preferred the irremovable president and the English senate, and if in the face of advancing anarchy he glanced at the question of European princes he soon understood that it could never prove a radical solution of the problems of the New World. "There is no power more difficult to maintain than that of a new prince" he told the Bolivians. There were in America "neither great nobles nor great prelates, and without these two props no monarchy is permanent." To the Liberator kings symbolised tyranny; he connected independence with republicanism, and believed that nature itself would oppose the monarchical system in America. In 1829, in a letter to Vergera, the Colombian Minister of Foreign Affairs, he expressed his arguments against the monarchy with great precision: "No foreign prince," he wrote, "would accept as his patrimony a principality which was anarchical and without guarantees; the national debts and the poverty of the country leave no means to entertain a prince and a court, even miserably; the lower classes would {64} take alarm, fearing the effects of aristocracy and inequality; the generals and the ambitious of every stamp could never support the idea of seeing themselves deprived of the supreme command; the new nobility indispensable to a monarchy would issue from the mass of the people, with every species of jealousy on the one hand and of pride on the other. No one would patiently endure such a miserable aristocracy, steeped in ignorance and poverty and full of ridiculous pretensions." The creator of five nations, Bolivar was profoundly conscious of the new social body, a disturbed and disorganised mass. He understood that the ambition of his lieutenants and the equalitarian tendency of the mob would oppose an American monarchy or a foreign principality. Iturbide and Maximilian, two emperors dethroned and shot, have justified his objections.
England, who might have founded constitutional monarchies in America, in spite of the Holy Alliance, pursued a commercial rather than a political policy. In 1829 Lord Aberdeen announced that his Government would not permit the establishment of a French or English prince, nor a prince of any other European dynasty, in Colombia. He would accept only a Spanish prince, or the monarchy of Bolivar himself.[1] The Conde de Aranda proposed to the King of Spain that America should be divided into nations governed by the Infantas, but his plan was not followed up. Once the independence of America was a fact, and the despotism of Ferdinand VII. re-established, no Spanish prince could be acceptable either to Argentina or Colombia. In the face of European indifference the tentative efforts of the monarchists spent themselves in America, and the continent acquired its definitive individuality. In opposition to the monarchies by divine right of the {65} Old World a liberal world came to birth; incoherent and incipient nationalities adopted equalitarian constitutions, which were, in the distant future, to flood their deserted territories with immense moral and material forces.
From Mexico to Chili the same revolutionary fervour engendered the partial movements of 1808 to 1811. Conspirators similar to the Italian carbonari, lodges in which men spoke of liberty in the midst of ingenuous rites, and university students who had read the Encyclopædists, were preparing the great crusade. The year 1809 was the first of the Revolution. On the 1st of January there was a popular rising in Buenos-Ayres; on the 16th of July a revolt at La Paz; on the 2nd of August a meeting took place at Quito. In 1806 an English expedition attacked Buenos-Ayres. At a venture, on his way home from Africa, an officer who entertained ambitions in the direction of new territory and new sources of wealth—Sir Home Popham—invaded the capital of the viceroyalty of La Plata. This city was defended not by the legitimate Spanish authority, but by a noble caudillo, who was soon to be a popular viceroy: Santiago de Liniers, the hero of the "Reconquest." In this struggle against the imperialist invader the Argentine people found the first revelation of nationality. First they freed themselves from the English; then from the Spaniards. On the 25th of May, 1810, the cabildo abierto (the municipality and the people), who had united on the 22nd, demanded the dismissal of the viceroy, and elected a governmental and revolutionary junta, patriotic but undecided. As early as 1808, in Montevideo, a junta formed in the heat of a violent popular commotion had turned against the viceroy of Buenos-Ayres.
Spain implacably condemned these precursors of the Independence. She exiled or strangled the rebels, {66} Zela in Peru; Dr. Espejo in Ecuador; Gual y España in Venezuela; two indomitable priests, Hidalgo and Morelos, in Mexico; Father Camilo Henriquez and Dr. Martinez de Rosas in Chili; Tiradentes in Brazil; Nariño in Colombia; all, between 1780 and 1810, struggled against the governors and viceroys, and in their liberal enthusiasm were precursors of the audacious wars of the future. The most notable of these was a Byronic individual, the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda. He was born in Caracas in 1756. He had a brilliant career in Europe, knew ministers and monarchs, was the favourite of Catherine of Russia, fought beside Dumouriez in the armies of the French Revolution, went to the United States with the legion which Spain sent thither to fight in the cause of American independence, obtained the sanction of Pitt to lead revolutionary expeditions against the Spanish authorities in Venezuela, and was concerned in all the liberative movements of his time, whether in Caracas or Buenos-Ayres. He formed an alliance between the destinies of the continent and the ambition of England, the gold of the London bankers, and the interests of English merchants, and so contributed, even more than by his abortive enterprises, to the cause of American liberty.
The cycle of the Precursors closed and that of the Liberators opened. The Spanish reaction had not vanquished the revolutionary principle. The first caudillos were dead; they were replaced by fresh leaders: the Directors, energetic and impassioned: Belgrano and San Martin in the Argentine, Dr. Francia in Paraguay, Artigas in Uruguay, Iturbide in Mexico, General Morazan in Central America, King Pedro I. in Brazil, and Bolivar, the liberator of five republics.
GENERAL FRANCISCO DE MIRANDA (VENEZUELA).
Who prepared for the liberation of his country.
Belgrano, an economic reformer, a supporter of commercial liberty, a founder of schools, was the {67} leader of the Argentine emancipation. He fought in Paraguay, where he suggested autonomy; in Uruguay, in the Argentine Sierra, and on the frontiers of Upper Peru. He was not a fortunate leader; he won the battle of Tucuman, but he was defeated by the royalists in other battles: Vilcapugio and Ayohuma. He retired, then returned to the struggle; took part in the civil wars against the dissident leaders, defended the constitutional monarchy at the Congress of Tucuman, and from 1808 to 1820 personified the uncertain progress of the Argentine revolution.
San Martin was his superior as a successful fighter, and in the scope of his action as liberator; he was a continental figure. A great general, able to organise armies and lead them to victory, his mind was methodical and conservative; he disliked abstractions, and was concrete and positive in his plans. He delivered Chili and contributed to the independence of Peru. While others were drawing up political programmes he was winning battles. He recalls Washington by the disinterested nobility of his character; he refused power after liberating two nations, and condemned himself to exile, being surrounded by ambitious generals who quarrelled for the supreme power. In action he was simple and orderly, and progressive; he defeated the Spaniards at San Lorenzo in 1813, giving proof of admirable warlike qualities; he then led the army of the North which fought in Upper Peru, and became the intendant of an Argentine province, Cuyo, in 1814. There he formed an army, and proposed to cross the Andes to the aid of the Chilian patriots. According to a French military critic, M. Charles Malo, "the passage of the Andes was in no way surpassed by the more famous passage of the Alps by the French." The summits of the Cordilleras are over twelve thousand feet high; and it was across them that {68} the army of San Martin, decimated and heroic, victorious over cold and fatigue, made its way into Chili. From that time forward the Argentine leader was an American general. At the foot of the Cordilleras, on the flanks of Chacabuco, he gained a decisive battle over the Spaniards (1817). He dislodged them from the summits which they occupied and entered Santiago in triumph, and was there proclaimed supreme director of Chili. He accepted the command of the armies, and was thereafter victorious at Maipo (1818), where his artillery put the royalists to flight. Chilian independence once assured, he aspired to fresh victories in Peru. American autonomy was his unfaltering ambition.
The Peruvian viceroyalty was the centre of the Spanish power, the treasury and arsenal of the royalists. Bolivar, in Colombia, and San Martin, in Chili, understood that all their victories would remain futile if they did not defeat Spain in the richest and most impregnable of her domains. Lord Cochrane, an English privateer, who had seen service in the Mediterranean, formed a squadron in Chilian waters for the purpose of dominating the Pacific (1819). He defeated the Spanish fleet at Callao, and declared a blockade of the Peruvian ports as far as Guayaquil. During this time San Martin was making ready, with his Argentine and Chilian troops, for his expedition of liberation. The Peruvian revolutionaries were awaiting him. He landed at Pisco (1820) with his army, and proclaimed the independence of Peru at Lima, which the Spaniards had deserted, on the 21st of July, 1821. Appointed Protector of the Republic which he had founded, he promulgated a provisional Constitution. Then from the North came another Liberator, Bolivar, to discuss with San Martin, in that mysterious interview at Guayaquil, the destinies of the Spanish New World.
SAN MARTIN.
General of Argentine, Liberator of Chile, and Protector of Peru.
San Martin, stoical and silent, yielded to the {69} impetuosity of Bolivar, abandoned Peru to him, the theatre of his future deeds of prowess, renounced his position (1822), and left America. His ambition, like his genius, was circumscribed; he preferred military glory to dictatorships; he believed in the benefits of foreign monarchies: he could organise armies, but he was powerless before anarchy.
Bolivar is the greatest of the American liberators. He surpasses some in ambition, others in heroism, and all in multiform activity, in prophetic insight, and in power. He was, amid the glorious generals and rival caudillos, the hero of Carlyle, "source of light, of intimate and native originality, virility, nobility, and heroism, in contact with whom every soul feels that it is in its element." All powers yielded to him. "Often," writes General Santander, "I go to him full of rancour, and only to see him disarms me, and I go away full of admiration." The people, with an infallible instinct, understood his heroic mission and worshipped him; the clergy praised him, and the glory of Bolivar was sung in the Catholic churches. He was statesman and warrior; he could criticise Olmedo's ode on the battle of Junin, decide the make-up of a journal, draw a plan of battle, organise legions, draft statutes, give diplomatic advice, and direct great campaigns; his genius was as rich and as various as that of Napoleon. Five nations, which he had snatched from the rule of Spain, seemed to him a narrow theatre for his magnificent career; he conceived a vast plan of Continental federation. At Panama he assembled the ambassadors of ten republics, and was already dreaming of an amphictyonic league of nations which should influence the destinies of the world.
Simon Bolivar was born at Caracas on the 24th of July, 1783, of a noble family of Vascongadas. In his youth he travelled through Europe in company {70} with his tutor, Simon Rodriguez: an austere mentor. He studied the Latin classics, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Holbach, and the Encyclopædists. Before his tutor, at Rome, on the Monte Sacro, he swore, like Hannibal of old, to consecrate his life to the liberation of his native country. He was nervous, impetuous, sensual—traits of the American Creole of the South; active and persevering in his undertakings, as an heir to the tenacity of the Biscayan should be; generous to a fault, and valiant to the verge of folly. He had the bearing and the features of a typical caudillo; the forehead high, the back straight; a luminous glance that impressed both friends and enemies, a resolute air, and eloquent gestures. His was a nature shaped for action, unhesitating and immediate; he had the face and the genius of an Imperator. At Caracas, after his long years of travel, he kept his Roman oath. From 1813 to 1830 he fought against the Spaniards and against his own generals, indefatigable in his task of liberation. Two terrible Iberian warriors, Boves and Morillo, carried "war to the death" into Venezuela. Bolivar opposed them, aided by Bermudez Piar, Mariño, and Paez, lieutenants alternately for and against him during his warlike career. In the Antilles he made ready for many expeditions. He was appointed supreme leader, provisional president, and director of the country; his generals doubted him, were jealous of his fame, and conspired against his authority, but Bolivar continued the war in the midst of the anarchy of Colombia.
He routed the Spaniards at Boyaca in 1819, and at Carabobo in 1821, and entered Caracas victorious. Colombia liberated, he turned to Quito. One of his lieutenants, Sucre, a man heroic and noble as the heroes of antiquity, won fresh battles at Bombona and Pinchincha (1822). Peru appealed to the Liberator, to "Bolivar, the hero of America."
The Colombian caudillo did not ignore the perils of the undertaking; the Spanish troops were good fighters; they had been victorious, and were not without resources in the Sierra; and the Peruvian and Colombian allies were inferior to them in experience and cohesion. "This matter of the war in Peru demands an enormous effort and inexhaustible resources," he wrote to Sucre. Impelled by his genius, he accepted the offer of the Peruvians, for he did not forget that "the loss of Peru would necessarily involve that of the whole of the south of Colombia." The Congress of Lima invested him with "the supreme military authority throughout the territory of the Republic." Two great battles, Junin and Ayacucho (1824), assured the independence of America. At Junin Bolivar led a cavalry charge which decided the day, which was followed by a hand-to-hand fight, not a single musket-shot being heard above the ring and clash of the sabres. Sucre was the hero of Ayacucho: it was he who devised the admirable plan of battle. The patriots were 6,000, the Spaniards 9,000. The Spanish artillery was superior to that of the allies. The enemy opened fire, descending the hillsides; the two lines of battle drew together. Night brought a truce; the officers of the two armies chatted in friendly groups before the coming conflict. On the morning of the 9th of December a charge of cavalry under General Cordova scattered the Spanish battalions: whereupon the royalist reserve came into action. The left wing of the allies wavered, but was reinforced, and the victory was complete. The Spanish army capitulated, its generals surrendered, and Peru was abandoned by its ancient rulers. Bolivar praised the heroism of Sucre, "the father of Ayacucho, the saviour of the sons of the sun," and Lima lauded the Liberator to the skies, proclaimed him the father and saviour of Peru, and elected him permanent President. After {72} these victories the capture of Potosi by the troops of Sucre and the reduction of the fortress of Callao, where the penates of Spain were guarded, terminated Bolivar's magnificent career. His last years were melancholy, like a tropical twilight. Paez and Santander revolted against him; he was given the supreme power and deprived of it; he was offered a crown, and was the victim of conspiracy. The Liberator died, abandoned, a tragic figure, at Santa Marta, on the deserted Colombian coast, like Napoleon at St. Helena, at the age of forty-seven, on the 17th of December, 1830.
Statesman and general, Bolivar was even greater in the assembly than on the field of battle. Equal to Sucre and San Martin as tactician, as politician he was the greatest of all the caudillos. He was the thinker of the Revolution; he drafted statutes, analysed the social condition of the democracies he liberated, and foretold the future with the precision of a seer. The enemy of ideologists, like the great First Consul, an idealist and a romantic, a lover of syntheses in the region of ideas and of politics, he never forgot the rude environment of his deeds. His Latin dreams were tempered by a Saxon realism. A disciple of Rousseau, he wished "the will of the people to be the only power existing on the face of the earth"; but in the face of an anarchical democracy he sought uneasily for a moral power. In 1823 he thought that the sovereignty of the people was not illimitable: "justice is its basis, and perfect utility sets a term to it." A republican—"since Napoleon has been a monarch," he said, he who so admired Napoleon, "his glory seems to me a gleam from Hell"—he wished, despite the servile admiration of his friends, to be neither a Napoleon nor an Iturbide. He disdained all imperial pomp; he wished to be merely the soldier of the Independence. He made a profound analysis of the failings of a future {73} monarchy in the old Spanish colonies. At the Conference of Guayaquil (1822) San Martin represented the monarchical tendency, Bolivar the republican principle. Their opposition was irreconcilable, said Mitre, the Argentine historian, for one was working for the Argentine hegemony and the other for the Colombian: the first respected the individuality of the separate peoples and would only accept intervention in exceptional cases; the second wished to unite the various peoples according to a "plan of absorption and monocracy."[2] This antagonism called for a superior point of agreement, a synthesis, for the Colombian doctrine brought with it as a reaction the premature formation of unstable democracies, and the Argentine theory favoured indifference, egoism, and the isolation of nations united by race, tradition, and history.
The genius, aristocratic pride, and ambition of Bolivar impelled him towards autocracy. He exercised a dictatorship and believed in the benefits of a permanent presidency. "In republics," he stated, "the executive power should be of the strongest, for all conspire against it; while in monarchies the legislative power should be supreme, for all conspire in favour of the monarch. Hence the necessity of giving a republican magistrate more authority than a constitutional prince." He did not forget the dangers of an autocratic presidency; but he feared anarchy, "the ferocious hydra of discordant anarchy," which grew like a noxious vegetation, stifling his triumphant work. He regarded with amazement the contradictions of American life: disorder leads to dictatorship, and the latter is the enemy of democracy. "The permanence of power in a single individual," writes the Liberator, "has often marked the end of democratic governments." Yet "indefinite liberty, absolute democracy, are {74} snares in which all republican hopes come to grief." Liberty without licence, authority without tyranny: such was the ideal of Bolivar. In vain did he struggle single-handed amid ambitious generals and a disordered people; before he died he understood the vanity of his efforts. "Those who have served the cause of the Revolution," he cried, "have ploughed the sand.... If it were possible that a portion of the world should return to its primitive chaos, such would be the last phase of America." He denounced the moral poverty of these new republics with the severity of a Hebrew prophet. "There is no faith in America, neither in men nor in nations. Their treaties are waste paper; their constitutions are paper and ink; their elections are battles; liberty is anarchy, and life a torment."
This pessimism, the credo of his maturity, was born of his implacable analysis of American failings. Bolivar understood the original traits and the vices of the new continent. "We are," he said, "a small human family; we possess a world of our own, surrounded by vast oceans; new in almost every art and science, although, in a certain sense, old in the usages of civil society. The present state of America recalls the fall of the Roman Empire, when each part formed a distinct political system, in conformity with its interests, its situation, or its corporations." "We shall not see, nor the generation following us," he wrote in 1822, "the triumph of the America we are founding: I regard America as in the chrysalis. There will be a metamorphosis in the physical life of its inhabitants; there will finally be a new caste, of all the races, which will result in the homogeneity of the people."
While scholars were constructing Utopias, imitating, in their provisional statutes, the federal constitution of the United States, and legislating for an ideal democracy, Bolivar was studying the social {75} conditions of America. "We are not Europeans," he wrote, "nor Indians either; but a kind of half-way species between the aborigines and the Spaniards; American by birth, European by right, we find ourselves forced to dispute our titles of possession with the natives, and to maintain ourselves in the country which saw our birth in spite of the opposition of invaders: so that our case is all the more extraordinary and complicated." "Let us be careful not to forget that our race is neither European nor North American; but rather a composite of America and Africa, than an emanation from Europe, since Spain herself ceased to be European by virtue of her African [Arab] blood, her institutions, and her character."
The Liberator proposed political institutions suited to a continent which in its territory and race and history was original. He was in favour of a tutelary authority: "The American States need the care of paternal governments which will heal the wounds and sores of despotism and war." He loathed federalism and the division of power: "Let us abandon the federal forms of government: they are not suited to us. Such a form of society is a regularised anarchy, or rather a law which implicitly prescribes the necessity of dissociating and ruining the State in all its members.... Let us abandon the Triumvirate of the Executive Power, by concentrating it in the person of a President, and conferring on him a sufficient authority to enable him to maintain himself and contend against the inconveniences inherent in our recent situation." He taught valuable lessons in public wisdom: "To form a stable Government we must have the basis of a national spirit which has for its object a uniform inclination towards two capital points: to moderate the general will and limit the public authority. The blood of our fellow-citizens presents many diversities: let us {76} mix it in order to unify it; our constitution has divided its powers: let us confound them in order to unite them.... We ought to induce immigration of the peoples of North America and Europe, in order that they may settle here and bring us their arts and sciences. These advantages, an independent government, free schools, and intermarriage with Europeans and Anglo-Americans, will totally change the character of the country, and will render it well-informed and prosperous.... We lack mechanics and agriculturists, and it is these that the country has need of to ensure advancement and progress." In Bolivar's writings are to be found the best programmes of political and social reform for America; he was the first sociologist of these romantic democracies.
Carabobo and Junin were his great military triumphs; the letter from Jamaica (1815), the constitutional project of Angostura (1819), the statute of Bolivia (1825), and the Congress of Panama (1826) were his most admirable political creations. To unite the American nations in a permanent assembly; to oppose Anglo-Saxon power by Latin force, the necessary factor of Continental equilibrium; to labour in favour of unity and synthesis: such was the aim of the abortive Assembly of Panama. The letter from Jamaica was a prophecy which the docile reality was to accomplish during the century. "From the nature of the different regions of the country, from the wealth, population, and character of the Mexicans," said the Liberator, "I imagine that they will attempt in the beginning to establish a representative Republic in which the Executive will have very wide attributes and will be concentred in a single person, who, if he governs with wisdom and justice, will attain almost naturally to irremovable authority." "If the preponderant party is military or aristocratic, it will be in favour of a monarchy, which {77} will probably be limited and constitutional in the first place, but will very soon become absolute." The presidency of Porfirio Diaz, the empire of Iturbide and Maximilian, supported by the monarchist party, and even the dictatorship of Juarez, and the powers which the Mexican constitutions have conferred on the head of the State, all confirmed the predictions of Bolivar. "The States of the Isthmus of Panama as far as Guatemala will form a federation." This federation existed until 1842, and to-day the Central American republics are slowly returning to it. Panama was for the Liberator the emporium of the world. "Its canals will shorten the distances of the world, will strengthen the ordinary ties between Europe, America, and Asia, and will bring to this happy region the tribute of the four quarters of the globe. There alone, perhaps, the capital of the world might be set, as Constantine pretended to make of Byzantium the capital of the ancient world."
"New Granada will unite itself to Venezuela in order to form a Central Republic, whose capital will be Maracaibo, or a new city, which, under the name of Las Casas (in honour of that hero of philanthropy), will spring up on the confines of the two countries, on the superb harbour of Bahia-Honda." Bolivar kept Venezuela and New Granada united until 1830; then new leaders, such as General Mosquera, wished to establish the federation which even to-day is still the object of the politicians of Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia. "At Buenos-Ayres there will be a central government, in which the military power will be supreme as a consequence of intestine divisions and external war." This is a prophecy of Argentine history up to the advent of Rosas, the struggles of the caudillos, and the anarchy of 1820. "This constitution will necessarily degenerate into an oligarchy or a monocracy." And a plutocratic group did actually rule in Buenos-Ayres, {78} and over all rose the monocracy of Rosas. "Chili is called by the nature of her situation, by the simple customs of her virtuous inhabitants, and the example of her neighbours, the proud Republicans of Araucania, to enjoy the benefits of the just and mild laws of a republic. If any republic lasts long in America I incline to think it will be the Chilian.... Chili will not alter her laws, manners, or practices; she will maintain the uniformity of her political and religious opinions." The long stability of the Araucanian nation, the homogeneity of its population, the lasting nature of its political charter, the conservative character of its institutions, the slow and steady development of Chili until the war of the Pacific and the revolution of 1891, fully realised the prophecies of Bolivar. "Peru includes two elements inimical to all just and liberal government—gold and slavery. The first corrupts everything; the second is corrupt in itself. The soul of a serf rarely succeeds in taking liberty sanely. It rushes furiously into tumult, or lives humiliated in chains. Although these rules are applicable to all America, I believe they apply with most reason to Lima. There the rich will not tolerate the democracy, and the slaves and the liberated slaves will not tolerate the aristocracy; the first will prefer the tyranny of a single person, in order to avoid popular persecutions and to establish a rule that will at least be pacific." The evolution of Peru proved the profound truth of this statement. The oligarchy accepted military dictators, who upheld property and preserved peace. As early as 1815, when America was still a Spanish domain, Bolivar, watching the spectacle of social forces in conflict, announced not merely the immediate struggles, but the secular development of ten nations. He was a great prophet. To-day, a century later, the continent is fulfilling his predictions as though they were a fate strangely laid upon it.
At Angostura the Liberator placed before the Colombians a draft of a constitution. The bases of this constitution were republican government, the sovereignty of the people, the division of powers, civil liberty, and the abolition of slavery and of privilege. In this remarkable essay we find the theories of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Bentham, the realism of England and the democratic enthusiasm of France. The legislative power is to be composed of two chambers: the first popularly elected, and the Senate hereditary, according to the English tradition, formed by the Liberators who would found the nobility of America. The president is a kind of constitutional king; his ministers, who are to be responsible, will govern. The judiciary will acquire stability and independence. A new authority, the Moral Power, completes the political structure. This Moral Power of the Liberator's Republic is an imitation of the Athenian Areopagus and the Roman censors: it is to be responsible for education and ensure respect for morality and the law; "it chastises vice by opprobrium and infamy, and rewards the public virtues by honour and glory." Bolivar had a tendency towards moral and intellectual despotism: this tribunal was to compel good behaviour. Later the Liberator condemned the teachings of Bentham in the Universities of Colombia, and accepted Catholicism as an instrument of the Government. Article 2 of the Angostura draft states that "ingratitude, disrespect, and disloyalty toward parents, husbands, the aged, the magistrates, and citizens recognised and proclaimed as virtuous; the breaking of the given word, in no matter what connection; insensibility before public misfortunes or those affecting friends or immediate relations, are recommended especially to the vigilance of this moral power." This was paternal tyranny, exercised over the feelings, the conduct, and the passions.
Bolivar created a republic—Upper Peru, which was to call itself Bolivia in memory of its founder. He gave it the constitution he wished, but in vain, to apply to Peru and Colombia. He developed there the ideas expounded in the Angostura draft, and thereby defined his ideal of a republic; it was, in fact, a monarchy in which the power was hereditary. The president must be irremovable and irresponsible, "for in systems without hierarchy there must be—more than in others—a fixed point upon which magistrates and citizens, men and things, may revolve." Against anarchy, a fixed magistracy; against tyranny, independent powers; the judiciary elected by Congress among the citizens nominated by the electoral colleges; the legislature composed of three chambers: tribunes, senators, and censors. The first exercise their functions for four years, the second for eight, and the last are permanent, "and exercise a moral and political control"; they constitute the "moral power." With this system the Liberator avoided political anarchy and the destructive ambition of the caudillos, constituting two stable forces in the midst of shifting democracies—the censors and the permanent president. He adapted unity and permanence—characteristics of the constitutional monarchy—to republicanism. The generals quickly realised that this constitution was a menace to them, and rose against it in Bolivia, in Peru, and in Colombia.
The founders of the Independence were surrounded by brilliant leaders, such as O'Higgins, the Carreras, Güemes, La Mar, Santander, Santa-Cruz, and Sucre, admirable as hero and statesman; but above them, dominating them all like an oak in the midst of saplings, according to the classic image, towered Bolivar, Liberator of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia.
BOLIVAR.
The Liberator of Venezuela, New Granada, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia.
He was the genius of the South American Revolution. {81} He felt himself dominated by "the dæmon of war." Like all great tormented spirits since Socrates, he obeyed, in his impetuous campaigns, an interior divinity. In his acts and his speeches, in his dignity and his faith, there was a notable grandeur. He worked for eternity, accumulating dreams and Utopias, dominating the hostile earth and censorious man; he was the Superman of Nietzsche, the representative man of Emerson. He belonged to the ideal family of Napoleon and Cæsar; a sublime creator of nations; greater than San Martin, greater than Washington.
II. From France, as emissaries of the ideal, came the doctrines of the Revolution. In the Encyclopædia we find the intellectual origin of the South American upheavals. The patricians in the archaic colonial cities smiled upon Voltaire; they adopted the essential ideals of Rousseau, the social contract, the sovereignty of the people, and the optimism which conceded supreme rights to the human spirit untainted by culture. Bolivar had read the Contrat Social in a volume that had formed part of the library of Napoleon; by will he left this book to an intimate friend. The great, sounding promises—democracy, sovereignty, human rights, equality, liberalism—stirred the patriotic tribunes like fragments of a new gospel. The masonic lodges worked in silence against the power of Spain and Portugal, and upheld the humanitarian ideas of French philosophy. In the lodge of Lautaro, San Martin and Alvear received their initiation as revolutionaries. In Mexico the lodge of York was transformed into a Jacobin club. In 1794 Antonio Nariño, the forerunner of Colombian independence, translated the Rights of Man. The Venezuelan Miranda fought in the revolutionary armies of France; the Peruvian Pablo de Olavide, the friend of Voltaire, took part in the Convention; {82} Raynal, Condorcet, and Mably had American disciples. Montesquieu was read in the universities as an antidote to the absolutism of the viceroys; Beccaria, Filangeri, and Adam Smith were among the prophets. Not only did French thought predominate, but the Revolution, the Terror, the Jacobin madness, the eloquence of the Girondins, the dictatorship of the First Consul, and the Empire, even, all exercised an immense influence upon the rising democracies of America. Iturbide, Emperor of Mexico, imitated Napoleon; in Buenos-Ayres there was a Directoire, as in Paris; there were consuls in Paraguay, and Rivadavia was a Girondist lost among the gauchos.
To the aid of French theory came the example of North America; Washington and the federal system served the Iberian statesmen as models. Belgrano exalted the first President of the United States as a hero "worthy of the admiration of our own age and of the generations to come—an example of moderation and true patriotism." He translated the Farewell Address, which was his favourite reading. Bolivar wished to be the Washington of South America. One of the forerunners of Brazilian independence, José Joaquin de Maia, had known Jefferson in Paris, and informed him that "the Brazilians considered the North American Revolution as the expression of their desires, and they counted on the assistance of the United States." The first South American constitutions betrayed this double influence; they adopted the policy of federalism, copying the political organisation of the United States, and were inspired by French ideas. They destroyed the privileges of the nobility, and established equality of caste. This was the case with the first Venezuelan constitution, despite the efforts of Miranda and Bolivar—opponents of federation. The Chilian constitution of 1822 and the Peruvian constitution of {83} 1823 conferred a conservative function upon the Senate, as in the North American Republic; and the first Chilian statutes established federation. In Mexico and in Central America the federal principle dominated the constitutions of 1824 and 1826. The Argentine constitution of 1819 was a copy "for the united provinces of South America of the Declaration of Independence of the United States."
To French doctrines and the example of the United States we must add the influence of English ideas. Miranda and Bolivar admired the political constitution of Great Britain, and were inspired by it. Bolivar, in 1818, recommended the study of this constitution: "You will find therein," he said, "the division of powers, the only means of creating free and independent spirits, and the liberty of the press—that incomparable antidote to political abuses." His enthusiasm for Voltaire and Rousseau was tempered by a study of English methods. In his Angostura draft he recommended a permanent Senate, a reproduction of the House of Lords. The British Executive—the sovereign surrounded by responsible ministers—seemed to him "the most perfect model, whether for a kingdom, or an aristocracy, or a democracy." The Colombian Constitution of Cucuta (1821), in which the political ideas of the Liberator were predominant, merited the eulogy of the Marquis of Lansdowne. "It has for its basis," said the English minister, "the two most just and solid principles"—property and education. Miranda laid before Pitt a constitutional essay inspired by British ideas, with a House of Commons, an Upper Chamber composed of hereditary Inca caciques and censors; in which curious project we find American traditions mingled with political forms borrowed from the English.
Spain also contributed to the development of the revolutionary ideas. She united the populations of {84} America under her crushing authority; she combined in a single body all the disinherited castes which were later to struggle for independence.
"The despotic rigour of authority," wrote Bauza, "unites all these heterogeneous elements with a rigid tie, and forms a race of them."[3] The Napoleonic invasion provoked a reaction in the peninsula: the juntas—provisional representations of nationality—took the place of the captured king. The central junta proclaimed in 1808 that "the American provinces are not colonies, but integral portions of the monarchy, equal in their rights to the rest of the Spanish provinces." In 1810 the Regency informed the American colonies: "Your fate depends upon neither ministers nor viceroys nor governors: it is in your own hands." The constitution of the Cortes of Cadiz (1812), at which the deputies of the colonies were present, declared "that the Spanish Union cannot be the patrimony of a person nor a family—that sovereignty resides essentially in the nation—and that the right of making law belongs to the Cortes and the king." In these documents, independence, national sovereignty, the idea of the native country, and the functions of the assemblies came overseas from the metropolis. The struggles against privateers, against the English invasions of Buenos-Ayres and the Dutch invasions of Brazil, and the influence of the territory itself, created the sentiment of nationality in America. French, English, and Spanish ideas fertilised this vague aspiration. Before imposing themselves upon the universities and assemblies these ideas became current in the journals and the meetings of the cabildo and revealed to the Creole oligarchy its desire for independence.
From 1808 to 1825 all things conspired to help the cause of American liberty; revolutions in Europe, ministers in England, the independence of {85} the United States, the excesses of Spanish absolutism, the constitutional doctrines of Cadiz, the romantic faith of the Liberators, the political ambition of the oligarchies, the ideas of Rousseau and the Encyclopædists, the decadence of Spain, and the hatred which all the classes and castes in America entertained for the Inquisitors and the viceroys. So many forces united engendered a sorry and divided world. The genesis of the southern republics is rude and heroic as a chanson de geste. Then history degenerates until it becomes a comedy of mean and petty interests—a revolutionary orgy. Such was the evolution of South America during the nineteenth century.
[1] Gil Fortoul, Historia Constitucional de Venezuela, Berlin, 1907, vol. i, p. 465.
[2] Historia de San Martin, Buenos-Ayres, 1903, vol. i. p. 3.
[3] Historia de la Dominacion española en el Uruguay, vol. ii. p. 647.
Anarchy and dictatorship—The civil wars: their significance—Characteristics of the industrial period.
Spencer observed the invariable succession of two periods in the development of human affairs—the military and the industrial period. Bagehot contrasted a primitive epoch of authority and a posterior epoch of discussion. Sumner-Maine discovered a historic law—the progress from status to contract; from the régime imposed by despotic governors to a flexible organisation accepted by free wills. Thus, in three different formulæ, we may express the same principle of evolution. In the beginning a warlike and theocratic authority determines ritual, customs, dogma, and laws. The common conscience is potent; individuality accepts without discussion or scepticism the essential rules of social life. History is thereafter a struggle between authority and liberty, a progressive affirmation of autonomous wills, an assertion of destructive and censorious individualism.
In America political development presents the same successive phases. Invariably we find the sequence of the two periods, one military and one industrial or civil. The Independence realised, the rule of militarism sets in throughout the republics. After a period of uncertain duration the military caste is hurled from power, or abdicates without violence, and economic interests become supreme. Politics are {87} then ruled by "civilism." The military régime is not theocratic, as in some European monarchies; the President does not combine the functions of religion and empire. None the less, the civil period involves a fatal reaction against the Church—a period of anti-clericalism or radicalism. The revolution is confined to a change of oligarchies: the military group gives way to plutocracy.
GENERAL JUAN JOSÉ FLORES.
President of Ecuador (1831-1835 and 1839-1843).
As the generals of Alexander disputed, after his death, for the provinces of Europe, Asia, and Africa, the remains of the imperial feast, and founded new dynasties in the flood of Oriental decadence, so the lieutenants of Bolivar dominated American life for a period of fifty years. Flores in Ecuador, Paez in Venezuela, Santa-Cruz in Bolivia, and Santander in Colombia, governed as the heirs of the Liberator. So long as the shadow of the magnificent warrior lay upon the destinies of America, so long the caudillos triumphed, consecrated by the choice of Bolivar. The monarchial principle was thus forced upon unconscious humanity. The Liberator left America in the hands of a dynasty.
The wars of the peoples were therefore civil conflicts; the quarrels of generals ambitious of hegemony. United in independence, united during the colonial period, the new nations were divided, and stood aside at the suggestion of these warriors; as Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, in the name of Santa-Cruz or Gamarra, Castilla or Flores. The national conscience was roughly shaped upon the field of battle. The generals imposed arbitrary limits upon the peoples; they are the creators in American history; they impress the crowds by their pomp and pageantry; by military displays as brilliant as the gaudy processions of the Catholic cult; by magnificent escorts and decorations and forms of etiquette; they call themselves Regenerators, Restorers, Protectors.
This first period is troublous, but full of colour, energy, and violence. The individual acquires an extraordinary prestige, as in the time of the Tuscan Renaissance, the French Terror, or the English Revolution. The rude and bloodstained hand of the caudillo forces the amorphous masses into durable moulds. South America is ruled by ignorant soldiers: the evolution of her republics must therefore be uncertain. There is, therefore, no history properly so called, for it has no continuity; there is a perpetual ricorso brought about by successive revolutions; the same men appear with the same promises and the same methods. The political comedy is repeated periodically: a revolution, a dictator, a programme of national restoration. Anarchy and militarism are the universal forms of political development.
As in European revolutions, anarchy leads to dictatorship; and this provokes immediate counter-revolution. From spontaneous disorder we pass to a formidable tutelage. The example of France is repeated on a new stage; the anarchy of the Convention announces the autocracy of Bonaparte. The dictators, like the kings of feudalism, defeat the local caciques, the provincial generals; thus did Porfirio Diaz, Garcia Moreno, Guzman-Blanco, &c. And revolution follows revolution until the advent of the destined tyrant, who dominates the life of the nation for twenty or thirty years.
Material progress is the work of the autocracy; as witness the rule of Rosas, Guzman-Blanco, Portales, and Diaz. The great caudillos will have nothing to do with abstractions; their realistic minds urge them to encourage commerce and industry, immigration and agriculture. By imposing long periods of peace they favour the development of economic forces.
In matters political and economic the dictators profess Americanism. They represent the new mixed {89} race, tradition, and the soil. They are hostile to the rule of the Roman Church, of European capital, and of foreign diplomacy. Their essential function, like that of the modern kings after feudalism, is to level mankind and unite the various castes. Tyrants found democracies; they lean on the support of the people, the half-breeds and negroes, against the oligarchies; they dominate the colonial nobility, favour the crossing of races, and free the slaves.
ARTIGAS.
Liberator of Uraguay.
Anarchy is spontaneous, like that which Taine discovered in the Jacobin Revolution. There is a movement hostile to organisation, to civilisation: thus Artigas fought at once against the King of Spain, the Argentine Revolution, and the Portuguese. He would have no subjection; he was a patriot to the death. Güemes fought against Spaniards and Argentines. The caudillos are like chiefs of barbarian tribes; they uphold local autonomy, division, and chaos. Sarmiento compares Lopez, Ibarra, and Quiroga, violent chieftains of the Argentine sierra and pampa, to Genghis Khan or Tamerlane. "Individualism," he says, "is their essence; the horse their only arm; the pampa their theatre." The montoneras are Tartar hordes, burned by the sun—a wild, devastating force. Their leaders represent the genius of the continent; they have the rudeness, the fatality of natural forces. Like Igdrasil, the fantastic tree of Scandinavian mythology, they send their roots deep into the earth, into the obscure kingdom of the dead.
The general ideas of this period are simple. There is a faith in the efficacy of political constitutions, and these are multiplied; men aspire to ideological perfection. They believe in the omnipotence of congresses, and distrust the Government. Constitutions separate the powers and enfeeble the executive, rendering it ephemeral; they divide authority by creating triumvirates, consulates, and governmental {90} juntas. The liberalism of the charters is notable. They usually establish three powers, according to the traditional rule of Montesquieu, in order to ensure political equilibrium; they recognise all the theoretical liberties—liberty of the press, of assembly, the rights of property, and industrial and commercial liberty. They accept trial by jury, popular petition, universal suffrage—in short, the whole republican ideal. They consecrate a State religion, Catholicism, thus paving the way for religious revolutions, and all the "Red and Black" revolts and conspiracies of South American history. Election is in some republics direct; in others by the second degree, by means of electoral colleges which appoint the president and the members of the legislative chambers. From North to South institutions are democratic; they bestow political rights with a generous profusion. The judicial power is independent, sometimes elected by the people, generally by congress. The judges are often dependent on the executive. Justice and the law are ineffectual. The president cannot be re-elected.
These constitutions imitate those of France and the United States in the democratic tendencies of the one and the federalism of the other; they are charters of a generous and hybrid species. The presidential régime exists in reality as in the United States; the parliaments are important in virtue of the constitution, but in actual political life are powerless in face of the pressure exercised by the military chiefs. The theory of the social pact and the ideology of the revolutionary are predominant in public speech.
The motives of the civil wars vary. In Ecuador men fight for the caudillos; in Colombia, for ideas; in Chili, for or against the oligarchy. All the national forces are involved in these wars. Revolution is the common heritage of these nations. The races which peopled America were warrior races, {91} both Indians and Spaniards, and their warlike spirit explains the disorder of the republics. Castes and traditions are inimical: the psychological instability characteristic of primitive peoples wars upon discipline and authority.
Two social classes—the military class and the intellectual or university class—had been in opposition since the origin of the Republic. They disputed the supreme power, or sometimes the intellectuals sided with the generals. The "doctors," by aid of reasonings of Byzantine subtlety, justified the dictatorships as well as the Revolution. A Venezuelan deputy, Coto-Paul, in 1811, pronounced a lyrical eulogy of anarchy.
The generals distrusted the lawyers, who represented the intellectual tradition of the colony: Paez hated the juriconsults as Napoleon hated ideologists. And the "doctors," vanquished by the military power, became the docile secretaries of generals and caudillos; they drafted laws and constitutions, and expressed in polished formulæ the rude intentions of the chiefs. To the violence of these latter they opposed subtlety; to the ignorance of despots, the scholastic ease and knowledge acquired in the universities of Spain.
To the struggles of classes was added the war of races; the half-breeds fought against the national oligarchy; the new American class was hostile to the aristocracy of the capitals. The Indians lived in the towns of the interior, in which the colonial isolation was unchanged; the metropolis—Buenos-Ayres, Lima, or Caracas—was still Spanish and increasingly alien. On the coast, where feeling was more mobile and will more variable, the ideas of reform took root; exotic ideas and customs were introduced; while the Sierra,[1] more American than the coast, remained slow and gloomy, and ignorant {92} of the brilliant unrest of the capitals. Thus a triple movement came into being; inferior castes rose against the colonial aristocracy, the provinces against the all-absorbing metropolis, and the half-caste Sierra against the cosmopolitan seaboard.
The provinces desired autonomy; the capitals, monopoly and unity; the metropolis was liberal, the Sierra conservative. The political conflict might know a change of names, but this antagonism was universal. The leaders disguised their deep-seated ambitions under a cloak of general ideas; they supported unity or federation, the military or the civil régime, Catholicism or radicalism. In Argentina the provinces fought against the capital; in Venezuela the coloured middle class against the oligarchies; in Chili the liberals against the pelucones, the proprietors of the soil; in Mexico the federals fought the monarchists; in Ecuador the radicals opposed the conservatives; in Peru the conflict was between the "civilists" and military caudillos. In the diversity of these quarrels we see one essential principle: two classes were in conflict—the proprietors of the latifundia and the poverty-stricken people, the Spaniards and the half-breeds, or the oligarchs and generals of a barbarous democracy.
In each republic the soil and the traditions of the country gave a different colour to the universal warfare. In the Argentine the provinces, under viceroys and intendants, enjoyed a partial autonomy; there federalism had remote antecedents. Unity seemed an imposition on the part of Buenos-Ayres, which possessed the treasury and the custom-houses of the nation, and monopolised the national credit and revenue. In Chili, the long, narrow country, with the Cordillera at the back, like a granite wall, naturally evoked a Unitarian republic. The disputes between centralisation and federalism were soon over. {93} Unity was possible in Peru, a brilliant sub-kingdom, the centre of a long-established and powerful authority. But some aspects of these violent struggles remain obscure. In Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, and Mexico there was enmity between the coast and the Sierra. Lima and Caracas were capitals near the seaboard; Mexico and Quito were far removed from it. Yet in Peru the struggle was civil and military; in Ecuador, conservative and liberal; and in Mexico, federal and central. Why do we not find the religious struggles, which lasted so long in Colombia, in Bolivia and the Argentine? To explain this diversity we must study the psychology of the different conquistadors—Castilian, Biscayan, Andalusian, Portuguese—and of the different subjected races: the Quechuas, Araucanians, Chibchas, Aztecs, and the proportion in which they were mingled; for the action of the territory itself upon the various admixtures of blood would vary as it was tropical or temperate, coast or Sierra.
The confusion of the struggles in some democracies was extreme. The oligarchs were not always conservatives, nor the half-breeds always liberal. There were reactionary autocracies, like that of Portales in Chili, and liberal autocracies like that of Guzman-Blanco in Venezuela. The federals were usually democrats and liberals, but they were occasionally conservative and autocratic. The democrats of Peru were reactionary in matters of religion; those of Chili were radical. The civil régime was conservative in Bolivia under Baptista and in Ecuador under Garcia-Moreno, but liberal in Mexico under Juarez and Chili under Santa-Maria and Balmaceda. Militarism was radical under Lopez in Colombia, but conservative under General Castilla in Peru. When political evolution followed its logical development, federalism, liberalism, and democracy formed a trilogy, and oligarchy was conservative and Unitarian.
Revolutions, in opposing castes and uplifting the half-breed, prepared the way for a new period. But a democratic society cannot easily establish itself in the face of the established aristocracies, and slavery still survived, although softened by liberal institutions. The military class, accessible to all, replaced the old nobility. Confusion of races commenced as early as 1850, when generous laws enfranchised the negroes, and new economic interests arose to complicate these democratic societies. Revolutions, dictatorships, and anarchy were the necessary aspects of the dissolution of the old society.
The age of generals gave way to an industrial period in which wealth increased, industries became more complex and numerous, and labour was subdivided, while association became more usual both in commerce and agriculture. Co-operation, organisation, and solidarity, unknown during the period of anarchy, were aspects of an intense economic development. The interests newly created sought for peace, and the internal order which favoured their expansion.
Politics commenced to eschew and disdain the squabbles of ideology, and constitutional liberties acquired precision and efficacy. Plutocracies came into being, and aspired to government in place of internal revolution and external warfare; immigration, transforming the social classification, facilitated their advent. National progress was effected despite the governments; it was an anonymous and collective task. The energetic individualities of the military epoch were followed by the laborious crowd. The caudillo receded to the background of politics; the captains of industry replaced him, the merchants and the bankers. Courage was once the supreme criterion of the man; now wealth is the touchstone by which individuals and peoples are judged. The table of human values changes; instruction, {95} foresight, and practical common sense determine success in an industrial democracy. In the social ascension of the generations which industry and commerce have thrown forward to the attack upon the old patrician society, the prejudices of class and religion grow feebler, and after a century of conflict the nations of the present day emerge.
In the southern republics of America industrialism is supreme in the Argentine, Uruguay, and Chili; even in tropical Brazil. In Bolivia and Peru the last leaders are not yet dead, the parties are still personal, but their influence is not as decisive as it was thirty years ago. Among the northern peoples, from Mexico to Ecuador, anarchy and caudillism still survive; there political unrest has not yet been dominated by the principle of authority. The long dictatorship of General Castro and certain Central American presidents proves that the dictatorial régime is the only form of government that is able to maintain peace in these countries.
It is hardly possible to determine the "historical moment" at which these republics passed from the military to the industrial system. The twilight of the caudillos was a long one. Even in the Argentine, where the economic life is magnificent and complex, their influence persists. In Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil there exists a latent militarism which might quickly destroy the work of the civil presidents. For ten years in Peru and Uruguay and Bolivia government has followed government without revolutionary violence, but can we say that the anarchy of fifty years has disappeared for ever? The political order is slowly becoming assured, and the relation between wealth and the increase of immigration and of peace is obvious. Even in the industrial field evolution is the work of a few caudillos who have been pacificators: General Pando in Bolivia, General Roca in the Argentine, Pierola in Peru, and Battle {96} y Ordonez in Uruguay, not to speak of the greatest of all, Porfirio Diaz.
Economically speaking this period of development material is superior to the first period of sterile revolution; it is superior also from the political point of view, for institutions have been perfected and their constitutional action has defined itself. The municipalities and the legislative power have acquired a relative autonomy; they have been victorious over the executive, which was omnipotent during the military period. In beauty and intensity, however, the prosaic age of industrialism has been inferior to the preceding period. Of old, vigorous personalities rose above the common level, and history had the vitality of a tragedy; men played with destiny and with death as in the time of the Italian renaissance. "Tyranny," writes Burckhardt, "in the ancient Latin republics, commenced by developing to the highest degree the individuality of the sovereign, of the condottiere." He then demonstrates the equally personal character of the statesmen and popular tribunes of Florentine history.[2] This analysis is applicable to the American leaders. Heroic audacity and perpetual and virile unrest characterise the struggles of the caciques. The military cycle closed, the republics lose this dramatic interest. Instead of describing the history of governments we must study the economic evolution of nations, and their statistics of industry and commerce. In tragedy the chorus, the crowd, becomes the essential person; it judges and executes, it is spectator and creator, while the heroes of old, the conquerors of destiny and founders of cities, disappear in the mists of the past.
To these political changes correspond changes in manners and customs; the cities, too, have changed {97} and have lost their archaic character. The cosmopolitan invasion has resulted in a brilliant monotony, and interest has become the sole motive of action; permanent war is followed by peace à outrance; the republics have gained in wealth and mediocrity. It is a period of transition: we cannot yet distinguish the firm lineaments of the future State.
Will the Argentine and Brazil become great plutocratic States like the United States? Will Chili, which is copying the social organisation of England, be subjected, like the Anglo-Saxon Empire, to the attacks of demagogy? The spectacle of these enriched nations permits us to affirm only that in revolutionary America four nations, the Argentine, Brazil, Uruguay, and Chili, will, before the lapse of a century, be definitively organised as republics.
Yet these States still betray old racial characteristics.
"The dead found the race," writes M. Gustave Le Bon. "The dead generations impose on us not only their physical constitution but also their thoughts. Forms of government matter little."[3] In the democracies of Latin America the "fundamental revolution" of which politicians boast has been sterile; under the republican mask the Spanish heredity survives, deep-rooted and secular. The forms vary but the soul of the race remains the same. President-autocrats replace the vice-kings; the old struggles between the governors of the State and the bishops persist, for patronage in ecclesiastical affairs, the prestige of the "doctors," and academic titles.
The ruling caste, the heir to the prejudices of Spain, despises industry and commerce, and lives for politics and its futile agitations. The territorial seigneurs still have the upper hand as before the {98} Revolution. The ancient latifundia still survive, the great domains which explain the power of the oligarchy. Assemblies exercise a secondary function, as the municipal cabildos of old. Catholicism is still the axis of social life. The picaros of Spanish romance, haughty and ingenious parasites, are still accepted at their own value. The bureaucracy swallows up the wealth of the exchequer; it was formed a century ago of voracious Castilians; to-day it consists of Americans devoid of will. Despite the equality proclaimed by the constitutions the Indian is subjected to the implacable tyranny of the local authorities, the curé, the justice of peace, and the cacique. Under other names the little despots of the Spanish period are still alive and active.
The democracies of South America, then, are Spanish, although the élite has always been inspired by French ideas. Democracies by proclamation and in their anarchy, equalitarian and of mixed blood, the individual often acquires a heroic significance like that of the supermen of Carlyle; mediæval republics divided into irreducible families and factions, governed by enriched merchants; Greek republics, hostile to their own leaders, jealous of the virtue of Aristides and the wisdom of Themistocles, but without the plebiscitary ardour of the Hellenic community.
[1] The cold region of lofty table-lands.
[2] La Civilisation en Italie au temps de la Renaissance, Paris, 1885, vol. i. pp. 165 et seq.
[3] Les lois psychologiques de l'Evolution des peuples, Paris, 1900, pp. 13 and 71.
THE CAUDILLOS AND THE DEMOCRACY
The history of the South American Republics may be reduced to the biographies of their representative men. The national spirit is concentred in the caudillos: absolute chieftains, beneficent tyrants. They rule by virtue of personal valour and repute, and an aggressive audacity. They resemble the democracies by which they are deified. Without studying the biographies of Paez, Castilla, Santa-Cruz, and Lavalleja, it is impossible to understand the evolution of Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia, and Uruguay.
The moral authority of Paez—The Monagas—The tyranny of Guzman-Blanco—Material progress.
Two central figures, Paez and Guzman-Blanco, dominate the history of Venezuela. The first founded a republic in spite of the Unitarian aims of Bolivar; the second established a long autocracy over the factions and the quarrels of half a century.
Paez was an individualist, a nomadic leader, an impassioned champion of the district, of the native country, as against any vast political concentration. As the Argentine pampa gave birth to Quiroga, and the Arabian desert engendered the mystic adventure of the Khalifs, so the llanos of Venezuela created Paez.
Among the haughty llaneros of Apure he grew to be a horseman, a lover of the infinite plains, the leader of a nameless troop, the hero of a host of adventures, romantic or brutal. He was born in 1790. He was a half-breed, representing the indigenous forces in conflict with the Spanish oligarchy and the Creole aristocracy. A democrat of the school of Castilla and Rosas, robust and audacious, with the perspicacity of the Indian and the pride of a tribal chieftain, he cared only to lead armies. He detested "literary people," "judges," and ideologues. A lieutenant of the Liberator's, he was with him in a hundred battles, but he loathed all discipline, {102} and his incipient insubordination in 18 18 diminished the success of Bolivar. His pride revolted against all tutelage, even when this was just. At times he wished Bolivar to be an absolute chieftain, an invulnerable monarch; at other times he rebelled against him. In 1819 he led the patriots of the llanos to victory; he obtained power and honours but was always notably insubordinate. In 1821 he opposed the order of enrolment issued by Santander, the Vice-President of Colombia. The municipality of Caracas shared his desire for autonomy, and Venezuela followed the leader who represented the national instincts. Bolivar intervened to enforce the unity of Colombia and gave way to Paez. In 1826 the latter counselled the Liberator to assume the crown.
The fusion of the peoples, unity as against discord, was the Bolivian ideal. At this time the spirit of nationality was working obscurely, and spontaneous republics were springing up. The race, exhausted by its long tutelage, uneasily sought subdivision, thinking thereby to gain autonomy; Paez, profoundly American, followed the stream and exiled Bolivar. He broke up the Colombian unity, as Santander in New Granada and Flores in Ecuador, and liberated his country in 1830. The nomad guerrillero had then to organise the country, to give it stability and continuity; his supple nature adapted itself to his new duties. By instinct (writes an eminent historian, Gil Fortoul) he inclined to play the part of certain constitutional kings, leaving the government to his ministers. Without denying his democratic past, he frequented the society of the literate and the oligarchs. His presidency (1831-1835) resulted in domestic peace, strict order in matters financial, political conciliation, and economic progress.
Dr. Vargas, an enemy of militarism, succeeded {103} him, but the brothers José Tadeo and José Gregorio Monagas, who had risen against Paez in 1831, renewed their attempt in 1835. The weak, irresolute President appointed Paez commander-in-chief of the army, while the revolutionists of Caracas proclaimed him supreme ruler. His immense moral force loomed paternally above the squabbles of the parties; he became the arbiter of Venezuelan quarrels.
He upheld the constitution and the presidency of Vargas, but the latter could not retain supreme power and abandon the reins of government to the hands of the vice-president. The chieftain of the plains was elected for a second presidential period in 1838. Militarism declined under his rule, foreign credit increased, the payment of the debt was assured, and orderly progress was effected. In 1843 his loyal friend, General Carlos Soublette, a republican of the antique mould, austere and liberal, was his successor. Once more the omnipotence of Paez was triumphant.
The political tranquillity of these two periods masked a social transformation. Venezuela was not a democratic republic; it was, like Chili, ruled by an oligarchy. The Constitution of 1830 conferred the enjoyment of political rights only upon the land-owners, property-owners, and government employés; as in the southern nation the territorial overlords ruled, and slavery persisted. The "doctors" belonged to the dominant group. The oligarchs were conservatives; they defended property, order, and wealth against militarism and demagogy. They recognised no State religion, nor did they practise intolerance.
In 1840 a liberal reaction set in against the dictatorship of Paez and the conservative clan; democratic institutions and "new men" were called for. It was a struggle of classes and races. The obscure mass—pardos (mulattos), mestizos, proletariats—subjected {104} to slavery or servitude, oppressed by the privileged, hybrid and anarchical—attacked the established ruling caste. Thus political unrest was complicated by social conflict. Antonio Leocadio Guzman, a brilliant demagogue, comprehending the liberal ambitions of the crowd, founded a popular party upon the hatred of hierarchies and traditions. A tribune and journalist, he violently attacked Paez, Soublette, and their ministers; he offered the people the abolition of slavery and the repartition of the soil, with the violence of all the creators of democracies, from Tiberius Gracchus to Lloyd George. He was presidential candidate in 1846; Paez supported General Tadeo Monagas, a gloomy personage who represented the oligarchy. The supporters of Guzman rebelled against the influence of Soublette and the tutelage of the great llanero, and a social revolution commenced under the mask of a political quarrel. The Liberals wished to overthrow the "Gothic oligarchy." Guzman was made prisoner. He was judged as were the tribunes of antiquity who terrified the patrician class by the tumult of a hungry democracy. Condemned to death as a conspirator and anarchist, he saw his punishment commuted to banishment.
GENERAL JOSÉ TADEO MONAGAS.
President of Venezuela (1846-1850 and 1855-1859).
The conservatives had won; the evolution of democracy was checked, thanks to the advent of certain crude demagogues. As in Chili, a moderate liberalism was germinating in the heart of the conservative group itself. Until 1861 the oligarchical constitution of 1830 was maintained, as in Chili the analogous constitution of 1833 persisted, in all its rigidity, until 1891. The liberals could hardly be distinguished from the conservatives; the democratic Guzman himself accepted slavery. There was not, therefore, any violent war of castes, but rather a slow infiltration of liberal principles in the substance of the aristocratic class. The man of this {105} period of transition was President Monagas. He governed with liberals and conservatives, and founded a personal system. The Congress wished to impeach him, but the people defended him against the Congress. The independent Assembly was dissolved, amidst bloodshed and the bodies of the slain, on the tragic 24th of January, 1848, and the Executive was triumphant. The rule of oligarchies was followed by personalism or autocracy. Monagas struggled against Paez; these two predominant influences could not co-exist. The old caudillo took the head of a revolution; he was defeated, and, like Guzman, exiled. Curious analogy between the fate of the chieftain of the oligarchy and that of the leader of the democrats!
José Tadeo Monagas was replaced by his brother José Gregorio. The pair formed a strange species of dynasty in which inheritance was collateral. Guzman having again lost the presidency, his supporters and those of Paez rebelled against the government in 1853 and 1854; but the government was victorious, and in 1854 liberated the slaves. Better than the apostrophes of the popular tribune this radical measure prepared the way for the advent of the democrats. After José Gregorio Monagas his brother José Tadeo became President in 1855. A new Constitution of 1857, centralistic in tendency, permitted the re-election of presidents, and Monagas remained in power. General Castro defeated him at the head of a coalition of all parties. The old political groups were reorganised; the struggles between federalists and centralists recommenced; and the decline of the oligarchies saw the advance of democracy. The Convention of Valencia (1858) promulgated a liberal constitution, which established the autonomy of the provinces under governors and congresses of their own; the electoral capacity, restricted by the old statute, was enlarged; the jury {106} system was established; and the Executive was weakened, with an eye to the personalism of Monagas. A civil war in which federals, liberals, centralists, conservatives, constitutionalists, and ideologists were mingled in motley assemblies disturbed the country. The battles lacked the simplicity of the old directorates, the rigidity of the old hierarchies. The democracy lamentably increased; the liberal factions were seized with an equalitarian frenzy. Their leaders—Falcon, Zamora—were demagogues on horseback. At the spectacle of this barbarism Paez, returning in 1861 from the United States, restored reaction and autocracy. On September 10th he proclaimed himself supreme chief in the face of the federal power; an octogenarian, he gathered all the powers of the State into his trembling hand; a melancholy symbol of the oligarchy, exhausted in its struggle against the invading democracy. In vain did he issue tyrannical decrees; he could not prevent the triumph of federation. At Coche, Guzman-Blanco, general of the federal forces, negotiated with Rojas, the omnipotent secretary of Paez, an agreement which put an end to the tottering dictatorship. The action of the founder of Venezuela, "the man of the plains," representing the conservative aristocracy, was over. He died in 1873, when his work of a half-century was about to be continued, under another form, by the great caudillo Antonio Guzman-Blanco.
He was the son of Antonio Leocadio Guzman, leader of the liberal party. He had travelled in the United States, was a diplomatist, and had followed a course of study in the law, and on his return to Venezuela had directed military operations during the revolt against Paez. He had the gifts of the military leader; he skilfully organised attack and retreat in that difficult warfare of many factions amidst the plains; he revealed himself as a heroic leader of men, dashing and persevering. In 1862 {107} he attained the rank of General-in-Chief of the Army. The General Assembly elected him vice-president of the Republic, under the presidency of Falcon, after the agreement of Coche. Guzman-Blanco then contracted a loan of one and a half million pounds in London, where Venezuelan credit was ruined. It was necessary to restore the public finances after the long crisis of the revolution. The operation was onerous, and the liberal leader was criticised. However, the Venezuelan Congress awarded him a prize in the form of an award of money.
In 1865 and 1866, during the absences of President Falcon, he exercised command with admirable political tact, introducing severe financial economies, regularising the debt, and suppressing sinecures and pensions. In the political world, despite the triumph of the federals, he demanded the reinforcement of the central power, as against the anarchy of the autonomous provinces. In fact, a new constitution, extremely liberal, which was promulgated by the Assembly in 1864, had conceded an excessive degree of independence upon the provinces.
A revolution overthrew the federal President, and the conservative malcontents restored José Tadeo Monagas. Anarchy continued, and Guzman-Blanco intervened to repress partial revolts, to counsel political tolerance, and to negotiate abroad the unification of the public debt; he had inherited the moral power from Paez. Monagas wished to draw him into his party, and offered him the succession of the presidency. The struggle increased in intensity; the "Blues" of Monagas, as in Byzantium, defied the "Yellows" of Guzman-Blanco. The civil war lasted five years. The country seeking stability, even if it involved autocracy, José Ruperto Monagas succeeded to his father and the monarchical policy was again attempted. The chief of the federals was the enemy of the President, who exiled him, after a {108} nocturnal attack upon his house, on the 14th of August, 1869.
Guzman arrived in Curaçoa, and in September openly commenced to work for revolution. Monagas was anxious to compromise, and willing to agree to one of those conventions so frequent in Venezuelan history; but the caudillo imposed hard conditions. His father, the demagogue and tribune, accompanied him as journalist. After indecisive battles the Revolution triumphed in Caracas (April, 1870), and Guzman-Blanco assumed the dictatorship. The autocratic régime accepted neither conciliation with the vanquished nor legal artifices; the figure of the Imperator looms above the passive crowd, a defence against federal disorganisation, economic waste, and incessant anarchy. The liberal leader attacked his adversaries energetically, directed battles, performing prodigies of strategy at Valencia and Apure. The "blues" recoiled, successively losing Valencia, Trujillo, and Maracaibo. General Matias Salazar, the seditious liberal chief, a friend of the dictator, was shot. Like Porfirio Diaz, the Venezuelan autocrat checkmated anarchy by decapitating its generals. Exile, battles, and confiscation of goods prepared the way for lasting peace. Two years the civil war lasted, and in 1872 Guzman-Blanco, a beneficent despot, commenced the material transformation of the country. He knew men, he had the gift of command; his decision was irresistible, his character of steel. He reduced import duties, and abolished export duties, founded a banking company which issued bonds guaranteed by the Government, and amortised the public debt. While introducing strict economies he attacked his political enemies with forced loans and special contributions. In the political arena he unhesitatingly repressed the revolts of the Blues and would grant them no amnesty; he exiled the archbishop because he refused to {109} celebrate the triumph of the liberal Revolution by a Te Deum. The dictator was nationalist as against foreign pressure and threats; he aspired to the reconstitution of Venezuela, in matters domestic and foreign, despite the anarchy of the factions and the manoeuvres of European stockjobbers. Diplomatic conflicts arose with the United States, Holland, England, and the Papacy.
Guzman-Blanco favoured education; he wished to see "a school in every street." He reformed the civil and penal codes, and established marriage and civil registers. In 1873 he renounced the dictatorship before Congress, but the latter elected him President, and accorded him supreme honours. Statues and streets and medals bore his name; he was given the pompous titles of "Illustrious American" and "Regenerator of Venezuela"; nothing could be refused him by the servile and extravagant deputies. His statue, erected in Caracas in 1875, near that of Bolivar, glorified the Regenerator equally with the Liberator. The popular dictator satisfied the ambitions of all; he brought the peace desired by the oligarchs, he was the idol of the crowds, and he attacked the Church like the liberals and free-masons.
From 1870 to 1877 the Government fostered material development by means of the construction of railways and highways, public buildings in the large towns, and the transformation and embellishment of Caracas. It was said that the Dictator wished to imitate Napoleon III. by opening up promenades and avenues. Credit prospered, the service of the debt was assured, the public revenues increased, orderly and economical budgets were established, and statistics organised. The President reinforced and disciplined the army, and intervened in the politics of the states, in defiance of federalism. He endeavoured to found a Venezuelan Church, with {110} a liberal archbishop and clergy elected by the faithful; he suppressed religious congregations and converted their goods into national property. His autocracy did not respect the powers of the outer world; he stimulated industries by a strict protectionism. An admirer of French art, he established museums in Venezuela.
In 1877 General Alcantara succeeded him. Guzman-Blanco stated in his message, reviewing his seven years' work, that he left behind him peace, administrative and political organisation, external credit, liberty of the vote, and "the triumph of the dignity and the rights of the Nation." He was acclaimed to the verge of apotheosis. He left for Europe, and in his absence the statues of the dictator were overthrown and his decrees annulled by those who had conferred such honours upon him. Democracy, unstable and feminine, burned what she had adored. Guzman-Blanco returned to Venezuela in 1878, devoured with dictatorial ambitions. He had sought in Paris to found a company which, like the East Indian and African companies of England, should transform his country. He longed for the power he had abandoned to an ungrateful mob. Upon his arrival a favouring revolution welcomed him, the state of Carabobo proclaimed him Dictator, and ten other states followed suit. The revolutionaries triumphed, and those who had overthrown his statues and reversed his statutes now praised him to the skies. Guzman-Blanco proposed to reform the Constitution; the Swiss federation was his political model. He reduced the number of states in Venezuela, and despoiled the Executive of many attributes, which he confided to a Federal Council. The Province approved the "Swiss" Constitution of 1882.
The "Illustrious American" then returned to France to realise a financial plan which was to {111} transform his country, and to conclude a contract with the great Jew bankers. He formed a privileged company which was to exploit the country, obtain concessions of land, and organise what financiers call the mise en valeur of new territories. The Constitution promulgated, Guzman-Blanco was elected President of the General Council. In 1882 he expounded to Congress the benefits of his autocracy: material development, budgetary surpluses, extended cultivation, and political stability.
Until 1886 Guzman-Blanco was President of the Venezuelan democracy, or its minister in European capitals. His power was absolute; he imposed new leaders, left the country, returned; he was the Protector of the Republic. From the enchanted banks of the Seine he directed the febrile development of Venezuela. Like Porfirio Diaz in Mexico and Rosas in the Argentine he conquered all other leaders, imposed peace, organised and unified, and ruled by terror or by sentiment. A caudillo without definite political ideas, he loved power and his native country. State, Church, parties, and national riches, all were his; they were the domains of this feudal baron. His enemies accused him of enriching himself at the expense of the national property, but his work in the material world was fruitful; he built roads, erected buildings, and stimulated the development of the national fortune. In matters of policy he affirmed the inviolability of the country against foreign aggression; he was a democrat as against the conservatives. He loved pomp and triumph, sumptuous external shows, sonorous phrases, and the servile adoration of the crowd.
He had an enormous faith in his own work. In 1883 he stated that Venezuela, under his authority, "had undertaken an infinite voyage towards an infinite future." His dictatorship appeared to him as necessary, providential: "the people insist upon {112} it so that we may be saved from anarchy." He aimed at "the regeneration of the country"; and his was the responsibility for this work; but the greatness also was his. "I have never followed the thought of any but myself," he said. Indeed, we may apply to him the classic phrase descriptive of absolutism: "L'Etat c'est moi."[1]
[1] En defensa del Septenio, Paris, 1878, p. 29.
The political work of General Castilla—Domestic peace—The deposits of guano and saltpetre—Manuel Pardo, founder of the anti-military party—The last caudillo, Pierola: his reforms.
The gestation of the Republic of Peru was a lengthy process. The vice-kingdom defended itself against Colombian, Peruvian, and Argentine troops: against the armies of Bolivar and San Martin. Here the penates of Spain were preserved: the treasure, the vigilant aristocracy, the warlike armies. It was not until 1824, when America was already independent, that the victory of Ayacucho liberated Peru from the Spanish rule.
Bolivar wished to give Peru the same constitution as Bolivia; to force the institution of the irremovable President on the anarchy of these republics; but the municipality of Lima refused the project. The Peruvians exalted the Liberator; "hero" and "demi-god" the poets called him; his praise was sung in the churches; the Congress granted him riches and honours. His generals were struggling for the supreme command. The Colombian hero returned to his own country, and at once President followed President and revolution revolution. The history of the first twenty years of the Republic, as in Mexico and the Argentine, records only the clash of the forces of society organised and disciplined {114} by the colonial régime. Generals and "doctors," autocracy and anarchy, the oligarchy of the vice-kingdom and the advancing democracy, all were at war among themselves. Byzantine factions struggled to attain the supreme power in the assemblies and the barracks. Aristocratic Presidents—Riva Aguero, Orbegoso, Vivanco, and military Presidents—La Mar, La Fuente, Gamarra, followed one another with bewildering rapidity. In the south Arequipa, the home of a tenacious race, engendered terrible revolts. External wars, such as that with Colombia in 1827 and Bolivia in 1828 and 1835 (to repulse the protectorate of Santa-Cruz), were really due to the quarrels of ambitious generals who were disputing the succession of Bolivar. New nations, whose frontiers as yet were vague, had not yet acquired a national consciousness. Santa-Cruz, President of Bolivia, unified Peru, founding a confederation, from Tumez to Tarija, necessary to the equilibrium of American politics; but he was a foreign President. Amid the host of provincial chiefs a general presently arose who for twenty years was the energetic director of the nation's life—Don Ramon Castilla.
GENERAL ANDRES SANTA CRUZ.
President of Bolivia (1829-1839).
He recalls Paez rather than Rosas. He was no invulnerable tyrant, but a caudillo of great influence. Born in Tarapaca in 1796, he was a mestizo, having in his veins the blood of an Indian grandmother. This origin perhaps explains his endurance and astuteness. His father was Asturian, a member of a warlike race. Castilla passed his youth at Tarapaca, in a region of vast plains and narrow valleys, and the desert made him a nomad, a chief of legionaries. A Spanish soldier in Chili, he was made prisoner at Chacabuco; set at liberty, he travelled through the Argentine and Brazil, and on his return to Peru he offered his services to San Martin; in 1821 he fought beside Sucre at Ayacucho, followed General Gamarra against Bolivia, and retaken prisoner at {115} Ingavi, he finally became general, then marshal. Short, with virile features and a penetrating glance, he was a great leader, strong and tenacious in the field. His bearing was martial; men felt that opposition irritated him, that he was an autocrat by vocation. Without much culture, he was astute enough to seem learned. He intuitively knew the value of men and the manner in which to govern them. His strong point was the gift of command. Experience made him sceptical and ironical; his speech was stern and incisive. His ideas were simple; a conservative in politics, he respected the principle of authority. Like San Martin, to whom he wrote some suggestive letters, he hated anarchy. In the midst of the tumult of revolution he understood the necessity of a strong government. He defeated the dictator Vivanco, in skirmishes and pitched battles, at Carmen-Alto, and became President of Peru in 1845. He granted an amnesty to the vanquished and re-established order. His government marked the commencement, after twenty years of revolutions, of a new period of administrative stability, during which commerce developed and the public revenues increased; new sources of wealth, namely, guano and saltpetre, transformed the economic life of the country. The telegraph united Lima to Callao in 1847; the first Peruvian railroad was inaugurated in 1851. The service of the external debt due to foreign loans commenced, and the internal debt was consolidated. The first presidency of General Castilla resulted in peace and economic progress.
General Echenique succeeded him, and financial scandals, guano concessions, speculations, and a corrupt thirst for wealth engendered discontent. The prophecy of Bolivar was accomplished: gold had corrupted Peru. Castilla hesitated before revolting against a constitutional government. A lover of order, he respected authority in others and in {116} himself. But finally a fresh revolution broke out, and triumphed at La Palma in 1855. In the same year Congress elected Castilla as President.
In the preceding year the general-President had already proclaimed the emancipation of the negro slaves, in order to ensure that the revolution which he now headed should be welcome. Congress declared the personal tribute demanded of the Indians abolished. A new constitution, the basis of that of 1860, which is still in force in Peru, changed the political organism in several essential aspects. It suppressed the Council of State and replaced it by two vice-presidents; it organised the municipalities, and set a term of four years on the duration of the presidency. Vivanco rose against Castilla in 1857, but was defeated. The government of General Castilla terminated peacefully: from 1844 to 1860 he directed the national policies with a hand of iron. None before him had been able to give the life of the nation such continuity. All the moral and economic forces of the country were developed; the exports attained to three millions sterling, which sum was in excess of the imports; railways and telegraph lines crossed the wilderness, and the credit of the country permitted of new and important loans. Peru, conscious of her progressive energy, aspired to extend her domains. Castilla declared war upon Ecuador in 1859, the pretext being a question of frontiers; as victor he granted generous terms of peace. He built ships to oppose the future maritime supremacy of Chili; then, divining the importance of Eastern Peru, he sent out expeditions to explore the great unknown watercourses. Like Garcia-Moreno in Ecuador and Portales in Chili, he established peace, stimulated wealth, promoted education, created a navy, and imposed a new constitution on the country. His action was not only political but social; by freeing the slaves and Indians he prepared the future {117} of democracy. The journals of the period condemned his absolutism. "The formula of the General is 'L'Etat c'est moi,'" wrote Don José Casimiro-Ulloa in 1862. For fifteen years he was the dictator necessary to an unstable republic.
After him the national life was personified by a civil President, Manuel Pardo, who represented the reaction of lawyers and business men against the militarism of Castilla and his predecessors. He did not govern for two terms, like the autocratic General, nor did his personal influence last ten years; yet his reputation increased after his death, so that his name, like that of Balmaceda in Chili, presides over the fortunes of a party.
Pardo was born in Lima in 1834. He was the son of a poet, Don Felipe Pardo; but he soon abandoned dreams for action; to him material interest seemed superior to all other questions.
He detested "pure politics"; he regarded the Constitution as a "dead letter in national life." His vocation impelled him to protect the financial affairs of the country; he was Minister of Finance from 1866 to 1868, fiscal agent in London, and founded a bank in Lima. His best address deals with the subject of taxation. As President he decreed a monopoly of saltpetre in 1875, an economic measure often criticised as having provoked the disastrous war with Chili.
An economist and champion of order, he continued the work of Castilla, was triumphant over revolution, and organised the country.
In 1862, when he had already been minister and mayor of Lima, a popular election carried him to power. In four years his extraordinary activity reformed all the public services: education, finance, and immigration. He ordered the census to be taken in 1876; he endeavoured to attract foreigners; founded the Faculty of Political Sciences and the {118} University of Lima for the education of diplomatists and administrators, and the School of Arts and Crafts for the improvement of popular education; he opened new primary schools, sent for German and Polish professors, and entrusted the pedagogic direction of the country to them. He promulgated new regulations dealing with education on the classic European lines. He re-established the National Guard, as Portales had done in Chili, and organised departmental juntas with an eye to decentralisation. His action was restless and universal. He preferred a positive policy, devoid of doctrinaire quarrels, dreamed of a practical republic, like Rafael Nuñez in Colombia and Guzman-Blanco in Venezuela, and preferred the faculty of political sciences, which formed administrators, to that of letters, which created literary men and philosophers.
Nevertheless, the country became bankrupt. Loans, the great undertakings of President Balta, and speculations in guano and saltpetre had exhausted it. Pardo could not prevent this financial disaster. He assured the service of the foreign debt and informed the democracy, intoxicated by the economic orgy, that it was ruined. He vainly sought the alliance of the Argentine and Bolivia in order to erect a triple bastion of defence against the ambitions of Chili. His efforts were fruitless, both at home and abroad. He was succeeded by a military President. The alliance of Peru and Bolivia was powerless against the might of Chili, and Pardo himself was assassinated during a supreme reaction of the demagogy which he hoped to rule.
MANUEL PARDO.
President of Peru (1872-1876).
Death made his influence lasting, as was the case with Garcia-Moreno and Balmaceda. A strong ruler of men, he had gathered about him enthusiastic and even fanatical partisans. His work of reformation became the evangel of a party, the civil party which he had founded. As early as 1841 the dictator {119} Vivanco had united, in a conservative group, the leading men of the time: Pando, Andres Martinez, Felipe Pardo. Ureta, Pardo's rival in the presidential campaign, united the first elements of a civil party. But it was his rival who concentrated all these forces, making them lasting and harmonious. A scion of ancient families, of the Aliagas and Lavalles, Pardo represented the colonial traditions in a disordered democracy.
Thanks to the discovery of new sources of wealth —saltpetre and guano—and to fiscal monopolies, a powerful plutocracy suddenly arose in Peru, which was soon, by the prestige of its wealth, to overpower the old Peruvian families. Pardo, not opposing the national transformation, joined this plutocracy; and his party, reinforced by the alliance, became the obstinate champion of property, of slow reform, and of order, against the anarchy of the Creoles. It was conservative without rigidity, liberal without violence, like the moderate parties of monarchical governments, or the Progressists of the third French Republic. Originally an aristocratic power, it abandoned its old severity, and became the party of the wealthy classes, taking mulattos and mestizos to its bosom. So, as in other South American democracies, the ancient oligarchy was replaced by a plutocracy which included the sons of immigrants, half-breeds, and bankers.
The influence of Pardo was greater and more lasting than that of Castilla. It responded to many of the needs of Peru; placed between militarism and demagogy, the civil element was the only agent of order and progress. The work of Pardo, interrupted during the war with Chili (1879-84) and the period of anarchy which followed, despite the efforts of a military leader who had fought like a hero in the war against Chili—Colonel Caceres—was by the irony of human affairs continued by the sworn enemy {120} of Pardo: Pierola, the last of the great Peruvian caudillos; restless, romantic, and always ready to seize the reins of power by the violent aid of revolution.
In 1869, at the age of thirty, he was Minister of Finance, following Garcia Calderon, who had resigned his post rather than authorise the waste of fiscal resources. Ten years later Pierola proclaimed himself dictator, and prepared, with unusual energy, to defend Peru against the invasion of Chili. A reformer after the methods of the Jacobins, he thought to transform the nation by heaping decree upon decree and by changing the names of institutions. His noble enthusiasm makes it easy to overlook his errors.
The Peruvian troops defeated, Pierola did not resign power, and divided the country. Ten years later, in the full maturity of his intellectual powers, he was elected President (1895-99); from which period we may date the Peruvian renaissance. Without raising loans he transformed an exhausted country into a stable republic. Like all the great American caudillos, he was an excellent administrator of the fiscal wealth of the country; he established a gold standard as the basis of the new monetary system, promulgated a military code and an electoral law, and by means of a French mission endeavoured to change an army which was the docile servant of ambitious factions into a force capable of preserving domestic peace. His organising talent, his patriotism, and his extraordinary ability, surprised those who had known only the revolutionary leader.
DON NICOLAS DE PIEROLA.
President of Peru (1895-1899).
He founded a democratic party, as did Pardo a party inimical to militarism. But in spite of the denomination of this party it has lent its aid to the military leaders, and no law in favour of the workers has emanated from the democrats. Pierola, who called himself "the protector of the native race," {121} established a tax upon salt, which was a great hardship to that poverty-stricken race.
DON FRANCISCO GARCIA CALDERON.
President of Peru (1881-1884).
The leader of the democrats is himself an aristocrat; not only by origin, by the somewhat old-fashioned elegance of his style, and by his patrician tastes; he has always preferred to surround himself with men of the old noble families: the Orbegosos, Gonzalez, Osmas, Ortiz de Zevallos, &c. This contrast between his tastes and tendencies and the party which he founded does not detract from the great popularity which the old ex-president enjoys in Peru; he is popular by reason of qualities which are wholly personal, like those of Manuel Pardo, and his supporters become fanatics. His mannered phrases, his heroism and his audacity, have a religious significance in the eyes of his believers; like Facundo in the epic of Sarmiento, he is the nomadic khalif who brings to a democracy in the throes of anarchy the promise of a divine message.
Santa-Cruz and the Confederation of Peru and Bolivia—The tyrants, Belzu, Molgarejo—The last caudillos: Pando, Montes.
Bolivia sprang, armed and full-grown, as in the classic myth, from the brain of Bolivar. The Liberator gave her a name, a Constitution, and a President. In 1825 he created by decree an autonomous republic in the colonial territory of the district of Charcas, and became its Protector. Sucre, the hero of Ayacucho, succeeded him in 1826. During the wars of Independence this noble friend of Bolivar resigned from power, disillusioned; he was the Patroclus of the American Iliad.
From that time onward the young republic was for twenty years ruled by a great caudillo, Andres Santa-Cruz. A lieutenant of the Liberator, he inherited, like Paez and Flores, a portion of his legacy of nations: he was President of Bolivia and wished to be President of Peru.
OPENING OF CONGRESS, LA PAZ, BOLIVIA.
(From "Latin America, the Land of Opportunity,"
by the Hon. John Barrett.)
In 1826 he presided over the Council of State at Lima and governed in the absence of Bolivar. In 1827 he was the head of the Bolivian Republic, prosecuting a difficult struggle against national anarchy. His ambition included the vast theatre of the old vice-kingdom; he wished to unite Bolivia and Peru, and to that end organised freemasonry as a political force, from La Paz to Lima. President of the Bolivian Republic for the second time {123} in 1828, he formed a government sufficiently strong to discourage revolution. Like Garcia-Moreno and Guzman-Blanco, he was a civilizer. The son of an Indian woman of noble origin, the Cacica of Guarina, he perhaps inherited imperial ambitions. He loved power and display, received the order of the Legion of Honour from Louis-Philippe, and instituted an analogous order for the Bolivian Confederation. He accumulated sonorous titles: Captain-General and President of Bolivia, Grand Marshal, Pacificator of Peru, Supreme Protector of the South and North Peruvians, &c. In domestic politics he was an organiser who was capable of cruelty in defence of order; a strict administrator. He promulgated codes, following the Napoleonic example, disciplined the army, and restored the national finances. The revenue increased, credit became more secure, and imperialism saw the light. Santa-Cruz attracted Europeans and protected his countrymen, for the question of population preoccupied him; it is, indeed, the great problem of Bolivia and South America. In 1833 he proposed the exclusion of celibates from the magistracy, a measure of protection in favour of numerous families. Like all the caudillos, he made great efforts to develop the public treasury.
Local triumphs did not satisfy him. Distrustful, crafty, frigid, without the declamatory eloquence of other presidents, ambitious of wealth and power, he longed to extend his despotic sceptre over new States. Imitating Napoleon, like Iturbide in Mexico, and remembering the successes of the First Consul, he prepared expeditions of conquest, and fostered anarchy in Peru, which he intended to govern once more as in 1826. Orbegoso, President of the neighbouring republic, called for his assistance in 1835 in order to overcome Salaverry, a brilliant officer who had proclaimed himself dictator. Santa-Cruz thereupon constituted himself the arbiter of Peruvian {124} disputes, and invaded the country. He defeated Salaverry at Socabaya and Gamarra, his ally, at Yanacocha. The dictator was shot in 1836, and the Bolivian president founded a vast confederation as a bulwark against Peruvian anarchy: he reconstituted the old vice-kingdom. His ambition then led him so far as to attack Rosas, the tyrant of Argentina. He had inherited the Unitarian ideals of Bolivar, and prepared to realise them. Three States, Bolivia, and North and South Peru, each with its own capital, its president, and its congress, formed the Confederation, under the imperial authority of the new Inca. Santa-Cruz organised the three States with amazing rapidity, imposed codes and constitutions, and expected to rule from Lima, the fashionable metropolis; it was said that he was the avenger of the oppressed race of half-breeds, oppressed by the colonial oligarchy. The Confederation existed from 1837, but Chili, in the south, envious of the Peruvian-Bolivian hegemony, threatened its existence. Portales, that omnipotent minister, sought pretexts to attack this solid political structure. He accused Santa-Cruz of fostering expeditions against the Chilian conservatives—for instance, that of Freire—and called him "the unjust violator of the sovereignty of Peru"; he feared that his power would strike a blow at the independence of the South American republics. Portales and Santa-Cruz represented two irreconcilable ambitions; they had the same love of authority and organic construction, and each professed a narrow nationalism and a violent patriotism. The Chilian oligarchy, led by Portales, proceeded to organise the "liberation campaign" against and on behalf of Peru. The historian Walker Martinez justifies this policy of interference and intervention in American affairs, although since the Pacific war the Chilian diplomatists have always pronounced against it.
Two successive expeditions were directed against the coast of Peru. Santa-Cruz defeated the first, which was led by the Chilian general Blanco Encalada, in 1837. General Bulnes was the leader of another "army of liberation." Peruvian generals supported him: Gamarra, La Fuente, Castilla, and Orbegoso himself. The battle of Yungai, in 1838, put an end to the Confederation, and Santa-Cruz lost all power over the peoples of Bolivia and Peru.
His political work, the Confederation, tended to unite two peoples which Bolivar had separated in spite of colonial traditions; it organised, on the shores of the Pacific, a stable power to oppose the increasing imperialism of Chili. Eminent Peruvians seconded the unifying efforts of the Bolivian leader: Riva-Aguero, Orbegoso, Garcia del Rio, and Necochea.
His work shattered, Santa-Cruz retired to Europe in 1845, but attempted, when urged by excited supporters, to return to his own country. Chili and Peru both opposed the suggestion. He was a friend of Napoleon III. in Paris, where he several times represented Bolivia, and where he died in 1865. The Confederation which he vainly desired to found would have changed the destiny of the peoples of the Pacific, by giving the political supremacy to Bolivia and Peru united. The successors of Santa-Cruz in the Bolivian presidency, Ballivian and Velasco, were friends of his, and continued his ambitious policy, although they had revolted against his autocracy. Since the days of the great mestizo leader no ruler has attained an equal reputation, nor attempted so great a political mission. Of later presidents, Baptista and Arce, civilians, and Pando and Montes, soldiers, exercised a real influence on Bolivian history, but had not the importance of the first presidents. The last was a remarkable organiser and a builder of railways which saved his country {126} from a dangerous isolation. They belonged to a prosaic age of steady economic development. Bolivia has also had its tyrants, figures of tragi-comedy, vulgar and gloomy: Belzu, Velasco, Daza, and finally Melgarejo, the bloody incarnation of Creole barbarity. He was the Nero of Bolivia; a man capable of every cruelty and every licence; daring, energetic, he inaugurated a reign of terror, surrounded himself with a prætorian guard, and represented the instincts of the mob, exacerbated by alcohol and envy. In vain did well-meaning dictators like Ballivian in 1841 or Linares in 1857 strive to continue, in the interval between two episodes of barbarism, the civilising task of Santa-Cruz. They dreamed of founding a Republique Almara, like Renan in the domains of Caliban, a tyranny of the intellectual elements. Their effort was fruitless. Down to 1899, the year in which President Pando inaugurated civil government, the history of Bolivia was a dreary succession of revolutions and tyrants. A remarkable writer who has studied his "sick people"[1] writes that "from 1825 to 1898 more than sixty revolutions broke out, and a series of international wars, and six Presidents were assassinated: Blanco, Belzu, Cordova, Morales, Melgarejo, and Daza, without counting those that died in exile."
COLONEL ISMAEL MONTES.
President of Bolivia (1905-1909).
[1] Pueblo enfermo, by A. Arguedas, Barcelona, 1906.
The factions: Reds and Whites—The leaders: Artigas, Lavalleja, Rivera—The modern period.
A small southern republic, situated between an Imperialist state, Brazil, and a nation ambitious of hegemony, the Argentine, Uruguay, "the Eastern Province" (Banda Oriental) has struggled for its liberty since the commencement of the nineteenth century. Artigas represented the principle of nationality in the long wars against Buenos-Ayres and the Spanish armies: he was the first caudillo, the forerunner of the Independence. Rivera and Lavalleja inherited his unconquerable patriotism, and proclaimed the independence of their country. In 1822, without the constant aid of armies of liberation, such as those of San Martin and Bolivar, but by the heroic efforts of its own soldiers, the ancient province of the vice-kingdom of La Plata constituted itself a new State, governed by a Unitarian constitution.
Artigas had fought for the liberty of the province of Uruguay, for its freedom from all tutelage. Rivera and Lavalleja were willing to compromise at the commencement of the new campaign of liberation. A Congress held at Montevideo proclaimed the incorporation of the Eastern Province with Portugal. The two caudillos desired the union of Uruguay with Brazil. Another leader, Manuel Oribe, was anxious for the protection of the legions of the Argentine {128} to conquer the independence of his country. An ambassador from Buenos-Ayres, Don Valentin Gomez, proposed to Brazil in 1825 that the rebellious Uruguay should once more become a province of the Argentine, but the Empire refused to consent. Lavalleja, who had sought for Brazilian protection, changed his mind; he sought for Argentine assistance, whether that of the capital or that of the federal leaders, while Rivera remained faithful to his original programme of union with Southern Brazil. A piece of heroism worthy of the Spanish conquistadors set a term to this indecision. Lavalleja, at the head of the "Thirty-Three," a little band of heroes comparable to the legendary companions of Pizarro and Cortes, landed on the Uruguayan coast on the 19th of April, 1825. "Liberty or death" was their watchword. Rivera joined them, and the struggle for the independence of the eastern province at once gained an intenser significance. At Florida a provisional government was installed, which decreed separation from Brazil and Portugal, proclaimed the sovereignty of the nation, and decided upon union, under a federal organisation, with the Argentine provinces. "Eastern Argentines," Lavalleja called his compatriots. The rulers of the Argentine did not decide upon supporting the liberators of Uruguay. With Brazil hostile, and abandoned by Buenos-Ayres, the indomitable "Orientals" commenced a bitter warfare which ended in their winning their independence. Rivera defeated the Brazilian general Abreu at Rincon-de-Haeda, then at Sarandu, a decisive battle which Zorrilla de San Martin compares to Chacabuco. The Argentines maintained their neutrality, but the Congress of 1825, obedient to the suggestions of Rivadavia, declared to Brazil that it recognised the incorporation of the Eastern Province "which has by its own efforts restored the liberty of its territory." War broke out against Brazil; Buenos-Ayres and Rio de Janeiro both aspired to {129} rule in Montevideo. The conflict lasted from 1826 to 1828; Argentines and Uruguayans took part in it, fighting side by side. The campaign was directed by Lavalleja and General Alvear, who in Buenos-Ayres had been a fashionable dictator. Rivera withdrew from the army. Brazil suffered a defeat at Itazango, where 3,000 "Orientals" and 4,000 Argentines fought against 9,000 Brazilian soldiers. All things pointed to the fact that Uruguay would soon be an independent nation. The "Orientals" no longer admitted the hegemony of Brazil, nor the tutelage of Argentina; they decided to pursue the struggle without the help of Buenos-Ayres. The war would be longer, but even more certain in its results. Lavalleja replaced Alvear in the government. Rivera, who had landed at Soriano, fought and won at Misiones (1828), and continued unaided the campaign against Artigas. He distrusted Buenos-Ayres and even Lavalleja himself, and, thanks to his continued efforts, peace with Brazil was finally signed on the 27th of August, 1838. The Empire recognised the independence of the "Province of Montevideo" and the constitution of a "sovereign State," a necessary factor in the political equilibrium of La Plata.
JUAN ANTONIO LAVALLEJA.
Caudillo of Uruguay in the struggle for independence.
Seven years later, under the tyranny of Rosas, Uruguay saw her autonomy menaced. The Argentine dictator aspired to conquer the little republic and to rule as the Spanish viceroys had ruled in all the provinces of La Plata, from Tarija to Montevideo. The "Oriental" President Oribe, elected in 1825, was the ally of Rosas against the Argentine refugees in Montevideo, who were supported by Rivera. Uruguayans and Argentines were confounded in the two parties, but Rivera represented a new source of conflict, as in his quarrels with Lavalleja, the unconquerable spirit of nationality. Defeated in 1837, he continued, upon Brazilian territory, an obstinate warfare against Oribe. He defeated him, and was {130} proclaimed President of Uruguay. Oribe then figured in the Argentine army, as a general of Rosas.
At this stage the conflict between Unitarians and federals around Montevideo acquired a transcendental significance. Brazil intervened once more in the affairs of La Plata. Impregnable as Paraguay under Lopez, the Eastern Province continued the war against Oribe, its ex-president, and against the legions of the Argentine tyrant. A noble crusader in the cause of liberty, Garibaldi, at the head of the Uruguayan squadron which defended Montevideo, gave the struggle a romantic character. Oribe, a genius of destruction, ravaged the country, and besieged Montevideo by land in 1843. Foreigners: French, Italians, Turks, and natives, defended the threatened city. England, France, and Brazil at first offered their mediation, which was refused by Oribe; they then sent squadrons to defend the autonomy of Uruguay and to insure the free navigation of the River Parana in the interests of European commerce. After a long war of heroic conflicts Urquiza, the leader of the armies in alliance against the autocracy of Rosas, put Oribe to flight (1861) and saved Montevideo from the Argentine peril.
Lavalleja and Rivera, the great caudillos in the struggle for liberty, were rival claimants for power and moral influence. Rivera, like Artigas, represented an aggressive patriotism, hostile to all outside influence; his ideal was national integrity. Generous, anarchical, of the native type, he was more liberal and more of a democrat than Lavalleja; he defended all liberties—liberty of conscience, of industry, of the press. A nomadic gaucho, he organised and led guerilla forces through a campaign of incessant skirmishes. Lavalleja, imperfectly educated, rude, authoritative, half a Spaniard in his pride and his colonial methods, was the leader of the aristocratic and cultivated classes. More conservative and more politic than Rivera, he opposed the rural democracy, {131} and desired an orderly independence, a disciplined liberty; in government he was a tyrant. He alienated the supporters of Rivera, dissolved the Chamber of Representatives, reformed the administration of justice, and estranged the authorities of the departments. Rivera, President from 1830 to 1834 and from 1838 to 1843, was—like the majority of the American caudillos—a zealous protector of commerce and industry. The national revenues mounted by 27 per cent.; imports and exports increased; the population was doubled, and schools and libraries were founded. Rivera exterminated the Charrua Indians, who pillaged in town and country, fostered the stock-raising industry, and, in his democratic enthusiasm, prohibited the slave trade in 1839 and freed the slaves in 1842.
In the rivalry of these leaders we may already perceive the elements of future civil struggles. Two political parties, the Whites and the Reds, struggled for power, as in other American republics; their disputes, which were long and violent, revealed an antagonism more profound than any simple conflict of political opinions. Uruguay, like Venezuela and Peru, is a country of caudillos, but all her leaders, from Rivera to Battle Ordonez, have effected not merely works of material progress, but also religious and moral reforms, which explains the violent mutual hatred of the Reds and Whites. In matters of local import, or of national convictions and traditions, there is a clash of formidable instincts, and the political problem becomes simplified. Two great groups, one conservative and the other liberal, both represented by tenacious leaders, disputed the supreme power in the government and in parliament. The Whites were partisans of absolutism, nationalists and catholics, and intolerant towards foreign cults; and the old Spanish aristocracy, the clergy, the "doctors"—all those, in short, who would constitute an intellectual oligarchy—sympathised with this authoritative {132} and traditionalist party. The Reds called their adversaries cut-throats (for in the name of reasons of State and of order they had no respect for human life), reproached them with opposing due liberties (they did condemn what they considered excessive liberties) and were liberals and enemies of the Church. The country districts and the cabins supported them; they were the popular party. The Whites called them "the Savages." Although very old families figured in both clans, the new social classes, the mestizos and children of foreigners inclined rather to the Reds, while the Whites included the proprietors of the latifundia.
Lavalleja died in 1853, Rivera in 1854. After the death of the two leaders a barbarous warfare continued between the two parties, which represented tradition and democracy. In vain did certain of the Presidents—Garro, Flores, and Berro—attempt to realise the unity of Uruguay and to form a national party. The conflict still continued, for the groups were swayed by an inevitable antagonism: the conservative oligarchy and the half-breed democracy are opposed in Uruguay as in Mexico and Venezuela. The old families, beati possidentes, defended "la grande proprieté" against the foreigners and mestizos.
With the triumph of Flores (1865) the Whites lost their political supremacy, and the liberal party regained its old position. Flores protected commerce, rebuilt the cities destroyed by so many wars, and built railways; his dictatorship terminated in 1868. The leader of the Reds returned to the Presidency from 1875 to 1876, and his party established itself more firmly. Despite fresh revolutions, it did not yield up the government, and effected great social reforms. Another caudillo, the present President, Don José Battle y Ordoñez, is, by virtue of his liberal creed, his influence, and the daring of his political programme, an eminent personage amidst the sordid {133} quarrels which divide the populations of America; he has inherited the authority of Rivera, Flores, and Lorenzo Battle.
The modern Uruguay is born of the struggle between the two traditional parties: a small nation with an intense commercial vitality, like Belgium and Switzerland. A harmonious republic, it has not overlooked, in its material conquests, the suggestion of Ariel. An admirable master, José Enrique Rodo, has established a chair of idealism at Montevideo. Immigration, a surplus[1] in the budgets, a strict service of the internal debt, an increasing population—in short, all the aspects of economic progress—go hand in hand with the spread of education, the abundance of schools, the importance of journalism, and the moral vigour of a younger generation, which is ambitious for its country, and anxious that Uruguay shall play a noble part upon the American stage. The most advanced laws—divorce, suppression of the death penalty, a code protecting workers, separation of Church and State—give the development of Uruguayan civilisation a markedly liberal aspect. Miscegenation decreased after the destruction of the Charruas, and the race is more homogeneous and keenly patriotic. The enthusiasm of the Uruguayans has baptized Montevideo in the name of New Troy, for the possession of this impregnable city was, in the Iliad of America, the ambition of every conqueror: it was the refuge of the pilgrims of liberty, of ambitious foreigners, of Argentine Unitarians, and of a romantic soldier, Garibaldi. When the peoples of America, weary of civil discord, wish to unify their laws and glorify the heroism of their past conflicts, they proceed to Montevideo, as to The Hague or Washington, in periodical Peace Congresses. In a continent divided by fatal ambitions, the capital of Uruguay preserves the tradition of Americanism.
[1] This surplus amounted to eight millions of piastres between 1906 and 1910.
Anarchy in 1820—The caudillos: their part in the formation of nationality—A Girondist, Rivadavia—The despotism of Rosas—Its duration and its essential aspects.
The Argentine passed through a crisis, a time of anarchy, like the other American nations. But the struggle between autocracy and revolution assumed epic proportions in the vast arena of the pampa. It was the clash of organic forces. Tradition, geography, and race gave it a rare intensity. The provinces fought against the capital, the coast against the sierra, the gauchos against the men of the seaboard, and the various parties represented national instincts.
The anarchy and ambition of the provinces commenced during the first few years of Argentine life. Governments followed one another at rapid intervals; constitutions and regulations were legion; political forms were essayed as experiments, on Roman or French models; there was the Junta of 1810, the Triumvirate of 1813, and the Directory of 1819. Every two years, with inflexible regularity, from 1811 to 1819, this uneasy republic imposed a new Constitution. The Argentine troops, like the armies of the French Revolution, gave the gift of liberty to Chili and Peru; but at home the effort of Buenos-Ayres to dominate the provinces was less fortunate.
It has been written that in 1820 the confusion and {135} discord in the Argentine were so intense that the effort of the revolutionaries of May appeared to have spent itself. In Buenos-Ayres there was a divorce between the factions, and a struggle between Unitarian and federal caudillos: Alvear, Sarratea, Dorrego and Soler; between the municipalities and the rebellious troops; in the country as a whole it was the struggle of the provincial leaders against Buenos-Ayres and the Directory.
In the midst of this period of disturbance the federal democracy was born; the provinces concluded treaties, the capital compromised with the caciques, the governors of the provinces; the cabildo retained its representative character, the military and civil elements entered upon a mutual conflict.
Finally, in 1821, the Directorial party, aristocratic and Unitarian, was victorious. Bernardino Rivadavia was the representative figure of the period. Secretary in the government of Rodriguez from 1821 to 1824, President from 1826 to 1827, a civil dictator like Portales in Chili, a remarkable statesman, a reformer like Moreno and Belgrano, he presided over a premature realisation of the democratic ideal, and symbolised the Unitarian principles in all their force: the supremacy of Buenos-Ayres, constitutionalism, European civilisation, and the ideal Republic. He was the pupil of Lamartine and Benjamin Constant in a barbarous democracy. He had every gift—physical arrogance, oratorical power, honesty, enthusiasm, patriotism. He divined the elements of Argentine greatness: immigration, the navigability of the rivers, the stability of the banks, and external trade. But Buenos-Ayres was then a plebiscitary republic, in which the cabildo and the people resolved all problems of politics, and Rivadavia suffered ostracism, as he had enjoyed the unstable popularity with which democracies endow their leaders.
He was, according to the expression of {136} M. Groussac, a vigorous forger of Utopias. He granted all political rights; he wished to see a republic with a free suffrage; he 'doubled the number of the representatives of the people, and suppressed the municipalities which had prepared the way for the revolution. The executive power renounced its extraordinary attributes and submitted to the legislative power. Was this wise, in a revolutionary country, face to face with the disunited provinces? Rivadavia organised the judiciary as a supreme and autonomous entity. He declared, in messages dealing with the doctrine of high politics, that property and the person were inviolable; he proclaimed the liberty of the press, and recognised the liberty of the conscience.
He commenced the campaign against the Church, suppressing convents, seizing their possessions by mortmain, ignoring the ecclesiastic charter, and secularising the cemeteries. He aspired, like Guzman-Blanco, to found a national and democratic religion upon the traditional elements. A great educator, he had faith in the benefits of popular instruction, erected buildings for the use of schools and colleges, attracted foreign teachers, and promulgated a plan of study in which the physical sciences and mathematics, forgotten under the old system, occupied the first rank. He founded numerous pedagogic institutions: the Faculty of Medicine, the Museum, the Library, special technical and agricultural schools, and colleges for young girls.
He did not overlook material progress. His financial reforms were radical; the national budget was instituted; a tax upon rent was imposed, and the customs duties were regularised. The minister Garcia contributed to this financial reformation. Rivadavia understood that the whole future of Buenos-Ayres depended upon that great civiliser, the ocean, and he ordered the construction of four harbours {137} on the coast. He favoured immigration, protected agriculture, improved the ways and means of transport, reformed the police, and contracted the first loan.
It was under the government of Rivadavia that the Constitution of 1826 was promulgated. This was inspired by the doctrines of J. J. Rousseau, and his Contrat social; but it aimed energetically at centralisation and authority. Senators were to exercise their functions for twelve years; they were the conservative power. The mandate of the deputies and the Director was to last only four years. It was a Unitarian constitution which made Buenos-Ayres, in spite of the protest of the federals, the capital of the United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata, the centre which "rules all the peoples, and upon which all depend."
Rivadavia imposed unity, propagated his ideas, multiplied reforms, and checkmated the Church; he was the civiliser par excellence. He wished to transform a Spanish province into a European nation, a barbarous people into a democracy, a sluggish and fanatical society into a liberal republic. He governed in the interests of Buenos-Ayres and the seaboard, for the future Latin democracy, and neglected the desert, the anarchy of the provinces, the indomitable sierra, the caciques, and the Indian tribes. He was vanquished by feudal barbarism, by a confused democracy, hostile to organisation and unity; but his work remains, in the shape of a constitutional programme. Alberdi writes that he gave America the plan of his progressive improvements and innovations: it is an immense political structure, a gospel of democracy. Were popular myths to rise in spontaneous birth in Buenos-Ayres, before the evocative ocean, as in the Greek cities lovingly bathed by the Mediterranean, then Rivadavia would be the genius of Argentine culture, the patron of the city, the creator of its arts and its laws.
While the magistral President was showering down reforms, the demagogues triumphed over his efforts toward unity. His constitutional labours miscarried in the provinces; the governors would not submit to the haughty supremacy of Buenos-Ayres. They fought for power in rude civil wars, in the North and on the seaboard. Some provincial congresses were precariously installed, and Montevideo renounced its union with the Argentine. A caudillo, who at times rose to the moral greatness of the Liberators, Artigas, longed to see Uruguay, his country, independent. The Empire of Brazil and the Argentine democracy were wrangling for its possession. Rivadavia stoically resigned the Presidency in 1827, having shown himself a prodigal and sumptuous creator and an eminent prophet; he left the country, having wearied the populace with his inventive genius.[1] In his place General Dorrego was elected Governor of Buenos-Ayres, the federal chief of the city, as Rosas was of the country. The war with Brazil continued; but in 1828 a treaty was signed which recognised the autonomy of Uruguay.
RIVADAVIA.
President of Argentina (1826-1827).
This Brazilian victory aroused the indignation of the Argentine Unitarians; they overthrew Dorrego and elected General Lavalle to be Governor. A storm of tragedy broke over the divided city. Dorrego was shot by order of Lavalle, and then began the terrible war of hatred between federals and Unitarians—a Jacobin conflict.
The daring revolt of the provinces had coincided with the promulgation of the Constitution of 1826. {139} Since 1820 the Argentine provinces had been in a state of revolt against the imposed or suggested rule of Buenos-Ayres; it was the period of caudillos. To the aristocratic presidency of Rivadavia they opposed the Terror. They represented the barbarian might of the provinces. They made federation a reality, cemented it by long quarrels, sanguinary hatreds, conventions, alliances, and friendships. The provinces fought within the nation; the cities within the province; within the city, the families. An inflexible individualism—the fundamental Spanish tradition—dissolved the provisional crystallisations of society and politics. It was not a simple federal disaggregation—a clash of ambitious overlords eager to surround their manors by new domains; it was a mystic barbarism, the leaders of which recalled the nomadic and fanatical Tamerlane. They were impelled by a strange, rude force, disordered and prodigious—the genius of the pampa, the instinct of a vagabond race.
General Quiroga, the "Facundo" of Sarmiento, was the prototype of these turbulent gauchos. By conquest or alliance he extended his government over several provinces. The paltry Bustos, the Reinafé family, the crafty Lopez, and Ferré were also among the Argentine caudillos; Lopez extended his rule over Entre-Rios, Santa-Fé, and Cordoba. Facundo dominated them all by the range of his deeds and his influence. He came from the Andes to the conquest of the seaboard and the great rivers; he reigned in Rio, Jujuy, Salta, Tucuman, Catamarca, San Juan, San Luis, and Mendoza; he grouped vast provinces together, and paved the way for unity in the future; he was the forerunner of Rosas. Cruel and loyal, noble and bloodthirsty, honest, frugal, and aggressive, a product of the pampa, he felt himself actuated by primitive forces, by simple passions and instincts, by heroism and the love of peril. Powerfully built, {140} with an abundant shock of hair, bushy eyebrows, and the eyes of a ruler, he resembled one of those gloomy Khalifs who brought the mystic terror of the Orient to the West. On the standard which he raised against the liberalism of Rivadavia was the proclamation: "Liberty or death!" He was the "bad gaucho" the enemy of social discipline, who lives far from the city and its laws, conscious and proud of his barbarism. Sarmiento stated that he entertained "a great aversion for decent persons," and that he hated the lordly city of Buenos-Ayres. He fought with success against the Unitarian generals, Paz and La Madrid, and against such secondary leaders as Lopez and Reinafé. His life was a continual running hunt across the rugged mountains; his goal the city of Rivadavia and the Directory; his campaigns were bloody, and worthy of a chaotic period, during which barbarism changed only in kind from Buenos-Ayres to Rioja. He pillaged, executed, and triumphed in his rude insurrections at Tala, at Campana de Cuyo. He wrote to General Paz in 1830, in his downright manner: "In the advanced state of the provinces it is impossible to satisfy local pretensions except by the system of federation. The provinces will be cut to bits, perhaps, but conquered—never!" Assassinated at Barranco-Yaco by the treacherous hand of Reinafé, probably with the complicity of Rosas, he left his heritage to this last of the caudillos.
Rosas was one of those hyperborean beings upon whom Gobineau conferred a perdurable authority over the human herd. He possessed a coat of arms, blue eyes, and the spirit of a ruler. Sober, astute, proud, energetic, he combined all the characteristics of a great and imperious personality. He obeyed neither general conceptions nor vast political plans. He was a will served by ambitions. His authoritative character of a Spanish patrician made him the {141} paterfamilias of the Argentine democracy. The pursuit of power was an instinct, a physiological need; he governed in the interests of federation, the concrete, practical idea, which he absorbed by contact with many regions, of the nomadic gaucho, the self-willed provincial; and he expounded it in 1824 in a famous letter to Quiroga. He was not content to work for the mere realisation of the North American ideal; his aim was national federation. He was persuaded of "the necessity of a general government, the only means of giving life and respectability" to a republic; but only the properly constituted states would accept this central authority. Of a federative republic he writes that nothing more chimerical and disastrous could be imagined when it is not composed of properly organised states. The anarchy of the Argentine was not a condition propitious to the foundation of federation or unity; Rosas affirmed, recalling the United States, that "the general government in a federative republic does not unite the federated peoples: it represents them when united." So he wished to unite the provinces: "the elements of discord among the peoples must be given time to destroy themselves, and each government must foster the spirit of peace and tranquillity."
Amid dogmatic governors and impenitent revolutionaries, this president who desired a real federation and accepted, as a factor of human conflicts, time, the creator of stable nations, seems a figure strangely out of place. Rosas left "the elements of discord time to destroy themselves"; an invulnerable dictator, he watched over the obscure process of national gestation, isolating his people, detesting the foreigner, as though he wished to prepare the way, free from all perturbing influences, for the fusion of antagonistic races, the purging of local hatreds, and the harmonious life of men, traditions, and provinces within a plastic and fruitful organism. From {142} chaos a spontaneous federation was to spring, of the North American type; as in the formation of the United States, the provinces, in possession of their autonomy, concluded pacts of union. Such was the federal pact of 1831, between the provinces of the seaboard—Corrientes, Entre-Rios, Buenos-Ayres, and Santa-Fé; such, twenty years later, was the Constitution of 1853.
Pacts and charters recognised "the sovereignty, liberty, and independence of each of the provinces."
The work of Rosas was profoundly Argentine. It presents a triple civilising significance; it overcame the partial caudillos, conquered the wilderness, and founded an organic confederation. Traditional, for it respected ancient liberties; opportunist, adapted at the critical moment of national evolution, for it prevented the disaggregation of the provinces by the labours of unconscious leaders. Like Porfirio Diaz, Rosas destroyed the provincial caudillos; he was a Machiavelli of the pampas. He dissembled his unificatory aims; he caused division among the governors, stimulated their mutual hatred, presided over their quarrels; he grouped or isolated his disciples, who cut a lively figure on the hustings. When the power of Quiroga increased, he protected Lopez, and exposed the former to the hatred of the Reinafé; Quiroga once murdered, he had the latter accused. He expected the governors to submit to his exequatur; the demi-gods fell before the stroke of his imperial axe. "Rosas is the Louis XI. of Argentine history," said Ernesto Quesada, with justice; for over the heads of the feudal barons he raised a magnificent Unitarian structure; he was the creator of Argentine nationality.
ROSAS, THE ARGENTINE TYRANT.
(1829-1852.)
Rosas surrounded himself with chosen men: the Lopez, Anchorenas, Mansillas, Sarrateas, Riglos. The cultivated classes demanded a strong government, renounced their liberty with a Dionysiac {143} delight, and conferred "unlimited power" upon Rosas. The tyrant governed, in short, above the law and above custom. He enacted laws to prohibit the carnival, that popular souvenir of the pagan Bacchanalia, and to establish the rules of mourning; he himself was the law, was reason, was the logos; intoxicated with docility, a whole nation bowed before his Cæsarian will, without hierarchic distinctions. His rule was a supreme levelling, a universal servitude; the Terror. Rosas, impelled and favoured by the supreme traditions of a race, became the Cæsar of a democracy.
Gauchos and negroes supported him; with the aid of the people he subjected the ruling classes. He unified; he destroyed social privileges; he inverted the order of the hierarchies in the Unitarian, aristocratic city. His political methods were of the simplest. Instinctively he applied infallible psychological truths. He knew the power of repetition, of habit, of formulæ; he understood the enervating effect of panic; the effect of vivid colours and sounding words upon the half-breed mob. "Federation or death!" he reiterated, in his proclamations. "Savages, infamous Unitarians—impious Unitarians," one read day by day in the journals, and in official documents; that vivid colour, red, was the symbol of federalism. Rosas wrote to Lopez: "Repeat the word, savage! repeat it to satiety, to boredom, to exhaustion."
What such influences did not obtain was produced by that effectual levelling agent, terror. Rosas crushed rebellious wills; he overpowered his enemies, the impious, infamous, savage Unitarians; he was the Jacobin of the Federation. A prætorian legion, the Mazorca, chopped off such heads as raised themselves. He was a fanatical democrat, a lay Inquisitor; if he discovered a political heresy he condemned it without pity. As national caudillo he {144} protected religion, attracted the clergy, and attacked the Unitarians, not only because they were savage, but also because they were impious. Like Portales, he made a tool of religion. He defended the "patrons," and condemned the Jesuits as conspirators, not from religious motives. The clergy saw in him the man chosen by God "to preside over the destinies of the country which saw his birth." Rosas governed according to tradition and history by making use of the hatred of the masses and classes, the fanaticism of the mob, the servility of the natives; he was therefore a Catholic and a democrat.
Like all great American dictators, Rosas proved to be an eminent administrator of the public finances. In a time of national disturbance and military expenditure he displayed an extraordinary zeal in organising and publishing the national accounts. His method was simple rather than scrupulous; he appointed honest men to high representative posts. The official journals published the fiscal balance-sheet monthly; receipts and expenditure, the fluctuations of paper-money, and the state of the national debt. Rosas was vigorous in assuring the service of the external debt; he accumulated neither loans nor fresh taxes. His economic policy was orderly and far-seeing. To him we owe the construction of many of the public works of Buenos-Ayres, including a magnificent promenade, Palermo, where he built his autocratic residence. His invulnerable dictatorship was based upon material progress and fiscal order.
He was also the defender of the continent against European invasion. Like Juarez and Guzman-Blanco, he professed a jealous individualism; his work was bound up with race and territory. Continuing the revolutionary movement of 1810, he desired not merely freedom from Spain but autonomy against the whole world.
In the twenty-four years, 1829 to 1852, Rosas {145} made federal unity a reality. He was first of all governor and leader of the gauchos; in 1835 he won the absolute power for five years, which term was extended by several re-elections. Before him was the anarchy of 1820 and the Unitarian bankruptcy of 1826; after him, the powerful unity of 1853 and 1860, and the triumphal progress of the Argentine democracy. Between this discord and this unity came his fruitful despotism, a necessary Terror. His dictatorship was more efficacious than the autocracy of Guzman-Blanco or the ecclesiastic tyranny of Garcia-Moreno. Porfirio Diaz and Portales, two founders of political unity, were his disciples. He was the builder of a practicable federation, because he was a gaucho and could interpret the inner voices of his race; he governed as an American, without borrowing anything from European methods. Without him anarchy would have been perpetuated, and the vice-kingdom of La Plata would have been irremediably disintegrated. Like the Roman deity Janus, Rosas had two faces; he closed one epoch and opened another; a past of warfare and terror and a future of unity, peace, democratic development, and industrial progress.
He defended the country against the territorial aggression of foreign coalitions, and his own power against conspiracy and revolt; against the avenging stanzas of Marmol, the aggressive journalism of Rivera Indarte, and Varela, the rude pamphlets of Sarmiento, and the meticulous dialectic of Alberdi. To Unitarian insult he opposed the bloody campaign of the Mazorqueros; to European tutelage, the individualism of the gauchos.
Rivadavia was thesis, Facundo antithesis, Rosas synthesis. The first represented absolute unity; the second, anarchical multiplicity; the third, unity in multiplicity, plurality co-ordinated, union without violent simplification. Rivadavia comprehended the {146} necessity of the supremacy of Buenos-Ayres, built as it was upon the ocean that brought men and wealth; he stood for the fundamental unity of La Plata. Facundo, in the place of this premature unification, erected the autonomous province, pure and simple, but diverse. Rosas brought about the final harmony of the forces of Argentine politics. He united, like Rivadavia; he separated, like Facundo; he dominated the capital city, and moderated provincialism; he painfully founded the Confederation. His renown reached Europe; Lord Palmerston was his friend; great foreign journals, such as the Times, the Journal des Débats, the Revue des Deux-Mondes, discussed his policy and his influence. Alberdi recognised that he contributed to the repute of the Argentine abroad by his heroic defence of his territory. His cruelty was effectual, his barbarism patriotic.
"Como hombre te perdono mi carcel y cadenas;
Pero como Argentine, las de mi patria, no!"[2]
cried Marmol. They were necessary chains, for they bound the country together after the feudal dispersion, vanquished the resolvent forces of provincialism, and gave unity and strength to democracy.
After Rosas, his political work, the confederation, survives in spite of the ambitions of Buenos-Ayres. A logical development confirms the ties that unite the provinces, grouping and organising all the national forces about the capital city. In eighty-six years, from the anarchy of 1820 to the glory of the Centenary, the Argentine has seen a transformation of race, of policy, of wealth, of culture, of history; Argentina is now a great Latin nation, which will soon possess the moral and intellectual hegemony of South America.
[1] Carlos Octavio Bunge, in his remarkable book, Nuestra America, gives the struggle between the capital and the provinces a racial and economic character. He distinguishes three periods of evolution: from 1810 to 1816 the Creole half-breeds contend with the "Goths"; from 1816 to 1825 the rural masses rise against the rich middle classes of the provinces; from 1825 to 1830 Buenos-Ayres—the capital city, rich, and Creole—enters upon a conflict with the provincial cities—Indian or mestizo.
[2] "As man I forgive you my prison and my chains, but as Argentine, those of my country—no!"
THE PRINCIPLE OF AUTHORITY IN MEXICO,
CHILI, BRAZIL, AND PARAGUAY
These republics have stood aside from the normal evolution of Venezuela, Peru, and Bolivia; they have known neither perpetual revolutions nor lasting anarchy. Social progress has been accomplished under the pressure of long-continued tutelage; the principle of authority has been a safeguard against disorder and licence. These are the more stable and less liberal peoples. In them liberty is not a spontaneous gift by charter, but something won from selfish oligarchies or tenacious despots. Such is the case in Mexico, Chili, Brazil, and Paraguay.
The Emperor Iturbide—The conflicts between Federals and Unitarians—The Reformation—The foreign Emperor—The dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz—Material progress and servitude—The Yankee influence.
In Mexico we find an alternation of revolutions and dictators. The principle of authority is supreme; it even gives rise to two empires and a permanent presidency; there has always been a well-organised monarchical party. Modern Mexico demonstrates the excellence of strong governments in a divided continent.
The Aztec nation was born into freedom in 1821, after the capitulations of Cordoba. The Viceroy O'Donoju recognised the triumph of Iturbide, and the rights of Mexico; the Spanish leader and the patriot caudillo decided upon the creation of an empire which should conserve the rights of Ferdinand VII., like the juntas of South America; the creation of a constituent congress, and the nomination of a provisional government, which should preside over the destinies of the nation during the indecision of the twilight of the old régime.
Iturbide very shortly came forward as an incarnation of the national characteristics; he was actuated by an imperious ambition, and haunted by the triumphs of Napoleon. He had studied the classics, and was a brilliant and persuasive orator. His courage and activity and his dominating character {150} won him a sudden popularity. Bolivar, in a letter to Riva-Agüero, said: "Bonaparte in Europe, Iturbide in America: these are the two most extraordinary men that modern history has to offer." The clergy, the Mexican nobility, the troops, and the lower classes, who regarded him as the liberator of their country, flocked around him. Congress was in part hostile; Generals Bustamente and Santa-Ana supported him in the Assembly; Generals Victoria and Guerrero attacked him. The deputies understood that he aspired to absolutism, and that he aimed at becoming the heir to the overlords of Anahouac. A prætorian revolution proclaimed him "Constitutional Emperor of Mexico" on May 21, 1822. The political opinion of the country was divided. The monarchists wanted a Spanish prince; the republicans a federation, a democracy with full liberties. Of these latter Iturbide said: "They were my enemies because I was opposed to the establishment of a government which would not have suited Mexico. Nature has produced nothing suddenly; she acts by successive stages."[1] The Emperor responded to the aspirations of the populace, and flattered the imagination of the crowd by the pomp and pageantry of his coronation, and the splendour of his Court; he was the national monarch, the creator of his country, as were the feudal kings in Europe. Convinced of his prestige and impelled by ambition, he dissolved Congress. Thenceforward his government was menaced by caudillos, who defended the violated constitution. Iturbide abdicated in May, 1823, and when he returned to his country the sentence of death pronounced upon him by contumacy was enforced. He was executed by shooting in 1824.
PASEO DE LA REFORMA, CITY OF MEXICO, ON INDEPENDENCE DAY.
(From "Latin America, the Land of Opportunity,"
by the Hon. John Barrett.)
Santa-Ana, who had directed the revolution against the Emperor, was the Mexican caudillo, as Facundo was the caudillo of the Argentine pampas, or Paez {151} of the Venezuelan plains. He professed no definite political doctrines; he was, first of all, a radical reformer, but afterwards, with prudent opportunism, he accepted the ideas of the conservatives. Crafty, ambitious, ignorant, a democrat by instinct, he finally became the fetish of the mob, the hero of the civil wars; as president, as general, as supreme authority, he governed his divided country. Between Iturbide and Juarez, between emperor and reformer, he was for twenty years a sombre and overpowering figure. His triumph in 1824 ratified the policy of federalism; the Constitution recognised two chambers; the presidential term was four years; the judicial power was irremovable, and the provincial assemblies elected the national Senate. Under this system General Victoria became president. It was then that a fear of Spain and the monarchy resulted in a policy of rapprochement with the great Northern republic. The yorkina lodges, radical in spirit, acquired considerable influence, and worked in favour of a North American hegemony; the prestige of the ancient Scotch lodges, on the other hand, decreased.
Santa-Ana led a new revolution which gave the Presidency to General Guerrero; General Bustamente was Vice-President. The economic crisis was accentuated by these successive revolts; the Government was carried on by means of onerous loans; the increasing debt drained the Treasury, and discontent evoked another revolution. A supporter of Iturbide, General Bustamente, autocratic and conservative, was proclaimed President; he had the previous ruler, Guerrero, shot, stifled the provincial rebellions, and re-established internal order. A civil war forced him, in 1832, to compromise with the director of all these political conflicts, Santa-Ana.
With him the liberals triumphed, and a social transformation commenced. The liberals were the "new men," as in Venezuela, under Guzman. The {152} colonial oligarchy, the republican bureaucracy, the high clergy, and the wealthy classes composed the conservative group which had founded the Empire with Iturbide, and desired royalty with Lucas-Alaman. Against them rose the reforming democracy, liberal or radical; it was a conflict of principles and classes. The lawyers, the lesser clergy, and the coloured middle classes gained the upper hand in 1833, and the great economic, social, and religious reformation commenced; Juarez was presently to give it the dignity of constitutionalism. In the struggle against the conservative and monarchical Church the liberals disregarded ecclesiastical jurisdiction, confiscated by mortmain the goods of the religious communities, promoted lay education, and secularised the reactionary University, as Garcia Moreno in Ecuador condemned the liberal University, and, impelled by a pernicious radicalism, they suppressed the army of a nation a prey to anarchy.
After Santa-Ana a coloured caudillo, Benito Juarez, was the leader of the reformers (1839), and with him the liberal movement took on a profoundly racial character. Juarez represented the natives, the democracy, as against the colonial oligarchy; like Tupuc-Amaru, he was the redeemer of the Indians; like Las Casas, the protector of the vanquished. Better than Guzman-Blanco and Rosas he realised the ideal of those American republics which were oppressed by memories of colonial days; hatred of all privilege, a dream of absolute liberty, war upon the tutelary Church, and a strict despotism designed to create classes and ideals.
He proclaimed the separation of Church and State, and the confiscation of ecclesiastical property. Lerdo de Tejada was the economist and ideologist of the Reformation; Juarez was its muscle, its iron will; he realised without compromise the old liberal programme. Congress, divided into Juarists and anti-Juarists, {153} elected him President. All the laws against the Church were applied, but that did not enrich the country. Stock-jobbing, scandals, waste, and bankruptcy accumulated and formed a terrible argument against the "pure" liberals; the latter defended themselves by means of proscriptions and new and violent laws of reform. Once more the shadow of the Empire hovered over the turbulent democracy.
It was no longer a question of the national Empire of Montezuma or Iturbide, but of the foreign eagles. Napoleon III., a conqueror by family tradition, intervened in Mexican affairs; like Louis-Philippe, he desired colonies oversea; he defended the Latin civilisation against the Yankee peril, protected the Church against the Reformation, and extended over barbarous countries the amiable empire of the French spirit, the spirit of lucidity, method, and harmony.[2] In 1861 the Mexican Congress suspended the service of the debt, as a remedy against financial bankruptcy, and this measure provoked French intervention; there was a crusade of ambitious creditors against Mexico. England and Spain signed an agreement in London; both were enemies of the insolvent democracy. The hatred of Mexico was then excited against Spain; the Spanish Minister was expelled; the federal Government refused to treat with the Spanish chargé d'affaires. The Reformation general, Zaragoza, organised the country for defence against the Spanish invasion; he was victorious at Puebla. The Mexican resistance was concentrated upon the central plateau, where dwelt the penates of ancient Mexico. Zaragoza died; Puebla, attacked by the French, defended itself heroically; the national war became also a civil war. The monarchists desired a prince, the restoration of the Catholic Church, and {154} the consolidation of the conservative oligarchy; the clergy shared their ambitions. The Archduke Maximilian arrived, to whom the conservatives had offered the throne of Iturbide, and from 1863 to 1864, after some hardly contested battles, the invaders ruled the country. Maximilian, surrounded by the aristocrats, triumphantly entered the Aztec capital, and the people, overpowered by the splendour of the new court, accepted the foreign monarch.
This monarch, pompous and ambitious, wished, like Napoleon III., to found a "liberal empire," a democratic kingdom; he did not condemn the Reformation, but professed to be anxious to assist it and to purge it of its Jacobin origin. Heir to the viceroys and dictators, Maximilian re-established the right of "patronage" and favoured religious tolerance. A few reformers applauded his liberalism, but neither liberals nor conservatives were satisfied; the former because they had dreamed of a secular republic, the latter because they wished for a clerical monarchy. The revolution continued. The Emperor, effaced like any Mikado, did not govern; his tycoon, General Bazaine, at the head of a French army, was the real source of authority.
BENITO JUAREZ.
President of Mexico in the struggle against the French invasion.
His presidential term ending in 1865, Juarez proclaimed himself Dictator in order to continue his resistance against the Empire, which, between a monarch and a general, between the discontented clericals and the aggressive reformers, was tottering to its fall. The North American Republic condemned the monarchy in the name of the Monroe doctrine: this was intervention against intervention. The War of Secession in the United States was over, and the States feared their Imperial neighbour. From that time fortune abandoned the Mexican monarch. Napoleon III. had occasion to withdraw his troops; Prussia, ambitious of hegemony in Europe, and victorious at Sadowa, was causing him {155} uneasiness. He advised Maximilian to abdicate; but the Emperor was by no means willing to give way; he had become a reactionary, and vigorously defended his Imperial dignity. The tragic hour of desertion and disaster struck, and the Mexican revolution was prolonged (1866). Porfirio Diaz, escaping from Puebla, which was besieged by the French, organised the reconquest of Mexico at Guerrero. Sombre and virile, he took refuge on the high plateau, as did the Gothic king in the mountains of Asturia. He captured Puebla after a day's glorious fighting. Surrounded by Republican troops, Maximilian took refuge at Queretaro; he was taken prisoner with his army and the best of his generals. He was condemned to death, and Juarez, inflexible as the Aztec gods, refused to show mercy. The Emperor was executed at Queretaro on the 19th of June, 1867. On the following day Mexico yielded to the legions of Diaz. The Reformation had vanquished two emperors and erected two scaffolds. In these struggles Juarez, the half-breed caudillo, and Porfirio Diaz, the invincible general, had acquired a lasting influence, and Juarez, as President and Dictator, proceeded to organise the country. He strengthened the executive power against anarchy, endeavoured to found a conservative Senate, maintained order by means of a disciplined army, and improved the condition of finances by severe economies. His ministers, better educated and more intelligent than their leader, realised sweeping reforms while he gathered the victorious generals about him. The new Government entrusted the Preparatory School to a great educator, Gabino Barreda; like Rivadavia in the Argentine, it applied itself to the moral and material transformation of the country. It protected foreign capital, established liberty of trade, favoured colonisation, fostered irrigation, and commenced to build a railway from Vera-Cruz {156} to Mexico. The ideal of Juarez was the education of the native race, the nucleus of nationality; like Alberdi, he believed that Protestantism would be a fruitful moral doctrine for the Indians. "They need," he told Don Justo Sierra, "a religion which will force them to read, not to spend their money on candles for the saints." He established an industrial democracy, a secular State.
But between his political ideas and his dictatorial acts there was a discrepancy which explains the ultimate sterility of his efforts. "The only book he had read thoroughly was the Politics of Benjamin Constant, the apology of the parliamentary system."[3] Juarez relied upon the democracy, on the governing Chambers; he aspired to a position like that of a constitutional monarch; that of a glorified spectator of the quarrels of parties. His ideas urged him toward parliamentarism; his ambitions, to dictatorship. He professed to conciliate all the national interests, to be the personification of the Mexican democracy, but his dislikes were mean and paltry. Severe, impassive, a great personality in his strength and his silent tenacity, he had no great ideals; he was no orator, no leader of the subject crowd. He was merely the supreme cacique of a half-breed nation.
JOSÉ IVES LIMANTOUR.
Minister of Finance during the Administration of General Diaz
in Mexico.
Despite his government, anarchy continued in the States. The soldiers who had conquered in the national war disturbed the domestic peace of the nation by their ambitions; in Yucutan, Sonora, and Puebla revolutions broke out, which Juarez energetically suppressed. His presidential term at an end, he aspired to re-election, and defeated Lerdo de Tejada, the financier, and the warrior Diaz; but his victory was not lasting. The great revolution in which Diaz figured commenced, and Juarez died in the midst of the struggle for power. Lerdo de Tejada, who continued the reforms already {157} commenced, was the next President; with him liberal principles figured definitely in the Mexican constitution. Lerdo strengthened the central power, and started a campaign against the cacicazgos, the tyrants of the Sierra, and founded a tutelary Senate. He, like Juarez, aspired to re-election, and a fresh rising at Tuxtepec prepared the way for his fall. The Supreme Court considered itself authorised to examine the titles of the presidential candidates, and invalidated his re-election. By 1877 the Revolution had conquered the country.
It imposed upon Mexico the hero of the re-conquest, Porfirio Diaz, who became the new national caudillo, inheriting the Imperial ambitions of Iturbide, the craft of Santa-Ana, and the moral dictatorship of Juarez.
The country was disorganised, its credit in the European markets was destroyed; its national finances were in disorder. The blood-stained soil was divided among petty caciques; radicalism led to demagogy and liberty to anarchy. Jacobinism had triumphed with the Revolution, and condemned the re-election of presidents and the conservative Senate; the omnipotence of the popular Chamber was proclaimed. The result was a feeble and ephemeral government; in the absence of a moderating power the radical Assembly was supreme. A man was needed to organise chaos; Porfirio Diaz was the necessary autocrat, the "representative man" of Emerson.
Stern and gloomy, he was preparing for the priesthood. Born in 1830, he was brought up in poverty. A half-breed, he combined the courage of the Iberian with the dissimulation of the native. He knew the efficacy of work, perseverance, and method; he was extremely ignorant, but was shrewd and perspicacious. He was six times elected President, for the last time in 1900, and peace was coterminous {158} with his rule. A great hunter and a master of manly exercises, his intensity of will-power was supported by solid physical foundations. Above all he was a man of action; his character was served by a robust organisation; a powerful frame and a vast power of resistance enabled him to rule and to intimidate. His intelligence applied itself to concrete things; it was unable to examine facts in the transforming light of an ideal; he had no general ideas, no spacious plans; he was slow in deliberation and rapid in action. His politics were an organised Machiavellism; like Louis XL, he divided that he might reign and dissembled that he might conquer. His ideas of government were simple: "Not much politics and plenty of administration," said his deeds and his programmes.
Machiavelli, in The Prince, taught the means of ruling in states which have had autonomous governments; he suggested the implacable extermination of the reigning families. General Diaz followed this counsel in part. To overcome anarchy he attacked the obscure tyrants of the provinces, and had them shot or exiled, or else he attached them to himself by means of honours and rewards. He imposed peace by means of terror. He knew that order was the practical basis of progress, as in the formula of Comte, which the Mexicans are fond of quoting, and this order he firmly established.
The destruction of the revolutionary instinct constituted the negative side of his work; Diaz built upon this foundation an industrial republic, practical and laborious. Weary of barren ideologies, he put the Reformation and its Jacobin doctrines out of his mind, accepted and encouraged the Yankee influence which had made Lerdo de Tejada so uneasy, conquered barbarism and the desert by means of the railway, and raised a number of loans. He was the president of an industrial epoch.
His economic labours were imposing; in twenty-five years Mexico was transformed from a divided republic into a modern State, from a bankrupt nation into a prosperous and highly solvent people. Diaz recalls the gods who built cities and filled the earth with the gold of fruitful grain, and taught the virtues of the metals and of fire. "Modern Mexico," writes the Times in 1909, "is the creation of the genius of General Diaz; he is the greatest statesman the transatlantic Latin communities have produced since their foundation." This organiser of peace astonished the old-established nations, who listened attentively to the fruitful words of light which fell from the lips of the Aztec demigod.
In 1884 Diaz commenced to reorganise the finances of his country. He was seconded in his task by eminent secretaries like Limantour and clever financiers like Romero and Macedo. The gold of the United States invaded the market; it was employed in the construction of railways and in industrial undertakings. In 1905 Limantour established the gold standard as basis of the monetary system. The service of the debt was regularised by agreement with foreign creditors; the budgets ceased to present deficits; in ten years the surplus reached a sum of seven million pesos. By 1894 the exports were in excess of the imports. Thanks to this favourable commercial balance, credit increased, and industries were multiplied; the exuberant national prosperity attracted foreign capital and settled it in the country. Here are some figures touching this progress. In 1876, at the beginning of Diaz's rule, the Mexican imports amounted to 28 millions of pesos (silver) and the exports to 32 millions; in 1901 the amount of the former was 143 millions and of the latter 148 millions. The imports, a proof of the wealth of the {160} country, had increased fivefold; the exports, a sign of agricultural and mineral production, had increased almost in proportion. In twenty years (1880-1900) the yield of the mining industry increased from 24 to 60 millions, and in the same period 20 banks were founded. A loan of 40 million dollars was contracted in 1904, being issued at 94, bearing 4 per cent interest, on the sole security of the national credit; that is, the security usual in such transactions in the case of the great European nations. In ten years the budget has doubled, increasing from 50 to 100 millions. The surplus of the fiscal revenue is devoted to decreasing the burden of taxation, and in providing the country with fine and spacious public edifices. The service of the foreign debt has been secured with a continuity rare in America, more than 30 per cent. of certain budgets having been used for that purpose. The result of the industrial evolution of the country is proving to the detriment of agriculture, as in the Germany of Bismarck and the Russia of Count Witte; looms, paper-mills, hat-factories, &c., have been established. The national requirements being satisfied, the products of agriculture are exported—tobacco, rubber, and sugar. The network of railways is being greatly extended, and irrigation works are being installed. Colonies of Boers have settled in Mexico. The invasion of capital goes on unchecked, as does the development of the economic life of the country, and its political progress, revealed by its external credit.
Thus, the President, by means of sound money, steady finance, and foreign gold, has founded a practical republic. He has overcome the traditional revolts—the ardour of the Jacobins and racial passions—by a utilitarian campaign; he has created a quiet and peaceful State, in which nothing is to be heard but the sound of its factories. A great {161} leveller, he has been, according to the Spanish tradition, a Cæsar at the head of a democracy, the arbiter of national conflicts, the supreme caudillo, obedient to the voices of tradition.
Sierra, the Athenian minister, and Bulnes, the tempestuous historian, exalt him in admirable dithyrambics. Sierra states that Diaz created "the political religion of peace." But in the Aztec nation this cult demands its sacrifices. Bulnes considers that the Dictator procured peace by "the system of Augustus as expounded by Machiavelli"; he gave the caciques "riches and honours," but not the government. And, in fact, Porfirio Diaz has built up the new Mexico by freeing it from the sectarian struggles and the foreign invasion which threatened to destroy it; but his work has been marred by uncertainty, and a heavy shadow has weighed on uneasy spirits.[4] The President at last abdicated his powers after a bloody revolution, and it is not easy to say whether or no his removal will not result in anarchy or new Dictators. His minister, Sierra, has written that the political system of the Dictator "is terribly dangerous for the future, for it imposes customs which are contrary to self-government, without which there may be great men, but not a great people"; and Bulnes says: "The personal régime is magnificent as an exception," for "under its empire a people grows accustomed to expect everything as a favour and a grace; to be the slave of the first who strikes it, or the shameless prostitute of the first to caress it."
These criticisms prove that General Diaz has not applied the British methods of preparation for self-government by means of a firm tutelage. Those who condemn his long autocracy say that he enervated {162} men's minds by means of terror, and has accentuated the Aztec gloom by a narrow and monotonous absolutism. Dictatorships are not societies of freemen; they give humanity uniformity and servility. In abandoning the supreme power after establishing order and peace, by presiding as moral authority over the free development of republican institutions, Porfirio Diaz, like Don Pedro in Brazil, might have been the supreme educator of the democracy.
He governed with the aid of the "scientific" party—a group which believes in the virtue and power of science, exiles theology and metaphysics, denies mystery, and confesses utilitarianism as its practice and positivism as its doctrine. The Mexican politicians, in renouncing Catholicism after the Reformation and the passing of the Jacobin laws, have not abandoned dogma and absolutism in doctrine and in life. As in modern Brazil, positivism in becoming the official doctrine. The heirs of Juarez are slowly returning to Catholicism; they aspire to definite certitudes; they have their "Syllabus." In the President political majesty and the religious pontificate were united, as in the Muscovite Czars and the Spanish kings.
In the restoration of the colonial order Juarez and Lerdo de Tejada attracted European capital, for the Yankee supremacy troubled them. Against this policy, which was based on racial interests, General Diaz protected North American capital; bankers and adventurers invaded the country, dominated its industries, and built railways. How check the fatal current which brings the all-conquering gold from the North? The national transformation is the work of the magnates of Wall Street; Mexico is becoming a "zone of influence" for the United States.
GENERAL PORFIRIO DIAZ.
President of Mexico (1876-1880 and 1884-1909).
The scientific party, intoxicated by an orgy of utilitarianism, has not sought to arrest the great {163} plutocracy of the North by means of European alliances.
Unity, wealth, peace: these are the magnificent features of modern Mexico, the admirable work of the Dictatorship. The Yankee peril; lay dogmas which fetter intellectual evolution; a level of utilitarian mediocrity without ideals of expansion, without culture, without the true Latin characteristics; popular ignorance and fresh revolutions: these are the disturbing aspects of this long period of tutelage. If the country triumphs over the obscure agents of dissolution, the influence of Porfirio Diaz will be as durable as that of Pedro II. or Portales or Rosas.
[1] Memoires autographes, Paris, 1824, p. 28.
[2] The brilliant Mexican historian Bulnes states that French intervention was "the revolt of Napoleon III. against the Monroe doctrine" (El verdadero Juarez, Mexico, 1904, p. 816).
[3] Bulnes, ibid., p. 101.
[4] Diaz pacified Mexico by means of the weapon employed by Rosas—fear. Bandits and revolutionaries were shot. His victims are said to have numbered 11,000.
Portales and the oligarchy—The ten-years Presidency—Montt and his influence—Balmaceda the Reformer.
In Chili the course of political evolution has been entirely original. Her first years of republican life were as troublous as those of the Argentine, Bolivia, and Peru; it was an age of anarchy. Carrera, the dictator, overthrew four governments; there were mutinies in the barracks, and quarrels among the generals; the Dictator O'Higgins fell in 1823; a junta followed him, and after the junta four governors, Freire, Blanco Encalada, Eyzaguirre, and Vicuña—ephemeral figures which a turbulent democracy set up and destroyed. They occupied the centre of the moving scene for some few months, and were seen no more. During the administration of Pinto, from 1827 to 1829, there were no less than five revolutions. Federation was attempted in a country essentially Unitarian; the Congresses were disruptive assemblies; and in 1828 and 1829 an obscure demagogy rose in revolt against the guardians of social order. The national life was chaotic: vandalism in the country, commerce paralysed, industry at a standstill, finance in disorder, credit vanished, and politics revolutionary. The parties were struggling for power; the "old wigs," pelucones, or conservatives, and the "white-beaks," pipiolos, or liberals. The latter governed a people {165} in love with liberty. The political orgy continued until 1830; the Chilian people went from liberty to licence, and from licence to barbarism. At last the demagogy was checked by a man of superior powers, Diego Portales, founder of the Araucanian nation.
THE CATHEDRAL, SANTIAGO, CHILE.
(From "Latin America, the Land of Opportunity"
by the Hon. John Barrett.)
The social constitution of Chili, the contact of the castes, and the traditions of the country all favoured his work of organisation. A narrow territory, whose racial action must be unifying, and a long coast-line, evoking the desire of adventure and expansion; these are the geographical basis of a homogeneous race. The Araucanians do not exhibit the gloomy passivity of the Quechuas and Aymaras; they are rude and warlike. Miscegenation has not, as in Peru and Brazil, been complicated by Asiatic and African strains; it has been simple, without the terrible "hybridisms" of other countries. Hence national unity and historical continuity. Over the servile mass reigns, haughty and remote, a narrow oligarchy formed of austere and positive Basques, deliberate Anglo-Saxons, merchants, and sailors.
No slaves, as in the tropics, but inquilinos, feudal serfs of territorial barons. The oligarchy is agricultural, and therefore stable and profoundly national. In short, we have a copy of Anglo-Saxon society, or of the first Roman Republic; a false democracy governed by absolute overlords.
With these strong conservative elements, Portales constructed an austere nation. He was born in 1793, and was thirty-seven years old at the time of his first intervention in political life. He was a "new" man, a merchant, with precise ideas. He had the suggestive power of the caudillos, a concrete intelligence, a moderate education, a strong will, some power of reflection and authority. He might well become the leader of a race that knew nothing of lyric enthusiasms nor enticing dreams—the sensible {166} director of a practical people. Minister under Ovalle in 1830, he profited by the victory of General Prieto over the pipiolos. His conservative, authoritative ideas carried him into power. He never wished to be President, but a powerful minister, like Disraeli or Bismarck. Three or four simple and concrete ideas guided him in politics; in the first place, the organisation of Chili against anarchy. Religion is one of the forces of order, and Portales, like Garcia-Moreno, utilised it without going so far as theocracy; the principle of authority is necessary in order to organise a country, and the leader of the pelucones demanded a strong executive with extraordinary faculties. Between two excesses—autocracy and demagogy—he inclined rather toward the former, and became a minister-dictator.
Portales governed against disorder; he dismissed the revolutionary leaders, and men he divided into good and bad. He surrounded himself with "good" men: they were, naturally, conservatives. He hated sargentadas (barrack mutinies); he educated the soldiers, and founded a national guard as a counter-check to militarism. He destroyed the bandits who infested the country. Primary and normal schools were opened, in which he favoured religious instruction. A severe economy was introduced into the national finances. His work was given legal and economic form by a Peruvian jurist, Juan Egana, and a Minister of Finance, Tocornal.
The minister wished his work to share the majesty of things eternal; his personal and passing influence on life was not enough to satisfy him. He had thoughts of a statute, an inflexible mould for the future. The Constitution of 1833, which others promulgated under his sovereign ægis, so to speak, was his political legacy.
This Constitution created a conservative Senate and a strong Executive; the first was to defend tradition, {167} the second to direct the progress of the nation. The provincial assemblies, vestiges of federalism, were suppressed, and the municipalities were entrusted with the public services. In case of internal trouble, the President could declare a state of siege and suspend the constitutional guarantees; but he could neither judge nor apply penalties. The departments elected the deputies; a limited suffrage appointed the senators; their mandate was for nine years. Patronage was organised, and the Church became a State institution, for it defended property, order, and the "good ideas" of the pelucones: it consecrated the oligarchy, pure and simple.
This Constitution explains the slow progress of Chili in matters of liberalism, her long domestic peace, and the lasting hegemony of an oligarchic group. Alberdi attributed the Chilian peace to "a vigorous Executive" and the Constitution of 1833.
This statute once a reality, Portales quietly organised the country; he imposed order "by reason or by force." He retired from power, and, in consequence, the conservative party passed through a crisis, during which Rengijo and Tocornal were in conflict; but Portales reappeared, as Minister of War, under Prieto, and Tocornal, the eminent financier, was at his side. The caudillo of order resumed his work of organisation with incomparable activity; his patriotic ambition was not satisfied by his triumphs over intestine quarrels. He realised that Chili was a maritime nation, commercial and oligarchical, like Carthage, and he aspired to the domination of the ocean.
In the north, under the leadership of Santa-Cruz, Peru and Bolivia had united. Portales feared this confederation, intervened in the affairs of Peru, sent two expeditions against Santa-Cruz, and fomented anarchy in Peru. He destroyed the great work of the great Bolivian cacique, and for half a century {168} his imperialism made progress. Peru had wealth, brilliance, and tradition; Chili deprived her of the hegemony of the Pacific in a four-years war (1879-84).
The work of Portales was considerable. He established peace in the interior, and excited the ambition to rule; he organised the country under a strong authority, aided by a tutelary Church; he fostered wealth and material progress; he built highways and railroads. A Constitution was to establish his moral dictatorship for a period of fifty years. The liberals themselves—Lastarria, Huneeus Gana—recognised his masterly action in a time of disorder. A conservative, Walker Martinez, wrote a brilliant apologia for his work. Vicuña Mackenna, the historian, wrote that "he was rather a great mind than a great character," though his life's work, from the repression of anarchy to the Peruvian war, proves plainly that he was rather a great character than a great mind. Portales died in 1833 by the hand of an assassin.
Manuel Montt continued his political work. His minister, Antonio Varas, assisted him, as Tocornal had assisted the leader of the pelucones. These conservative minds began to govern in 1851, and the re-election of Montt in 1856 prolonged their term of action; this was the "Decenniate," a period of bloodstained autocracy. The Monttvarists became a national party; they defended order to the death, by violence and dictatorship, first of all against the radicals, and later against the radicals and the pelucones. These ten years of disastrous organisation divided two periods: the conservative period of Prieto and Portales, and the liberal period of Perez and Errazuriz.
A liberalism better defined than that of the pipiolos was causing the champions of order some uneasiness. The eloquence of a tribune, Matta, the patriarch of {169} radicalism, the propaganda of Bilbao and Lastarria, and the work of revolutionary clubs, such as the "Society of Equality," formed a party of romantic youth eager to sacrifice itself for its ideals. Montt and Varas opposed it, and exiled or condemned to death the future liberals—Santa-Maria, Vicuña Mackenna, &c. They considered that Chili was not yet sufficiently prepared for the theoretical liberties upheld by Lastarria and Bilbao; they sought to promote education of the British type, with a view to liberty and self-government. They were the representative personages of the Creole oligarchy, a powerful conservative force, rude and beneficent. Dictatorial repression did not destroy liberalism; the presidents of the future were to be liberals, and Montt himself slowly changed the direction of his policy. In 1858, in the last years of the decenniate, the pelucones attacked him because he tolerated the Protestant religion in Valparaiso.
Under the Monttvarist government, as under the dictatorship of Guzman-Blanco and Garcia-Moreno, the country progressed in an economic sense. Railways, highroads, and telegraph lines were constructed. Montt fostered agriculture and the colonisation of the soil in the south by means of credit banks; he opened nearly five hundred schools, and also founded a national bank. Maritime commerce increased, and the public revenue was doubled during the Decenniate; finally, the admirable civil code of Andres Bello, promulgated in 1857, gave discipline and stability to the civil life of the country. Portales, Bello, Montt, and Varas organised Chili both politically and socially.
After Montt, the presidencies of Perez, in 1861, of Errazuriz, in 1871, and of Santa Maria, in 1881, modified the conservative tendencies of the country. All the conquests of the liberals—the civil register, civil marriage, religious toleration—became laws of {170} the State. Liberalism has not lessened the presidential authority. Perez, like Montt, ruled for ten years. Long autocracies and conservative constitutions explain the strength of Chili amid the anarchy of South America.
Portales was the organising genius; Montt represented an epoch of social defence; Balmaceda was the democratic reformer in an oligarchic country, a liberal president in a time of conservative traditions. Balmaceda is the greatest Chilian figure after Portales; his presidency excited a revolution, and transformed the political life of his people.
José Manuel Balmaceda belonged to the Chilian oligarchy. He was descended from a very old colonial family. Juan de Balmaceda was president of the Real Audienca, the king's tribunal, towards the end of the eighteenth century. The name of the family reveals its Basque origin. Balmaceda was born in Santiago in 1838. His father, Don Manuel José Balmaceda, was a conservative, the possessor of vast latifundia, as the head of a traditional family.
Balmaceda adopted democratic ideas. "Apostate" the conservatives called him, forgetting that he had changed his doctrines, but had not abandoned his original mysticism; he believed in liberty as he had previously believed in the inflexible dogmas of the conservatives. He belonged to the Reform Club of Santiago, in which a brilliant younger generation upheld all the liberal idelas and romantic faiths of 1848, the antitheses of the ideas of the pelucones and the Monttvarists. To the despotic executive he opposed electoral liberty, a single-term presidency, autonomous municipalities, and the restriction of presidential powers; to the Catholic oligarchy, religious tolerance; to the traditions of authority, the formal recognition of the rights of the press and the rights of assembly, meeting and petition; to the confusion of the powers of the State, their independence. {171} Balmaceda was the president of the Reform Club. He did not attack the position of a traditional group with plebeian fervour, as the avenger of an age of servitude; he left their ranks, rich and patrician, to condemn their authority and their privileges. It is the attitude of Winston Churchill in liberal England.
Balmaceda had powerful tools at his disposal: personal wealth, the basis of independence, a sympathetic creed, and a party which had been growing powerful under the governments of Perez and Errazuriz.
We may distinguish three phases in his political action: as a deputy he championed the laws of reform; as Minister of Foreign Affairs he prevented the intervention of the United States in the Pacific war; as President he increased the presidential power against the tyranny of Congress. From 1870 to 1879 he was an impassioned parliamentarian, believing in the efficacy of liberty against the excesses of the conservative régime. In the Chamber, as deputy and as Minister of the Interior and Religions, he supported the legal measures of the liberals: secular burial, civil register and marriage, and liberty of worship. In place of an absolute separation of Church and State—not to be realised in Chili—he proposed the union of the two powers on the basis of the traditional "patronage" and religious liberty. He desired no radical reforms. "Let us renounce," he said, "the idea of accomplishing everything in a short space of time; let us beware of carrying our solutions, guided by a spirit of rigorous abstraction, beyond what is required by the actual needs of the moment for the correct application of liberal doctrine and for the common happiness." Balmaceda, a radical in 1879, moderated his ambitions ten years later, when he came to ask the Chilian Parliament to pass his reforms.
Minister of Foreign Affairs under Santa-Maria in 1881, he consolidated the victories of Chili in the war of the Pacific. The military campaign was over, and Peru was vanquished, but was defending her territorial integrity against the conquering ambition of Arauco. What the armies had not been able to do diplomacy hoped to effect. The intervention of the United States would have proposed, as the solution of the war, peace without conquest; this was the policy of Mr. Blaine, who dreamed of an America at lasting peace under the golden reign of arbitration. A North American minister, Mr. Trescott, brought the proposals of his government to Chili. Garcia-Calderon, President of Peru, the champion of territorial integrity and national union, stimulated the intervention of the United States, but the mediators were inclined to treat the victors with docility. President Garfield died, and the North American policy changed. The Peruvian President was a prisoner of Chili; from Rancagua to Quillota, from Santiago to Valparaiso, he was the irreducible symbol of vanquished Peru. The United States abandoned him; their policy finally became indecisive, turbid, Machiavellic. Lima and Callao were occupied until 1883, when Balmaceda succeeded in arranging the terms of peace, and the treaty was signed which delivered over to Chili the riches of Southern Peru.
JOSE MANUEL BALMACEDA.
President of Chile (1886-1891).
The Imperialist minister had conquered; he aspired to the presidency of his country. Santa-Maria put him forward, and public opinion accepted him, proud of his diplomatic triumphs. An age of plenty commenced; the ancient Chilian austerity was at an end. Balmaceda governed with his energies increased a hundred-fold by the gold of Peru, the moral power of victory, his ambitions as a statesman, and the vocation for empire which a victorious war develops in the heart of an energetic people.
Materially, he transformed Chili; morally, he presided over her dissolution, or, at least, her decadence. Neither this degeneration nor this progress was the exclusive work of the autocratic President. Wealth enervates a sober people; it permits the erection of monuments, but it weakens men's characters. Honest and far-sighted, Balmaceda employed the millions he had drawn from the war in material enterprises; he built schools throughout the country, special institutes, mining and agricultural colleges, professional colleges; he began the construction of new railways, of a breakwater at Talcahuano, of palaces for the administrative services; he fortified several ports, bought new ironclads, encouraged immigration, founded military schools, and re-equipped the army. He suppressed contributions, assured the service of the foreign debt, amortised paper money, and demanded guarantees of the banks. When in Chili you inquire as to the origin of a public works, a school, or a prison, you will hear of Balmaceda. In finance, in education, and in colonisation he effected a fundamental renaissance; he was the master-builder among Presidents.
Balmaceda was raised to the presidency by three parties: the liberals, the radicals, and the nationals; that is to say, by three aspects of one central idea, varying from an attenuated liberalism which verged on conservatism in its ideas (nationalism) to a violent liberalism, verging on demagogy (radicalism). The Balmacedist victory stifled all attempts at clerical reaction; Balmaceda was a reformer. His ambition could not be satisfied by material progress and practical advance. As ideologist, he applied abstract ideas to politics. He wished to unite all the liberals in one preponderant party, to ensure a still greater independence to the public powers, judicial and municipal, and to despoil the executive of its traditional attributes; to found an educated, liberal, {174} military, and virile democracy as a check against the oligarchy, in which democracy dreamers of every school could find their Utopia.
Between his character and his doctrines there was a grave discrepancy. An autocrat by vocation and by temperament, because a patrician, he nevertheless weakened the executive by the Municipal Law, which established autonomous municipalities, and by the law of incompatibilities, which conceded to Congress a complete independence of the other powers. "The mandate of the deputy" declares this law "is incompatible with the exercise of any paid public function." At this hour of party confusion Balmaceda despoiled the executive of efficacious agents in Parliament. He was thus, by a reform which, ideally speaking, was perfect, preparing the way for serious future conflicts.
The liberal President condemned the Constitution of 1833, the basis of Chilian order; he believed that the new period demanded a new statute. "Neither the desires of the country nor those of the parties or groups now active," he wrote, "can adapt themselves to the system of centralisation and authority consecrated by the Constitution of 1833."[1] He criticised "the attributions which devolve upon the chief of the Executive Power, the weakening of initiative and of the local charters by excess of vigour in the central power; the part played by the Executive in the formation of the judicial power, its influence upon the elections, the functioning of the legislative power, the centralisation of the administration, and the works which foster material progress."
But by abandoning, by a sort of heroic suicide, the forces conferred upon him by a traditional statute, Balmaceda paved the way for an omnipotent Congress. Pelucon by heredity, a cultured despot, he {175} soon disregarded the power which he himself had raised above the decadent presidency. The contradiction between his life and his doctrines, his heredity and his ideals, gives his noble and patrician figure the majesty of a character of Æschylus, ennobled at once and annihilated by destiny. Balmaceda weakened the executive and put forward official candidates; established the preponderance of Congress and wished to have independent ministers; destroyed the Constitution of 1833 and ruled as an autocrat. Renan compared himself to the scholastic hircocerf, which bears within itself two hostile natures; this was also the fate of Balmaceda.
His political ideal was that of Benjamin Constant; of Lamartine, of Laboulaye. He accepted neither the despotism of the President nor the tyranny of Congress.
Could the perfect equilibrium of the public powers be realised in Chili, or was it merely the noble dream of an ideologist? Very soon the omnipotence of a centralised government was replaced by the dictatorship of anarchical Parliaments. The parties imposed ministers upon Balmaceda, and presented him with lists of candidates, among whom the President, powerless to refuse, was to choose his counsellors.
It was a radical transformation, for from the time of Portales the government had intervened in elections, had insisted upon presidents and deputies. Balmaceda disregarded his own work, rebelled against Congress, governed without a budget, defended the rights of the power which he had destroyed by short-sighted legislation, and tried to enforce his wishes as to the Presidency, in the traditional manner, and Congress refused to accept his candidate. It has been truly said that the government of Balmaceda was the crisis of electoral intervention.[2] Parliament refused to pass the President's law of contributions, {176} overturned his ministries, and protested against the designation of an official candidate; as in the time of the French Revolution, a revolutionary committee was formed in the heart of the Chamber. The two dictatorships clashed. The revolution broke forth in 1891; the fleet revolted; civil war divided families; Congress fought for the Constitution, the Government for the autocracy. From La Moneda Balmaceda directed a terrible war against the combined forces of the fleet, the banks, and the Parliament. The factions fought with lamentable ardour; it was a war of hatreds and reprisals, bitter as a racial conflict. Two battles, Concon and La Placilla, destroyed the power of the President.
The revolutionaries got the upper hand, invaded Valparaiso and Santiago, and the Araucanian savages burned the dwellings of the President's friends, and swept, brutal and drunken, through the silent cities. Balmaceda took refuge in the Argentine Legation, and his supporters hid, while a horde of vandals proceeded to reduce the capital to ruins. The defeated President took on a stoic grandeur; like a hero of Plutarch, he transformed his fall into an apotheosis; he purified the local tragedy by catastrophe. Serene as a figure of antiquity, he committed suicide, after drafting a noble political testament. "Among those who are to-day my most violent persecutors," he wrote, "are the politicians of various parties whom I have heaped with honours, whom I have exalted and served with enthusiasm. I am in nowise surprised, neither by this inconsequence, nor by the inconstancy of mankind.... All the founders of South American independence have died in dungeons, in prison cells, or have been assassinated, or have perished in proscription and exile. Such has been civil war in the ancient as in the modern democracies. It is only when one has witnessed the fury to which the victors in a civil {177} war abandon themselves that one comes to understand why, of old, the vanquished politician, even though he were the most unworthy servant of the State, made an end by falling upon his own sword."
After these considerations of political philosophy, the firm protestation of the hidalgo. He cannot submit to "the criterion of judges whom he dismissed from their posts on account of their revolutionary ideas." Two ways remained open to him: flight or death, and he preferred the second, for it might lessen the persecution and the woes to be endured by his friends. "I might still escape," he says in his testament, "by leaving Chili, but this expedient would not be consistent with my antecedents, nor my pride as a Chilian and a gentleman. I am inevitably delivered over to the judgment or the pity of my enemies, since the Constitution and the laws have no longer any virtue. But you know, gentlemen (he is addressing Claudio Vicuña and Julio Banados-Espinosa) that I am incapable of imploring favour, or even benevolence, of men whom I despise for their ambition and their lack of citizenship." He felt that a great crisis, or a drama, requires a protagonist or a victim, and he accepted his destiny to the death. Above the half-breed caudillos, above the obscure crowd who swarm in palaces and parliaments, hungering for power and display, rises this patrician figure, towering and solitary.
In his political testament he condemns the existing system: "As long as parliamentary government, as men have wished to practise it, and as the triumphant revolution will uphold it, shall continue in Chili, there will be no electoral liberty, no serious and permanent organisation within the parties, nor peace between the groups in Congress." His bitter prophecy is accomplished: an excessive and sterile parliamentarism triumphed with the revolutionaries. From Portales to Balmaceda the President was the supreme {178} authority; after Balmaceda Congress governed, and the President, the slave of the ruling groups, could neither dissolve Parliament nor appeal to a popular referendum. The liberty of the vote has been won, but it ratifies the tyranny of the Assemblies. The parties are fractional; authority, the basis of Chilian greatness, has declined. A President without initiative, an incoherent ministry, a Parliament divided and uncertain: there is the political outlook. "The Government of Congress is the Government of the parties, and these political entities exist in Chili only in the shape of antipathies or memories."[3]
The Balmacedist party itself did not escape the universal dissolution. It still supports the presidential system, but it does so without the rigidity of its founder; it is liberal, democratic, and parliamentary; its strength lies in the assemblies. "In liberalism," Don Julio Zegers can write,[4] "the Balmacedists are those who prefer Unitarian pacts to doctrines."
In the political world the tradition of the pelucones, of a strong tutelary authority, is dying; in the social world the oligarchy is losing its ancient privileges before the progress of the middle classes. Balmaceda, the founder of schools and colleges, the champion of all liberties, realised this national transformation. Chili was the scene, after the political revolution of 1891, of a social revolution, a warfare of castes, a bloody conflict between the feudal overlords and a Third Estate formed in the schools, liberal and industrial. Two parties, radicals and democrats, are organising themselves for the battles of the future. "The radical party," writes an observer, "is composed of the fervent enemies of the clergy and a {179} great part of the youth of the middle class, which combines with its religious hatreds a certain degree of dislike of the wealthy and respected classes."[5] Señor Edwards believes that this socialistic tendency, which is predominant among the radicals, "constitutes a serious danger for the future." The democratic party, like the English labour party, and the united socialists of France, is a working man's party.
The revolution of 1891 was directed by the bankers. After the war of the Pacific the Chilian oligarchy was dissolved; it formed itself into a plutocracy, without austere traditions, which is predominant in the Parliaments and is ambitious to seize the reins of government. Balmaceda would never give way before the "new men"; as an aristocrat he was the enemy of the merchants. Portales founded a society of patricians, but the liberal president could not organise the democracy he dreamed of. The financiers united with the great families before the threat of formidable strikes, and the intellectual elevation of the middle class, bankers and landowners and property owners grouped themselves in a more accessible oligarchy, much after the pattern of the oligarchy of the United States. Balmaceda was the last representative of the great Chilian tradition, of the tutelary oligarchy which led and educated the people and distrusted the plutocracy.
[1] See J. Bañados Espinosa, Balmaceda, su gobierno y la revolucion de 1891, vol. i. pp. 455 et seq.
[2] Said by Don Juan Enrique Tocornal, a Chilian politician.
[3] Alberto Edwards, Bosquejo historico de los partidos politicos chilenos, Santiago, 1903, p. 116.
[4] Cited by Vicuña-Subercasseaux in his study of Balmaceda. See Gobernantes y Literatos, Santiago, 1907, p. 64.
[5] Edwards, as cited.
The influence of the Imperial régime—A transatlantic Marcus-Aurelius, Dom Pedro II.—The Federal Republic.
While the republics of America have passed, without prudent transition, from colonial dependence to self-government, Brazil, by means of paternal autocracies, was prepared for the ultimate realisation of its republican dreams. There liberty was not the immediate gift of unrealisable constitutions, but the logical end of a painful conquest. Brazil was successively a tributary colony, an independent monarchy, an absolutist empire, and a federal and democratic republic. One principle, that of authority, was dominant throughout this process of evolution. A rigid despotism gradually ceded secular prerogatives before the attacks of an ardent liberalism; progress was definite and order lasting, and revolution has been powerless to shake the principle of monarchical continuity.
Portugal has not yet been invaded by the French armies. The royal family, carrying the monarchical penates, have fled toward their distant colony, the idyllic and tropical Brazil. We are in 1807: Maria, Queen of Portugal, is insane; João de Braganza, the regent, placid and undecided, hopes for a bourgeois ostracism, without political convulsions.
In Brazil, the monarch, guided by conservative spirits, transforms the economic system and decrees {181} the freedom of the ports, and the metropolitan monopoly is thereby abolished. England, watching over the exodus of the king, demands protection for her products. The factories which a policy of lamentable rivalities had closed are reopened. As early as 1808 the king wishes to found an empire in this colony, devoid as it is of political personality; in 1815 he raises it to the category of kingdom, thus laying the foundations of nationality. Independence, after this, will only be the natural segregation of an organism already formed.
The government of the Portuguese king develops all the national forces which were embryonic in the colony—art, law, literature. He founds the Bank of Brazil, establishes a military academy, a national library, and a botanic garden; he fosters agriculture and immigration. His new domain seems to have transformed the mediocre monarch. Under the influence of his queen, Charlotte, eager for power and display, he longs to extend his dominion over Uruguay and Paraguay, perhaps even to reconstitute, to his own profit, the vice-kingdom of La Plata. He seizes upon French Guiana, which remains in the power of Brazil until 1817.
But such vast plans as these do not strengthen the hands of the monarch. The Court, silent and extravagant, does not please the Brazilians, and the King favours the Portuguese merchants by an extreme prodigality. He creates a new nobility, that of the "sons of the King," and its influence in the palace and its insolent display soon weary the colonists. The old régime is still extant; a parasitical bureaucracy, recruited among the Portuguese, weighs heavily on the destinies of Brazil.
A revolution in Portugal in 1820 invites the King to return to Europe to accept the Constitution put forward by the revolutionary junta of Lisbon. The monarch leaves his son, Dom Pedro de Alcantara, {182} in Brazil, and quits the country. It is said that on bidding Dom Pedro farewell he cried: "Before long Brazil will separate from Portugal; if it is so, crown yourself before some adventurer gets hold of the sceptre."
The Lisbon Parliament wished to destroy the reforms of João VI. in Brazil, and to transform a monarchical nation into a feudal colony, but the Brazilian deputies then in Portugal protested and emigrated to England. A revolution at Pernambuco in 1817 had raised the standard of nationalism. The manifesto or Preciso of the revolutionaries formulated the complaints of the colony. "There is no longer any distinction," said the victorious patriots, "between Brazilians and Europeans; all consider themselves brothers; as descendants of the same origin, as inhabitants of the same country, as believers of the same religion."
Journalism, in its infancy, was propagating constitutional ideas both in the north and in the south. Jacobin declamation and romantic ideology created a powerful movement in the taciturn colony. Governmental juntas were appointed in the provinces. Portuguese and Brazilians struggled for political and social domination, but a Lusitanian army, in spite of popular protest, imposed the oath of fidelity to the Constitution which had been promulgated for the metropolis by the distant Cortes.
The prince prevented a federal disaggregation and founded the unity of Brazil. He united the representatives of the rebellious provinces, convoked, in 1822, a Constituent Assembly, visited the country districts, and became the "perpetual defender of Brazil." Like the Gothic kings at the time of the Moorish invasion, or the French princes who were faced with feudal anarchy, he founded a national dynasty, and bound the unity and independence of Brazil with the destinies of the monarchy. Dom {183} João VI. had raised Brazil to the rank of a kingdom; Pedro I. rendered it independent of Portugal. "Independence or death!" he cried, in his triumphant Odyssey across the rebellious provinces. At Ipiranga floated the new flag, gold and green, of the new-born Empire. Pedro I. was crowned Constitutional Emperor in December, 1822.
José Bonifacio Andrade e Silva, naturalist, philosopher, and soldier, an encyclopædist according to the French tradition, was the minister of this national transformation; he condemned the revolution, having previously supported natural rights and excessive liberties. He suppressed the journals, and the monarch dissolved the Constituent Assembly, whose violence and lyrical propensities were not a help to the political action of a conservative minister.
Extreme groups were formed which the Emperor endeavoured to conciliate: reactionaries who wanted an absolute government, idealists who wished for a republic, moderates, and conciliatory monarchists who sought a gradual progress under a stable government. Weary of revolutions the Emperor inaugurated a despotic régime; he withdrew from the Assembly, exiled the rebels, among others Andrade, now radical but formerly a reactionary, and always greedy for power. He surrounded himself with Portuguese troops, and the new nobility, the filhos do reinho, and the press attacked him in the name of nationalism. It demanded the persecution of favourites, as in the Spanish colonies the expulsion of the old ruling classes was decreed.
The Emperor once again united the moderate parties, and demanded a Constitution, to which the country swore allegiance in 1824; it was a constitutional charter, an imitation of the liberal European charters. In 1826 he convoked a new National Assembly. Revolutions were still disturbing the country; some provinces wished to secede {184} from the new kingdom; Pernambuco was always the centre of liberalism. An old patriot, Paez de Andrade, hoped to unite the Northern States of Brazil in the "Confederation of the Equator." The monarch sent troops to the north to intimidate the country, and the Lower Chamber condemned this act of despotism; a radical priest, Diego Antonio Feijó, led the radical opposition. He was a revolutionary in Parliament, demanding a responsible government, and condemning the ministers who forced peace upon the provinces by means of foreign legions, German and Irish mercenaries.
The Chambers were invaded by republicans and federals, and Pedro I. by no means abandoned his reactionary ministers. These latter succeeded one another in a series of perpetual crises. The external warfare complicated the political situation; Uruguay had revolted, counting on the aid of Argentine regiments. The Brazilians were defeated, and recognised the independence of Uruguay by the treaty of 1828.
King João died in 1826, and the Emperor remained undecided between the traditional kingdom and the new Empire. He formed a liberal Cabinet to satisfy radicals and federalists, who had triumphed at the elections of 1830. A useless transaction: ministries fell, and the financial muddle increased. The people of Rio de Janeiro revolted, and the Emperor abdicated. José Bonifacio, creator of the political régime, was to be the tutor of the infant prince.
The Regency was a moderate government which steered clear of reactionaries and exaltés both, of absolutism and republicanism. Father Feijó, minister of the Regency, became, like many radicals, a conservative; he organised the National Guard, suppressed military meetings and enforced peace in the interior. Subversive movements continued, and the invulnerable minister repressed them. The administration {185} of the country progressed, schools were founded, the Assembly issued wise codes of laws. The Regent, Andrade, imprisoned and deposed, Diego Feijó was elected tutor of the prince in 1835; the old radical politician was now dictator. He represented the moderates as against the revolutionists; in extreme cases he abandoned liberalism for autocracy. As early as 1836 his political autocracy began to decline and the liberal campaign gathered force. Feijó passed over the regency to his friend, Aranjo Lima, and left the Government. This representative of authority in a country which was a prey to anarchy was autocratic by virtue of his patriotism; like all American dictators he stifled revolution in its blood.
The liberals of yesterday are often the moderates or conservatives of to-day in monarchical Brazil. Andrade, Feijó, and Pereira de Vasconcellos are examples of this inevitable transformation. Liberty was the creed of these politicians when they were oppressed by colonial absolutism, by the servitude anterior to the monarchy and the Empire; they realised their creed, and the reign of liberal principles resulted in disorder. The excess of authority or the excess of anarchy stood in the way of peace and progress. The political leaders of Brazil swayed from side to side; they were liberals against despotism and autocrats against demagogy.
In 1840 the infant prince attained his majority; the liberals, powerful in Parliament, demanded that the Regency should be terminated. The country longed for internal peace, but discord between the parties continued. Numerous revolutions disturbed the country. Minas and Pernambuco, where sedition had passed into a chronic condition, rose in 1842 and 1848 respectively.
Pedro II. governed with the liberals, but the dangers of excessive liberalism, of premature democracy, {186} forced him toward autocracy. He was a learned and sceptical Marcus Aurelius, a stoic who had read Voltaire. "A simple and modest democrat, losing nothing of his personal distinction," wrote the historian Ribeiro, "generous and disinterested, an example of all the domestic virtues, he courted the respectful sympathy of the crowd rather than popularity."[1] He was the first republican of Brazil; he presided over a nation in process of transformation. Before the clash of races, the revolutionary unrest, and Utopian radicalism his Government maintained the traditions, reacted against violent reforms, and favoured the gradual formation of a new world.
In 1841 he confided the ministry to the Marquis de Paranagua, who exiled the revolutionaries, reinforced the political unity of the country, and re-established the Council of State. New ministries continued the conservative reaction. Without freeing the slaves, Brazil prohibited the traffic in this black merchandise, at the suggestion of England. The Empire, faithful to its traditions, intervened in the affairs of La Plata.
The Viscount de Itaborahy, once the external conflict was at an end, presided over an administrative ministry. Immigrants were attracted, and founded German colonies in the south; the navigation of the interior was protected, and the higher regions of the Sertaõ were conquered. A new commercial code, an administrative organisation, agrarian laws, and the reform of the treasury: such were the various forms of the Imperial activity. Itaborahy was followed by an authoritative minister, the Marquis de Parana, a political figure of lasting national significance.
A great administrator, he organised public education, and extended the railways and the navigation {187} of the rivers of the interior. He was assisted in his labours by distinguished statesmen: a jurist, Nabuco de Araujo, and a diplomatist, Baron de Rio Branco. His activities were not merely administrative, but political and social as well. He wished to reconcile the parties; he absorbed the liberal element in the conservative group, and by this fusion of the old parties prepared the way for the appearance of new groups, dominated by a definite intention of liberation or conservation. The reactionary cabinets and the philosopher-Emperor had founded order in the place of revolutionary dispersion. But this order, the victory of narrow traditionalism, could not be lasting. Multiple racial elements—Portuguese, Indian, and African—were seething in the new society; democracy would prove to be the protest of redeemed slaves against a powerful oligarchy. The Marquis de Parana, who, having attracted the liberals, transformed his own conservative group, and consolidated order by reuniting the factions, understood that reaction could not be permanent in an incoherent democracy. He was the last of the conservatives and the first of the liberals.
The reactionary cabinets of Caxias, Olinda, and Ferraz followed his, and other parties were formed: authoritative conservatives, uncompromising liberals, and a party of conciliation. The elections of 1860 were a democratic triumph. Great orators came to the fore with a truly tropical eloquence; these "new men," like Antonio Leocadio Guzman in Venezuela, stirred the passions of the people. To oppose their liberal programme conservatives and moderate liberals united in Congress. The reactionaries governed from 1848 to 1862; now the radicals sought for power. The last conservative cabinets fell to pieces before the opposition of Parliament and the protests of the crowd. Despotic monarchy was condemned; constitutional monarchy had many {188} supporters; new elections, in 1863, increased the strength of the liberals and democrats. The Paraguayan war against the dictatorship of Lopez gave unusual prominence to the external life of the country, and political agitation died down.
Pedro II., representing the conservative interests of historical and national continuity, was opposed to an unruly liberalism. After one liberal ministry he chose two moderate cabinets, under Olinda and Vasconcellos, which were inclined to conservatism, and finally Itaborahy dissolved the Lower Chamber. The Emperor had gone back ten years; the ministry that in 1852 had marked the triumph of the conservatives was now to rule in the face of a rising tide of democracy. A constitutional monarch by law, he was none the less an autocrat, for he forced his ministries upon a hostile Chamber, and gave politics a direction contrary to the will of the people, and those their suffrage had newly elected.
The liberals rose against the reactionary Emperor and demanded reform or revolution. A transformation of the electoral system, of the Draconian code of justice, and of the army, which was really a Prætorian legion supporting an absolute power, and, in the social department, the liberation of the slaves: such was the programme of 1869. A dissident group of conservatives united with the liberals, and a patrician, Nabuco de Araujo, signed the manifesto of the reformers.
It was the crisis of the monarchy. Its historical function was nearly at an end; it had organised peace, created unity and nationality, and laid the orderly foundations of the new Brazilian race. Autocracy, necessary in the dawn of the century, was now contrary to democratic development; after 1870 the liberals openly aspired to found a republic.
The ministry of Viscount Rio Branco, from 1871 to 1876, maintained the status quo. A great administrator, {189} like the Marquis de Parana, he effected a reform in public education by founding special schools; he took a census of the country, and extended the network of railways. Immigration increased under his government and exchange was bettered. A great social reform changed the face of the Empire; in 1871 slavery was abolished. The separated classes were about to mingle with the nation; the result was the rise of a mestizo democracy. Slavery abolished, castes confounded, liberals discontented, the reactionaries growing old—on the doubtful horizon one supreme hope was visible: the republic. It was now the collective ideal, as the Empire had been in the last days of the colonial period. It was proclaimed, without violence, in 1889.
The Emperor, who abdicated, a symbol of the majestic past, had prepared the advent of the Republic that ostracised him. His ideas were liberal; he was the protector of the sciences; a smiling philosopher; and in fostering the intellectual transformation of Brazil he exposed his own autocracy to the criticism of the liberals. By abolishing slavery he weakened the power of the reigning oligarchy; by destroying privileges and uniting hostile classes he created a democracy.
The Empire, in America, represents tutelary authority. Between the feudal colony and the Republic—two extreme points of political development—arose the Brazilian monarchy, as a moderative power. It brought a necessary equilibrium, and, with that, progress. First of all it established autonomy; then a national order, a national dynasty; it preserved traditions, and organised the forces of society. Beside it arose a conservative oligarchy, bound to the soil; castes and permanent interests were created. The territorial overlords upheld the stability of the Empire, and an admirable political system imposed peace upon a heterogeneous people, {190} shaken by the clash of races and the opposition of seaboard and province. Between 1848 and 1862 the monarchy created the Brazilian nation.
In the South American republics anarchy destroys national unity and prevents the crystallisation of the social classes. In Brazil there were frequent revolutions under the Regency; military leaders were eager for power, but there was a permanent and inviolable bulwark against disorder. The Emperor was the caudillo of caudillos, the leader of leaders; the Constitution partially justified his despotism. Without violating it, he imposed, by means of conservative ministries, lasting peace and gradual reforms. Against this inflexible Cæsar struggled a seething democracy; it snatched certain privileges and won limited liberties, and eventually saw the birth of the Republic, the appointed term of political and social evolution. The rigour of the principle of authority has spared Brazil the perpetual revolutionary crises endured by other American nations.
[1] Work already cited, p. 516.
Dr. Francia—The opinion of Carlyle—The two Lopez—Tyranny and the military spirit in Paraguay.
Paraguay, a child of the old régime, has preserved seclusion and absolutism. In other republics independence was a violent condemnation of the colonial methods. Freed from Spanish tutelage, the Paraguayan democracy none the less maintained its retired life under paternal monarchs. Its evolution is original; showing neither continual anarchy, as in the tropics, nor the perpetual quarrels of caudillos, disputing territory and wealth. Dictators and tyrants imposed their inviolable will on the inland nation. Autocracy levelled classes and races, and prepared the way for the appearance, in isolated Paraguay, of a new caste, formed of the fusion of Guarani Indians and Spaniards. The dictators of Paraguay professed a rigid Americanism; they expelled strangers, and with arrogant patriotism wished the republic to be self-sufficing. Their ideal was essentially Spanish; a democracy governed by Cæsar.
Dr. Francia was the first dictator in the Republic founded by the Jesuits. A gloomy personality, of an intense inner life, like Garcia-Moreno, he seemed one of Cromwell's Puritans. Taciturn and solitary, truthful and punctual, methodical, like the Anglo-Saxons, and ambitious, but without passion or exaltation, he admired Bonaparte, and like him became consul and emperor.
He was born in 1758. He was the son of a Portuguese or Brazilian, Garcia Rodriguez Francia. He studied theology in the colonial university of silent, austere Cordoba. When General Belgrano fomented the rebellion of the Paraguayans against the Spanish rule, and a governmental junta was installed, Caspar Rodriguez Francia was a member of the latter. The little republic elected triumvirs and consuls in the Roman manner. A Congress assembled in the same year decreed the independence of Paraguay. The country freed itself not only from Spain but also from Buenos-Ayres. No longer recognising the limits of the ancient vice-kingdom, the junta refused to treat with Belgrano unless he recognised the autonomy of Paraguay.
The Congress of 1813, at which a thousand deputies were present, continued to parody Rome; it appointed Francia and Fulgencio Yegros consuls, and promulgated a political system. Cæsar and Pompey became the names of the new magistrates, who were alternately in power. The liberty of Paraguay was consolidated, and the consuls refused to send delegates to the Congress of La Plata, which the haughty metropolis convoked at Buenos-Ayres. These magistrates condemned Argentines and Spaniards to civil death, and forbade them to marry Paraguayan women of white race. In a third Congress (1814) Francia and Yegros demanded a temporary dictatorship.
Yegros was ignorant and popular. Francia, energetic, learned, and a born dissembler, was obedient to classic memories and to the Napoleonic tradition; he aspired to absolute power. He was appointed dictator for three years, and soon obtained supreme power. He improvised his policy upon reading the ancient history of Rollin; the republicans of Rome served him as constant models, whose energy and austerity he imitated.
Educated for the priesthood, he became an advocate. He knew the law and theology like a lettered colonial, subtle and dogmatic. Before becoming consul he had filled various municipal offices; first he was secretary to the municipality, then mayor. He studied local needs, and prepared to govern as a nationalist.
He made use of religion, as did Garcia-Moreno and Portales, in order to render his political actions more efficacious. He was tolerant in respect of beliefs, but condemned atheism; he felt that the Church was the only moral force in a disturbed democracy.
He would accept no international religion; he wanted a Paraguayan, American cult, in which also he resembled Guzman-Blanco. He declared himself head of the national Church, and disregarded the authority of the Holy See; he suppressed the seminary and the monastic orders of the Franciscans, the Dominicans, and the Sisters of Mercy, and proceeded to appoint vicars and curates himself. The Inquisition was abolished, processions were forbidden, and the number of holidays was reduced to a minimum. Francia ordered the payment of tithes, protected religion, and extended the rights conferred by patronage on the Spanish kings; he sold the goods of the Church to build schools and barracks. In short, he aspired to govern a Christian republic freed from clericalism.
Religion consecrated his authority; the Paraguayan Church taught that all power, even tyranny, was in its essence divine. When moral activity did not suffice, Francia, like Rosas, appealed to terror. Conspiracies against his tyranny were numerous; the Dictator shot the rebels. His punishments revealed an Oriental cruelty. In 1821 he executed the representatives of the Paraguayan nobility. He levelled his subjects, and governed without ministers, {194} surrounded only by informers and prætorian guards. In 1860 a Congress conferred perpetual dictatorship upon him, and he dissolved the Congress. He suppressed the cabildos, or municipalities, and replaced them by juntas selected by himself; he annihilated all hierarchy and all privilege, and assassinated Yegros, his companion in the Consulate. His enemies he imprisoned, exiled, or killed. His ambition was to cut off every head that raised itself above the level of the uniform, anonymous, and laborious crowd.
He established internal order under his autocracy. "Quarrels," he said, "paralyse industry, and injure the prosperity of the nation."
He created a Church and a Fatherland. To ensure his work, he expelled the Spaniards and isolated his country. He protected all foreigners who did not come from Spain, closed the ports to trade, and barred the rivers to free navigation.
His efforts were contradictory. He hated Spain; he wished to abolish the privileges of the nobility and clergy, and he restored the colonial system; he even aggravated it, giving it an unheard-of severity. He restored absolutism, commercial monopoly, and the communism of the Jesuits; there were estancias known as "the Country's," whose products satisfied the requirements of the budget. He unwillingly conceded licences to trade or navigate on the rivers; he opened great magazines, which recalled the colonial fairs, for the sale of merchandise. Paraguay existed in a condition of prodigious isolation; commercial transactions declined, and money went out of circulation.
During this time the population increased. The Dictator favoured Creoles, stimulated the crossing of Indian and foreign blood by severe measures, and carefully chose foreigners for the improvement of the Paraguayan population by means of forced unions; {195} in this way he continued the work of the Jesuits. A homogeneous democracy, a national conscience, was gradually formed.
Like all the great American dictators, he stimulated material progress, and rebuilt Assomption, the capital city. He constructed public works, and forts to stop the encroachments of Indians, protected agriculture, and created industries. His ideal was full autonomy in an isolation possibly barbarous. By successive regulations he forced proprietors to sow their lands, to extend the cultivated area; like the Peruvian Incas, he would have none idle in his kingdom; he distributed tasks and enforced their execution.
He ruled from 1811 to 1840, a long thirty years, a period attained by no other American dictator but Rosas. His work was rude and imposing; he created a race, and freed his threatened country in every sense, political, economic, and religious. A priest said once in an ardent panegyric: "The Lord, having cast a pitying glance upon our country, sent us Dr. Francia to save it." The tyrant thus became a redeemer, and is not without his strange legend. At seventy years of age he was regarded as a remote and divine personage. From a secret palace he governed a disciplined people. He had militarised the country and exalted patriotism, the strong national feeling of small nations, from Uruguay and Paraguay in America and Servia, to Bulgaria and Montenegro in Europe.
His long tyranny in no way debased the race. When he died Francia was mourned by his people, a people about to reveal in warfare a Spartan tenacity, a tranquil heroism. Paraguay was unconquerable; it was dispeopled, the masculine population disappeared, but the Republic remained erect and aggressive. Francia had formed a proud and warlike race. He was the most extraordinary man the world had seen {196} for a hundred years, said Carlyle in one of his Essays—a Dominican ripe for canonisation, an excellent superior of Jesuits, a rude and atrabilious Grand Inquisitor. The Scottish historian praises the grim silences of Francia—"the grim unspeakabilities"—that mute solitude in which remarkable men commune with the mystery of things.
After thirty years of uniform dictatorship the Guaranian people might have revolted against autocracy. But here, contrary to that which passed in other republics, the monarchy was not the term of absolutism. Francia was replaced by new tyrants, the two Lopez, and Paraguay accepted perpetual dictatorship.
A "ricorso" exhibited the old round of evolution: the triumvirate, then the consulate, then dictatorship.
The last of the Lopez was better educated and more moderate than the previous tyrants; he militarised the country, created an army of thirty thousand men, and developed the fleet. Brazil and the Argentine had difficulties with Paraguay; these two countries were quarrelling for supremacy in La Plata. Paraguay and Uruguay, States rebellious to every yoke, provoked conflicts between these ambitious powers. Brazil demanded reparation for the attacks directed by Uruguay against Brazilians, and Lopez intervened as meditator in this conflict. He assisted Uruguay to maintain "the equilibrium of La Plata." The Empire refused his good offices, and the haughty tyrant declared war. He asked General Mitre, President of the Argentine Republic, permission to send his troops across the territory of Corrientes. The President refused permission, and protested against the accumulation of Paraguayan troops on the frontier. The belligerents were now three. Paraguay attacked two powerful States, the Argentine and Brazil. The war lasted five years (1865-70).
The war had all the grandeur of an ancient epic. The heroism of Paraguay overcame numbers, destiny, and death; she defeated the allies, and, hemmed in by superior forces, still held out under the leadership of Lopez, now transformed into a stern apostle of nationalism. He performed prodigies; he attacked without reserves, and, in a bellicose delirium, shot down those who criticised his actions, and continued the war on a territory dispeopled and steeped in blood. The allies seized Assomption, and Lopez himself fell in battle: the tragic personification of an irreducible people. The first of the Lopez had written to Rosas in 1845, "Paraguay cannot be conquered." The war confirmed this prophecy. In 1870 the Brazilian and Argentine victors found only a decimated country; the cities were deserted, and foreigners had taken possession of the soil; the solemn silence which Francia had dreamed of for his country reigned throughout. The women were accomplishing their funeral rites above unnumbered and innumerable tombs; they dug trenches, and, like Antigone in the Æschylean tragedy, carried in the folds of their mantles the maternal soil that was to cover the dead.
After this war nothing could be more monotonous than Paraguayan life; military presidents and civil presidents have succeeded one another with intervals of anarchy. The spirit of dictatorship is not dead. The intellectuals—Dominguez, Gondra, Baez—deny Lopez and Francia; but new tyrants reign over the midland Republic.
The principle of authority, exacerbated and tenacious, has created modern Paraguay. This nation confirms a law of American history. Dictatorship is the proper government to create internal order, to develop wealth, and to unite inimical castes.
FORMS OF POLITICAL ANARCHY
Revolution is general in Latin America. There the most civilised nations have been rent by civil wars. But there are a few republics in which these conflicts have been perpetual: such is the case in Central America and the Antilles. It seems as though the tropical climate must favour these disturbances. Assassinations of presidents, battles in the cities, collisions between factions and castes, inflammatory and deceptive rhetoric, all lead one to suppose that these equatorial regions are inimical to peace and organisation.
There are two South American peoples in which Jacobinism has become a national malady, in which men of every creed are involved: they are Colombia and Ecuador. Their tragic history shows us a curious form of Ibero-American anarchy: namely, religious anarchy.
Conservatives and radicals—General Mosquera: his influence—A statesman: Rafael Nuñez, his doctrines political.
A certain writer of New Granada, Rafael Nuñez, a President and a party-leader, writes that "there is not in South America a country more iconoclastic, politically speaking, than Colombia." Republican evolution there has been peculiar: it has witnessed perpetual anarchy, like other American democracies, and civil wars as long and as sanguinary as those of the Argentine, but no long succession of tenacious caudillo, personifications of local discord, whose ambitions determine the intention of political conflict.
In Colombia men have fought for ideas; anarchy there has had a religious character. The parties had definite programmes, and in the conflict of incompatible convictions they soon arrived at the Byzantine method of destruction. Public and private wealth was exhausted, the land was dispeopled, and inquisitors of religion or free thought condemned their enemies to exile. "With us," Rafael Nuñez admits "there has been an excess of political dogmatism." A Jacobin ardour divides mankind; the fiery Colombian race is impassioned by vague and abstract ideas. The champions of liberty and the supporters of absolutism apply their principles to an unstable republic; they legislate for a {202} democracy devoid of passions and inimical castes; they build the future state by means of syllogisms.
These sanguinary struggles have a certain rude grandeur. On the continent men fight for crafty caudillos, for the conquest of power and fiscal treasure; the oligarchy which occupies the seat of government defends its bureaucratic well-being from the parties in opposition. In Colombia exalted convictions are the motives of political enmities; men abandon fortune and family, as in the great religious periods of history, to hasten to the defence of a principle. These hidalgos waste the country and fall nobly, with the Semitic ardour of Spanish crusaders. Heroes abound in the fervour of these battles. Obedient to the logic of Jacobinism, Colombia perishes, but the truth is saved.[1]
The liberal party, victorious in 1849, promoted a vast democratic programme: the romantic liberalism of the French thinkers, the socialistic ideas of the Revolution of 1848, had reached Colombia. The Colombians desired not only the liberation of the slaves, the abolition of industrial monopolies, and the autonomy of the communes, but also the realisation of the needs of democracy; all the political liberties, subject to prudent reserves; direct and universal suffrage, trial by jury, the suppression of the army, the abolition of capital punishment, the institution of universities and scientific diplomas, and the expulsion of the Jesuits, who in America were the obstinate supporters of the old colonial system. Federation, a weak executive, a secular State, and powerful communes: such was the aspiration of the liberals. A fraction of the party bore a symbolic name: it was known as Golgotha. In their civil wars the Catholics chose Jesus of Nazareth for their {203} patron. Radicalism even aspired to religious consecration; it founded a Christian anarchy, like that of the primitive evangelical communities. It preached fraternity and liberty, condemning political power.
Nothing could be more disastrous to a disorganised republic than rationalism of this type. It applied the principles formulated by the extremest idealists in highly cultivated countries. Colombia, shaken by revolutions, had need of a strong government; radicalism destroyed it. There was no provincial life, yet it created the omnipotent commune; it suppressed the army in a democracy threatened by civil and external war, established trial by jury in a country swarming with illiterates, and granted liberties wholesale to a revolutionary people; it accorded political rights to the negro and the Indian, servile and ignorant as they were, and demanded federation, which is to say that it multiplied political disorder. Foreseeing the errors of the future, Bolivar told the Colombians: "I can plainly see our work destroyed and the maledictions of the centuries falling upon our heads."
From 1849 to 1853 the liberal party struggled to impose its doctrines. The Constitution of 1853, celebrated in Colombian annals, was doctrinaire and radical; it proclaimed the liberty of the press, of thought, and of suffrage. By separating Church and State it provoked a religious war and accepted a moderated political centralisation. Thus the excesses of unity and of federation were avoided.
The liberal charter gave rise to lengthy quarrels. The States gave themselves conflicting and opposite constitutions; some were conservative and reinforced authority; some were radical and founded an anarchical democracy; some were liberal and extended the suffrage; some were moderate and conciliatory, uniting the ideas of all parties in unstable equilibrium. {204} In a country already divided by religious questions this variety of status created a perpetual disorder.
A new Constitution, more precise than that of 1853, established the federal system without restrictions; it was the triumph of the "Golgothas" over the "Draconians," the radicals over the classic liberals. The battle was renewed with fresh vigour. The religious communities lost their legal character, and could no longer acquire property; the State usurped their wealth and ruined them as in Mexico. The impetuous radicals sapped not only the ecclesiastical power, but the political power also. They reduced the presidential period to two years, granted the provinces full sovereignty, prohibited the death penalty without exception, conceded the absolute liberty of the press, and authorised the buying and selling of arms.
Excessive liberalism disorganised the country. Colombia suffered much from this vain idealism; she became the social laboratory of professors of Utopianism. The radicals created fresh elements of discord; they attacked authority, religion, and national unity. In 1870, in the face of bankruptcy, the party abandoned its original extremeness; it no longer professed anti-militarism, nor desired the complete separation of Church and State. Sceptical as to the benefits of the suffrage, it re-enforced the executive, in spite of its original federal creed.
The conservatives governed the country from the dissolution of Greater Colombia, in 1829, until 1849; they performed the work of organisation. Without forming an oligarchy, as in Venezuela and Chili, they represented permanent interests and effective powers; religion, the colonial nobility, and the patricians who won autonomy for their country. They were conservatives in so far as they opposed the radicals, but in 1832 they granted a political charter in which they accepted liberal principles; they respected municipal {205} liberties and the liberty of the press, surrounded all the powers of the State with prestige and authority, as also the senate and the magistrature, created a Council of State, so necessary in an improvised democracy, protected Catholicism, and limited the suffrage. To be a citizen a man required "an assured subsistence without subjection to any one whatever in the quality of servant or workman." In the social world they accepted the old division of castes. They did not free the slaves, and they tolerated the exportation of human merchandise. The radicals protested against this shameful traffic; in 1842 regulations were passed affecting black immigration, and 1849 marked the fall of the conservative party. Then arose eloquent demagogues, who preached a social gospel much like that of the French revolutionists of 1848.
Political life was less imperfect in Colombia than in other Latin democracies. The opposition did sometimes triumph in the electoral struggle; thus in 1837 Dr. Marques was elected president against the will of General Santander, the government leader. I have spoken of the solid organisation of the parties: however, there was no lack of caudillos, whose influence in neo-Granzdan history was a lasting one.
The first President, General Santander, was one of Bolivar's lieutenants, as was Flores in Ecuador and Paez in Venezuela. He inherited the moral authority of the Liberator, and governed pacifically from 1831. He aspired to absolutism, founded schools, and organised the public finances; in London he commenced the negotiation of the Colombian debt, declared Panama a free port, and endeavoured to enforce unity and peace; conspirators and revolutionaries he shot.
After the founder of the nation came two strong personalities who hold a prominent place in the history of Colombia: General Mosquera and {206} Dr. Rafael Nuñez.[2] Their long rule is comparable to that of Garcia-Moreno in Ecuador, or of Paez and Guzman-Blanco in Venezuela.
General Mosquera was at first a conservative leader; his education, his origin, and his travels in Europe all divided him from the democracy. He had the gift of command, which had been developed by the direction of armies in his youth. President in 1845, he developed the national wealth. His government, which lasted from 1845 to 1849, was distinguished by an intense material progress: railways were constructed, steam navigation commenced on the River Magdalena, the teaching in the universities was improved, the finances were organised, the service of the debt was assured, and the moral prestige of the country improved.
This conservative President had liberal leanings. He presented laws to Congress which made his old supporters uneasy; the abolition of the "tenth" or tithe paid to the Church, and the diminution of fiscal protection. It is difficult to believe that this lucky soldier conceived the wise ambition to transform his government into a liberal régime without violence. Mosquera knew that after 1848 and its echoes in Colombia the basis of his future popularity must be a violent liberalism, and he became a federal and a democratic leader. As military dictator he placed himself at the head of the revolution of 1860, seized the capital, Bogota, and was elected President in 1861. He imposed his variable will, changed his ideas and his party in order to retain power, and attempted to govern above the law and above mankind.
GENERAL MOSQUERA.
President of Colombia (1845-1849, 1861-1864, 1865-1867).
Mosquera declared a Kulturkampf, separated Church and State, exiled the bishops, confiscated the goods of the convents, and, like Guzman-Blanco, {207} created a national Church. Without the authorisation of the supreme power no priest could exercise his religious functions. The civil power was the supreme power; the Church and her ministers were subject thereto.
The President shot or suppressed his enemies, and imposed his policy by terror; he enthroned militarism. Faithful armies followed him, accustomed to victory. The domestic policy of New Granada did not satisfy his ambition; he aspired to restore the Greater Colombia, and dreamed the dream of Rosas and Santa-Cruz; the hegemony of his country to be forced upon other peoples. He declared war upon Ecuador, and was victorious. In 1864 he was followed by another liberal, Dr. Murillo-Torro. In 1865 the military caudillo resumed the reins of government. He was hostile to Congress, and proclaimed himself dictator; he violated the Constitution and the law, intervened in the struggles of other States, and sought an absolute and irresponsible authority. His own supporters conspired against him, and sent him into exile. In Colombia he was the indisputable authority, as Paez in Venezuela, from 1845 to 1867.
After this long empire came a period of civil Presidents and military Presidents, who moderated the ambitions of the liberals. Presently a new caudillo arose: Dr. Rafael Nuñez. Mosquera was first a conservative, then a liberal. Nuñez, a liberal, fomented a conservative reaction and dominated Colombian politics for twenty years.
At one time secretary to Mosquera, he had made a study of the evolution of great States. He was not only a leader, but also a diplomatist, and a philosopher in his political disinterestedness, his lasting moral influence, and the width of his views. A theorist like Balmaceda and Sarmiento, he none the less did not forget the inevitable imperfections of {208} Colombia. He became President of the Senate in 1878, and a minister of the Reformation and head of the Republic in 1880. Democracy looked to him for a renaissance.
In the heart of the liberal party Dr. Nuñez directed a new independent group. He had been a radical in 1850, but he departed from the rigidity of his original beliefs before the persistent suggestions of experience. Why weaken the executive in an anarchical nation—why increase the national troubles by the bitterness of religious warfare? Nuñez became a liberal-conservative; he forgot his original socialistic principles, the theories of Louis Blanc and Saint-Simon, and applied a British common-sense to Colombian politics.[3]
His political ideas (expounded in various articles) were prudent and conciliatory; no sterile idealism dominated Dr. Nuñez. He believed, with many English statesmen, that "in politics there are no absolute truths, and all things may be good or evil according to opportunity and extent." This was the policy he opposed to Colombian dogmatism. He believed that "politics is indissolubly bound up with the economic problem."
A conservative in religion, tolerant in the art of governing, he taught the Jacobins of America some admirable lessons. "Our population," he wrote, "does not exceed three millions of inhabitants, the majority of whom are but slightly civilised. If the social fraction called upon by its aptitudes to the functions of government divides and subdivides itself and occupies itself in weakening itself we shall never succeed in doing anything of importance as legatees of the Peninsular domination." His ideal was a free oligarchy, coherent in intention, and in action persistent.
Equally lamentable were the division of the best {209} class of the nation and the intolerance of the governing parties. Rafael Nuñez preached respect for minorities. "The absolute exclusion from the government of the parties in a minority," he said, "weakens the national spirit, envenoms discussion, and creates extraordinary dangers." Majorities have need of discussion and opposition. "The myopia of party spirit," adds the caudillo, "fails to perceive the virile vigour which a political group obtains by the mere fact of giving proofs of tolerance, justice, and respect for its defenceless adversary." "When for some extraordinary reason one of the great parties disappears, the surviving party splits up into fractions, and these fractions fight among themselves as bitterly as when they have to face a common enemy: even more bitterly."
The leader of the independents had studied political science not only in foreign books, but also in practice, in public life; he had a profound acquaintance with the country which he governed, and with the Latin American vices which are the incurable weakness of these new democracies. "We have no viceroy in Colombia," he said, "but anonymous rulers. We have a written liberty, but no practical liberty. We have a Republic, but only in name, for opinion is not expressed by the only legitimate means, which is the suffrage." "It is a grave error, generally accepted by us, that the sole object of a political party and all its efforts should tend toward the possession of the public power, represented by the leadership of the national army."
He defends the principle of authority as against anarchy. "The best of instruments, destined for the long and arduous task of civilising the human species."
Respect for the constituted powers is unknown in Colombia. All "dynamic mechanism" should have a governor, that is, a counterpoise to the predominant {210} impulse. Nuñez writes: "Monarchies need liberal accessory institutions, and republics restrictive or conservative institutions, without which the former degenerate into autocracies and the latter into anarchies, which announce the approach of despotism." In default of the principle of authority, so necessary and generally so feeble in democracies, Rafael Nuñez sought for "elements of order in the moral domain."
He became a conservator; he protected religion, like Portales, in order to give a disorganised nation the firm unity of a law. The ex-radical ordered the teaching of religion in the schools. "Traitor!" cried his former supporters, but if he renounced his former dogmas it was in his intellectual prime, before the lamentable spectacle of an unstable republic. "Fanaticism," he wrote, "is not religion any more than demagogy is liberty; but between religion and morality there is an indissoluble bond."
Colombia had need of a stable internal law, of a morality. To obtain order Dr. Nuñez desired a Catholic unity; he abandoned his radical convictions, and put his trust in authority, religion, and moderate centralisation. But were not the articles of his new programme the result of a free examination of reality and of history? The leaders of the independents were inaugurating an experimental politics.
He accepted neither abstract principles nor theories imported from other continents. Free trade obtained in Colombia: it is the English economic dogma. "With us," explained the statesman, "free mercantile exchange simply transforms the artisan into a mere proletarian working man, into food for powder or a demagogue, for free trade practically leaves only two industries vigorous—commerce and agriculture—to which those who lack capital and credit cannot as a rule devote themselves." This caudillo wished to see a real autonomy based on a moderate protectionism: {211} as President he fostered industries and condemned the bureaucracy; he knew that the latter favoured revolutions, and that men seldom fight in civil conflicts except to obtain public employment. "The motives for disturbing the peace," said he, "will be less and less powerful as the official system ceases to monopolise the opportunities of work."
Dr. Nuñez was a sociologist; he had studied Comte and Spencer; he wrote of society and its laws, starting from the liberalism of Lamartine to arrive at the British prudence of Guizot. An eminent Colombian, Don Miguel Antonio Caro, called him "the providential and necessary man," and demanded recognition of his political infallibility.
When he came into power in 1880 he was supported by the independents and the conservatives; men hoped for reform and peace as the result of his political action. Under his government public order was untroubled. He introduced economies in the finances, and realised, like Mosquera, many works of material progress; he founded a national bank, reformed the university, and convoked, like Bolivar, a Congress of plenipotentiaries at Panama.
Dr. Zaldua followed him in 1882. But the influence of the great caudillo was not yet at an end; he was re-elected in 1884 for a period of two years, and exercised a moral dictatorship. He proposed to a friendly Congress the revision of the Constitution of 1863.
He then applied his political ideas, condemning the two years' presidency, excessive federalism, and the licence and demagogy of the country; he organised a strong executive, conceded liberty to the Church, increased the duration of the presidential term, and initiated a prudent measure of concentration. The Constitution of 1885 ratified the triumph of the conservatives.
From that time forward the President was {212} imperator; elected for six years in 1886, re-elected in 1892, he continued to exercise the supreme power at intervals. He lived at Carthagena, and Vice-Presidents (designated by himself) replaced him. He became the tutor of the Republic; the governors were his pro-consuls. He was the last great man produced by Colombia, that fruitful soil for politicians and men of letters.
Mosquera represented federalism and radicalism; Nuñez unity and tolerance. Fresh revolutions, conflicts between conservatives and liberals, have retarded the national development; new chiefs have arisen, demigods of the world of politics. The conservative work of Nuñez has proved sterile: Colombia is always the land of eloquence and Jacobinism, extravagant and excessive as the tropics themselves. She still awaits fresh dictators who shall organise the democracy of the future.
[1] In his book Desde Cerca (Paris, 1908) General Holguin writes that Colombia has known 27 civil wars. In that of 1879 she lost 80,000 men. She has spent 37 million pesos (gold) in revolutions.
[2] There was one demagogue President in this State who, when the slaves were freed, excited a conflict of castes: General Obaudo.
[3] Rafael Nuñez, La Reforma politica en Colombia, Bogota, 1885.
Religious conflicts—General Flores and his political labours—Garcia-Moreno—The Republic of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Ecuador constituted itself a free democracy after a long period of indecision. Guayaquil aspired to be an independent state; it listened to the melodious aspirations of its poet, Olmedo, and at other times sought to unite itself to Peru. Bolivar and La Mar both sought to claim this city, which a proud provincialism called "the pearl of the Guayas." The vast ambitions of Bolivar won the day, and Ecuador became a province of Greater Colombia, under the hegemony of Venezuela or New Granada.
General Juan José Flores, a Venezuelan, and a friend and lieutenant of the Liberator's, founded the Ecuadorian Republic in 1830. He was the "Father of the Country," and teacher and guardian of this precocious nation, as was Paez in Venezuela and Sucre in Bolivia. He governed the country for fifteen years, being elected President in 1831, in 1839, and in 1843. The unity of Colombia, maintained by the autocracy of Bolivar, was an obstacle in the way of Flores' ambitions for Ecuador; he therefore sought to destroy the federal organisation. Sucre, too, whose young and glorious shoulders were soon to sustain the authority of a liberator, was opposed to the ambitions of the Venezuelan caudillo. {214} The latter convoked a Constituent Assembly at Riobamba. The first national statute of the equatorial republic was then promulgated: it established a representative government with two Chambers, an executive independent of these Chambers, and Catholicism as the sole State religion: these were the bases of the Constitution. Ecuador once independent, an era of incessant disturbances set in; men fought for their leaders and for ideas. Flores symbolised the principles of the conservatives, inimical to radicalism and democracy; he dreamed of a strong executive, a national religion, and a limited suffrage. His ideal was a presidency of eight years, and a senate of twelve, an echo of the Bolivian Constitution. He accepted monarchy as the necessary solution of Ecuadorian anarchy; he fell because he attempted the restoration of a superannuated system.
He and Rocafuerte, a liberal caudillo, the leader of a party of cultivated youth, shared the public functions between them. When Flores was President, Rocafuerte was governor of Guayaquil; when Rocafuerte ruled, Flores was commander-in-chief of the army. Both were sent into exile; they were successively enemies and allies. Flores played the tyrant, suppressed liberties, and aspired to the dictatorship; when he fell from power he prepared filibustering expeditions in Europe to be launched against his country. Spain offered him her aid in 1846. "Treason!" cried the Ecuadorian patriots. The chimera of a monarchist, the scepticism of an ambitious foreigner who had fruitlessly created a new country on the ruins of Greater Colombia, say we, after half a century has elapsed. America was stirred by the campaign of reconquest which he headed; in 1851 his temerarious plan had entirely miscarried, and he sought the aid of Peru in order to invade his country, then a prey to anarchy. He was not successful in the field, and after a long period {215} of ostracism he joined Garcia-Moreno, the leader of the conservative forces; under the authority of the latter his influence decayed and his history ended. His disciple Rocafuerte was an excellent administrator, who founded schools, organised the National Guard, established military colonies in the east, partially secularised education, proved a liberal patron of arts and letters, and commenced the codification of the civil and penal laws.
In 1851 General Urbina forced a radical government upon Ecuador; he was the genius of destruction, an intriguer, an ambitious man whose excesses provoked a conservative reaction. He attempted in vain to establish a military régime. Garcia-Moreno denounced the treason of Flores and the radicalism of Urbina, and his moral influence overcame the prevailing anarchy. This remarkable statesman was born at Guayaquil in 1821; he came of a Castilian family. His mother trained him strictly in poverty; a priest, Father Bethencourt, directed his later education. In 1836 he entered the University of Quito, and soon became the supervisor of his own companions—an undergraduate autocrat. Tall, of a severe aspect, the forehead wide, and the eyes forceful, he was already revealed as a leader of men. He devoted himself with ardour to mathematics and philosophy; he acquired general ideas and an analytical turn of mind. Endowed with a prodigious memory and a vigorous dialectic, always master of himself, he had every desirable gift. Towards his nineteenth year his chaste youth passed through a moral crisis. He issued therefrom, according to his biographer, less the devotee but not less of a believer. Like Goethe, he made up his mind abruptly. He would not be guilty of timidity; he liberated himself from the tutelage of the world by dint of heroism; he was Mucius Scævola before he was Cæsar. His fiery spirit and irreducible will {216} made him a leader whom all respected, a mystic whom the conservatives acclaimed.
Garcia-Moreno intervened in politics as a journalist; he was a satiric poet, and founded various polemical sheets: El Zurriago, El Vengador, and El Diablo. He drafted pamphlets, accused and condemned in prose and in verse, and wrote his classic Epistle to Fabius concerning the poverty of the times. His style was steely, energetic, rarely declamatory; he wrote apostrophes in the manner of Juvenal; he brought into politics a rude indignation, the rebellious anger of a Hebrew prophet, announcing the final catastrophe of democracy; as a journalist he represented the national interests. In 1846, when the threat of a Spanish invasion hung over Ecuador, Garcia-Moreno roused America by his writings. He was the pacificator of Guayaquil, where the partisans of Flores had risen in insurrection.
A voyage to Europe brought the young writer into contact with the social revolution of 1848. The spectacle of triumphant anarchy re-enforced his conservative opinions. In Ecuador radicalism triumphed in 1850; on his return the conservative leader protected the Jesuits expelled from Colombia, demanded the return of their property, and authorised them to found colleges. He published a pamphlet, Defence of the Jesuits, in which he called them "the creators of peace and order," and stated with fearless candour that he was a Catholic and was proud of the fact.
The military-radical dictatorship of Urbina devastated the country; the "Tauras," a prætorian guard, as brutal as the "Mazorqueros" of Rosas, killed and pillaged, and were the docile servants of tyranny. Garcia-Moreno then founded the journal La Nación, and preached the doctrine that there can be no social progress in a country which does not foster material progress, and in which a devouring poverty is {217} triumphant. He was arrested and exiled. He reached Europe once more in 1854, and there gave much time to the study of European politics. He had been something of a Gallican on the subject of the relations of Church and State, believing in the supremacy of the civil power. His opinions changed. Subscribing to the tradition of those Popes who aspired to empire, he considered that the Church should be absolute sovereign above all earthly powers. But a triumphant radicalism was secularising ecclesiastical foundations, and convents were being invaded by the troops. The conservative caudillo returned from exile in 1856, and was met with every species of homage; he was elected Mayor of Quito, and rector of the University. He founded a political party—that of national union. Elected senator, he called, with the authority of an avenging tribune, for honest finances, the suppression of the masonic lodges, a law of public education, and the abolition of the poll tax, which burdened the native, and represented all the forces of social conservation under the tutelage of the Church.
The Convention of 1860 made him provisional President, then constitutional President. Garcia-Moreno inaugurated a clerical semi-dictatorship after thirty years of revolutions. He did not limit the suffrage; he depended on the democracy to defeat unpopular demagogues. He believed that "to moralise a country one must give it a Catholic Constitution, and, to ensure the necessary cohesion, a statute of unity." He organised the finances, the army, the schools; he reduced the fiscal expenditure; founded at Quito a Tribunal of Accounts, which he supervised himself; he waged a pitiless war upon smuggling, peculation, and bureaucracy; he built roads connecting the capital with the coast, ruined militarism, and founded a civil régime.
He was a Catholic President. As in the Colonial {218} period, politics centred upon the Church. The clergy taught and legislated. "The Church," said Garcia-Moreno, "must march side by side with the civil power under conditions of true independence." He entrusted public education to the religious congregations, and prepared to sign a concordat with the Church; Catholicism was to be recognised as the State religion, to the exclusion of all foreign sects and cults, and the bishops would supervise the colleges and universities; they would choose the textbooks to be used, and the government, like the Spanish Inquisition, would see that no forbidden works were introduced. The ecclesiastical charter would be renewed, and as a set-off the government would annul the exequatur, the authorisation which the American governments accorded to the pontifical bulls, that these might be obeyed. More Catholic than the Sacred College, Garcia-Moreno insisted upon the reform of the clergy, despite the hesitation of the Pope. Once the Concordat was signed; Pius IX. created new dioceses, and ecclesiastical courts, which tried all causes relating to the faith—to religious matters in general, and to marriage and divorce. The conservative leader aspired to a Catholic Imperialism. He intervened in the domestic affairs of Colombia, where a radical President was in power; he eulogised the Mexican Empire, which was to deliver the country from the "excesses of a rapacious, immoral and turbulent demagogy." He dreamed of an America enfeoffed to the Papacy.
Presidents followed him who were weak in the face of anarchy: Borrero, Carrion, Espinosa. The great caudillo did not lose his influence; many times he was forced to leave his retreat in order to pacify a province or direct a political party. In 1860 he returned to power, to lay the foundations of a stable theocracy. His governmental programme read like an episcopal address. As essential articles appeared {219} "the respect and protection of the Catholic Church, unshakable attachment to the Holy See, education based on morality and faith, and liberty for all and in everything, excepting crime and criminals." He declared that civilisation, "the fruit of Catholicism, degenerates and becomes impure in proportion as it departs from Catholic principles"; that "religion is the sole bond which is left to us in this country, divided as it is by the interests of parties, races, and beliefs." The new Constitution was to conform to the principles of the Syllabus; in Ecuador no one was to be elected or eligible who did not profess the Catholic religion, and whosoever should belong to a sect condemned by the Church would lose his civil rights. In his mystic ardour, he consecrated his country to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and in 1873 he protested, in a note addressed to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the King of Italy, against the taking of Rome and the confiscation of the Papal States. His ideal was the monarchy of Philip II.; the Jesuit Empire of Paraguay; the return of the Middle Ages, and a conventual peace. Like Rafael Nuñez and Portales, he believed that "religion is the only national tradition in these democracies at the mercy of anarchy—the creative agent, the instrument of political unity." Religion is the foundation of morality, and "the absence of morality is the ruin of the Republic; there are no good manners and morals without a pure clergy, and a Church free of all official tutelage." A moralising despot, he repressed concubinage, and imposed Catholic marriage or chastity upon his subjects. Virtue, faith, and order: there was his ideal.
The authoritative Constitution which he promulgated is analogous to the Chilian statute of 1883. The President was re-eligible; his mandate was for ten years; he could govern for a third period after his immediate successor. The government was at {220} the head of the army, and appointed all provincial authorities; political rebellion was punished as high treason. The legislative term was six years for deputies and nine for senators. Garcia-Moreno strictly observed this new law; he made war upon revolutionaries, and condemned the leaders of revolts and conspiracies to death. Internal order re-established, he commenced a series of vast reforms in the national finances, in public education, and in legislation; he opened schools, re-established the death penalty, sent officers to Prussia to follow the military manoeuvres, reorganised the school of medicine, founded an astronomical observatory, and attracted German Jesuits who were to teach physics and chemistry. He proved himself a potent organiser: "Twenty-five years are needed," he said, "to establish my system." Re-elected in 1875, he was quickly overthrown by his enemies. He resisted to the death; the dagger of an enemy struck him down in the mournful solitude of the plaza of Quito, and he fell near the cathedral in which he had worshipped. A long silence, a time of deep mourning, followed the death of the caudillo; he was named a second Gregory the Great, the regenerator of his country, the martyr of Catholic civilisation.
Indefatigable, stoical, just, strong in decision, admirably logical in his life, Garcia-Moreno was one of the greatest personalities of American history. He was no tyrant without doctrines, like Guzman-Blanco or Porfirio Diaz. In fifteen years (1859-74) he completely transformed his little country according to a vast political system which only death prevented him from realising. A mystic of the Spanish type, he was not content with sterile contemplation; he needed action; he was an organiser and a creator.
He felt the aid and the continual presence of God; he asked his friends for their prayers, and read daily in The Imitation of Christ. He was even too much {221} of a Catholic for the conservatives; he was often to be seen carrying the daïs in procession. "A Christian Hercules, a disciple of Charlemagne and St. Louis," writes Father Berthe, his ingenuous and enthusiastic biographer. "A hero of Jesus Christ, not of Plutarch," said Louis Veuillot in a dithyramb; while his enemies, Montalvo and Moncayo, accused him of treason, Jesuitism, and cruelty. Montalvo recognised, however, in the conservative President, "a sublime intelligence, a superiority to every trial, a strong, imperious, invincible will." Superior to exaggerated eulogy and acerbated criticism, Garcia-Moreno represented the great civilising principles in the Ecuadorian democracy; unity, the struggle against a militarism of thirty years' standing, material progress, religion, morality, and strong government against licence and demagogy. As an autocrat he resembled all great American leaders; but he surpassed them in idealism, by the logic of his actions and the originality of his essay in theocracy. With Philip II. and the Paraguayan Jesuits, he believed Catholicism to be an instrument of culture, and his policy was for fifteen years the exaltation of that religion. Only Nuñez and Balmaceda brought equally coherent ideas to the task of government. No one in Ecuador, neither Veintemilla, nor Borrero, nor Alfaro, could gather up the inheritance of this admirable despot. Carlyle, had he known him, would have set him in his gallery of heroes.
Tyrannies and revolutions—The action of climate and miscegenation—A republic of negroes: Hayti.
In Central America and the islands of the Antilles civil wars are the result not merely of racial conflict, but also of the enervating action of the Tropics. Precocious, sensual, impressionable, the Americans of these vast territories devote their energies to local politics. Industry, commerce, and agriculture are in a state of decay, and the unruly imagination of the Creole expends itself in constitutions, programmes, and lyrical discourse; in these regions anarchy is sovereign mistress.
Five republics came into being here, which have lived in a continual state of conflict, their aim being political domination. Internal disorders and international wars are continual. Ambitious generals have sometimes forced a provisional unity upon the continent, but it is soon divided by the anarchy and dictatorships which continually overwhelm the soil of the Tropics.
It is impossible to distinguish a military period and an industrial period in the history of Central America. Intellectuals and generals govern alternately, it is true, but thanks to identical methods; they all exercise the same sanguinary tutelage. A few dictators whose rule has been slightly more {223} prolonged have at times contrived to increase the number of schools or develop the national finances, but personal initiative and the importation of foreign capital are equally out of the question under the rule of autocracies which govern solely by grace of the military element. Liberty, wealth, and human rights are the appanage of inhuman dictators.
The Republic was proclaimed and the political Constitution adopted in Central America on the 10th of April, 1825. It was then that the autonomous life of the five united provinces commenced. General Manuel Joseph was the first President of Central America. The Federal Statute of 1824 attributed all powers to Congress: it initiated a parliamentary dictatorship. As against the popular assembly the Executive was powerless, and the Senate, to which the Constitution confided the final sanction of the laws promulgated by Congress, was weak in point of numbers. As in all republics, the government was popular, representative, and federal. The equality of all citizens and the abolition of slavery being decreed, it was a new era that opened, liberal and romantic.
In the Lower Chamber Guatemala had the majority, and from this superiority ensued a tendency to political domination which provoked a long series of internal wars. Here was no conflict of nations, but of the interests of rival provinces or the quarrels of individual generals. Salvador wished to realise its autonomy; a virile and well-peopled republic, she could not readily accept the hegemony of Guatemala. Here is one aspect of this monotonous history: the frequent wars which divided Guatemala and Salvador. They struggled for supremacy, for moral tutelage. The federal tie survived, and the Assemblies multiplied; there were General Assemblies and Provisional Assemblies. Suddenly one of the States declared void the pact which united it to the {224} other republics: Congress was dissolved, and at once re-elected. There was a perpetual confusion of powers.
During the first twenty years of liberty the anarchical instinct which sought to separate the republics and the calm reason which sought to unite them under the pressure of powerful traditions were in mutual conflict. It was the conflict of nationalism and unity. As in Chili the Carreras opposed the authority of San Martin, as in Venezuela Paez rebelled against the unification of Bolivar, so Carrera the Guatemalan general warred against Morazan, the caudillo of the Unitarian party, during twelve years of a struggle of province with province.
However, the States separated one from another, and united anew under the domination of a theoretical federation; men still legislated in Congresses, and built the future nation with the ardour of Jacobins: eleven Assemblies of the Confederation prepared codes and statutes. One essential trait of the new laws was their secular spirit, and their tendency to aggressive action against the clergy. Even sooner than Mexico these assemblies promulgated the laws of the Reformation; even before the era of religious quarrels opened in Colombia the radical fervour which was contemporary with the liberalism of Rivadavia was at work in Central America. For that matter, it appeared to be a remnant of the old "regalism." In 1829 the Assembly suppressed all convents of monks; in 1830 Honduras declared that secular priests might marry; in Guatemala it was enacted that the sons of members of the clergy ordained in sacris were necessarily their heirs. In 1832 toleration was proclaimed, but, on the other hand, the States were continually fighting over the question of patronage, and the antagonism between the State, which wished to impose its tutelage, and the rebellious Church was perpetual.
Two influences dominated the minds of the new law-makers: English utilitarianism and Yankee federalism. Here French ideas were not predominant. But the tropical republics could not assimilate the severe English doctrine. In vain, in 1832, did Congress go into mourning on the occasion of the death of Bentham; in vain was absolute liberty of testimony proclaimed in Guatemala. The double and inevitable influence of tradition and race cannot be destroyed by means of improvised laws.
Central America borrowed from the United States their mode of suffrage, the federal system, the organisation of the jury, and the codes of Louisiana. But popular agitation condemned the institution of the jury; the codes borrowed from the United States did not annihilate barbarism, and the federal system was powerless to enforce unity.
In 1842 this troublous Confederation of sister nations was dissolved. Once these nations were definitely separated, what we may call the period of provincial history commenced; it was confused, yet identical in the case of the various States. Above the anarchical multitude rose energetic caudillos; necessary tyrants, who endeavoured to enforce order in the interior, and to organise the national finances.
The history of Costa Rica forms the only exception among these republics oscillating between tyranny and demagogy. In this country were no clearly divided social castes, no great capitalists, and no crowds of proletariats. A small homogeneous State, in which men were always known as hermanicos ("brotherlies") because their interests and their ideas were identical, Costa Rica seemed to justify the classic idea which associated the success of the republican system with limited territories and small human groups. Work, unity, and lasting peace have been the characteristics of social evolution in {226} Costa Rica. While neighbouring States were at war this tiny republic was progressing peacefully.
Salvador also developed normally without the discords of Nicaragua or Guatemala. Race explains the differences to be observed in these great theatres of political experience; in Salvador and Costa Rica the Spanish element was predominant, the castes were confounded, the population was dense, and the birth-rate high. In Honduras mulattos abounded, and in Nicaragua and Guatemala the races were mixed, and the Indians were superior in point of numbers. Among these five tropical republics those which progressed were those in which the race was homogeneous, or in which the Iberian conquerors outnumbered the Indians, negroes, and mulattos.
The very tropical anarchy which has turned Central America into a perpetual theatre of civil wars has also continually divided the two zones of the ancient Hispaniola: San Domingo and Hayti. In the one the Spaniards ruled, in the other the French, and the antagonism of these two Powers was of long duration. Hayti is a negro State, and San Domingo refused to submit to the tyranny of ex-slaves. Conflicts of a political origin were supplemented by the warfare of castes. Caudillos and tyrants have succeeded one another in the government; revolutions and domestic wars have continually troubled these two small States, over which the United States have gradually extended their tutelage.
As early as the seventeenth century the French were established in Hispaniola, on the northern coast; bold Normans, herdsmen and shepherds, the celebrated buccaneers, had founded a kind of forest republic ruled by special laws. In 1691 this territory was a French colony, and in 1726 it contained 30,000 free inhabitants and 100,000 slaves, black or mulatto. The Creoles, according to the chroniclers of the time, were proud and inconstant, idle and {227} sceptical as to religion. The negroes, chiefly occupied in servile labour, superstitious and imprudent, formed the bulk of the slaves. A Jesuit, Father Charlevoix, who had observed them, wrote in 1725: "Properly speaking we may say that the negroes between Cap Blanc and Cap Noir have been born only for slavery."[1] It was said that the negroes were wont to celebrate the rites of a secret worship in the forest, and were preparing to fight for their liberty. They hated the other castes, the whites, the free negroes, and the mulattos; and the Hayti of the future was born of this racial hatred. Ex-slaves governed the isle, and found in bloody hecatombs revenge for their long servitude. These formed the oligarchy, an intolerable and intolerant aristocracy, inimical to whites and mulattos. Like the revolts of slaves in the ancient world, these rebellions of American serfs were the occasion of wars of extermination. The French Revolution provoked them by its Utopian liberalism: Mirabeau and Lafayette were friends of the negro, and the Convention decreed the abolition of slavery in the colonies in 1794. The slaves had risen already, in 1791, at the first rumours of the risings in France, burning property and killing their rulers.
They therefore attained political and civil liberty suddenly, with no prudent transitions. A caudillo, Toussaint Louverture, was the hero of the war of liberation. The metropolis made this ex-coachman a general. Sober and active, crafty and patriotic, he aspired to seize the reins of government; he expelled the English and fought against the people of colour who were led by General Rigaud; he was the indomitable defender of his race. The slaves regarded him as a tutelary deity; they thought him inspired; he gradually became the fetish of a superstitious caste. In 1801 an Assembly elected him governor for life; but he did not renounce the protection of {228} France. In vain did his adulators call him the Napoleon of the negroes; he did not aspire to absolute rule. He organised an army and set the finances in order; he proved a vigilant administrator. Like the dictator Francia in Paraguay, he forced his people to work by strict regulations; he prosecuted vagabonds, won the esteem of the whites, and introduced a severe morality into matters of finance.
Napoleon wished to reconquer the emancipated colony, and sent a strong army against it. The negroes rallied round their chief, and offered a heroic resistance; finally the French withdrew, and abandoned the island to the ex-slaves. In 1825 the metropolis recognised the independence of Hayti.
The Constitution of the new republic was promulgated in 1801. Without disdaining the suzerainty of France, which had prematurely abolished slavery, the negroes made laws intended to establish a democracy; they organised municipalities, and recognised Catholicism as the State religion. They recognised that labour, painful as it is to an indolent nation, is yet obligatory. From this time forward the history of Hayti is a perpetual succession of civil wars and dictatorships. Liberal laws were given to a caste habituated to slavery. Pétion, who was honoured by the friendship of Bolivar, was President in 1807; he applied himself more especially to the education of his people, and was called the father of his country; his government was a period of peace between two crises of vandalism. Before him the successor of Toussaint Louverture, Dessalines, had ordered the killing of all the whites, and had commenced a disastrous racial war. Nothing could be more hateful to the ex-slaves than the aristocracy of the skin; neither whites nor mulattos escaped the fury of the rulers. The integrity of the negro race was the ideal of these ferocious dictators.
No South American republic had to suffer such ill-augured tyrannies as those of Hayti; no autocracy was so formidable as that of these ex-slaves, whose leaders were notable amateurs of pageantry and bloodshed. Soulouque, the sworn enemy of the mulattos, proclaimed himself Emperor in 1849, taking the name of Faustinus I., and surrounding himself with a grotesquely ambitious court: he was the most execrable of despots. The Republic was re-established in 1859, and the monotonous sequence of servile coxcombs who made use of their power to gratify their passion for extermination recommenced: civil wars, international wars, assassinations, and massacres filled the bloodstained chronicles of the isle. The Haytian rulers exercised a harsh domination over San Domingo, where mulattos abounded and the Spanish tradition was not extinct; the negro invasion exiled the Dominican writers, destroyed the culture of the university, and swept like a wave of barbarism into the brilliant colony.
The Dominicans abhorred their long servitude, and, despite the terrible reprisals of their rulers, they prepared in silence for liberation. In 1821 Nuñez de Caceres declared San Domingo to be separated from Spain, and demanded protection of Colombia; the President of Hayti, Boyer, could not permit this unexpected autonomy, and sent an army to occupy the capital of the new republic. After a long period of secret preparation another group of patriots again proclaimed the independence of San Domingo, and in 1844 a movement which coincided with the revolt of the Haytian liberals against the tyranny of Boyer. This campaign, known as "the Revolt," was directed by an impassioned ideologist, Juan-Pablo Duarte, who was surrounded by intellectuals and men of action. The traditional oppressors were vanquished, and the victors proclaimed that "the peoples of the ancient Spanish portion, in vindication of their rights {230} and desiring to provide for their own welfare and future happiness in a just and legal manner, have formed themselves into a free, independent, and sovereign State."
In winning her autonomy San Domingo did not realise the dream of the strict republicans. Her history is less troubled than that of Hayti, and education and literature have attained an astonishing development in the old Spanish colony, but political life has been indecisive and full of revolutionary upheavals, as in the other democracies of South America. Perhaps we must attribute to the great number of mulattos, always incapable of self-government, or to the long duration of the Haytian domination, the anarchy of this, one of the youngest of the overseas republics. After 1844, the year of liberation, Santana, a half-breed dictator, cunning, uncultured, and implacable in hatred, retained the supreme power. The Februarists were at the head of the revolution known as the Reformation—Duarte, Mella, Sanchez—noble idealists in love with the idea of democracy. However, a caudillo profited by this movement of regeneration, overruling the ideologists in the name of practical despotism. "Februarism," said a remarkable Dominican thinker, "that is to say, the constitution of a free government founded upon equity, without caciquism and without the shameful fetters which sometimes limit the exercise of sovereignty, has predominated for too short a time on two or three occasions of our national life. On the contrary, Santanism—that is, personal autocracy, rigid and stifling, such as characterised the entire policy of Santana, and which has been practised since his time by nearly all our rulers, attenuated in some cases and in others exasperated—Santanism seems to have deep and inextricable roots."[2]
But is it not the fact that despotism is the necessary {231} form of all government in these republics, where the division of castes opposes unity and the normal development of nationality? The future of Haytians and Dominicans both is full of grave problems: among the first we find poetry, imagination, a high state of culture, but political evolution is very slow. The peoples of the Tropics seem incapable of order, laborious patience, and method; so that the prodigal literature of San Domingo forms a striking contrast to the archaic quality of its political life. "Its geographical situation," says Señor Garcia Godoy, "places it almost at the mercy of North American imperialism." Hayti is still a barbarous democracy. It is not easy to turn a colony of negro slaves into an orderly and prosperous republic merely by virtue of political charters of foreign origin; and it has not been proved that parliamentarism, municipal life, and the classic division of powers, the creation of the East, form an adequate system of government for negroes and mulattos. In vain did General Légitime, once President of Hayti, affirm that had they been properly encouraged and directed, his people would already have arrived at "the highest degree of prosperity and civilisation"; in vain did he pretend that the decadence of his country was due not to a question of race but to a problem of social economy: excess of taxation and paper money. Hayti possesses immense natural wealth, yet the taxes are crushing, the railways go bankrupt, labourers emigrate, and agriculture and industry are dwindling, as the General recognised; all because the indolence of the race does not permit it to take advantage of the fertility of the soil nor to govern itself.
[1] Histoire de l'Isle cspagnole, Amsterdam, 1733, vol. iv. p. 362.
[2] Rufinito, by F. Garcia Godoy, Santo Domingo, 1908, pp. 53, 54.
INTELLECTUAL EVOLUTION
Spain founded universities in America, where she exercised a true monopoly of ideas. The Revolution in her colonies was inspired by the doctrines of the French Encyclopædists. Since then—that is, during the whole of the nineteenth century—the metropolis has been losing the greater portion of her ancient intellectual privileges. Political and literary ideas, romanticism and liberalism, faith in reason and poetic enthusiasm, all these have been imported from France. It is interesting to study the results of this lasting influence in philosophy and letters.
Conservatives and liberals—Lastarria—Bilbao—Echeverria—Montalvo—Vigil—The Revolution of 1848 and its influence in America—English ideas: Bello, Alberdi—The educationists.
The revolutionists of America hastily sought for an ideology which should ratify their victory. By virtue of French ideas they had demolished an ancient organisation, had thrown off the Spanish tyranny, and had exalted anarchy in speech and in verse. To raise future cities in the wilderness they had need of a political gospel.
They founded the Republic, imported institutions from abroad, and granted all the political liberties to an amorphous crowd. The first disputes were already audible between the defenders of the old order and the radicals who sought to destroy it; conservatives and liberals appeared at an identical moment of republican life. Militarism, revolutions, and the warfare of caudillos were in part explained by the profound differences between the champions of tradition and the soldiers of liberty.
Dominated by the need to live, these nations created a political philosophy. They disregarded criticism and analysis; they affirmed and constructed; they required a faith as intolerant as the archaic dogmas. Democracy and liberalism were the essential articles of this secular religion. To the eyes of the new orthodoxy the convictions of the {236} monarchists and absolutists were dangerous heresies: royalists were prosecuted as free-thinkers had been of old. Thought was not divorced from action. It reflected the political unrest; it prepared or justified political transformations. A species of pragmatism was characteristic of American thought. Poetry was rhymed oratory, lyrical declamation; the poet condemned any form of civil autocracy; he execrated tyrants, or evoked ingenuous liberties; he could not conceive of pure thought as divorced from life. Alberdi, an Argentine thinker, wrote: "Philosophy is meant for politics, morality, industry, and history, and if it does not serve them it is a puerile and a trifling science." He condemned the analysis of the eighteenth century, which "dissolves and corrupts everything"; to vain ideology, to the question whether "ideas and sensations, memory and reminiscence are distinct faculties," he preferred "an Argentine philosophy in which are distilled the social and moral needs of our country; a clear, democratic, progressive, and popular philosophy, with ideas like those of Condorcet; human perfectibility, continual progress of the human species; a philosophy which inspires men with the love of country and the love of humanity."
The champions of liberalism defined the principles of the new social state; they were brilliant commentators, their subject being the ideas of French and Spanish philosophy. Their action in a society in which the old colonial prejudices were still triumphant was categorical and magistral. They created institutions and laws, and applied foreign doctrines to the troubles of the time. Sometimes they seemed inspired in the Biblical sense; they prophesied and condemned, as did Bilbao and Echeverria.
Lastarria, Bilbao, Montalvo, Vigil, and Sarmiento were the leading figures of this romantic period; {237} with them intellectual activity was inseparable from politics. Lastarria and Bilbao opposed the authoritarianism of Chili; Montalvo and Vigil respectively, the clericalism of Ecuador and Peru; Sarmiento, the tyranny of Rosas. Their works were pamphlets, their theories were always practical: criticisms of contemporary reality, or constructive sketches of the State of the future.
Lastarria and Bilbao were the professors of liberalism in Chili. The liberalism of the first was tempered by the influence of Comte, and the study of philosophy and history; that of the second, indisciplined and prophetic, was eventually the bitter protest of a misunderstood evangelist.
Lastarria was the great Chilian reformer, as Bello was the prudent master who disciplined youth and defended tradition and the classic ideology. He was, like Bilbao, a pupil of Bello's, but to the conservative doctrines of the latter he opposed a generous liberalism. He was professor of legislation at the National Institute of Santiago from 1841, and from his professorial chair he criticised Chilian laws and prejudices. At first he followed Bentham in his lectures on constitutional law, and then the French liberals. He was influenced by Herder, by Edgar Quinet, a jurist and a disciple of Krause, and by Ahrens. Finally he accepted certain ideas of Comte's—for instance, the theory of the Three Estates—and endeavoured to reconcile his teaching with that of John Stuart Mill, Toqueville, and Laboulaye.
He believed, as did the romantics, in indefinite progress, liberty, universal harmony, and the power of man as against the inevitability of physical laws; in 1846 his political studies won the eulogy of Edgar Quinet. From a liberal standpoint he studied the evolution of Chili from the Conquest to the Republic.
In the defence of his political faith the professor intervened in the struggles of his country; academic {238} dissertations did not satisfy him; he felt the need of action, of parliamentary agitation. As deputy and publicist he opposed the influence of Portales, the representative of the Chilian oligarchy, and the Constitution of 1833, that admirable piece of conservative legislation. "The State," said Lastarria, "has for its object the respect of the rights of the individual: there is the limit of its action." Portales, on the other hand, considered a strong central authority, a stern tutelage, to be a necessity in the South American republics, subject as they were to crises of anarchy. Liberty seemed to him a premature gift where the crowd was concerned. Lastarria opposed the positive work of the dictator by a vague idealism: liberty of conscience, of work, of association; an executive powerless to limit these liberties; municipal government, federation—such were the fundamental items of his propaganda. In the generality of American constitutions he disapproved of the vague definition of individual rights, the attributions of the public powers, the irresponsibility of these latter, and the amalgamation of colonial political forms with the administrative centralisation of the French régime.
Two Presidents, Bulnes and Montt, from 1841 to 1861, continued the despotic system founded by Portales; against them the liberal professor commenced his magnificent campaign. He was exiled in 1850. He travelled, and continued to publish his political writings. He had studied Comte, Mill, and Toqueville, and he now completed his education in certain directions. His next book, Lessons in Positivist Politics (1874), applied the principles of the Positivist school to the evolution of South America and to Chilian history in particular. He studied the organisation of the powers of the State, of society, and government, and abandoned his former radicalism. He recognised the fact that where Catholicism is the religion of the majority (as in Chili) the State may {239} protect the national Church while exercising the moderate supervision that is known as "patronage."
Lastarria influenced the destinies of Chili. At his death the liberals came into power, and politicians like Santa-Maria and Balmaceda, who supported liberal legislation, may be regarded as disciples of the author of Positivist Politics.
Lastarria was a politician, Bilbao an apocalyptic dreamer. He founded the "Society of Equality," which was a democratic club. A generous and radical nature, he criticised, in a celebrated article on Chilian Sociability (1844), "the tradition, the ancient authority, the faith, the servile customs, the national apathy, the dogma of blind obedience, the respect for the established order, the hatred of innovation, and the persecution of the innovator," which he deplored in his native country. He gave a pitiless analysis of Chilian prejudices, and studied the national problems—commerce, education, marriage, taxation, the functions of Church and State—and answered them in a democratic sense. He was accused of immorality, blasphemy, and sedition. He also attacked the Constitution of 1833, and the minister Montt could not forgive him for this liberal campaign. Ten years later Bilbao was exiled for his leanings toward anarchy, and in Paris he became acquainted with Quinet and Lamennais, the evangelists of his democratic faith. In 1880, on his return to Chili, he resumed his inflammatory courses.
Montalvo in Ecuador represented the same liberal effort as Bilbao and Lastarria. But this democrat had read Montaigne and Voltaire; he was a master of satire, irony, and sarcasm. His contradictory nature united Lamartine's faith in democracy with the scepticism of the eighteenth century. He was not a politician merely, but a man of letters. His wide culture was revealed by the multiple forms in which his intellectual activity found an outlet. As an {240} essayist, by his lyrical disorder, he recalled Carlyle. His harsh criticism of the national clergy in La Mercurial Eclesiastica is as lively as an Italian conte. He imitated Cervantes with perfection; he could make a clever pastiche of Don Quixote. He knew his Byron, Milton, Lamartine, Racine, and the Latin and Spanish classics, and would have been the completest type of the humanist which the Latin New World has produced had not his restless spirit yielded too readily to the solicitations of politics.
In contrast to Garcia-Moreno, the Catholic dictator, Montalvo was the liberal free-lance; he could not forgive the caudillo his long tyranny, his intolerant faith, his submission to the Pope as a supreme monarch. The Ecuadorian polemist believed in liberty and the republic; he detested the theocracy implanted by the Christian President.
But his activities were not destructive; Montalvo was a believer in the manner of the revolutionists of 1848. "A sane and pure democracy has need of Jesus Christ," he wrote in his liberal enthusiasm; he loved Christianity because it was the religion of the democracy. Democracy would be the law of the nations "if some day the spirit of the Gospel were to prevail." He eulogised the stoicism and virtue of the Roman Republic, in the image of which he wished to construct the Chilian democracy, and in a magnificent essay he exalted the nobility of these qualities. He was not a radical like Bilbao; a forerunner of pragmatism, he accepted all useful ideas, even Catholicism, so that it did not become a political tyranny. "There is nothing to be gained by attacking certain beliefs," he wrote, "which by virtue of being general and useful to all will eventually become verities, even if the curious and courageous investigation of bygone things could constitute a motive for doubting them."
An American thinker, he applied Latin ideas to {241} the affairs of the continent. In his Seven Treaties, his capital work, are some superb passages upon the heroes of South American emancipation. His cult was that of Carlyle, religious and full of lyrical passion. "In what is he inferior to the great men of antiquity?" he asks of Bolivar. "Only in this, that no long centuries flow between us, for only time, the great master, can distil in his magic laboratory the chrism with which the princes of nature are anointed." He traces a parallel between Bolivar and Napoleon, between Bolivar and Washington. "In Napoleon there is something more than in other men; a sense, a wheel in the mechanism of understanding, a fibre in the heart. He looks across the world from the Apennines to the Pillars of Hercules, from the pyramids of Egypt to the snows of Russia. Kings tremble, pallid, and half-lifeless; thrones crack and crumble; the nations look up and regard him and are afraid, and bend the knee before the giant." Montalvo admires Napoleon, but he judges Bolivar the superior, because the work of the former was destroyed by mankind, while the work of the latter still prospers. "He who realises great and lasting undertakings is greater than he who realises only great and ephemeral things."
Montalvo believed in the American race, in the mestizos, "in the high, lofty spirit and the stout heart which make the aristocracy of South America." His prophetic enthusiasm exalts the future inhabitants of America, "who will be our descendants when the traveller shall sadly seat himself to meditate upon the ruins of the Louvre, the Vatican, or St. Paul's." To his work of criticism of Garcia-Moreno and the clericals we must add this religious Americanism, this tenacious faith in the destinies of the democracy.
Without the lyric fervour of Montalvo, heavy and dusty as an ancient palimpsest, Vigil represents the struggle of Peruvian liberalism against the power of {242} the Church. Born in 1792, he was a priest, and abandoned his calling, but without retaining, like Renan, the unction of the seminarist. A stoic in his life, the champion of liberty in several Congresses, he devoted his riper years to a long campaign against ecclesiastical privilege. His admirable erudition served him in this propaganda. He defended the State against the encroachments of the clergy. An idealist, he preached universal peace, the union of all American nations, and expounded the excellencies of the democracy, in whose Christian virtues he, like Montalvo, firmly believed. He won respect, as did Bilbao, by the austerity of his life and the sincerity of his exhortations: a Socratic master whose life was harmonious as a poem.
An Argentine thinker, genial and tumultuous, Sarmiento represented a liberalism less coherent than that of Echeverria, but as a champion of the ideal and the intellectual life in the democracy tyrannised over by Rosas he deserves to be placed beside Lastarria and Montalvo. Menendez Pelayo called him the gaucho of the Republic of Letters; for his pugnacious individuality, his barbaric impetuosity, and his semi-culture, which was mitigated by admirable intuition, were inimical to all classic order or discipline. Sarmiento was a romantic by temperament; he attacked Spanish culture in the name of French liberalism, and condemned tradition, which led to slavery; he believed in the virtuality of ideas, the mission of education, and the greatness of democracy. He applied to the United States for models of popular education, and for political examples of federal life. He was a teacher, a journalist, a pamphleteer, and a President.
He analysed Argentine life and the American revolutions; in 1845 he published El Facundo, an evocation of the Argentine civil wars, with all the passion and lyrical fervour of a Michelet. Sarmiento {243} was the enemy of Rosas, as Montalvo was the eloquent rival of Garcia-Moreno. In El Facundo are pages of pitiless criticism of the tyranny of the federal caudillo. Exiled, he founded a review in Chili, in 1842, in which he still attacked Rosas, but he did not confine himself to ephemeral journalism. He discovered eternal elements in the battles of the time; he studied the American man and the American soil, as in the prologue to El Facundo. He then studied the racial problem, and in another book described the ideal republic of which he dreamed. His work is profoundly American.
American liberalism, between 1830 and 1860, was inspired by French ideas. One revolution, that of 1789, explained in part the movement for the conquest of political liberty. Another, that of 1848, found echoes even in these distant democracies, and disturbed them by the insinuating eloquence of a new gospel. A curious parallelism may be observed between the claims of French socialism and American radicalism.
In France the Revolution of 1848 had not only a political tendency, but also a social aspect. An extension of electoral capacity was desired, and the right to work was proclaimed; men fought for the sovereignty of the people, and workshops were founded in which the State assured the subsistence of the working-classes. While the republican parties were fighting against the monarchy of Louis Philippe, Icarians and Communists were preparing for the social revolution; the proletariat was rising against the bourgeoisie, as the Third Estate rose against the nobility of old. A note of equalitarian fervour was noticeable in the protest of the crowd. The leaders of the movement against Guizot and his oligarchy of property-owners were socialists: Louis Blanc, Pierre Leroux, Blanqui, and Ledru-Rollin; they supplemented their democratic victories by a programme of social reform.
In Latin America the Revolution was chiefly political; it demanded the suffrage, equality before the law, and respect for political rights, and it condemned the excesses of authority. It did not forget to make a social protest, but the conflict of classes was not as yet very violent.
"The Revolution of 1848 was loudly echoed in Chili," wrote the historian Vicuña-Mackenna. To combat the oligarchy the young Lastarria brothers, Bilbao, the Amunategui, the three Mattas, the three Blests, Santiago Arcos, and Diego Barros-Arana founded the "Society of Equality," a secret club, "to save the people from the shameful tutelage to which it has been subjected."[1]
This tutelage was more especially political; for this reason the club proclaimed democratic principles: the sovereignty of reason, the sovereignty of the people, and universal love and brotherhood. These young men opened schools for the people. Lillo published a translation of The Words of a Believer, by Lamennais, which served the radical circle for their Bible.
But the real master of the new generation in Chili and in the other democracies was Lamartine. "From 1848 to 1858 he was a demi-god, a second Moses," wrote a historian. The "young men" formed a commentary upon the History of the Girondists. They imitated the great figures of the French Revolution: Bilbao was Vergniaud; Santiago Arcos, Marat; Lastarria, Brissot. Societies were formed, congresses were held; one exalted group called itself The Mountain.
In Venezuela, in 1846, a demagogue by the name of Antonio Leocadio Guzman offered the people the abolition of slavery and the repartition of the soil; he led a revolution against society and the Government. In Colombia the liberal Constitution of 1853 was an {245} echo of the French Revolution of 1848, and democratic clubs were formed as in Chili. They ruled the country by means of terror, were predominant in the journals, and propagated socialism and hatred of the oligarchy of property-owners and the omnipotent clergy. The liberals evoked Christ as the first democrat, whence the faction known as Golgotha. Anarchy increased in the provinces. Bishops and conservative notabilities were pursued, the Jesuits were expelled, and in 1851 the slaves were freed. A discontent of long standing was revealed by the activities of these eloquent revolutionaries, who imitated, like the Chilian Girondists, the French politicians of the Revolution.
"Democracy," Lamartine had said in 1848, "is, in principle, the direct reign of God." His ideal was an equalitarian Republic. His political ideas were drawn from the New Testament; he saw in the French Revolution "a Divine and holy thought." Charity, the protection of the disinherited, equality, and fraternity—in short the whole democratic creed—was merely the application of Christian ideas to the world of politics. Lamartine wrote in defence of all the liberties, and wished the Government to be "an instrument of God." We can understand what enthusiasm this eloquence, impregnated as it was with idealism and the love of humanity, must have produced in America; we find the accents of Lamartine echoed in the words of Montalvo as well as Bilbao. Anarchy presently became a sort of mystic rebellion against tyrants. Throughout all South America Lamartine and the Revolution of 1848 inspired men's speech or writings, and engendered revolutions or fresh tyrannies.
The influence of France was sovereign. The influence of Guizot and the doctrinaires must be added to that of Lamartine. English ideas also were prevalent; Bentham was the great authority on {246} political science from the earliest years of the Republic; at his death the Central American Congress, which had followed his teaching, proclaimed a period of mourning. In Colombia General Santander quoted against Bolivar phrases inspired by English radicalism and by Destutt de Tracy. Bentham harshly criticised the Contrat Social of Rousseau, and his pretended "natural rights"; policy he based upon the happiness of the greatest number. Tracy professed a moderate relativism, and utilitarian ideas, like Bentham. Bolivar, unlike these professors of individualism, believed in the benefits of a moral dictatorship.
Bello again represented English thought, not only in his philosophical work, but also in his writings as jurist. He was, like the classic legislators, the creator of the written law. His civil code, promulgated in Chili in 1855, served other nations as a model, and his Law of Nations became the international law of South America. He was born into the world for the purpose of pouring language as well as law into logical moulds. In his legislative work he displayed a severe analysis, a British prudence, and a constant recognition of social realities. He hated the vague and the nebulous, and liked to express his ideas in clear, concrete formulæ; he brought to the solution of social problems a solid common sense.
Alberdi also adopted British methods and ideas. In France he especially admired Guizot, and distrusted Lamartine. He attacked the sterile intellectualism of his fellow-Americans, and wrote in defence of Protestantism, a religion peculiarly appropriate to republics on a Catholic continent. He believed in the English constitutional monarchy, in the benefits of technical schools, and in the disastrous effects of a parasitical scholarship; he preferred strong governments, like that of Chili, and detested demagogues. "The Republic," he wrote, "has been {247} and is still the bread of Presidents, the trade of soldiers, the industry of lawyers without causes, and journalists without talent; the refuge of the second-rate of every species, and the machine for the amalgamation of all the dross of society." Such was his verdict on the political system of South America.
He called for a monarchy as the only salvation of the country: "thus the Republics might unite themselves to Europe, whence their riches and their civilisation derive, and resist the monopoly of North America." From European influence he hoped to obtain not only culture, but also the consecration of political independence. He begged the Old World for emigrants, for capital, and for princes. In an admirable volume published in 1858 he analysed the "bases" of the Argentine organisation. This book was no Latin gospel; with the "relativity" of an Anglo-Saxon he proposed practical solutions; he ascribed supremacy to population, strong governments, laborious immigrants, and industrial wealth; he disdained the ideology of the revolutionists, and their implacable Jacobinism. His effort may be compared to that of Burke in his criticism of the French Revolution. Amid the sterile enthusiasm of romantic politicians his book stands out, in its gravity, sobriety, common sense, and realism, like a lesson for all time.
Other American conservatives were Lucas Alaman, leader of the Mexican conservatives and author of a fine history of his country; Bartolome Herrera, a follower of Guizot, in Peru; Cecilio Acosta, in Venezuela: these were in agreement with Alberdi upon certain points of his ample doctrine. Like the Argentine, Acosta wished to see more elementary and secondary schools and fewer universities, to find "practical knowledge replacing a parchment scholarship; free speech and thought the fetters of the peripatetic school; and generalisation, casuistry." The jurists obeyed the same tendency; they were {248} positive and analytic spirits; they brought clarity and discipline to an incoherent politics. Among them we may cite, after Bello, Calvo, Garcia Calderon, Velez Sarsfield, and Ambrosio Montt. They opposed the ineffectual Constitutions of the precisians.
Liberal idealism vanquished conservative good sense. Lastarria attracted impetuous youth more than Bello and Alberdi; Guizot had few readers; Lamartine and Benjamin-Constant were popular. Liberalism, radicalism, Jacobinism: these were the various disguises of South American anarchy.
[1] Za piola, La Sociedad de la Igualdad, Santiago, 1902, p. 8.
Spanish classicism and French romanticism—Their influence in America—Modernism—The work of Ruben Dario—The novel—The conte or short story
The ancient Spanish colonies, freed from the political authority of Spain, still followed her in the matter of literature; republican autonomy and intellectual subjection were not incompatible. Towards 1825 writers in prose and verse were by no means imitating France, although she gave them her declamatory politics and her revolutionary code. Educated in Spain, the best minds were seeking their inspiration in the Spanish literature of the eighteenth century: the works of the classic Quintana, of Moratin, Gallego, Lista, and Jovellanos dominated the American schools.
A lasting divorce, this of a romantic politics and a classic literature. When letters were invaded by romanticism, with its lyric lamentations, a sane realism—the realism of men preoccupied with finances or laborious codifications—struggled against the swamping waves of all this rhetoric. Literary forms, long out of fashion in France and even in Spain, still aroused enthusiasm in America; the American author adopted the realism of the naturalistic novel when the French schools were already given over to symbolism, and at a later date he became first {250} a modernist and then a decadent, while in France a classic restoration had set in. To the real current of European literature South America has preferred ephemeral excesses, and the work of coteries, which she has imitated with enthusiasm. It is barely ten years since South American letters began to reflect—curiously behind the times—the direction taken by French poetry. The literature of the new continent, to-day invaded by books and ideas, follows a path parallel to that followed by French and Spanish letters. Every novelty finds an echo, and the very diversity of imitation ought before long to give rise to a final originality.
Poets, both romantic and classic, threw themselves into the social conflicts of the time; whence that kinship between poetry and eloquence, already recognised by Brunetière in France.[1] In American poetry we find the civic accent, eulogies of liberty, odes to civilisation and the mother-country, rather than elegies or "states of soul." Tyrtæus would be popular there rather than Anacreon; Béranger would be imitated rather than De Musset. Classicism thus takes the form of a civic poetry; calm and mannered, it sings of political subjects, of progress, independence, and the victories of liberty over theocracy.
In Mexico, Ecuador, and the Argentine, the first generation of republican poets were incontestably disciples of the master of the Spanish masters—Quintana, whose grave and virile odes exalted the printing-press, philanthropy, and progress: new deities erected by the French Revolution upon the ancient altars. His emphasis, the movement of his verse, and the breath of oratory which enlivens his stanzas, charmed and subjugated the writers oversea. Liberty, so barely conquered, gave birth to a poetry {251} which sang of heroes and of battles. Ideas and forms were inspired by Quintana; their best eulogy is comparison with their model. Thus Olmedo, the second poet of this classic age, is known as the American Quintana.
Those who acclaimed the Revolution in Mexico also were disciples of the Spanish poet; republican orators in verse, Quintana Roo or Sanchez del Tagle, who describe the heroes of the War of Independence. An eminent poetess, Salome Ureña de Henriquez, of San Domingo, sang of civilisation and the native land with a most austere and noble eloquence.
A political poet again, Juan Cruz, of Argentina, gracefully proclaimed the glory of the Unitarian party and that of the reformer Rivadavia.
The contemporary writers of the Revolution did not forget the instruction received in Spain, in the universities of the eighteenth century, where they studied in Latin and commented upon the classics of Greece and Rome. They read and imitated Horace and Virgil, and were inspired by the ancient democracies, and the heroes of Plutarch; the Isthmus of Panama was compared to that of Corinth. At their birth the Republics appointed consuls and triumvirs. In speeches and proclamations of the time we find numerous classical reminiscences; politicians and poets borrowed their images from Pindar, Horace, Homer, and Virgil.
The influence of the classics and of Quintana is especially to be remarked in Olmedo, the poet of Ecuador, who chanted the victory of Junin and the genius of Bolivar. The movement of his verses is that of a Latin ode, while the eloquence, sonority, and graceful progression of his stanzas recalls the Spanish classics.
The Venezuelan lyrist Bello, a true humanist, was inspired by Virgil, and attained a truly classic perfection.
But Quintana was not alone in serving as model to the lost colonies; others, the fiery Gallego, and Moratin, the author of delightful comedies; a critic, Alberto Lista; Melendez, Cienfugos, and Martinez de la Rosa, cultivators of a correct, elegant, and frigid form, were also imitated, and the imitators could not free themselves from their impoverished classicism. Olmedo (1780) and Bello (1781) were both masters of metre, taste, and harmony. It is not easy in their case to separate the politician from the artist, they themselves considering their art to be a high republican function; Olmedo counsels federation in his Canto à Junin, and José Eusebio Caro attacks the tyrant Lopez in a poem upon liberty, while Felipe Pardo writes political satires. Of the American democracies he says:
"Zar de tres tintas, indio, bianco y negro,
Que rige el continente americano
Y que se llama Pueblo Soberano."[2]
Towards 1840 classicism gave way to romanticism. The Revolution, the protest of individualism against the Spanish rule, disdained the old literary canons, having first condemned the old political system. The poets, still numerous, sought models in Spain. Arolas, Espronceda; Zorilla, the Duke de Rivas; and in France, Victor Hugo, de Musset, and Lamartine. Byron, too, had his disciples. All were romantic in life and work, pilgrims à la Childe Harold, who described Châtiments and were persecuted for liberty. Disorderly, imperfect, dominated by an inward dæmon who produced a continual exaltation, they portrayed the constant restlessness of their spirits. {253} Romanticism in Europe was the triumph of the individual, of liberty, the lyrical poetry of confessions—the melancholy of René or the satanic pride of Manfred—the revenge, in short, of sentiment against reason. In art this stood for liberty, the cult of the exotic, the return to nature, the Gothic restoration, and war upon classic conventions.
Which among these elements could give the new generation in South America that enthusiasm which might evoke a romantic state of mind? Certainly not the national antiquities, remote and misunderstood. Although a few poets wrote Orientales without much sincerity, none sought to renew his lyrical gifts in the Aztec or Quechua traditions. But this imitation of the tendencies of French and Spanish letters was assisted by the lack of discipline found in the American character, which was more attracted by idealism and sentiment than by classic rigidity or reason. All things favoured romanticism; the political conflicts and the anarchy of the time formed Byronic heroes; tropical passion found its food in the sentimentalism of Lamartine and the ardour of De Musset, while the individual was developed by struggling against the tyrants. In the uncertain and barbaric life of these young democracies there was a confusion of rôles; the poet became the vates, the leader of the crowd, only to feel himself exiled among mediocrities, the victim of illiterates. Melancholy, exasperated individualism, the high mission of the poet, and solitude—these are romantic elements which are reflected in American literature.
The Colombian Caro believed in the "consoling mission" of the poet, and this mission, for the Argentine Andrade, was a priesthood and a prophetic gift. The poet appears "when the human caravan changes its route in the desert." But as a result of this mission Nemesis inflicts solitude and suffering. {254} The South American poets abandon the world as a result of their despair:—
"Sufrirás el martirio
Que al nació poeta
Reserva el hado impío,"[3]
sings the Argentine Echeverria.
And Marmol:—
"Yo vivo solamente cuando feliz deliro
Que los terrenos lazos mi corazón rompió.
. . . . .
Venid porque yo gozo yo vivo solamente
Si pienso que he dejado la humanidad detras."[4]
The Peruvian Salaverry contemplates his heart:—
"Cual la ruina de un templo silencioso
Vacío, abandonado, pavoroso,
Sin luz y sin rumor."[5]
José Eusebio Caro, who has sung of liberty in admirable strophe, would hide himself in the forest:—
"Que los hombres ya me niegan
Una tumba en sus ciudades
En mi patria me expulsaron
De la casa de mis padres."[6]
These romantics were not, like Rousseau, inclined toward the simple life by an excess of artificial civilisation. Their melancholy, when it is not an echo of exotic griefs, is the cry of anguish of a noble mind lost in a barbarous republic. This contrast between the man and his surroundings very clearly explains the strong hold obtained by the {255} romantic ideal; the literature of passion, pride, and revolt, it expresses a social condition of inner conflict and solitude.
The Argentine, Marmol, imitates Byron in his Pilgrim. Grandiloquent, passionate, and mournful, he curses the tyranny of Rosas. Echeverria, under a classic mantle, barely hides his romantic subjectivity, full of passion and a vague melancholy. In Venezuela Heriberto Garcia de Quevedo left a legacy of prodigiously long poems.
In Cuba Gertrudis Gomez de Avellanada, wearied and lyrical, exalted love in the accents of De Musset; the mulatto Placido wrote musical descriptive verse; Juan Clemente Zenea, translator of Leopardi and Longfellow, confessed, in musical elegiac verse, his disabused outlook upon life; and greater than any, Hérédia, the singer of Niagara, a fiery, suffering spirit, full of contrasts as his art, tells us of his sorrow and his faith; he sings of love and nature in beautiful imagery, admiring both the divine might and the intoxicating sensuality of the tropics.
In Mexico Espronceda and Lamartine inspired Fernando Calderon and Ignacio Rodriguez Galvan; Zorilla found a disciple in Manuel Flores, the poet of burning sensuality and savage nature. Brazil, as fruitful of romantics as Cuba, produced Gongalvez Diaz, who sang of the melancholy and nostalgia so well expressed by a word in his own tongue—saudades;—of sorrow, deliverance by knowledge, and the consolation of tears:—
"Men Deus, senhor men Deus, o que ha no mundo
Que não seja soffrir?
O homen nasce, e vive um so instante
E soffre até morrir!"[7]
In his love poetry there is a very, beautiful sincerity, although we may recognise the influence of many masters—Byron, Zorilla, and the French romantics. Cited by him, this line of Saint-Beuve's:—
"Mon Dieu, fais que je puisse aimer!"[8]
enables us to understand his plaints.
Casimiro de Abrou also essayed romantic subjects: solitude, misery, and exile. Alvares de Azevedo imitated Byron and De Musset, while a poet who did not versify, José de Alencar, expounded in his tales and novels a romantic conception of the Indian, simple and virtuous as one of Rousseau's characters.
We find this conception again in the work of a great poet of Uruguay, Zorilla de San Martin, who in Tabaré sang the struggles of the greedy conquerors and the ingenuous Americans.
Romanticism was not with these men merely a matter of art; their lives were no less troublous and lyrical than their poetry. Rebels and nomads, thirsting for democratic liberty, they were wasted in the struggle with tyrants, or sent early to the scaffold or into exile, as though fate respected the unity of their troubled career. Thus these disciples of Lamartine, imaginative and sensual, vehement and melancholy in their art, gave a sombre yet vivid colouring to a period of American history, the years between 1840 and 1860.
Andrade was conspicuous among all for his sonorous eloquence; he was the greatest by virtue of the oratory, wealth, and ambitious grandeur of his poems, vast compositions which recall the Légende des siècles, the Prometheus of Shelley, or the Ahasuerus of Edgar Quinet. Doubtless he is not the equal of his masters. But devoid of melancholy and restless passion, his rhetoric, his verbal wealth, and his {257} sybilline accents exercised a powerful influence. Repeating the grandiloquent excesses of Hugo, he was the poet of democracy and the Latin race.
His Atlantide is the Latin future; Prometheus the eternal battle of thought and fanaticism. He is full of Spanish arrogance. Marvellously sonorous, his stanzas proclaim, with pomp and majesty, a romantic faith in America and liberty. The soul of Rome "destined to inaugurate history and embrace space," lives again beyond the ocean; Spain was the heir at first, until she choked beneath the "enervating shadow of the Papacy." France,
"Montana en cuya cumbre
Anida el genio humano,"[9]
was now the leading Latin nation, and Napoleon the instrument of the ancient imperial spirit. His sword
"Que sobre el mapa de la Europa absorta
Trazó fronteras, suprimió desiertos
Y que quizás de recibir cansada
El homenaje de los reyes vivos,
Fuá á demandar en el confin remote,
El homenaje de los reyos muertos."[10]
Andrade believed in the sacred rôle of the poet: Hugo, his admired master,
"La voz de trueno del gran profeto hebreo
La cuerda de agrios tonos
De Juvenal
Y el rumor de los cantos
Del viejo Gibelino,"[11]
{258} seemed to him prophet and forerunner, martyr and exile. The poet, seer, and leader of men, is thus
"Hermano de las águilas del Cáucaso
Que secaron piadosas con sus alas
La ensangrentada faz de Prometeo."[12]
Lyric scholars in these troublous republics, the romantics sought to ennoble politics by a generous idealism, to overthrow the tyrants, and realise an impossible democracy.
French naturalism and the Parnassian school had little influence in Latin America. Although Zola enjoyed a strange popularity—which corresponds, in the literary world, to the enthusiasm of the Trans-atlantic universities for materialism and positivism—we meet with few imitations of Germinal or La Terre. The American writers have not assimilated the naturalistic methods, their brutal and minute observation, their study of the crowd, and their intentional pessimism; they have hardly read the masters of the realistic school, Balzac and Flaubert. Only during the last twenty years have Maupassant, the Portuguese novelist Eça de Queiros, d'Annunzio, and the great Russian writers interested and disturbed the American reader. The love of the novel is but gradually dislodging the old lyric enthusiasm.
CLÉMENTE PALMA.
Peruvian essayist and novelist.
RICARDO PALMER.
The Parnassian movement, in America, produced the Argentine poet Leopoldo Diaz. He adapted to Spanish verse the sonority, the relief, and the plastic beauty of the French masters. One of his poems is dedicated in homage to the poet of the Sonnets, to his incomparable model, José-Maria de Hérédia. Diaz sought to give his native Spanish, the language of eloquence, a Parnassian inevitability, and to mould its rhetorical abundance to the narrow limits of the sonnet. Les sombras de Hellas invokes the Greek {259} life, sensual and luminous; Les conquistadores the thunderous epic; and all his optimistic songs speak of a Latin renaissance in the overseas democracies.
An absorbing taste for symbolism and the decadents, for "deliquescent" poetry and the work of the small Parisian cliques, has produced an intensely vital intellectual movement—modernism—which, by its wealth of language and ideas and the renewed vitality of its language, signifies a true renaissance. Beside it the old classic and romantic movements seem lukewarm imitations which pale before the exuberance of more modern work.
Modernism is undoubtedly an adequate diet for Transatlantic Latins. But is this decadent renaissance better inspired than the passion and the eloquence of yesterday? Is it also an indication of servitude? By no means; the great poets have retained a robust belief in life, and their master, Ruben Dario, followed his Prosas profanas by his Songs of life and hope.
The younger generation was drawn to this art by purely psychological motives. The Spanish character had become refined by its new environment; weakened, perhaps, but it had gained a keener intelligence and a greater wealth of fantasy. Chiaroscuro and subtle shades, such as the French delight in, delighted the Creole also, partial as he was to finesse, to a delicate Byzantism, and gracefully sceptical of the robust Spanish faith. Then there were hosts of half-castes, in whom the inimical heredities of two races were in painful conflict. The strangest characteristics—the sensuality of the negro and the melancholy of the Indian—gave the new race a spiritual personality full of contradictory characteristics; melancholy but not without optimism; the desires of a faun or a satyr, violent or languid; and a love of the rare and unusual, of verbal music, of complication in the matter of feeling, of {260} carefully chosen language and unfamiliar rhythms. Reading Verlaine, Samain, Laforgue, Moréas, Henri de Régnier, and not as yet forgetting Gautier and Banville; mingling all cults and asking intoxication from every flagon, the poets of America have struck the national chord. Symbolism has been of little assistance; it calls for a lofty conception of the world and a profound sense of mystery. They much prefer decadence in art, because of its musical lyric quality, its exotic images, and its melancholy rhythms. An elective affinity, to use Goethe's phrase, has enabled them to draw an individual music from the foreign instrument.
So new metres and old fashions refurbished, modern images in sonorous and tortuous measures, all that in Europe was the voice of ennui, the tardy fruit of a world grown old, a Baudelairian art, the art of refined scepticism, was made to serve a young generation in love with life for the expression of its ambitions. This reform has reached Spain; the initiate has captivated the initiator, as in the drama of Renan. The recent voices of Spanish poetry follow that of the pontiff of the new school, Ruben Dario. Similarly Brazil has influenced Portuguese poetry, and, according to Theophilo Braga, surpasses it.
German and French romanticism revived the old forgotten chansons de geste, the despised poetry of the Gothic school; they charmed by the rude naturalism of the primitive legends. Similarly the modernists of America have renewed Spanish literature by listening to the ingenuous voice of Berceo and the more melancholy accents of Manrique. The result is that they are more traditionalist than the classic writers of the seventeenth century, whose intolerance so impoverished the language.
This renaissance is of barely twenty years' date. Certain forerunners—Marti and Julien del Casal, both Cubans, one a revolutionary in politics as in poetry, {261} the other a man of tragic life, and Gutierrez Najera in Mexico—revealed the new poetic speech to a continent weary of sentimentalism. New or unfamiliar rhythms and agile metres were the vehicle of a new and intimate lyrical passion. But the note was not as yet decadent: Banville and Gautier, and De Musset, even, had not yet given way to Verlaine, who was as unknown as Mallarmé. A Venezuelan critic, Pedro Emilio Coll, drew attention to the persistent cult among the "American decadents," of the great Theodore, and of the author of Funambulesques. In the Azul of Ruben Dario he noted the influence of Mendès and Loti, even that of Daudet and the realists of his school, rather than the influence of symbolism.[13]
By the vivacity and brilliance of his verse, Manuel Guttierrez Nájera reminds one of Banville. He sings in a new key, at once Creole and exotic, the complicated sensations which are presently to torment Ruben Dario. Spanish verse had never yet held such grace and spirit, nor this sensuality appeased by tears, nor this proud and reserved melancholy. A Cecilia, Vidas Muertas, Castigadas, Mariposas—these contained a new lyric poetry, elegiac and tender, an unknown rhythm, a forgotten manner. He was a forerunner. Who does not know his lines upon the spoiled child whom he loves?
"No hay en el mundo mujer mas linda!
Pié de Andaluza, boca de guinda,
Esprit rociado de Veuve Cliquot,
Talle de avispa, cutis de ala,
Ojos traviesos de colegiala,
Como los ojos de Louise Théo."[14]
{262} He is not always so frivolous. Mystery torments him; he knows the bitterness of vanished illusions; a pessimist, he has a vision of the moths of death "which have such black wings, and encircle us in a funereal round." The monologue of the unbeliever is a lament like that of Sigismond de Calderon upon the vanity of life:—
"Si es castigo ¿ cual pecado,
Sin saberlo, cometimos?
Si premio ¿ porque ganado?
Sin haberlo demandado,
Responded ¿ porqué vivimos?"[15]
Poems and chronicles are filled with a like restlessness and trouble. He writes Odes worthy of an anthology; he translates De Musset and Coppee. His master is Gautier: he shares his love of the light; he sings, in love with ideal whiteness:—
"¿ Qué cosa más blanca que cándido lirio?
¿ Qué cosa más pura que místico cirio?
¿ Que cosa mas casta que tierno azahar?"[16]
The modernism of South America was inspired firstly by the Parnassian school of France, which did not until later give place to the new voice, symbolist or decadent. Verlaine, Samain, and Laforgue were then the chief models; but beneath the current of imitation a movement was forming which was more and more original, a great school of verse, the leading note of which was refinement. "We owe to foreign literatures, and more particularly to the French," says a writer already cited, "the refinement of the organs necessary to the interpretation of beauty; we owe to them our methods of observation {263} and our love of impressions, rather than any kind of co-ordinated æsthetic perspective.... Our eyes have learned from them to see better, and our minds to gather fugitive sensations."
No writer represents this evolution, this progressive refinement, better than Ruben Dario, a poet of Central America (of Nicaragua), the recognised master of the new school and one of the greatest lyric writers of all time in the Spanish language. He is to America what Verlaine and Hugo are to France. His images, his phrases even, excite a servile imitation. A noble band of disciples aspires to continue his immortal work. He denies his disciples: "He who shall slavishly follow my track will lose his treasure, and, whether page or slave, will not be able to hide his livery." But in vain: ardent youth listens and lays its votive offerings at the feet of the great and disdainful artist.
His poetic reform was effectual in the extreme. He renewed the youth of archaic metres, adapted French rhythms to Spanish verse, and modified, with perfect taste, the classic division of the line of verse—the place of the cæsura. With equal mastery he has employed slow and majestic measures to interpret the melancholy of the flesh, or the dancing metres of Banville, or plastic forms of a Hellenic perfection. He seems to make his own the cry of Carducci: Odio l'usata poesia.
Modern Spanish poetry used often to employ verses of eight and eleven syllables, forms to which a certain rhetorical pomp very readily allies itself. An interpreter of new ideas, Dario would not, like the French poet, accept old forms; he employed lines of ten and twelve syllables, adopted the pentameter and hexameter of the classics, and employed verses of fourteen and sixteen syllables.[17] He displaced accents, {264} and wrote admirable vers libres. A revolutionary, in ten years he had transformed Spanish poetry.
Prosas Profanas, published in 1900, is, according to the phrase of his incomparable critic, José Enrique Rodo, "the full tension of his poet's bow." From the paradoxical title to the wealth of metre, all is strange in this delicate piece of work, which opens a new literary cycle, as did Emaux et Camées or Fleurs du mal in France. The originality of the book comes from the poet's prodigious faculty of recognising in each school what is essential to him, and in appropriating it, without, therefore, ceasing to be personal. A lyric unrest carries him to one manner or another, but, archaic or modern, it becomes his own. His grace, suppleness, and learned complexity are unequalled; he will write a Symphony in Gris Majeur like Gautier, or poems in the manner of Verlaine, or a Chant an Centaure in the manner of Maurice de Guerin. His work is not built of imposing granite, but of many coloured marbles, with strange and decadent shades, such as the chiseller of the Camées loved.
RUFINO BLANCO FOMBONA (VENEZUELA).
Contemporary poet, novelist, and thinker.
His verse possesses at once the sensuality of a faun, the distinction of a marquis of the Grand Siècle, and the disenchantment of a mystic. No form, no period can arrest his wandering spirit:—
"Yo persigo una forma que no encuentra mi estilo,
Boton de pensamiento que busca ser la rosa."[18]
In the presence of love, art, and life he experiences an enthusiasm which quickly vanishes; he discovers the final melancholy of all things. He knows, with the Roman, the sadness that lurks in human joys: quod in ipsis floribus angit.
But before singing his autumnal bitterness of heart {265} he sings of nature, of ancient civilisations, of the art of all ages, and of the pageantry of life.
Dario is the leader of a school, but other poets, as great as he, may be regarded as the precursors of literary "modernism": José Asunción Silva, Leopoldo Lugones, Guillermo Valencia, Rufino Blanco Fombana—the latter, like Almafuerte, Chocano, and the Lugones of the "Hills of Gold," seeks to be the poet of the new America. These writers aim at an American art, an art free from rhetorical clichés, innocent of imitation, of declamation, of affected sensibility. Who shall say whether the revolt of this younger generation will lead it? Angel de Estrada is the poet of the exotic in his Alma nomade; Guillermo Valencia, as great as Dario in the exegesis of the legends of Greece and the love of things Hellenic, has a universal curiosity and an astonishingly versatile lyrical capacity. Rufino Blanco Fombana has sung of sensual passion, the hatred of tyrants, and the glories of Bolivar; he has remodelled the lyric, has written verses as finely chiselled as the gems of the Greek anthology, and sonorous lines in which we hear a call to action and to victory. Chocano aspires to become the poet of America: grandiloquent, sonorous, rich in imagery. Lugones is a much admired author of sentimental verse, audacious as to form and vocabulary. José Asuncion Silva was noted for his melancholy, languorous verse: he was a forerunner, a master, like Dario. Ricardo Jaimes Freire employs the more audacious metres; Amado Nervo, equally radical in his love of new forms, exhibits a modernism touched by a breath of Buddhistic pantheism, and sings of "Sister Water" like a modern St. Francis.
Essayists of the English type are numerous in America. They import European ideas, freely discuss the great problems of existence. If they apply themselves to the criticism of letters, they discover {266} general ideas; in place of minute analysis they write artistic commentaries. José Enrique Rodo, of Uruguay, is the master in this department of literature. He has published an essay on Dario, and his two books, Motivos de proteo, a collection of essays of great beauty, and Ariel, a noble address to the youth of South America, have become classics. There are other critics as brilliant: Manuel Ugarte, at once thinker and artist, writer of short stories, poet, ideologist, and the author of a remarkable book dealing with the future of South America; the Colombian, Sanin Cano, who treats of ideas; two Argentines, Emilio Becher, who writes admirable analyses of ideas and books, and Ricardo Rosas, who is, by reason of his nationalism and his wide culture, the master of the rising generation; two Venezuelans, Manuel Diaz Rodriguez and Pedro Emilio Coll, the first a noble idealist and prose artist, the second a dreamer, who has been influenced by the sceptical irony of Renan; the Peruvian, Manuel Gonzala Prada, whose aggressive and sonorous style reveals a lofty moral unrest: in his essay on life and death are pages which Guyau might have signed, and his study of Castelar is a magnificent satire; José de la Riva Agüero, a historian, a critic, and a polemist of unusual vigour; in San Domingo a powerful mind with an extraordinary knowledge of literatures, classic and foreign, Pedro Henriquez Ureña; while in Uruguay, Carlos Reyles has just proved by his book, La Mort da Cygne, his acquaintance with all the new ideas and his ability to make a powerful synthesis of them. Two Brazilian essayists, Oliveira Lima (also a great historian) and José Verissimo have written remarkable studies of civilisations and books.
MANUEL UGARTE (ARGENTINA).
Contemporary poet, novelist, and essayist.
The short story, neglected by the romantics, is being revived. Modernism, having already transformed poetry, has brought to the conte a subtlety {267} in the analysis of the passions and a knowledge of psychology that refuses to take alarm at problems of morbid obscurity, and the indispensable quality of concentration of interest. Machado de Assis is a master of powerful analysis, and a sober and ironical style; his vision of life is melancholy. Diaz Rodriguez has written some superb short stories. An evocation or a symbol places those of Carlos Reyles of Uruguay on a plane far above that of the ordinary romance. Two other writers of the younger generation, Attilio Chiappori and Clemente Palma, hailing respectively from Argentine and Peru, have introduced a new æsthetics into the short story; the latter seems to show the influence of Hoffmann and Poe, but his examples of the macabre are none the less powerfully original; while Chiappori, a physician and alienist, loves the states of twilight phases of a mind which is tottering on the verge of reason. Borderland tells us of this vague territory in a sinuous, and, in America, hitherto unfamiliar style.
A great Peruvian writer, Ricardo Palma, has created a department of literature, that of tradition, which partakes equally of the nature of history, and the romance, and the conte. He has described in a sumptuous style the life of the old Spanish colonies, devout and sensual; the traditions of a cultivated community, the city of Lima. His subtle irony, his joyous and somewhat licentious narrative, often remind us of M. Anatole France and the Italian story-tellers.
In Latin America are published not only exquisite examples of the conte, but also novels in which the study of society and the analysis of the mind are not overlooked. Among others may be cited El Hombre de Hierro, by Rufino Blanco Fombona, a Venezuelan; Canaan, by the Brazilian, Graça Aranha; La Gloria de don Ramiro and Redención, {268} by the Argentine writers Enrique Rodriguez Larreta and Angel de Estrada; Idolos Rotos and Sangre Patricia, by Diaz Rodriguez, whose high talent as a writer of short stories we have already praised; La Raza de Cain, by Carlos Reyles, so remarkable, also, for his essays and his tales.
Blanco Fombona possesses irony, the gift of telling a story, a rich descriptive talent, ease of dialogue, and a power of forcible scene-painting. A novelist by temperament, he has written the biography of a representative Creole, the lamentable type created by environment, for whom love and life reserve their most terrible cruelties. A scrupulous employé, neither strong nor cunning, he is the product of the languorous tropical life; this "man of iron" is the symbol of all the weaknesses. And about this life is all the monotony of a small city, civil war, the secret hatred of Creoles and foreigners, the superannuated grace of the Spanish manner and the Spanish pomp—in short, the whole of a little seething world.
Canaan is the romance of the promised land, of fertile Brazil, where the blonde immigrant and the half-breeds of every shade compete for the bounty of a prodigal Nature. This long struggle is the dramatic interest of the book; its beauty lies in its magnificent descriptions of the tropics; the language of Graça Aranha is full of harmonious poetry. Angel de Estrada is one of the most cultivated spirits of America. Traveller (is not one of his books entitled Ame Nomade?), novelist, and poet, he distils in his books the quintessence of long meditation and infinite reading. His novel Redención is the work of a humanist; civilisations, arts, beliefs, all pass before us, evoked by the hand of a master. A subtle and rich vocabulary serves him to give life to his ideas and resuscitate the life of dead cities.
RICARDO ROJAS (ARGENTINA).
Contemporary poet and essayist.
Enrique Rodriguez Larreta has described in his novel La Gloria de don Ramiro the period of Philip II., bloody, austere, and tyrannical. No American artist has his verbal wealth, his power of evocation, and his meticulous scholarship and genius for reconstruction. This patient and harmonious piece of work surprises us in a literature full of improvisations like that of South America.
La Raza de Cain, by Reyles, is a remarkable romance, in which the author shows us the superman, Nietzsche's man of prey, at grips with the weak and the vanquished; he exalts, in language full of eloquence, the Dionysiac joy of life and domination.
Writer of short stories, a novelist at times, but above all a brilliant chronicler, Gomez Carrillo has had the greatest influence in Latin America. In a nervous, harmonious style, full of delicate shades, he has instructed the younger generation in symbolism, in the elegant paradoxes of Wilde, in the work of D'Annunzio and Verlaine; in short, in the whole of decadent art. Above all, he eulogises Paris: the "charming soul" of the city, the sounding boulevards, its women, and the galante frivolity of its unrest. A master of smiles and subtle irony, he has the taste, the delicate amenity, of Scholl or Fouquier, the art of telling an anecdote, of analysing a comedy, of pouring gentle ridicule upon learned heaviness or conceited solemnity. His books on Japan and Greece, praised by the French critics, have revealed the mystery of exoticism to the American public, and all his work breathes a continual suggestion of France.
Such is the new literature, in which you will find novelists and poets and a truly Florentine love of beauty. He who knows America only by its imperfect social framework, its civil wars, and its persistent barbarism sees only the outer tumult; there is a strange divorce between its turbulent politics {270} and its refined art. If ever Taine's theory of the inevitable correspondence between art and its environment was at fault, it is in respect of these turbulent democracies which produce writers whose literary style is so precious, such refined poets and analysts.
GOMEZ CARRILLO.
Contemporary novelist, essayist, and chroniqueur.
[1] L'Evolution de la poésie lyrique en France au XIXe siécle, Paris, 1899, p. 134.
[2] "Tzar of three colours, black, white, and Indian (red)—who governs the American continent—and is called the Sovereign People."
[3] "Thou shalt suffer the martyrdom—that for him who is born a poet—is reserved by impious fate."
[4] "I live only when I dream—that my heart has broken all ties with the world— ... Come, for my life and my joy hardly begin to be—save when I know I have left mankind far behind me."
[5] "Like the ruins of a silent temple,—empty, abandoned, fearful,—without light and without sound."
[6] "Men refuse me a tomb in their cities,—in my country I was expelled from the house of my fathers."
[7] "My God, Lord my God, who is there in the world—that is not sorrow's?—Man is born and lives a moment—and suffers unto death."
[8] "My God, make me able to love!"
[9] "Mountain on whose summit—human genius nests."
[10] "Which on the map of astonished Europe—traced frontiers and suppressed deserts,—and which, weary perhaps with receiving—the homage of living kings,—came at length to demand afar—the homage of dead kings."
[11] "The voice of thunder of the great Hebrew prophet,—the chord of bitter tones—of Juvenal—and the rumour of the songs—of the old Ghibelline."
[12] "Brother to the eagles of the Caucasus—who fanned piously with their wings the bleeding face of Prometheus."
[13] Decadentismo y americanismo, in El castillo de Elsinor. Caracas 1902.
[14] "There is not in the world a prettier woman!—Foot of an Andalusian, mouth of fruit—Sparkling wit of Veuve Cliquot—Waist of wasp, skin like a bird's wing—The roguish eyes of a schoolgirl—Such the eyes of Louise Theo."
[15] "If it is a punishment, what sin—have we without knowing committed?—If it is a reward, how gained?—Without having asked it,—say, why do we live?"
[16] "What whiter than the candid lily?—What purer than the mystic wax?—What more chaste than the tender orange-blossom?"
[17] See the study of these innovations in Horas de estudio, by P. Henriquez Ureña, p. 118 et seq. Paris, Ollendorff.
[18] "I pursue a form which my pen does not find—the bud of an idea which would be the rose."
Bello—Hostos—The influence of England—Positivism—The influence of Spencer and Fouillée—The sociologists.
The democracies of America have not created new systems of philosophy; they have rather contributed, with Emerson and William James in the United States, to propound the old problems in a new light. Politics and history have been the occupation of intelligent men. To pure speculation they have preferred the patient study of the past, and the impassioned analysis of the conflicts of the day.
Yet they adopted European theories from the earliest years of the Republic: those of the French ideologists, Cabanis and Laromiguière were the predominant influences in some schools, while the influence of England extended from Central America to Chili. With that influence went a moderate utilitarianism, a bold analysis of the doctrines of political and economic liberty. England contributed to the liberty of America in Montevideo as in Colombia; with the English gold which the revolutionaries received the English philosophic radicalism entered the country. Jurists and politicians profited by its lessons, and certain of the thinkers of America freed themselves from the shackles of the peripatetic school under the influence of the Scottish philosophers. Thus Ventura Martin and José-Joaquin de Mora in Chili and Alcorta in the Argentine. With {272} Andrès Bello, poet and legislator, philosopher and philologist, these doctrines acquired a great importance. His Philosophy of the Understanding was inspired by Reid and Hamilton. In England he had known James Mill, and some of his ideas upon the inductive method and causality recall the doctrines of John Stuart Mill, the son of James. Bello was especially noted for the vigour of his logic and his analysis of the phenomena of consciousness, his penetrating psychology, and his positivism, which caused him to disdain anything in the nature of metaphysics. His conservative spirit accepted the Catholic dogmas, while his critical faculty was checked by them; what his implacable analysis destroyed his religious temperament reconstructed. He believed in perception, liberty, and the reality of the external world, and in a first cause; he transformed grammar by his psychological analysis, and by his positivism civil law and the law of nations. His excessive critical faculty sometimes ran to super-fine abstraction, to an intellectual algebra. Bello passed from ideology to positivism, from Destutt de Tracy to Stuart; Mill, by way of the Scottish philosophers. His admirable grammatical and juridical efforts may be attributed to his mastery of English analysis and realism.
After Bello, the most remarkable of South American philosophers was Eugenio de Hostos, who was born in 1839. He did not merely expound European ideas; he had his own system, which he developed in a series of remarkable works; he was a moralist rather than a metaphysician, and whether in San Domingo or Lima or Santiago he never ceased his endeavours to reform education and the law. Problems, social and moral, gave him no rest; he sought to found a new morality and sociology.
Hostos might be called an optimistic rationalist. He believed in an ideal world. Science, according {273} to him, is an efficacious agent of virtue. He thought it possible to discipline the will by teaching what is true. Good is not a metaphysical entity nor duty an imperative; the two together constitute a "natural order." A profound harmony exists between man and the world he lives in, and the moral law is merely the revelation in the consciousness of the geometry of things. For Hostos the world was just, logical, and full of reason; an internal law, lex insita, was manifested in the sidereal harmonies as in virtuous actions.
The moral ideal is therefore merely the adaptation of conduct to the inevitable and harmonious relations of things. Does not this optimism recall the morality of Spencer, the rigorous ethics of Spinoza, and the thought of Cournot, that "the philosophical basis of morality is the idea of conformity to the universal order"?
The founders of the Republic were formed by scholasticism. In the old universities men debated in language bristling with syllogisms. A free philosophic doctrine which accepted all the Catholic verities—immortality, free will, and Providence—and explained them with a fiery eloquence, was the reaction against this school, whose thought was crystallised in variable forms; this philosophy corresponded to the romanticism of the politicians, to their faith in democracy, liberty, and human progress.
In Spanish America French ideas predominated; in Brazil, German thought. Tobias Barreto and Sylvio Romero propagated this culture in the place of a colourless eclecticism; the first was a disciple of the German philosophers, the second popularised Spencer, without neglecting the Germans. In his German studies Barreto adopted the monism of Ludwig Noiré: "The universe is composed of atoms, absolutely equal, which are endowed with two properties: the one, which is internal, is sensation; the {274} other, which is external, is movement." This is the metaphysics of the Brazilian thinker, and such was his influence that, according to a critic, "the theories of Comte and Noiré explain modern intellectual Brazil." Sylvio Romero expounded the evolutionary theories of Spencer, "a philosophic monument even more important than that of Comte"; but in spite of the efforts of this disciple Spencer is not as popular in Brazil as in other American nations.
Barreto, a monist and philosopher, was a disciple of the judicial finalism of Jhering; Sylvio Romano, a disciple of Spencer, expounded and supported the conclusions of the social science of Demolins; in the scientific ardour of these propagandists doctrines were assembled together which had no mutual affinity. In Brazil all exotic philosophies find their readers and commentators, but the confusion caused by incoherent imitations completely lacks the unity of a national tendency. A psychologist of great value, a free follower of Renan, Joachim Nabuco, in a style full of subtlety, writes essays in philosophy and criticism.
A Spanish philosopher, less rigid than the schoolmen and richer in doctrine than the eclectics, Balmes engrossed many minds which were fatigued by sterile eloquence. He founded no school in America, but he is much read by the conservatives. His penetrating analysis, his British realism, and his rationalism, which seeks to harmonise these faculties with his dogmas, attract many who are repelled by a diffuse spirituality.
These various tendencies—English empiricism, French eclecticism, Benthamism—are not very profound intellectual movements. They have replaced the old scholasticism. A political ideology is wanted which shall be adequate to the needs of those who are struggling for power; metaphysical discussions are relegated to oblivion.
JOSE ENRIQUE RODÓ (URUGUAY).
Contemporary critic and essayist.
Positivism was the first philosophy to impress men's intellects; it has created great social movements, such as the Reformation in Mexico and the Republic in Brazil. It became an intellectual dictatorship, a new scholasticism. Free-thinkers believe in Comte and Spencer; in the humanitarian religion of the first and the agnosticism of the second.
Comte, to quote Mill, founded a complete system of spiritual despotism. It upholds order and authority as against the abuses of individualism, "the energetic preponderance of the central power"; it condemns "anarchy, and destructive liberalism"; it exalts "the eminently social genius of Catholicism." In nations annihilated by revolution and a romantic freedom these theories are liable to justify dictatorship, as they did in Brazil. There the Comtian phrase "order and progress" has become the national watchword.
Other causes explain the supremacy of positivism; a reaction against theology in the name of science, and against a vague and official philosophy. Minds formed by Catholicism, even if they have lost their faith, demand secular dogmas, and verities organised in a facile system: in short, a new faith, and the Positivist philosophy satisfies this craving. At the same time material progress, based upon scientific development, and the utilitarianism which exaggerates the importance of wealth, find in positivism, which disdains futile ideologies, a system adequate to industrial life.
In Mexico, Brazil, and Chili positivism in its integrity is predominant: the philosophic method and the religion of humanity. In Brazil the positivist school, with Constant, d'Araujo, Bastos, and their disciples, preserves the calendar, the secular saints, and the rites of the founder. It produces teachers and creates political constitutions like that of Rio Grande do Sul, and ardently propagates the doctrines {276} of Comte. In Chili, Juan Enrique Lagarigue preached a generous idealism, and the oblivion of patriotic hatreds; but the democracy did not give ear to this ingenuous apostle. In Mexico Barreda, founder of the Preparatory College, and the leader of intellectual life, was a disciple of Comte in Paris from the year 1867. He revolutionised Mexican education in a positivist direction, but did not accept the religious aspect of the new philosophy. There is still in Mexico a Positivist Review, which has a certain small influence.
Comtism influenced thinkers as a method, as a reaction against theology and metaphysics, and as a goal of pedagogy. But the philosophy of Spencer is that which has sent its roots deepest into the life of the Latin republics; progress, the cardinal idea of the romantics, is succeeded by evolution, a doctrine more agreeable to the positivist intelligence. Since 1880 the theories of Spencer have made converts of two generations; in some universities they constitute an official system. No application has been made of his psychology nor his biology, but his social and moral teaching has been followed with servility. Politicians and journalists employ Spencerian formulæ: the social organism, the instability of the homogeneous, differentiation, the relativity of consciousness. In 1883 a Colombian politician, Rafael Nuñez, President of his country, expounded the philosophy of Spencer to his fellow-citizens as a remedy for the political dogmatism of his predecessors. American statesmen might readily have asked the philosopher of evolution for scientific suggestions, as did the Japanese.
Under the influence of the English thinker the scientific period was ushered in. The study of social science is beginning; men profess a materialism or a positivism hostile to the older ontological ideas; they believe in science even more than in the sciences, {277} in the rational explanation of all mysteries, in the supremacy of mathematics and physics. Various influences are at work, and the confused result thereof favours the triumph of positivism. The political and social theories of Dr. Gustave Le Bon, the impetuous writings of Max Nordau, the criminology of Lombroso and Ferri, the formulæ of Taine, the biology and sociology of Letourneau, are studied and commented upon in the universities, the parliaments, and the schools of South America. Eloquence is repudiated as contrary to scientific precision, and romantic faith is disdained by the positivist. A party which has ruled over the evolution of Mexico for the last thirty years has named itself the "Scientific Party."
The significance of these doctrines rapidly acquired an excessive importance; in place of lucid methods and clear ideas we find the teaching of the professors full of the narrowness of dogma. Positivism implants a limited and vulgar rationalism, a new metaphysic which accords an absolute truth to the formulæ of science; which exalts egoism and practical interests, and the frantic pursuit of wealth in daily life. The tendency of the American mind being undue simplification, this philosophy has not been a discipline of knowledge and action, but has limited the effort of man to the conquest of the useful. The positivists organise plutocratic tyrannies in certain American nations.
Without reigning in the schools as Spencer has done, a French philosopher, M. Fouillée, has greatly influenced law, politics, and education. In spite of the reign of positivism his flexible doctrine has attracted many Americans, and his works, such as the Idée du Droit and the Histoire de la Philosophie, are coming into use as text-books in some universities. The theory of unavoidable ideas is well known; and thinkers and philosophers have been {278} inspired by this "philosophy of hope." By its noble idealism, by its admirable wealth, its serene rationalism, and its essentially Latin character, the harmonious system of M. Fouillée has won considerable popularity among the youth of America.
We cannot separate his influence from that of the young poet-philosopher whom a premature death has consecrated: Guyau was the professor of idealism to two generations of America. In Ariel José-Enrique Rodo has enlarged upon his finest metaphors; and a Peruvian thinker, Gonzalez Prada, has popularised the suggestions of this Platonic thinker upon death.
Nietzsche also has disciples and commentators. Translated into Spanish and vulgarised, his doctrines are the Bible of exasperated egoism. Men saw nothing of his stoicism, his worship of heroic life and tragic adventures; "concussionary" ministers and half-breeds aspiring to power believe themselves Nietzschians, because in their immoral advancement they ignore all moral scruples. A generation above good and evil is practising opportunism—what the French call "arrivism"—disorganising philosophy and society, and forgetting the code of human dignity.
Fouillée, Guyau, and Nietzsche have not supplanted the positivist philosophers; the superstition of science and the hatred of metaphysical construction is still prevalent. All the new doctrines are making their way: pragmatism, Bergsonism, the philosophy of Wundt and Croce, the philosophy of contingency: without, however, creating new tendencies. From this variety of imitations perhaps an American system will arise. To-day every intellectual novelty is passionately received and applied; an Argentine judge has even founded some of his judgments upon the teaching of Tarde.
A reaction is setting in against dogmatic {279} positivism; the present is a period of dissolution and criticism. In accepting influences so various—English, German, and French—the old faith in science, in Comte and Spencer, is evaporating. Two young philosophers, Antonio Caso in Mexico and Henriquez Ureña in San Domingo, have contributed to this analysis. Inspired by the ideas of M. Emile Boutroux, they attack the narrow interpretation of scientific laws.
Thus after thirty years of influence, positivism is losing its prestige. It is not being replaced in the schools by any rigid system; but in place of an intolerant dogmatism we have a free examination of which we cannot yet foresee the consequences. Some essays of Enrique Varona, in his writings on morality and philosophy; of Carlos Octavio Bunge, in his Psicologia individual y social; of Vaz-Ferreira, in his critique of the problem of liberty; of Deustua, of Lima, in his essays on morality, reveal the fact that the new school is not lacking in a serious philosophical orientation. But originality, the new doctrine, the Ibero-American school—are these shortly to be realities? So long as these nations are still busy at the task of self-organisation in the midst of anarchical unrest, so long as the cult of wealth prevails above all disinterested efforts, so long we shall assuredly have no other philosophy than an adaptation of foreign systems.
But in the new movements philosophical speculation is losing its old simplicity; the study of psychology is developing, analysis is more profound, the old verbal solutions are rejected, and the study of societies is acquiring an extraordinary importance.
Half a century ago books on political science swarmed. The same pragmatic preoccupation—the adaptation of scientific ideas to the uses of social life—prevails to-day.
Many sociologists are inspired by biology, or {280} psychology, or historical materialism. Cornejo, in Peru, is adopting the psychological theories of Wundt, his analysis of language, myth, and custom. Letelier, in Chili, inclines toward the positivism of Comte; Ramos Mejia, in the Argentine, explains social phenomena in a biological sense. His books, La Locura en la Historia, Las Masas Argentinas, reveal this tendency. Ingegnieros has studied the history of the Argentine in relation to the economic factor. His work, De la Barbarie al Imperalismo, is an essay in Marxist sociology.
To sum up; social science preoccupies our thinkers rather than pure philosophy. Neither the great German idealists nor the critics and thinkers are known in America; neither Hume, nor Kant, nor Hegel, although the Spanish orator Emilio Castelar has propagated a Hegelianism ad usum delphini in the new continent. The pessimism of Schopenhauer does not acclimatise itself in the tropics. Eclecticism, positivism, and spiritualism prevail.
ALCIDES ARGUEDAS (BOLIVIA).
Novelist and sociologist.
THE LATIN SPIRIT AND THE GERMAN, NORTH
AMERICAN, AND JAPANESE PERILS
From a racial point of view, it is true, one cannot call the South American republics Latin nations. They are rather Indo-African or Africo-Iberian. Latin culture—the ideas and the art of France, the laws and the Catholicism of Rome—have created in South America a mental attitude analogous to that of the great Mediterranean peoples, which is hostile or alien to the civilisation of the Germanic or Anglo-Saxon peoples.
New influences, whether they come from Germany or Anglo-Saxon America, and even more those that come from Japan, are dangerous to the Latin-American nations, if they tend to destroy their traditions.
Spanish and Portuguese heredity—Latin culture—The influence of the Roman laws, of Catholicism, and of French thought—The Latin spirit in America: its qualities and defects.
Contrasting the Imperial Republic of North America with the twenty democracies of South America, we seek the reason of the antagonism which exists between them in the essential element of race. The contrast between Anglo-Saxons and Latins is the contrast between two cultures.
The South American peoples consider themselves Latin by race, just as their brothers of the North are the remote descendants of the Anglo-Saxon Pilgrim Fathers; but although the United States were created largely by the aggregation of austere English emigrants, there has been no intervention of pure Latin elements in the colonisation of the South. Navigators of Latin blood discovered an unknown continent, and Spaniards and Portuguese conquered and colonised it; but there was little Latin blood to be found in the homes formed by the sensuality of the first conquerors of a desolated America.
Emigrants from Estremadura and Galicia, Andalusians and Castilians, many-hued men of Spain and Portugal, were all concerned in the first interbreeding with the vanquished races; they were Iberians, in whom the anthropologists discover moral analogies with the Berbers of North Africa. The Basques, {284} rude and virile, who emigrated from Spain to dominate America, did not come of Latin stock; the Andalusian element, from Seville or Cadiz, was of Oriental origin. A Spain that was half African and half Germanic colonised the vast territories of America; two heredities, Visigoth and Arab, were united in its strange genius.
The French and Italian colonists have not the importance of the Spaniards and Portuguese; they are inferior in numbers and in wealth. The Iberians have jealously defended their racial prerogative in these isolated transatlantic colonies. After three centuries, when once the continent was opened to the outside world and to European commerce, the Italians invaded the rich plains of the Argentine; there they contributed to the formation of a new race, which is more Latin than Spanish.
But we must not forget the innumerable Anglo-Saxons who have founded families in the Argentine and in Chili, and have brought wealth to those countries; nor the Germans in Southern Brazil, nor the Asiatics of the Peruvian seaboard. Iberians, Indians, Latins, Anglo-Saxons, and Orientals all mingle in America; a babel of races, so mixed that it is impossible to discover the definite outlines of the future type.
It is useless to look for unity of race in such a country. And even in the United States the confused invasion of Russian Jews and Southern Italians is little by little undermining the primitive Anglo-Saxon unity.
This confusion of races in the North and the South leaves two traditions, the Anglo-Saxon and the Iberian. By force of assimilation these traditions are transforming the new races. Englishmen and Spaniards disappear, but the two moral inheritances survive.
The Latin tradition is not far to seek in the {285} Americans of the South. They are not exclusively either Spanish or Portuguese; the legacy received from Spain is modified by persistent influences of French and Italian origin.
From Mexico to La Plata, by long continued and extensive action, the Roman laws, Catholicism, and the ideas of France have given a uniform aspect to the American conscience.
Laws of Spanish origin prevail in South America; they have formed the rigid framework of civil life. These laws, in spite of strong feudal elements, are of Roman origin. Under the influence of Roman law Alfonso X. unified Spanish legislation, during the first half of the thirteenth century; three centuries later the Spaniards colonised America. The Partidas, that vast encyclopædia of law and collection of Castilian laws in particular, is a Roman code. It confirmed the individualist sense of property as against the Spanish forms of collectivism; it reinforced the power of the paterfamilias in the austere Iberian family; it consecrated equality, authorising marriage between free men and the serfs formerly banished from the State; and it adopted the Roman formalism.
Politically, after the downfall of the feudal system, ambitious princes, from the time of Alfonso X. to that of the Catholic Kings and of Charles V., enforced their royal authority in the Roman sense. These monarchs were Cæsars; they concentrated all the powers of the State in themselves; they centralised, unified, and legislated. This royal absolutism destroyed privilege and levelled mankind. A vast Spanish democracy was formed, subject to Cæsar, after the manner of the Roman people. The Latin sense of authority and law prevailed in the Spanish colonies; property was individual and absolute; civil equality obtained; in spite of racial differences, Indians and Spaniards were theoretically {286} on the same plane; the family, like the Roman gens, united slaves and children under the gloomy paternal power. The distant monarch was a formidable overlord, to whom viceroys and chapters, courts, judicial and ecclesiastical, addressed themselves to demand laws and regulations, penalties and sanctions.
Catholicism was indissolubly bound up with the Roman authority of the laws; in Spain and America the prince was at the same time the shepherd of the Church. Religion was an instrument of political domination; it was an imperial force, a legacy of the Latin genius. It multiplied forms and rites; it disciplined the colonists, demanding outward obedience and uniformity of belief and manners. "The Roman Church," says Harnack, "is a juridical institution." Catholicism is also a social religion. In America it created the Brazilian nation in opposition to the Dutch peril; it founded republics among Indians inimical to all forms of organised social life; it extended the field of Latin endeavour, and from North to South favoured the constitution of new governments and societies.
Under the double pressure of Roman Catholicism and legislation, America became Latinised. It learned to respect laws and forms, to submit to a religious as well as a civil discipline. French ideas, added to these influences, first prepared the way for the Revolution, and afterwards dominated the mind of America, from the Declaration of Independence to our own days.
These ideas constituted a new factor of Latin development. France is the modern heir of the genius of Greece and Rome, and in imitating her, even to excess, Ibero-Americans have assimilated the essential elements of the antique culture. We find in the Gallic spirit the sense of taste and harmony, the lucidus ordo of the classics; the love of general ideas, of universal principles, of the rights of man, {287} and a hatred of the mists of the North and the too violent light of the South; rationalism, logical vigour, emotion in the presence of beauty, and the cult of grace. France has been the teacher of social life and letters to the American democracies; her influence is already of no recent date. Voltaire and Rousseau were the theorists of the revolutionary period; Lamartine taught "lyrism" and romantic melancholy; Benjamin-Constant, the theory of politics, and Verlaine the lamentations of decadence.
Either indirectly, through the influence of the thought and literature of Spain and Portugal, or directly, these republics have lived by the light of French ideas.
Thus a general current of thought has arisen on the American continent which is not merely Iberian, but also French and Roman. France has effected a spiritual conquest of these democracies, and has created a new variety of the Latin spirit. This Latin spirit is not a thing apart; it is formed of characteristics common to all the Mediterranean peoples. French, Greeks, Italians, Portuguese, and Spaniards find therein the fundamental elements of their national genius, just as in antiquity the Greek women found in Helen the reflection of their own beauty. To this spiritual synthesis Spain contributes her idealism; Italy, the paganism of her children and the eternal suggestion of her marbles; France, her harmonious education.
In the Iberian democracies an inferior Latinity, a Latinity of the decadence prevails; verbal abundance, inflated rhetoric, oratorical exaggeration, just as in Roman Spain. The qualities and defects of the classic spirit are revealed in American life; the persistent idealism, which often disdains the conquests of utility; the ideas of humanity and equality, of universality, despite racial variety; the cult of form; the Latin instability and vivacity; the faith in pure {288} ideas and political dogmas: all are to be found in these lands oversea, together with the brilliant and superficial intelligence, the Jacobinism, and the oratorical facility. Enthusiasm, sociability, and optimism are also American qualities.
These republics are not free from any of the ordinary weaknesses of the Latin races. The State is omnipotent; the liberal professions are excessively developed; the power of the bureaucracy becomes alarming. The character of the average citizen is weak, inferior to his imagination and intelligence; ideas of union and the spirit of solidarity have to contend with the innate indiscipline of the race. These men, dominated by the solicitations of the outer world and the tumult of politics, have no inner life; you will find among them no great mystics, no great lyrical writers. They meet realities with an exasperated individualism.
Indisciplined, superficial, brilliant, the South Americans belong to the great Latin family; they are the children of Spain, Portugal, and Italy by blood and by deep-rooted tradition, and by their general ideas they are the children of France. A French politician, M. Clemenceau, found in Brazil, the Argentine, and Uruguay, "a superabundant Latinism; a Latinism of feeling, a Latinism of thought and action, with all its immediate and superficial advantages, and all its defects of method, its alternatives of energy and failure in the accomplishment of design." This new American spirit is indestructible. Contact with Anglo-Saxon civilisation may partially renew it, but the integral transformation of the spirit proper to the Latin nations will never be accomplished. It would be a racial suicide. Where Yankees and Latin Americans intermingle you may better observe the insoluble contradictions which divide them. The Anglo-Saxons are conquering America commercially and economically, but the {289} traditions, the ideals, and the soul of these republics are hostile to them.
The Ibero-American race should seek to correct its vices without forsaking the framework of tradition which is proper to it. Without losing its originality as a nation, France is to-day triumphant in many departments of sport, and is spending her energy and inventive genius upon the conquest of the air without counting the cost; she has made her own victories which seemed to belong to the Anglo-Saxon. At the same time, if the American democracies are to acquire a practical spirit, a persistent activity, and a virile energy, they must do so without renouncing their language, their religion, and their history.
The defence of the Latin spirit has become a duty of primordial importance. Barrès, an impassioned ideologist, preaches the cult of self as a remedy for barbarism; no foreign tutelage must trouble the spontaneous internal revelation. The republics oversea, wending their way under hostile or indifferent eyes, sous l'oeil des Barbares, must cultivate their spiritual originality in the encounter with inimical forces.
The North American peril, the threat of Germany, the menace of Japan, surround the future of Latin America like those mysterious forces which, in the drama of Maeterlinck, dominate the human stage, and in silence prepare the way for the great human tragedies. To defend the traditions of the Latin continent, it is useful to measure the importance of the influences which threaten it.
German Imperialism and the Monroe doctrine—Das Deutschtum and Southern Brazil—What the Brazilians think about it.
The Teutonic invasion is troubling our Ibero-American writers. The tutelary protection of the United States does not suffice to make them forget the European peril; memories of the Holy Alliance, of that crusade of religious absolutism and reconquest, are still lively in Latin America.
Three great nations—England, France, Germany—aspired to establish their supremacy oversea in a lasting manner. England, a colonising power in all parts of the world, thought to rule at Buenos-Ayres; the defence of that Spanish city by the Viceroy Liniers was, says Onésime Reclus, the Latin revenge for the taking of Quebec. France attacked Mexico, and forced a monarch upon her; England and a French monarch sent expeditions against the nationalist dictator Rosas, and Lord Salisbury, in a diplomatic duel with the North American Secretary of State, Mr. Olney, attempted to ignore the tutelary significance of the Monroe doctrine.
The triumphs of these attempts would have founded in Latin America extensive colonies, proud and populous. The efforts of the ill-organised republics could not have prevailed against them.
For the new continent this would have meant a loss of autonomy; but the Monroe doctrine stood in {291} the way of any conquests save those made by the United States, and a sudden disagreement between the two invading nations, France and England, in their campaign against Rosas, caused these attempts to miscarry. The three Guianas, British Honduras, and some of the West Indian islands, bear witness to the ambitions of Europe; they are the scattered fragments of the empire which the Old World coveted. Invasions of capital and of merchant vessels quickly replaced those of warships.
Secretly, without the employment of these warlike means, Germany began to make herself felt; her imperialism wore a mercantile disguise, or took the form of immigration. Persevering Teutonic colonists made their way toward Brazil, Chili, and Central America, and although the European peril was over the German peril survived. Neither Russia, who possesses vast desert territories in Asia, nor Italy, whose ambitions are limited to Africa, to Tripoli, considered the possibility of conquest upon the American continent.
Against flat invasion by any power the tutelage of the United States is a protection, but the Monroe doctrine is powerless against the slow and imperceptible invasion of German immigration. By virtue of their capital and their adventurers, Germany and the United States are slowly occupying South America; other continents being closed to their ambitions of expansion, it is in the free territory of the New World that they found their colonies. There we find their bankers and merchants, the rude emissaries of these commercial powers. Americans and Germans resemble one another by race and in energy. The Middle West of the United States was peopled by German emigrants; two imposing cities, New York and St. Louis, are vast reservoirs of Teutonic energy. The new empire is actuated by ambitions similar to those of the United States; {292} both are conquering and plutocratic powers. The German Empire has the passions of a new people; the active faith, the practical Christianity, the cult of gold, the instinct of gigantic accumulations, of cyclopean enterprises, trusts, and combinations, and the optimism, the anxious desire to improvise the civilising work of centuries by the pressure of sheer wealth. The Kaiser and Colonel Roosevelt, Biblical shepherds of their people, evangelists of the strenuous life, direct the ardent industrial evolution of their nations, and establish a mystic imperialism. It is from this analogy of tendencies that the future clash will come. To-day the continual incursion of the United States into South American affairs and the organised immigration from Germany are different forms of the same ambition.
In Guatemala and Costa Rica the influence of Germany is immense; the importance of her capital in Central America can only be compared with that of England in the Argentine. It is valued at £15,000,000. Germans acquire landed property, build railroads, and found banks. In these regions two dominating influences are in conflict: German imperialism and the Monroe doctrine. The Kaiser hastens to recognise President Madriz in Nicaragua, while the revolutionists, protected by the United States, hasten to deprive him of his ephemeral power. Dispersed throughout Chili, Venezuela, Peru, and Central America, the Germans are concentrating in southern Brazil. They aspire to the integral colonisation of three Brazilian States—Santa-Catalina, Parana, and Rio Grande do Sul. Since 1825 a slow current of humanity has invaded these rich provinces: 350,000 Germans are established there, where they rule the municipalities, enjoy rights of self-government, despise the negroes and half-castes, and live in an aristocratic isolation. They {293} have retained the language, traditions, and prejudices of their native country. In certain colonies of the South there are only 10 per cent. of Brazilian citizens; the Germans represent the prevailing race, the effective nationality. Their efforts further the territorial ambition of Das Deutschtum.
Economists recommend that the excessive immigration which constantly pours into the United States should be directed towards South America. A tenth part of the population of the United States admits to a Teutonic origin; there are eight millions of Germans in the huge northern democracy. Thanks to affinities of race, or thanks to the assimilative action of the national spirit, this colossal colony does not form a State within the State; its members adapt themselves to the American life, and in the numerous schools of the country they assimilate an Anglo-Saxon culture. They do not threaten the normal development of the republic, as do the negroes of the South and the Asiatics of the Far West.
In Brazil the Germans occupy eight thousand square miles of territory. They proudly contrast the magnificent destinies of the Vaterland with the turbulent federalism of the Brazilian States. The colonisation companies affiliated to the powerful and active banks, in especial the Deutsche Uberseeische Bank, a marvellous instrument of conquest, are extending the prosaic Teutonic hegemony through Brazil and the whole of Latin America. In Chili Germans direct the education of the country, and organise the army; just as in the Prussian schools, they teach an intolerant patriotism and a strongly nationalistic history.
While the emigrants are realising their imperialistic Odyssey, German professors are condemning the Monroe doctrine. Hugo Münsterberg, professor of philosophy at Harvard, and Adolf Wagner, an economist of Berlin, regard the Yankee thesis merely as {294} a perishable improvisation upon a fragile foundation. The interest of Germany demands that the United States should abandon their tutelage, and that the swarming Germanic legions should invade the southern continent. Münsterberg writes in his book The Americans that the Yankee will soon realise "the error and folly" of his argument, which he qualifies as a moribund doctrine. No Russian, French, or Italian colony in South America, he says, could create difficulties in the United States; but the doctrine which forbids their establishment will be the cause of conflicts in the future. If South America were set free from this tutelage, if its bearing were limited to Central America, the possibilities of a conflict between the United States and Europe would be considerably diminished. Does not this disinterested counsel conceal a desire to found colonies upon a continent which the vigilance of the United States would no longer protect?
An economist who, like Treitschke and Sybel, believes in the divine mission of the German Empire, Gustave Schmoller, would like to see a nation of twenty or thirty millions of inhabitants founded in Southern Brazil.
Concentrated in the three provinces of Brazil, an unmixed and hostile race would struggle against the Brazilian half-breeds and prevail over them, which is what these professors of conquest desire. This fruitful invasion would realise the dream entertained by those rich bankers of Augsburg, the Velzers, who three centuries ago bought a Venezuelan province from the Hispano-Germanic monarch, Charles V. Heirs of this vast abortive plan, the German financiers of our days dream of planting a foreign province in the heart of the vast territory of Brazil.
Brazilian thinkers have protested against this German conquest in disguise; they recognise the {295} danger, and seek to avoid it. Sylvio Romero suggests, as a means of limiting this expansion, the education of the race along Anglo-Saxon lines, which would develop the love of initiative and the sense of effort, a migration of Brazilian proletarians who should occupy these southern territories and hold them against the Germans, and finally, the establishment of military colonies in the threatened regions. It is the traditional struggle for nationality, for the possession of the very soil itself. Language is an instrument of conquest; it is therefore urgent to enforce the use of Portuguese in the schools of the South, where the far-sighted colonists teach only their own tongue. Foreign syndicates acquire large and numerous stretches of territory; Señor Romero would have these land trusts inhibited, and would favour the establishment of indigenous centres among the German populations, in order to contend with this perilous invasion by an alien race.[1]
The national uneasiness has even affected the art of the country; Graça Aranha has written, in Canaan, the drama of the contact of races. "For the moment," says Milkau, the blond invader of the half-breed country, "we are nothing more than a solvent acting upon the race of the country. We are effecting a new conquest, slow, persistent, and pacific in the means employed, but terrible in its ambitious intention." Hentz, his companion, proudly describes the triumph of the white man, and the {296} expulsion of the "coloured man who was born on the land." He prophesies a terrible future: "The Germans will arrive with their thirst for possession and domination, and their originality, the harsh originality of barbarians, in unnumbered legions; they will kill off the sensual and foolish natives who have built up their societies upon this splendid soil and have degraded it by their turpitude."
It is the purging of a territory infested by African slaves. Germany, mother of men without number, officina et vagina gentium, invades with her blond legions the land of brown men, sends forth her chaste Teutons to the conquest of the lascivious forest.
Without denying the reality of this peril, we cannot but realise that it would be difficult to establish on Brazilian soil colonies which should reflect the glory of Das Deutschtum. Already 350,000 Germans are lost in the national mass; demographically they signify nothing as against the 19 millions of Brazilians. To found a colonial empire in the interior of the Lusitanian Republic it would first of all be necessary to have a strong basis of population; the theorists of the Germanic movement of expansion would dispose of 18 to 20 million emigrants in these rich southern provinces. Moreover, the Germanic invasion is not concentrated upon Brazil. The United States absorb the Germanic alluvium; and the Brazilian half-breeds being fertile, the numerical disproportion between the natives and the blond invaders would in the future be enormous.
On the other hand, the contingent of Teutonic immigration is diminishing. The modern cities of industrial Germany are increasing in numbers and in population; they are absorbing new elements into their artificial life. The rural multitude which migrates is changing the direction of its painful journey; it no longer forsakes its fatherland, but leaves the silent fields for the enervating life of the {297} cities. Its taste has become sophisticated; it prefers urban attractions to the adventures of emigration. In the last ten years barely 30,000 Germans have left the Vaterland each year. Not with such scanty legions as these will Germany establish a centre of domination oversea, for even these are divided among the United States, Central America, and Brazil.
The Italians, enriched and triumphant, are invading the Argentine and Southern Brazil. Theirs is a current of increasing volume; more than 50,000 Latins emigrate annually; they adapt themselves to their new country, acquire immense stretches of soil, and accumulate enormous fortunes, until names of foreign origin begin to predominate in the world of Argentine letters and in the plutocratic salons of the new continent. They transmit their Latin heritage to their numerous children. The stiff-necked group of German colonists cannot vanquish these races, whose affinities are the same as those of the natives, and who bring oversea the sensuality of Naples and the commonsense of Milan.
When German emigration is not excessively concentrated upon one point it forms laborious and assimilable populations. The German learns more readily than the Englishman the language of his new country; he studies local manners and adopts them; he brings to the restless and turbulent democracies of America his deliberation, his spirit of industry, and his methodical activity. In the Argentine, in Chili, in Peru, in countries where he has not yet undertaken to establish the foundation of an empire, his influence has been fruitful.
The tutelage of the United States seems to us more dangerous than the German invasion.
[1] See A America latina, Porto, 1907, p. 323. M. Onésime Reclus gives the same advice to the Lusitanians of America: "In each State, in each municipality, let those charged with the partition of the soil see that they establish no Polish, German, English, or Irish colonies unless they also establish Spanish, Portuguese, Brazilian, French, and Italian, or analogous colonies; let no colony be formed exclusively of people of a single nationality, but well divided among colonists speaking different tongues; and if such a law be strictly observed Latin America may resist the fatal onset of Slav or German Europe" (Le Partage du Monde, p. 278).
The policy of the United States—The Monroe doctrine: its various aspects—Greatness and decadence of the United States—The two Americas, Latin and Anglo-Saxon.
To save themselves from Yankee imperialism the American democracies would almost accept a German alliance, or the aid of Japanese arms; everywhere the Americans of the North are feared. In the Antilles and in Central America hostility against the Anglo-Saxon invaders assumes the character of a Latin crusade. Do the United States deserve this hatred? Are they not, as their diplomatists preach, the elder brothers, generous and protecting? And is not protection their proper vocation in a continent rent by anarchy?
We must define the different aspects of their activities in South America; a summary examination of their influence could not fail to be unjust. They have conquered new territories, but they have upheld the independence of feeble States; they aspire to the hegemony of the Latin continent, but this ambition has prevented numerous and grievous conflicts between South American nations. The moral pressure of the United States makes itself felt everywhere; the imperialist and maternal Republic intervenes in all the internal conflicts of the Spanish-speaking democracies. It excites or suppresses revolutions; it fulfils a high vocation of culture. It {299} uses or abuses a privilege which cannot be gainsaid. The better to protect the Ibero-Americans, it has proudly raised its Pillars of Hercules against the ambition of the Old World.
Sometimes this influence becomes a monopoly, and the United States take possession of the markets of the South. They aim at making a trust of the South American republics, the supreme dream of their multi-millionaire conquistadors. Alberdi has said that there they are the "Puerto Cabello" of the new America; that is to say, that they aim, after the Spanish fashion, at isolating the southern continent and becoming its exclusive purveyors of ideas and industries.
Their supremacy was excellent when it was a matter of basing the independence of twenty republics of uncertain future upon a solid foundation. The neo-Saxons did not then intervene in the wars of the South; they remained neutral and observed the peace which Washington had advocated. They proclaimed the autonomy of the continent, and contributed to conserve the originality of Southern America by forbidding the formation of colonies in its empty territories, and by defending the republican and democratic States against reactionary Europe.
But who will deliver the Ibero-Americans from the excess of this influence? Quis custodiet custodem? An irresponsible supremacy is perilous.
Naturally, in the relations of the United States and the nations of the South actions do not always correspond with words; the art of oratory is lavish with a fraternal idealism, but strong wills enforce their imperialistic ambitions. Although fully attentive to the fair-sounding promises of the North, the statesmen of the South refuse to believe in the friendship of the Yankees; being perturbed by the memory of ancient and recent conquests, these peoples perhaps exaggerate the danger which might come from the {300} North. A blind confidence and an excessive timidity are equally futile.
In 1906, at the conference of Rio de Janeiro, Secretary Root, in the presence of assembled America, was the lay prophet of the new gospel.
"We do not wish," he said, "to win victories, we desire no territory but our own, nor a sovereignty more extensive than that which we desire to retain over ourselves. We consider that the independence and the equal rights of the smallest and weakest members of the family of nations deserve as much respect as those of the great empires. We pretend to no right, privilege, or power that we do not freely concede to each one of the American Republics." This was the solemn declaration of a Puritan politician; Mr. Root continues the noble tradition of Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton.
Ten years earlier another secretary, Mr. Olney, declared to Lord Salisbury that the great Anglo-Saxon Republic was practically sovereign—paramount was his word—on the American continent, and that its fiat was law in affairs which called for its intervention. Which is the truth: the imperialistic declarations of Mr. Olney or the idealism of Mr. Root?
Against the policy of respect for Latin liberties are ranged the instincts of a triumphant plutocracy. The centre of North American life is passing from Boston to Chicago; the citadel of the ideal gives way to the material progress of the great porcine metropolis. There is a conflict of dissimilar currents of morality. The Puritan tradition of New England seems useless in the struggle of the Far West; the conquest of the desert demands another morality; the morality of conflict, aggression, and success. The trusts raise their heads above the impotent clamour of the weak. The conflict between the new-comers is tumultuous and brutal; as in the time of imperial {301} Rome, the latter-day republicans are becoming aware of their defeat by a new caste, animated by an impetuous love of conflict. It is the struggle between idealism and plutocracy, between the tradition of the Pilgrim Fathers and the morality of Wall Street; the patricians of the Senate and the bosses of Tammany Hall.
The great historical parties are divided; while the democrats do not forget the ideal of Washington and Lincoln, the republicans think only of imperialism.
Will a generous élite succeed in withstanding this racial tendency? Perhaps, but nothing can check the onward march of the United States. Their imperialism is an unavoidable phenomenon.
The nation which was peopled by nine millions of men in 1820 now numbers eighty millions—an immense demographic power; in the space of ten years, from 1890 to 1900, this population increased by one-fifth. By virtue of its iron, wheat, oil, and cotton, and its victorious industrialism, the democracy aspires to a world-wide significance of destiny; the consciousness of its powers is creating fresh international duties. Yankee pride increases with the endless multiplication of wealth and population, and the patriotic sentiment has reached such an intensity that it has become transformed into imperialism.
The United States buy the products they themselves lack from the tropical nations. To rule in these fertile zones would to them appear the geographical ideal of a northern people. Do not their industries demand new outlets in America and Asia? So to the old mystic ambition are added the necessities of utilitarian progress. An industrial nation, the States preach a practical Christianity to the older continents, to Europe, and to lands yet barbarous, as to South America; they profess a doctrine of aggressive idealism, a strange fusion of economic tendencies and Puritan fervour. The Christian Republic imposes {302} its tutelage upon inferior races, and so prepares them for self-government.
This utilitarian and mystical expansion is opposed to the primitive simplicity of the Monroe doctrine. In 1823, to counter the political methods of the Holy Alliance, President Monroe upheld the republican integrity of the ancient Spanish colonies. The celebrated message declared that there were no free territories in America, thus condemning in advance any projected establishment of European colonies upon the unoccupied continent of America, and that the United States limited their political action to the New World, and renounced all intervention in the disputes of Europe.
At the close of the last century the political absolutism of the Holy Alliance was only a memory; democracy is progressing, even in the heart of the most despotic of monarchies, and France is republican. Europe, after the tragic adventure of the Mexican Empire, abandoned her expeditions of conquest. The United States, forgetting their initial isolation, intervened in the politics of the world; they defended the integrity of China, took part in the conference of Algeciras, and maintained peace in the East. Like the character in Terence, nothing in the world leaves them unconcerned. The two bases of the Monroe doctrine, the absolutism of Europe and the isolation of the United States, exist no longer, but the Monroe doctrine persists indefinitely. "If," says Mr. Coolidge, professor of political law at the University of Harvard, "if, by his principles, the American finds himself drawn to conclusions which do not please him, he ordinarily revolts, forsakes his promises, and jumps to conclusions that suit him better." To the logic of the Latins Americans and Englishmen oppose utility, common sense, instinct.
The Monroe doctrine has undergone an essential transformation; it has passed successively from the {303} defensive to intervention and thence to the offensive. From a theory which condemned any change of political régime among the new democracies under European pressure, and which forbade all acquisitions of territory, or the transfer of power from a weak to a strong nation, there arose the Polk doctrine, which, in 1845, decreed the annexation of Texas for fear of foreign intervention. In 1870 President Grant demanded the seizure of San Domingo as a measure of national protection, a new corollary of the Monroe doctrine. President Johnson was anxious to see his country in possession of Cuba in the name of the "laws of political gravitation which throw small States into the gullets of the great powers." In 1895 Secretary of State Olney, at the time of the trouble between England and Venezuela, declared that the United States were in fact sovereign in America. From Monroe to Olney the defensive doctrine has gradually changed to a moral tutelage.
If theories change, frontiers change no less. The northern Republic has been the beneficiary of an incessant territorial expansion: in 1813 it acquired Louisiana; in 1819, Florida; in 1845 and 1850, Texas; the Mexican provinces in 1848 and 1852; and Alaska in 1858. The annexation of Hawaii took place in 1898. In the same year Porto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, and one of the Marianne Islands, passed, by the Treaty of Paris, into the hands of the United States. They obtained the Samoan Islands in 1890, wished to buy the Danish West Indies in 1902, and planted their imperialistic standard at Panama in 1903.
Interventions have become more frequent with the expansion of frontiers. The United States have recently intervened in the territory of Acre, there to found a republic of rubber gatherers; at Panama, there to develop a province and construct a canal; in Cuba, under cover of the Platt amendment, to {304} maintain order in the interior; in San Domingo, to support the civilising revolution and overthrow the tyrants; in Venezuela, and in Central America, to enforce upon these nations, torn by intestine disorders, the political and financial tutelage of the imperial democracy. In Guatemala and Honduras the loans concluded with the monarchs of North American finance have reduced the people to a new slavery. Supervision of the customs and the dispatch of pacificatory squadrons to defend the interests of the Anglo-Saxon have enforced peace and tranquillity: such are the means employed. The New York American announces that Mr. Pierpont Morgan proposes to encompass the finances of Latin America by a vast network of Yankee banks. Chicago merchants and Wall Street financiers created the Meat Trust in the Argentine. The United States offer millions for the purpose of converting into Yankee loans the moneys raised in London during the last century by the Latin American States; they wish to obtain a monopoly of credit. It has even been announced, although the news hardly appears probable, that a North American syndicate wished to buy enormous belts of land in Guatemala, where the English tongue is the obligatory language. The fortification of the Panama Canal, and the possible acquisition of the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific, are fresh manifestations of imperialistic progress.
The Monroe doctrine takes an aggressive form with Mr. Roosevelt, the politician of the "big stick," and intervention à outrance. Roosevelt is conscious of his sacred mission; he wants a powerful army, and a navy majestically sailing the two oceans. His ambitions find an unlooked-for commentary in a book by Mr. Archibald Coolidge, the Harvard professor, upon the United States as a world-power. He therein shows the origin of the disquietude of the South Americans before the Northern peril: "When two {305} contiguous States," he writes, "are separated by a long line of frontiers and one of the two rapidly increases, full of youth and vigour, while the other possesses, together with a small population, rich and desirable territories, and is troubled by continual revolutions which exhaust and weaken it, the first will inevitably encroach upon the second, just as water will always seek to regain its own level."
He recognises the fact that the progress accomplished by the United States is not of a nature to tranquillise the South American; "that the Yankee believes that his southern neighbours are trivial and childish peoples, and above all incapable of maintaining a proper self-government." He thinks the example of Cuba, liberated "from the rule of Spain, but not from internal troubles, will render the American of the States sceptical as to the aptitude of the Latin-American populations of mixed blood to govern themselves without disorder," and recognises that the "pacific penetration" of Mexico by American capital constitutes a possible menace to the independence of that Republic, were the death of Diaz to lead to its original state of anarchy and disturb the peace which the millionaires of the North desire to see untroubled.
Warnings, advice, distrust, invasion of capital, plans of financial hegemony—all these justify the anxiety of the southern peoples.
The people of the United States have always desired a Zollverein, a fiscal union of all the Republics; they wish to gather into their imperial hands the commerce of the South, the produce of the tropics. The unity of the German Empire was born of a Zollverein or customs union, and perhaps in the future the same means will create that eternal empire of which the patriotism of Mr. Chamberlain used to dream. The United States, according to candid Professor Coolidge, are, in respect of Latin {306} America, in a position analogous to that of Russia in respect of the nations of the Zollverein: their population is greater and more imposing. "History shows us," he writes, "that when feeble states and powerful states are closely associated the independence of the weak states runs certain risks."[1] The Yankee ideal, then, is fatally contrary to Latin-American independence.
For geographical reasons, and on account of its very inferiority, South America cannot dispense with the influence of the Anglo-Saxon North, with its exuberant wealth and its industries. South America has need of capital, of enterprising men, of bold explorers, and these the United States supply in abundance. The defence of the South should consist in avoiding the establishment of privileges or monopolies, whether in favour of North Americans or Europeans.
It is essential to understand not only the foundations of North American greatness, but also the weaknesses of the Anglo-Saxon democracy, in order to escape from the dangers of excessive imitation.
The Anglo-Saxons of America have created an admirable democracy upon a prodigious expanse of territory. A caravan of races has pitched its tents from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and has watered the desert with its impetuous blood. Dutch, French, Anglo-Saxons, and Germans, people of all sects, Quakers, Presbyterians, Catholics, Puritans, all have mingled their creeds in a single multiform nation. At the contact of new soil men have felt the pride of creation and of living. Initiative, self-assertion, self-reliance, audacity, love of adventure, all the forms of the victorious will are united in this Republic of energy. A triumphant optimism quickens the rhythm of life; an immense impulse of creation builds cities in the wilderness, and founds new {307} plutocracies amidst the whirlpool of the markets. Workshops, factories, banks; the obscure unrest of Wall Street; the architectural insolence of the skyscraper; the many-coloured, material West; all mingle perpetually in the wild, uncouth hymn which testifies the desperate battle of will and destiny, of generation against death. Poets have exalted the greatness of America. Hear Walt Whitman, the bard of this advancing democracy:—
"Long, too long, America....
For who except myself has yet conceived
What your children en masse really are?
They will make the most splendid race the sun
Ever shone upon,"
he cries, in his free rhythms.
"O mother of a mighty race!"
said Bryant, celebrating the glories of North America, and the fastidious Whittier would have the United States excel the Old World on its own ground:
"And cast in some diviner mould
Lest the new cycle shame the old."
They have reconciled equality with liberty, in manners and in law. Fair play, the identical chances which the Republic offers her citizens, in creating schools, in fostering the advance of self-made men in society, constitutes the firmest foundation of the life of a republic. Equity and equality prevail above the eager onrush of her citizens; equality in industrial struggles against monopolies; equality in the churches in place of intolerance; equality in school instead of the privileges created by wealth. This persistent exaltation of liberty matches the sentiment of social discipline. The Germanic sense of {308} organisation is added to the Anglo-Saxon individualism; associations multiply and become a gigantic network spread over the entire face of the country; clubs, leagues, societies of co-operation and production and philanthropic institutions.
But this civilisation, in which men of strong vitality win wealth, invent machines, create new cities, and profess a Christianity full of energy and accomplishment, has not the majesty of a harmonious structure. It is the violent work of a people of various origin, which has not yet been ennobled by the patina of tradition and time. In the cities which restless workers hastily raise on barren soil, one can as yet perceive no definitive unity. Race antagonism disturbs North America; the negroes swarm in the South; Japanese and Orientals aspire to the conquest of the West. Neo-Saxon civilisation is still seeking its final form, and in the meantime it is piling up wealth amid the prevailing indiscipline. "We find in the United States," says M. André Chevrillon, "a political system, but not a social organisation." The admirable traditions of Hamilton and Jefferson have been subjected to the onslaught of new influences, the progress of plutocracy, the corruption of the administrative functions, the dissolution of parties, the abuse of the power of monopolies. The axis of the great nation is becoming displaced towards the West, and each step in advance marks the triumph of vulgarity.
An octopus of a city, New York, might be taken as the symbol of this extraordinary nation; it displays the vertigo, the audacity, and all the lack of proportion that characterise American life. Near the poverty of the Ghetto and the disturbing spectacle of Chinatown you may admire the wealth of Fifth Avenue and the marble palaces which plagiarise the architecture of the Tuscan cities. Opposite the obscure crowds of emigrants herded in the docks you will see the refined luxury of the plutocratic {309} hotels, and facing the majestic buildings of Broadway, the houses of the parallel avenues, which are like the temporary booths of a provincial fair. Confusion, uproar, instability—these are the striking characteristics of the North American democracy. Neither irony nor grace nor scepticism, gifts of the old civilisations, can make way against the plebeian brutality, the excessive optimism, the violent individualism of the people.
All these things contribute to the triumph of mediocrity; the multitude of primary schools, the vices of utilitarianism, the cult of the average citizen, the transatlantic M. Homais, and the tyranny of opinion noted by Tocqueville; and in this vulgarity, which is devoid of traditions and has no leading aristocracy, a return to the primitive type of the redskin, which has already been noted by close observers, is threatening the proud democracy. From the excessive tension of wills, from the elementary state of culture, from the perpetual unrest of life, from the harshness of the industrial struggle, anarchy and violence will be born in the future. In a hundred years men will seek in vain for the "American soul," the "genius of America," elsewhere than in the indisciplined force or the violence which ignores moral laws.
Among the Anglo-Saxon nations individualism finds its limits in the existence of a stable home; it may also struggle against the State, according to the formula consecrated by Spencer, "the man versus the State." It defends its jealous autonomy from excessive legislation, from the intervention of the Government in economic conflicts or the life of the family. And it is precisely the family spirit which is becoming enfeebled in North America, under the pressure of new social conditions. The birth-rate is diminishing, and the homes of foreign immigrants are contributing busily to the formation of the new generations; the native stock inheriting good racial {310} traditions would seem to be submerged more and more by the new human tide. A North American official writes that "the decrease in the birth-rate will lead to a complete change in the social system of the Republic."[2] From this will result the abandonment of the traditional austerity of the race, and the old notions of sacrifice and duty. The descendants of alien races will constitute the nation of the future. The national heritage is threatened by the invasion of Slavs and Orientals, and the fecundity of the negroes; a painful anxiety weighs upon the destinies of the race.
The family is unstable, and divorces are increasing at an extraordinary rate. Between 1870 and 1905 the population doubled; during the same period the divorces increased sixfold and the marriages decreased. There is no fixity in the elements of variety, and the causes of this state of transition will not disappear, as they are intimately allied with the development of the industrial civilisation which has brought with it a new ideal of happiness. By emancipating men and women from the old moral principles it has modified sexual morality; by accelerating social progress it has brought an additional bitterness into the social mêlée, a greater egoism into human conflict.
Excessive and heterogeneous immigration prevents any final crystallisation; in the last ten years 8,515,000 strangers have entered into the great hospitable Union. They came from Germany, Ireland, Russia, or Southern Italy. It is calculated that the United States are able to assimilate 150,000 to 200,000 immigrants each year, but they certainly cannot welcome such an overwhelming host without anxiety.
Criminality increases; the elaboration of a {311} common type among these men of different origin is proceeding more slowly. Doubtless beneath the shelter of the political federation of the various States a confused agglomeration of races is forming itself, and this justifies the query of Professor Ripley: "The Americans of the North," he says, "have witnessed the disappearance of the Indians and the buffalo, but can they be certain to-day that the Anglo-Saxons will survive them?"
In seeking to imitate the United States we should not forget that the civilisation of the peoples of the North presents these symptoms of decadence.
Europe offers the Latin-American democracies what the latter demand of Anglo-Saxon America, which was formed in the school of Europe. We find the practical spirit, industrialism, and political liberty in England; organisation and education in Germany; and in France inventive genius, culture, wealth, great universities, and democracy. From these ruling peoples the new Latin world must indirectly receive the legacy of Western civilisation.
Essential points of difference separate the two Americas. Differences of language and therefore of spirit; the difference between Spanish Catholicism and the multiform Protestantism of the Anglo-Saxons; between the Yankee individualism and the omnipotence of the State natural to the nations of the South. In their origin, as in their race, we find fundamental antagonisms; the evolution of the North is slow and obedient to the lessons of time, to the influences of custom; the history of the southern peoples is full of revolutions, rich with dreams of an unattainable perfection.
The people of the United States hate the half-breed, and the impure marriages of whites and blacks which take place in Southern homes; no manifestation of Pan-Americanism could suffice to destroy the racial prejudice as it exists north of Mexico. The {312} half-breeds and their descendants govern the Ibero-American democracies, and the Republic of English and German origin entertains for the men of the tropics the same contempt which they feel for the slaves of Virginia whom Lincoln liberated.
In its friendship for them there will always be disdain; in their progress, a conquest; in their policy, a desire of hegemony. It is the fatality of blood, stronger than political affinities or geographical alliances.
Instead of dreaming of an impossible fusion the Neo-Latin peoples should conserve the traditions which are proper to them. The development of the European influences which enrich and improve them, the purging of the nation from the stain of miscegenation, and immigration of a kind calculated to form centres of resistance against any possibilities of conquest, are the various aspects of this Latin Americanism.[3]
[1] The United States as World-Power.
[2] Race Improvement in the United States. Academy of Political and Social Science, Philadelphia, 1909, pp. 70-1 et seq.
[3] The Mexican sociologist, F. Bulnes, writes in his book, L'Avenir des nations Hispano-Americaines: "It is more than probable that by 1980 the United States will hold a population of 250,000,000 inhabitants. They will then scarcely be sufficient for the needs of this population, and will no longer be able to supply the world with the vast quantity of cereals which they supply to-day. They will therefore have to choose between a recourse to the methods of intensive culture and the conquest of the extra-tropical lands of Latin America, which are fitted, by their conditions, to the easy and inexpensive production of excellent cereals."
The work of Spain—The North American reforms—The future.
By turns Spanish and North American, and frequently disturbed by the conflict of these two Americanisms, the history of the "pearl of the Antilles" has been a long political experiment. Its result, the success of one method or the other, will prove the aptitude or the incapacity of the Latins of America in the art of organising a State or instituting a Republic.
The last colony, the final vestige of the vast Spanish Empire overseas, Cuba still betrayed, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the political and moral influence of the mother country. The exuberant and classic land of tobacco and sugar, its tropical opulence attracted pioneers and colonists. Spain therefore fought to retain this country, which she granted in recompense of the audacity of her adventurers and the rapacity of her officials.
Its geographical situation, its wealth, its traditions, are all exceptional. The race, imaginative and precocious, is fertile in poets, heroes, and orators. We see generals of thirty, poetical swordsmen, divided between their battles and their verses; irreducible guerillas, orators full of tropical eloquence, passionate pilgrims, who wander through America relating the miseries of the Spanish tyranny: a gloomy tale which has made the liberated democracies attentive {314} to the fate of their captive sister. Thus Europe used to shudder at the fate of Poland or Ireland. Astonishingly audacious were these soldiers—Garcia, Maceo, Gomez—who defended the national liberty to the death; bitter were the battles, the hand-to-hand conflicts, the wars of skirmishes and outposts. Of the high lineage of Bolivar, San Martin, and Sucre, the last of the Liberators, at once poet, statesman, and warrior, a Gothic knight enamoured of an ideal Dulcinea—the autonomy of Cuba—Marti was the representative leader of the nation.
As in the other colonies, freed a century earlier, the action of Spain in Cuba was at once fertile and limited, useful and disastrous. What effort could be more paradoxical than that of loading with fetters, with prohibitions and monopolies, the very cities whose birth and development was the work of Spain? Authoritatively she sought to stamp out the longing for liberty, and in this island consumed by racial hatred—the old hatred of the conquerors and the Creoles—she responded to every revolutionary demand for independence by a terrible policy of repression. One of her governors left the bloody traces of an Alva, the pacificator of Flanders.
In Madrid a great minister, Canovas del Castillo, an uncompromising traditionalist, believed that Spain should possess a colonial empire "to preserve her position in the world." From that time only energetic action in the revolted islands could save the metropolis. Already, in 1865, at the beginning of his career, he wished to limit the representation of Cuba and Porto Rico; and in 1868, when the long war broke out, he supported the demands of the 9,000 Spaniards who demanded the rejection of all reform.[1] Once in power, in 1876, Canovas was still more emphatic; the Cuban problem was to be solved only by violence. The generosity of Martinez {315} Campos was followed by the inflexible severity of governors who turned the island into a vast barracks. The timid liberties granted to Zanjon were soon suppressed; neither popular elections nor commercial liberties were allowed, but martial law, and a general to aid the Spaniards of the island in their war against the Creoles and mulattos.
In 1878 the first civil war was over, but in 1895 the revolt was so successful, so popular, so terrible, that Martinez Campos abandoned the government of the island, feeling himself incapable of "wholesale shootings and other feats of the same kind." Marti, tragic symbol of revolt, was killed. General Weyler installed a Reign of Terror; the island was exhausted. No one could dislodge the guerillas from the plantations of sugar-cane which served them as refuge. Weyler ordered a "concentration" of women, children, and the non-combatants in the fortified cities. Offences of opinion were punished by death, and absolute submission was demanded. The intervention of the United States forced Spain to grant a brittle autonomy in 1896. The assassination of Canovas by an anarchist permitted a reaction against his uncompromising ideals, and an offer was made of a constitution, and of elective chambers, without, however, authority over the governor sent by the metropolis, and a Council of Administration, to which the Cubans would have access; but economic interests were ignored and sugar and tobacco were not set free.
Cuba was awaiting her crusader, her Lohengrin. The United States filled the rôle. Attentive to the affairs of the island, they negotiated, arranged for intervention with non-official agents, and New York began to fit out filibustering expeditions. The incidents of the Yankee campaign against Spain are well known, from the sinking of the Maine by an explosion in Havana roadstead to the Treaty of {316} Paris. Once their rival was vanquished would the States give Cuba her longed-for liberty? Porto Rico was conquered and Cuba obtained only a mediocre autonomy.
Here is a difficult question: what was it that impelled the Americans to undertake the adventure: imperialistic ambition or chivalrous impulse, as many Cubans still believe? The opinion of their politicians was always clear; annexation of the island or preservation of the status quo. They feared that Spain might cede the colony to a power better armed than herself, and Cuba, since the time of Jefferson, had been reckoned among those countries which a "law of political gravitation" should eventually give them. An eminent Brazilian historian and diplomatist, Oliveira Lima, has even demonstrated that when Bolivar, after convoking the Congress of Panama in 1826, had thereupon proposed, as the last stage of his vast epic, to give liberty to Cuba, it was the United States that prevented him. For they knew that independence would also mean the enfranchisement of subject races, and they needed slaves for the proud and wealthy feudal State of Virginia. These tropical countries, Cuba and Porto Rico, were the promised prey of a future Federal imperialism, and Spain might remain their guardian until the States could demand their cession or undertake their conquest.
Thus the very interest which in 1826 vetoed the independence of Cuba was later to give the choice between autonomy or war; a dilemma from which the haughty metropolis could not escape. Between the commercial brutality of old and this recent Quixotism there is only an apparent contrast: a hidden logic has guided American policy. If we consider the end in view—to assure the incontestable control of the Caribbean Sea, by purchase or annexation of its islands—the former attitude of a {317} country which had not yet peopled its own territory, and that provoked to-day by a plethora of wealth and men, no longer appear irreconcilable.
As early as 1845 the purchase of Cuba was discussed in Washington. The famous "Ostend manifesto" (1854) issued by the American diplomatists, expounded their right to seize the island in case Spain should refuse to sell it. This resolution to give independence to a country they despaired of buying was therefore only the end of a long campaign.
Certainly in 1898, once peace was signed and Porto Rico conquered, they respected this independence. But their detachment was incomplete; they occupied the island, sent governors thither, and generously reformed the finances, education, and hygiene of the country. A provisional tutelage, soon followed by the proclamation of the Republic. Was this the independence of which Marti had dreamed? The treaty which proclaimed it also limited it; the Platt amendment found its way into the margin of a liberal text, reserving to the United States the right of intervention to remedy any possible anarchy. A strange severity, to demand of an untried tropical republic, where the hostility of castes was extreme, a serene and untroubled existence! Eventual military occupation for the purpose of suppressing revolts would be a dangerous snare to independence. Intervention in the public affairs of the old Spanish colony, twice repeated, was both times followed by a campaign of annexation in the Yellow Press. It is difficult to guess whether Yankee imperialism, with its ever-increasing appetite, will respect the autonomy of the island in the face of periodic occupations. It will probably prefer a protectorate or a final conquest when wearied of the turbulence of a democracy incapable of self-government.
Will this beautiful island one day become a State {318} of the Anglo-Saxon or Federal Union? The accession of the Cubans to this democracy would cause a disturbance in the political and social world as profound as that created by Japanese immigration in the Far West. The plutocrats of the States have too much contempt for half-breeds and negroes willingly to accept deputies from a country where the profound admixture of races contains an important African element; a society which despises the negro cannot wholly agree with one ruled largely by Spanish half-castes of Indian and African ancestry. The protectorate would be a step toward the control of the Tropics which Mr. Benjamin Kidd and other English sociologists imagine to be the appanage of their race.
The civilising work of the United States has been admirable. Once Spain was defeated and her colony conquered, they transformed the education, finance, and hygiene of the island to prepare the people for the liberty they ignored. It was four years before they gave it; four years of pedagogy, of which Brigadier-General Wood, military and civil chief, was in charge, until on the 20th of May, 1902, "thanks to the goodwill of President Roosevelt, we were recognised as having attained our majority."[2]
Four years of extraordinary activity transformed the exhausted island into a prosperous country, a reform which we may follow in the memoirs of General Wood. Two years of endeavour extirpated the yellow fever, which had prevailed in Havana since 1762. The Yankees fought the mosquitos, the vehicles of the disease, and their sanitary works and measures decreased the death-rate from 91.3 per 1,000 in 1898 to 20.63 in 1902. In the same period the deaths among the American troops fell from 91.03 to 20.68. They also attacked malaria {319} and tuberculosis, until Havana, as one of them proudly writes, became one of the healthiest cities of America.
Pavements, gutters, sewers, the demolition of old buildings and the construction of new; asylums, hospitals, and prisons, gave the island an aspect at once modern and sanitary. The fiscal revenues, formerly badly employed by an unskilful bureaucracy, found useful employment; dilapidations were noted and a railway statute was passed. The Yankees opened up new roads, knowing how far the prosperity of the island depended on them; in 1906, the second year of the occupation, there were only 610 kilometres of carriage-roads in Cuba, while Jamaica, with one-fifth the area, had 10,113.[3]
Communications being thus improved, the sugar industry, on which the prosperity of the island depends, developed rapidly. The visitors did not forget to attract immigrants and to reconstruct the ports.
The government of General Wood installed modern schools in the old Spanish school-houses, while it built special schools, kindergartens, and technical colleges in the large towns.
Under the Spaniards education was obligatory, no doubt, but it was the Americans who brought a lapsed law into force. Fines punished parental neglect. A thousand teachers went to Harvard, in the year 1900 alone, sent thither by General Wood to improve their methods of teaching; new pedagogic methods and a wider culture strongly modified social and political life. The Americans left ten times as many schools as they found, and an education adequate to the race and the Cuban child, who is "impressionable, nervous, and furiously imaginative."
Governor Wood requested his country to reduce by one-half the customs rates upon the coffee, fruits, and {320} sugar which the island produced, as the basis of a Zollverein profitable to both countries. He complained, in his memoir, of the indifference of the wealthy towards the communal and political life, which he wished to render more active. A law passed by him regulated the elections in the new Republic.
The Cubans willingly recognise that the Americans have performed an excellent work in education and finance, but accuse them of having provoked in political life a corruption analogous to that of the leaders or bosses of Tammany Hall, which replaces violence by fraud. It is difficult to speak of such a matter, but perhaps the reaction against these dangerous methods was insufficient. In 1906, after four years of independent life, President Estrada Palma demanded intervention. It must be recognised that the Americans did not respond without some uneasiness. Mr. Roosevelt, in a letter to the Cuban diplomatist Gonzalo de Quesada, gave some admirable advice: "I solemnly exhort the Cuban patriots," he said, "to form a close union, to forget their personal differences and ambitions, and to remember that they have one means of safeguarding the independence of the Republic: to evade, at all costs, the necessity of foreign intervention, intended to deliver them from civil war and anarchy."
Heedless of the voice of the shepherd of the American people, they asked him to put an end to the long quarrel between the liberals and the moderates. The Americans occupied the island for a year; Mr. Taft, the new President, was one of the pacificators. It is difficult to judge whether the anarchical inhabitants of the island have gained ground since the departure of the Americans. One of their most remarkable politicians, Señor Mendez Capote, believes that in Cuba—and more generally {321} in any very young country where the government has need of an unfailing authority in order to check discord—representatives of one or both parties ought to belong to the Cabinet in order to render political life less changeable and to decrease its contrasts.[4] This organisation is impossible in a democracy which passes alternately from revolt to dictatorship.
Some Cubans, satisfied with the material progress effected, would prefer annexation. Others, and among them one of the most remarkable writers of the country, Señor Jesus Castellanos, are never tired, remembering their happy intervention, of calling the United States, "the great sister Republic." Certainly the States have given Cuba autonomy, but was it not a treacherous gift? Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. The historic interest of Cuba for the Americans is to-day increased by imperialistic ambitions. A Harvard professor, Mr. Coolidge, writes in a book already cited: "A glance at the map is enough to show us how important the island is to the United States. Of great value by virtue of its natural resources and its temperate climate, it is strategically the key to the Gulf of Mexico, where the Mississippi Valley terminates facing the Caribbean Sea and the future Panama Canal. Its situation is comparable to that of Crete in the Eastern Mediterranean."
The danger is therefore serious; the island is already in the lion's mouth. Only a skilful policy can keep the hope of deliverance alive. The servitude offered by the modern Cyclops is only a gilded pill; and to swallow it the merchants of the island would willingly forget their national pride. Analysing Rodo's book, Señor Castellanos has denounced the excessive utilitarianism of these men, without idealism, and full of a cupidity and gross materialism, which makes any collective effort towards national unity {322} impossible. Poets and dreamers, the Cubans would need to undergo some prodigious change before one could interest them in action, before they could understand in the medley of political conflict what is really in the interests of the country; before they could establish political solidarity in the place of anarchy, and temper their easy confidence in the Yankee by a necessary and self-preserving scepticism. Could they ever transform their intellectual gifts into a less showy but more efficacious capacity for conflict and discipline? Will they acquire a sense of reality? Cuba should serve the rest of Latin America as a kind of experimental object-lesson. She suffers from the characteristic malady of the race, the divorce between intelligence and will.
She opposes the Anglo-Saxon invasion, being still thoroughly Spanish, her deliverance being a matter of yesterday, but American also by the mixture of the two races, the conquerors and the vanquished, by the usual Latin virtues and defects. The loss of her independence would be a painful lesson to the republics of Central America, and to Mexico even, where anarchy is paving the way for servitude. The United States offer peace at the cost of liberty. The alternatives are independence or wealth, material progress or tradition. The choice between dignity and a future is a painful one. Only an abundant immigration under benevolent tyrants strong enough to enforce a lasting peace, only a new orientation of the national life, setting business and industry and rural life before politics, could save the country from the painful fate which seems to be hers.
A fresh intervention, followed doubtless by annexation, would demonstrate the racial incapacity for self-government—a mournful experience. The successive rule of Anglo-Saxons and Creoles would render obvious the superiority of the former in the matter of administration, economics, and politics.
[1] See Como acabó la dominación, de España en America, E. Piñeyro, Paris.
[2] Enrique Collazo, Cuba intervenida, Havana, 1910, p. 93.
[3] Informe del Gobernador Charles E. Magoon, Havana, 1909, pp. 26, 39.
[4] Cited in Cuban Pacification, Washington, 1907, p. 506.
The ambitions of the Mikado—The Shin Nippon in Western America—Pacific invasion—Japanese and Americans.
Facing the United States in the mysterious Orient is an extensive empire which is sending its legions of pacific invaders into the New World. Anticipating the Japanese victories, the German Emperor warned a somnolent Europe of the terrible Yellow Peril; the peril of hordes like those of Genghis Khan, which would destroy the treasures of Western civilisation. This danger, after the defeat of Russia and the formation of the Anglo-Japanese alliance, has been felt in America from Vancouver and California down to Chili.
To dominate the Pacific is the ambition both of the North American Republic and the Asiatic Monarchy.
Before ruling America the Japanese, exposed to the hostility of the Californians, will fight in the North the great battle which will decide their fate. The Monroe doctrine, which liberated Latin America from the tutelage of the Holy Alliance, is perhaps destined to protect it also against the menace of the East. The Anglo-Saxons will not tolerate the foundation of Japanese colonies on the southern coasts of America, and to prevent them they are overcoming the obstacle of the Isthmus: are digging a canal, {324} fortifying it, and increasing their navy. The United States understand that their future will baffle Japan, and by the acquisition of the Philippines they have become an Asiatic power. They defend the integrity of China, negotiate peace between Russia and Japan, demand the neutrality of the Manchurian railway, and claim a financial share in the Chinese loans and undertakings of material civilisation. The policy of Mr. Taft tends to ensure the American control of the Chinese finances.
The industry of North America needs outlets in Asia, because South America is still a commercial fief of Europe. On the other hand, the Japanese population is increasing at such an excessive rate that emigration is a necessary phenomenon for that country; a people of mariners hemmed in by the ocean naturally looks for fruitful adventures by sea. Moreover, the State stimulates emigration; socialism is causing it anxiety, and the dense population of proletariats is producing implacable caste antagonisms. Anarchists, brilliant propagandists of European doctrines, are spreading their convictions among the multitude which vegetates upon a poverty-stricken soil. Industrialism, and the general transformation of the nation, renders the protest of the disinherited still more bitter.
This current of emigration is neither chaotic nor fruitless. Even more than the German the Japanese is an emissary of imperialistic design. He does not become absorbed into the nation in which he lives; he does not become naturalised under the protection of hospitable laws; he preserves his worship of the Mikado, his national traditions, and his noble devotion to the dead.
Japan aspires to political domination and economic hegemony in Korea and Northern China. The Japanese have annexed Korea, and flying the Imperial standard upon this peninsula they have become a {325} continental power. They have received from ancient China lessons in wisdom, artists and philosophers, and to-day the initiate seeks to rule the initiator. Japan is transforming China and teaching her the methods of the West; the philosophy of Heidelberg, the arts of Paris. In Manchuria, despite the ambitions of the United States, she pretends to supremacy for her industries and her banks.
"Asia for the Asiatics" is the Japanese cry, as "America for the Americans" is that of the people of the States.
Neither of these peoples respects the autonomy of foreign nations. The United States are conquering Asia economically, and the Japanese, the defenders of Oriental integrity, are slowly invading the Far West of America. The Philippines for the United States and Hawaii for Japan are the advance posts of commercial expansion on the one hand and imperialism on the other.
We are then face to face with a struggle of races, a clash of irreconcilable interests. In the proud northern democracy we note an uneasiness which reveals itself by the jealous exclusion of the Japanese from the life of the West, and by immovable racial prejudices. The American General Homer Lee, in a pessimistic book, The Valor of Ignorance, states that a heterogeneous nation in which foreigners constitute half the population can never conquer Japan. He foresees that the island empire, having eliminated its two rivals, Russia and China, by successive wars, will vanquish the United States and occupy vast territories in the American North-West. Only alliance with England, "to-day allied with the destinies of Japan," could save the Republic from subjection to her Oriental rivals.
Such prophecies, however, do not assume a general character. While waiting for the future war the struggle for the Pacific between the two powers {326} concerned remains acute. The Japanese emigrants halt at Hawaii, assimilate American methods, and resume their exodus toward the Californian Eldorado. In the islands they are electors; they prevail by force of numbers; they change their professions or industries with remarkable adaptability, and then return to Japan, or remain, and retain their national feeling inviolate. In California they follow humble callings; they are secretly preparing themselves for conquest. Numberless legions thus arrive from the Orient; they are proud, adventurous, speculative; they aspire to economic supremacy.
In California, that country of gold and adventure, the problem of Japanese immigration is becoming more complex. M. Louis Aubert explains that in this State the Japanese constitute a necessary defence against the tyranny of the trades unions.[1] They accept an absurd wage and furnish the financial oligarchy with useful arms and sober stomachs. When the associations of working men demand increased salaries and threaten the greedy plutocrats with strikes or socialistic demands, the Japanese passively submit to the iron law of capitalism. If the interests of the race demand their expulsion from California, the interests of the capitalist class demand their retention. The instinct of the democracy which supports the civilising mission of the white man, "the white man's burden," is stronger than its utilitarian egoism. The immigrant is accused of immodesty or servility. The energy, frugality, self-respect, triumphant patience, and hostile isolation of the Japanese in Hawaii and California cause the Americans much uneasiness.
Repulsed in the north, the conquering Japanese take refuge on the long coast-line of South America. They do not renounce California and its admirable soil, but they prefer to forget the disdain of the {327} North, to compromise with that haughty democracy, and prepare in silence for the future conflict.
They are, as a race, transformed; they have forsaken their own history in the midst of the millennial and ecstatic Orient, and this renovation has resulted in an intense ambition of expansion. The Japan which apes Europe does not overlook the teachings of Anglo-Saxon imperialism. Its statesmen, disciples of Disraeli and Chamberlain, wish to found an immense empire under the tutelage of the Asiatic England, insular and proud as the United Kingdom itself. Count Okuma stated that South America was comprised in the sphere of influence to which the Japanese Empire may legitimately pretend. Is not this the very language of the conquerors of Europe, for whom such "spheres of influence" pave the way for protectorates, tutelage, or annexation? "Western America," write the Japanese journals, "is a favourable ground for Japanese emigration. Persevering emigrants might there build up a new Japan, Shin Nippon." It is the identical object of the Germans in Southern Brazil; the creation of a Transatlantic Deutschtum.
The Japanese emigrate to Canada, there to establish a base for the invasion of the United States; they do the same in Mexico, and settle even in Chili; but Peru is the favourite soil of these imperialistic adventurers. To a statesman here is a Shin Nippon whose future is assured, a new Hawaii. Its climate resembles that of Japan. "In Peru, as in the greater part of South America, the government is weak, and if energy be displayed it cannot refuse to accept Japanese immigrants," writes a journal of Tokio. "In this hospitable country the Japanese could receive education in the public schools, acquire lands, and exploit mines." It is necessary, says an Osaka news-sheet, that these immigrants should not return to Japan after amassing a fortune; {328} they must remain in Peru and there create a Shin Nippon.[2] The Japanese immigrants are reminded that already there are 60,000 Chinese in the sugar plantations of Peru, and that this republic is one of the richest on the Pacific coast. A minute explanation is given of the agricultural products which can be raised in Mexico, Chili, and Peru, and what are the privileges granted to immigrants in these countries; but these comprehensive statements do not trouble American statesmen. The very date of the first Japanese exodus toward the Eldorado of the conquistadors has become the classic anniversary of the commencement of a new era; "the thirty-second of the Meijie," of the regeneration of the Empire. According to recent statistics 6,000 Japanese are at work in Peru, in the plantations of sugar-cane, the rubber-forests, or the cotton-fields; following the tracks of the Chinese, they fill the lesser callings and defeat the mulattos and half-breeds in the economic struggle. New fleets of steamers carry these persistent legions under the Imperial flag. The State protects the navigation companies which run between Japan and South America, and although the commerce thus favoured is more profitable to Peru and Chili than to Japan, the far-sighted Mikado encourages relations which are not particularly favourable to-day, but which permit of the development of Japanese influence all along the Pacific coast, and the creation of centres of Japanese population and influence in Mexico, Peru, and Chili.[3] The Japanese vessels discharge their human freight at Callao and Valparaiso. The soil, which lacks Chinese serfs, is thus fertilised by Japanese immigrants, and the agricultural oligarchy {329} of Chili and Peru is satisfied. Brazil itself attracts these emigrants, replacing the fertile Italian invasion by these sober workers of a hostile race, and is preparing the way for the establishment on Brazilian soil of two groups of identical tendencies, but inimical: one Japanese, the other German.
Japanese spies have been captured in Ecuador and Mexico. At the centennial fêtes of Mexico and the Argentine in 1910 a Japanese cruiser and an ambassador of the Mikado brought fraternal messages from the Orient. Uneasy on account of the North American peril, certain writers of the Latin American democracies entertain a certain amount of confidence in the sympathies of Japan; perhaps they even count upon an alliance with the Empire of the Rising Sun. But we cannot see, with the brilliant Argentine writer Manuel Ugarte, that Latin diplomacy must henceforth count upon Japan, because the hostility between that nation and the United States might be successfully exploited at the proper moment. In the commercial battles for the domination of the Pacific Japan does not support the autonomy of Latin America; her statesmen and publicists consider that Peru, Chili, and Mexico are spheres of Japanese expansion. We have cited conclusive opinions on this subject, and they contradict the optimism of the Argentine sociologist. Apart from the emigrants and the companies which encourage them the projects and designs of Count Okuma, leader of the Japanese imperialists, are manifested in the nationalist Press, which sometimes betrays more than it intends. To-day, in the face of the unanimous opinion of these journals, we cannot deny that Japan has ambitious designs upon America. The future war will be born of the clash of two doctrines, of two imperialisms, of the ideal of Okuma and the Monroe doctrine. Victorious, the Japanese would invade Western America and convert the Pacific into a vast closed {330} sea, closed to foreign ambitions, mare nostrum, peopled by Japanese colonies.[4]
The Japanese hegemony would not be a mere change of tutelage for the nations of America. In spite of essential differences the Latins oversea have certain common ties with the people of the States: a long-established religion, Christianity, and a coherent, European, occidental civilisation. Perhaps there is some obscure fraternity between the Japanese and the American Indians, between the yellow men of Nippon and the copper-coloured Quechuas, a disciplined and sober people. But the ruling race, the dominant type of Spanish origin, which imposes the civilisation of the white man upon America, is hostile to the entire invading East.
The geography of the Oriental Empire in no sense recalls that of America; there are neither wide plains, nor mighty rivers, nor fertile and luxurious forests. Narrow horizons, gentle hills, minute islands, closed seas, and the strange flora of the harmonious insular landscape: lotuses, cryptomera, bamboos, chrysanthemums, dwarf trees. Beliefs, manners, and customs all differ radically from the American. "The Europeans," writes Lafcadio Hearn, "build with a view to duration, the Japanese with a view to instability." A keen sentiment of all that is fugitive in life, of the anguish caused by the incessant flux and mobility of things, causes men to love ephemeral apparitions. Buddhism speaks of the fluidity of life. Japanese art strives to fix passing impressions; the dew, the pale light of the moon, the fleeting tints of twilight, the provisional {331} temples, the small houses of wood, the rice-paper shoji, on which the very shadows of those within are vague and momentary. There is nothing persevering in Japanese life; the inhabitant is a nomad and nature is variable. Impassive Buddhas, seated on their blue lotus flowers, contemplate the irresistible current of appearances. Mobility, and a religious sense of becoming: these would be elements of dissolution in a divided America.
Powerful and traditional, the Japanese civilisation would weigh too heavily upon the Latin democracies, mixed as they are. Bushido, the cult of honour and fidelity to one's ancestors, is the basis of an intense nationalism; the contempt for death, the pride of an insular people, the subjection of the individual to the family and the native land, and the asceticism of the samurai, constitute so formidable a superiority that in the conflict between half-breed America and stoic Japan the former would lose both its autonomy and its traditions.
[1] Louis Aubert, Americains et Japonais, Paris, 1908, pp. 151 et seq.
[2] M. Aubert cites these and other extracts.
[3] The Peruvian imports into Japan were £101,000 in 1909; the Japanese imports into Peru only £4,400. There is a commercial treaty between Chili and Japan.
[4] Perhaps the emigration of Orientals towards the two Americas will be arrested, for there is a Chinese Far West which is slowly becoming peopled. Japan aspires to assure herself of the domination of Manchuria, and is sending colonists to Korea, the annexed peninsula. The excess of the population of China and Japan tends naturally to occupy territories in which everything is favourable—climate, religion, and race.
PROBLEMS
Serious problems arise from a consideration of the Latin democracies, which are in the full tide of development. They are divided, in spite of common traditions, and they comprise races whose marriage has not been precisely happy. In spite of the resources of the soil, and its fabulous wealth, these States live by loans. Their political life is not organised; the parties obey leaders who bring to the struggle for power neither an ideal nor a programme of concrete reforms. The population of these States is so small that America may be called a desert.
We will consider all these problems minutely: problems of unity, of race, of population, of financial conditions, and of politics.
The foundations of unity: religion, language, and similarity of development—Neither Europe, nor Asia, nor Africa presents this moral unity in the same degree as Latin America—The future groupings of the peoples: Central America, the Confederation of the Antilles, Greater Colombia, the Confederation of the Pacific, and the Confederation of La Plata—Political and economical aspects of these unions—The last attempts at federation in Central America—The Bolivian Congress—The A.B.C.—the union of the Argentine, Brazil, and Chili.
A professor of the American university of Harvard, Mr. Coolidge, writes that if there is one thing that proves the backwardness of the political spirit of the Latin Americans, it is precisely the existence of so many hostile democracies on a continent which is in so many respects uniform. With so many points in common, with the same language, the same civilisation, the same essential interests, they persist in maintaining the political subdivisions due to the mere accidents of their history.[1] And he advises in all sincerity that these inimical nations should associate themselves in powerful groups, a means of defence which no nation could oppose, neither the United States nor Europe. If, for example, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Paraguay were to unite with the Argentine Republic; if the old United States of Colombia were re-established, and if, as formerly, Venezuela and Ecuador, with perhaps Peru, were to form a confederation; if the republics of Central America were {336} at last to succeed in forming a durable confederation, and were perhaps to join Mexico—then Latin America would consist only of a few great States, each of which would be sufficiently important to assume by right an enviable position in the modern world, and to fear no aggression on the part of any foreign power.
The Latin Republics pay no attention to this wise counsel; we observe among them a tendency toward further disagreement, toward an atomic disintegration. Originally a different and a wider movement, in the sense of the close union of similar nationalities, did manifest itself. The contrary principle prevails to-day, and it results in the separation of complementary provinces and the conflict of sister nations.
During a century of isolated political development, and under the influence of territory and climate, divergent characteristics have manifested themselves in the nations of America. Mexico is without the tropical eloquence we find in Colombia; the Chilian inflexibility contrasts with the rich imagination of the Brazilians; the Argentines have become a commercial people; Chili is a bellicose republic; Bolivia has an astute policy, the work of a slow and practical people, which has given it a new strength; Peru persists in its dreams of generous idealism; Central America remains rent by an anarchy which seems incurable; Venezuela is still inspired by an empty "lyricism." Some of these republics are practical peoples governed by active plutocracies; others are given to dreaming and are led by presidents suffering from neurosis. In the Tropics we find civil war and idleness; on the cold table-lands, in the temperate plains, and in the maritime cities, wealth and peace.
But such divergences do not form an essential separation; they cannot destroy the age-long work of laws, religion, institutions, tradition, and language. {337} Unity possesses indestructible foundations, as old and as deep-rooted as the race itself.
From Mexico to Chili the religion is the same; the intolerance of alien cults is the same; so are the clericalism, the anti-clericalism, the fanaticism, and the superficial free thought; the influence of the clergy in the State, upon women, and the schools; the lack of true religious feeling under the appearance of general belief.
To this first very important factor of unity we must add the powerful and permanent influence of the Spanish language, whose future is bound up with the future of the Latin Transatlantic peoples. Sonorous and arrogant, this language expresses, better than any other, the vices and the grandeur of the American mind; its rhetoric and its heroism, its continuity of spirit from the feats of the Cid to the Republican revolutions. The Spanish tongue is an intimate bond of union between the destinies of the metropolis and those of its ancient colonies, and it separates the two Americas, one being the expression of the Latin and the other of the Anglo-Saxon genius.
The language is always to a certain extent transformed in these democracies; provincialisms and Americanisms abound; the popular tongue differs from the autocratic Castilian. Don Rufino Cuervo predicts that Spanish will undergo essential alterations in America, as was the case with Latin at the time of the Roman decadence. An Argentine writer, Señor Ernesto Quesada, believes that a national language is in process of formation on the banks of the Plata, and that the barbarisms of the popular speech are forecasts of a new tongue. In Chili an exalted patriot has upheld the originality of the Chilian race and language in an anonymous book, claiming that they derive from the Gothic. Thus is the effect of the national spirit exaggerated. Among the Ibero-American republics there is a profound and general {338} resemblance in the pronunciation and the syntax of the language; the same linguistic defects even are to be found in all. The Spanish of the Peninsula loses its majesty overseas; it is no longer the language, lordly in its beauty, solemn in its ornaments, of Granada, of Mariana, of Perez de Guzman. Familiar, declamatory, pronounced with a caressing accent, the Castilian of America is uniform from North to South.
More effectual than religion and language the identity of race explains the similarity of the American peoples, and constitutes a promise of lasting unity. The native race, the Spanish race, and the negro race are everywhere mingled, in similar proportions, from the frontier of the United States to the southern limits of the continent. On the Atlantic seaboard European immigration, an influx of Russians, Italians, and Germans, has given the supremacy to the white race, but this influence is limited to small belts of land, when we consider the vast area of the continent.
A single half-caste race, with here the negro and there the Indian predominant over the conquering Spaniard, obtains from the Atlantic to the Pacific. There is a greater resemblance between Peruvians and Argentines, Colombians and Chilians, than between the inhabitants of two distant provinces of France, such as Provence and Flanders, Brittany and Burgundy, or between the Italian of the north, positive and virile, and the lazy and sensual Neapolitan, or between the North American of the Far West and the native of New England. The slight provincial differences enable us the better to understand the unity of the continent.
This identity explains the monotonous history of America. A succession of military periods and industrial periods, of revolts and dictatorships; perpetual promises of political restoration; the tyranny of {339} ignorant adventurers, and complicated and delusive legislation.
It is in the great crises of its history that the essential unity of the race is revealed. The Wars of Independence were a unanimous movement, an expression of profound solidarity. In 1865, after half a century of isolation, the democracies of the Pacific once more united to oppose Spain's attempt at reconquest. Soldiers of different nations, who had already fought in bygone battles, but against each other, now fought side by side for the common liberty. The same unity of inspiration has brought the nations together in opposition to many projects of conquest: the expedition of Flores against Ecuador, of France against Mexico, and the Anglo-French alliance against Rosas. At the second Hague Congress in 1907 Latin America revealed to the Western world the importance of her wealth and the valour of her men, and supported her ideal of arbitration; to the Monroe doctrine she opposed the doctrine of Drago, and, without preliminary understanding, asserted her unity.
No other continent offers so many reasons for union, and herein lies the chief originality of Latin America.
In Europe states and races are in conflict, and the unstable equilibrium is maintained only by means of alliances. Religions, political systems, traditions, and languages differ. History is merely a succession of turbulent hegemonies: of Spain, England, France, and Germany. We find artificial nations, like Austria; unions of democratic and theocratic peoples, like the Franco-Russian Alliance; rival empires of the same race, like England and Germany; political alliances of alien races, like Germany and Italy; and the dispersion of peoples painfully seeking to recover their lost unity, like the Poles, the Irish, and the Slavs. The federation of Europe is a Utopian dream.
Africa is not yet autonomous; it is a vast group of enslaved peoples of primitive races, colonised by the great European powers. There the Anglo-Saxon genius is seeking to establish a political union between English and Dutch, and one day, perhaps, the empire dreamed of by Cecil Rhodes will stretch from Cairo to the Cape. But the unity of Africa is impossible; for the colonists come to the Dark Continent as conquerors, as the representatives of hostile interests; they can but quarrel over Morocco, Tripoli, and the Congo. Oceania possesses only a partial unity in the Australian commonwealth, the work of England. In Asia it is still more impossible to guess whence a future unity might arise. Mussulmans and Buddhists share India; Japan has won only an ephemeral superiority; China retains all her irreducible independence; in Manchuria and Korea Russian and Asiatic interests are opposed; in Turkestan, Persia, and Tibet the conflicts of race and religion are enough to destroy any hope of union.
In America and in America only the political problem is relatively simple. Unity is there at once a tradition and a present necessity, yet in spite of this fact the disunion of the Latin democracies persists.
Forty years ago Alberdi thought it necessary, and believed it possible, to redraw the map of America.
To-day the Latin nations overseas are less plastic; the frontiers seem too definitely established, and prejudices too deeply rooted to allow of such a recombination; but the formation of groups of nations is no less urgent. If the unity of the continent by means of a vast federation in the Anglo-Saxon manner seems impossible, it is none the less necessary to group the Latin-American nations in a durable fashion, according to their affinities. While respecting the inevitable geographical inequalities which give certain peoples an evident superiority over others, and the no less inevitable economic inequalities which {341} create natural unions, it would still be possible to found a stable assemblage of nations, a Continent.
There is a spontaneous hierarchy in the Latin New World; there are superior and inferior democracies, maritime nations and inland states. Paraguay will always be inferior to the Argentine Republic; Uruguay to Brazil; Bolivia to Chili; Ecuador to Peru; Guatemala to Mexico; as much from the point of wealth as in population and influence. The preservation of the autonomy of republics which differ so greatly in the extent and situation of their territories can only be removed by federative grouping. To oppress and colonise these countries is the desire of all imperialists, no matter whence they come; but the peace of America demands another solution; which is, not the synthesis which some one powerful State might enforce, but the co-operation of free organisms. By grouping themselves about more advanced peoples the secondary nations might succeed in preserving their threatened autonomy.
Central America, exhausted by anarchy, may aspire to unity; these five small nations maintain a precarious independence in the face of the United States. Until 1842 Central America was only one State, and subsequent attempts at unification proved that this was not merely the artificial creation of its politicians. When the Panama Canal has divided the two Americas, and increased the power of the United States, these nations, together with Mexico, might form a true Spanish advance-guard in the North.
Moreover, the free islands of the Caribbean Sea might be united in a Confederation of the Antilles, according to the noble dream of Hostos. Greater Colombia might be reconstituted, with Ecuador, New Granada, and Venezuela. Their greatest leaders have desired their union, as a preventive of indefinite and fractional division and internal discord. On the basis {342} of common traditions, and for important geographical reasons, these three nations might form an imposing Confederacy. Once the Canal is open, this group of peoples, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, on the northern extremity of the continent, would form a massive Latin rampart, a country capable of absorbing European emigration and of opposing to Anglo-Saxon invasion the resistance of a vast populated and united territory.
Bolivia, the inland republic, deprived of her coast-line by Chili, has already been twice united to Peru; in 1837, under the authority of Santa-Cruz, and in 1879, to oppose the supremacy of Chili on the Pacific. What should henceforth separate it from a people to which it is united by so many historical and economic ties, and a similitude of territory and race from Cuzco to Oruro? Chili and Peru will be either two perpetual enemies, or two peoples drawn together by a useful understanding. Their geographical proximity, their mutually complementary products—the tropical fruits of Peru and the products of the temperate zones of Chili—might contribute to bring them together. Have we not here an actual economic harmony? In the moral domain the very causes which have engendered hatred between Chili and Peru, from the time of Portales to that of Pinto, might equally prove to be the elements of future friendship. Peru, impoverished by the Chilian conquest, and deprived of her deposits of nitre, would no longer be the victim of the Chilian greed of gold, nor the hatred of a poor colony for the elegant vice-kingdom. Chili is wealthier than Peru, and her people have more energy and more will-power, although they may have less imagination, less nobility of character, and less eloquence. The Peruvian vivacity and grace may be contrasted with the prosaic deliberation of Chili; the anarchy of the one country with the political stability of the other; the idealism {343} of Peru with the common-sense of Chili. Physically and morally these two countries complete one another. The economic necessities of each might form the permanent basis of a possible alliance. The Confederation of the Pacific, formed by Peru, Bolivia, and Chili, would be a safeguard against future wars in America. Unhappily Chili professes and seeks to enforce a superiority founded upon victory, just as, when the German Empire was confederated, victorious and warlike Prussia enforced her superiority over artistic Bavaria.
The Confederation of La Plata, the heir to the traditions of the colonial era, might be formed of Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Rosas did seek to create this great federal organisation. During the course of the century Uruguay has extended her sympathies alternately to the Argentine and to Brazil, and Paraguay, during a period of epic grandeur, defended her isolation. The union of these republics was prevented by national rivalities and the ambitions of their caudillos, but it will surely be effected in the future under the pressure of the power of Argentina. It is true that Uruguay has only too definite an originality in the matter of intellect, from the point of view of liberalism and education, but the federation of the future would not be the imposition of a harsh hegemony of one nation over others, but rather the co-operation of republics with equal rights which had at last understood the poverty of their isolated condition. Paraguay, remote and concealed, ruled sometimes by a Jesuitical and now by a civil dictatorship, has need of a place in such a vast confederation of cultivated peoples.
These groups of nations will thus form a new America, organic and powerful. Brazil, with her immense territory and dense population; the Confederation of La Plata; the Confederation of the Pacific; Greater Colombia: these will finally {344} establish the continental equilibrium so anxiously desired. In the North, Mexico and Central America and the Confederation of the Antilles would form three Latin States to balance the enveloping movement of the Anglo-Saxons. Instead of twenty divided republics we should thus have seven powerful nations. We should have not the vague Union of which all the Utopian professors since Bolivar have spoken, but a definite grouping and confederation of peoples united by real economic, geographical, and political ties.
To realise these fusions there are both economic and political methods. Hasty conventions would be powerless to uproot the hatreds and the narrow conceptions of patriotism peculiar to the American peoples. The organisation of the continent should be the work of thinkers, statesmen, and captains of industry, a work fortified by time and history. To the tradition of discord we must oppose another, the tradition of union.
A series of partial commercial treaties, navigation treaties, railway systems, customs unions, and international congresses (like those recently held at Montevideo and Santiago) may all be indicated as means of realising unity. The railways above all will create a new continent; for isolation and lack of population are the enemies of American federation.
To-day these peoples do not know one another. Paris is their intellectual capital, where their poets, thinkers, and statesmen meet. In America everything makes for separation: forests, plains, and mountains. What does Venezuela know of Chili, Peru of Mexico, Colombia of the Argentine? Even in the case of neighbouring nations the political leaders do not know one another. The psychology of neighbouring peoples is a mystery; whence traditional errors and disastrous wars. American journalism is ignorant of nothing in European life—the sessions of the Duma, the ministerial crises of {345} Roumania, the nobility of the Gotha Almanac, the scandals of Berlin; but of the public life of the American nations it publishes only the vaguest and most erroneous news. By stimulating the love of travel and building railroads these peoples would escape from an isolation so perilous. "Every line of railroad which crosses a frontier," said Gladstone, "prepares the way for universal confederation." The Yankees have understood this, which is why they are preparing to build a great Pan-American railway to unite the two Americas under their financial sceptre.
The line which has recently united the two capitals of the South—Santiago and Buenos-Ayres—has contributed to the formation of a solid understanding between Chili and the Argentine. That which will unite Lima and Buenos-Ayres in the near future will bring the culture of the Argentine to the Bolivian table-lands, as far as Cuzco, the centre of Inca tradition; it will draw together the seaboard populations of the two oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific, and will prove a powerful agent of civilisation and unity. The great rivers of the Amazonian basin from the Putumayo to the Beni, the affluents of the Rio de la Plata, the Magdalena and the Orinoco, united by new railroads, will also contribute to the continental unity by multiplying international relations. One may well repeat the celebrated phrase, that to govern is to lay rails. Railways vanquish barbarism; they attract the stranger, people the desert, civilise the native. Political organisation and internal peace correspond with the development of the means of communication. With the appearance of the rails the caudillos lose their influence, and a double transformation is effected; in the interior by the civilising action of commingled interests, and at the exterior by the new relations which the multiplication of railways involves.
Customs unions in Germany created the Imperial {346} unity; Mr. Chamberlain thinks that a Zollverein would increase the power of the British Empire. The economic grouping of nations prepares the way for future confederations. The frequent congresses which unify law and jurisprudence, and bring together politicians, men of letters and scientists, all tend to the same result. To increase the number of these assemblies, to hold them in different capitals of the continent, and to replace the Pan-American Congresses, whose plans are somewhat indefinite, by racial Latin-American Congresses, would be equally to the profit of the economic and intellectual unity of the continent, and the harmony of its politics and its laws. An undivided, uniform American law,[2] a single monetary system, a similar policy in respect of protectionism and free trade, the unification of methods of teaching, and the equivalence of academic diplomas and university degrees, are questions that might be discussed at these general assemblies. Each nation would have ministers in the other republics, who would be at once intellectual emissaries and propagandists, while to-day American peoples who send ministers to Austria or to Switzerland have no accredited representatives in the capitals of adjacent states. The national ambitions which satisfy our politicians to-day would be replaced by a more ample and original design, embracing the future of an entire continent, as was the case a century ago.
In short, we should neglect no form of co-operation—conventions, travel, diplomatic labours, periodical congresses, commercial treaties, and partial groups of nations. Nothing but a disastrous weakness can perpetuate the present division of the Latin {347} peoples in the face of the unity of the United States.
The nations of the South are not unaware of this necessity, and after a century of independence they are seeking to reconstitute the ancient unions. Central America, disturbed by periodic wars, is endeavouring to create a Confederation. In 1895 a treaty between Honduras, Nicaragua, and Salvador formed the Republic of Central America; only Costa Rica and Guatemala held aloof from this union. In 1902 all these nations, with the exception of Guatemala, accepted a convention of arbitration. In 1905 the presidents of the five republics met at Corinth in order to honour the work of Morazan and Rufino Barrios; spontaneously, or at the instance of the United States and Mexico, they signed various treaties intended to realise the unity of the sister nations. A Central American Pedagogic Institute was created, and a "Bureau of the Five Republics," with the same object of unification. In 1907, after nine different conflicts in the interval, a conference of these same nations was assembled at Washington. On this occasion a tribunal of arbitration for Central America was installed, and the neutrality of Honduras was recognised. This tribunal, which sits at Cartago, in Costa-Rica, is to judge the conflicts between states and the diplomatic claims of the governments and of individuals. Moreover, the Republics of Central America have agreed to a declaration which provides that they will recognise no government which has been enforced by a revolution or a coup d'État, and that they will not intervene in the political movements of neighbouring countries.
The Court of Arbitration thus established had already, in 1909, settled differences between Salvador and Honduras, and between Guatemala and Nicaragua, by rejecting the pretentions of Honduras in the one case and of Nicaragua in the other.[3] In {348} short, the United States and Mexico are leading these peoples, who used to be in a condition of perpetual discord, towards the unity necessary to their progress.
A Congress met recently (1911) at Caracas, which was attended by the representatives of the states liberated by Bolivar—Venezuela, New Granada, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru. This was a truly Bolivian assembly in honour of the national hero. The object of this Congress was to reconstitute Greater Colombia with the three Republics which formerly made part of it—Venezuela, New Granada, and Ecuador; this would be a return, after the lapse of a century, to the harmonious union of the sister peoples, which would truly give them a common future.
The formation of a great Bolivian State, after a period of isolation lasting more than a century, is certainly the dream of generous statesmen. It is not easy to conceive of the political union of peoples as far removed as those of Venezuela and Bolivia, but this assembly might well result in a natural union of the peoples of the North; a new Greater Colombia, whose provinces would stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
In the south the A.B.C., the alliance of the Argentine, Brazil, and Chili, is the question incessantly discussed in the sensational press, and in the chancelleries, which love to surround themselves with an atmosphere of mystery. These three nations, wealthy, military powers, situated in distinct zones, are seeking confederation; their ambition is to exercise in America a tutelage which they consider indispensable. Already the understanding of May, 1902, had limited the armaments of Chili and the Argentine, and had put an end to a long conflict. The rivality between the Argentine and Brazil; the old friendship between that country and Chili, which afterwards changed to a jealous alienation; the rivalry between the Argentine {349} and Chili in the matter of wealth and power; discord, threats of war, uneasy friendships; all this is insufficient to restrain the military ambition of the three great nations. The statesmen of Buenos-Ayres, Rio de Janeiro, and Santiago are labouring to effect the realisation of an alliance between the three most highly civilised and organised and most advanced nations of the continent. Once this union is accomplished, to the indisputable influence of the United States will be added the moderative influence of the three great States of the South, and the equilibrium between Latins and Anglo-Saxons would be its immediate result.
There are writers in America who defend the chauvinistic autonomy of small countries as against the natural supremacy of such combinations of States. It is, however, certain that these alliances do not in any way threaten the countries which take part in them; they respect their internal constitution, and their historic organisation; they confine themselves to a fusion of general and external interests, to matters of commerce, and of peace and war. These utilitarian partisans of the independence of each separate nation cannot conceive of the grouping of nations as in the Greater Colombia, the Confederation of the Pacific, or the Southern Alliance, without the existence of obvious commercial interests. It is certainly true that the Zollverein, or permanent customs agreement, was the basis of German unity. But there are moral interests as powerful and as obvious as the interests of commerce. Should not a common danger, such as the Yankee peril in Panama and Central America, impel nations toward federation and unity?
Moreover, federation is not always the result of purely commercial ties. Our century tends to synthetical action. As modern nations were formed by overcoming the old feudal anarchy, so metropolis and colonies are uniting in our days to form {350} formidable empires which merely commercial interests could not explain. What economic tie served as the basis of the South African Federation, a group of hostile races retaining a memory of autonomy? Did not North and South in the United States enter upon a terrible war of interests, and, in spite of this utilitarian antagonism, is not Lincoln, the founder of the Union, as great to-day as Washington, the founder of nationality? The enormous power of the North American nation is the result of this unity. If the patricians of the South had been victorious in the War of Secession, if they had succeeded in annihilating the Federal bond, then instead of the Republic which overawes Europe and aspires to Americanise the world there would be two powerless and inimical States; in the South an oligarchic nation served by slaves, and in the North a feeble assemblage of Puritan provinces, while the Far West would be incapable of resisting the Yellow Peril.
But there are economic ties between the Latin nations, which may assist the preparation of respectable unions. Between Brazil and Chili, Peru and Chili, Bolivia, Chili, and Peru, or the Argentine, Paraguay, and Bolivia, there are actual currents of commercial exchange, of agricultural products from complementary zones, and therein a basis of union may be found.
Latin America cannot continue to live divided, while her enemies are building up vast federations and enormous empires. Whether in the name of race or commercial interests, of common utility or true independence, the American democracies must form themselves into three or four powerful States. The Latin New World is alone in resisting the universal impulse toward the establishment of syndicates and federations, trusts and trades unions, associations and alliances—in short, of increasingly vast and increasingly powerful organisations.
[1] The United States as a World-Power.
[2] See A. Alvarez, Le Droit international americain (Paris, 1910), in which the reader will find an interesting list of problems respecting frontiers, immigration, and means of communication, affecting Latin America in particular, which have on several occasions met with solutions which form the basis of a new law (pp. 271 et seq.).
[3] Alvarez, ibid., p. 189 et seq.
The gravity of the problem—The three races, European, Indian, and Negro—Their characteristics—The mestizos and mulattos—The conditions of miscegenation according to M. Gustave Le Bon—Regression to the primitive type.
The racial question is a very serious problem in American history. It explains the progress of certain peoples and the decadence of others, and it is the key to the incurable disorder which divides America. Upon it depend a great number of secondary phenomena; the public wealth, the industrial system, the stability of governments, the solidity of patriotism. It is therefore essential that the continent should have a constant policy, based upon the study of the problems which are raised by the facts of race, just as there is an agrarian policy in Russia, a protectionist policy in Germany, and a free-trade policy in England.
In the United States all the varieties of the European type are intermingled: Scandinavians and Italians, Irish and Germans; but in the Latin republics there are peoples of strange lineage: American Indians, negroes, Orientals, and Europeans of different origin are creating the race of the future in homes in which mixed blood is the rule.
In the Argentine, where Spanish, Russian, and Italian immigrants intermingle, the social formation is extremely complicated. The aboriginal Indians {352} have been united with African negroes, and with Spanish and Portuguese Jews; then came Italians and Basques, French and Anglo-Saxons; a multiple invasion, with the Latin element prevailing. In Brazil Germans and Africans marry Indians and Portuguese. Among the Pacific peoples, above all in Peru, a considerable Asiatic influx, Chinese and Japanese, still further complicates the human mixture. In Mexico and Bolivia the native element, the Indian, prevails. The negroes form a very important portion of the population of Cuba and San Domingo. Costa-Rica is a democracy of whites; and in the Argentine, as in Chili, all vestiges of the African type have disappeared. In short, there are no pure races in America. The aboriginal Indian himself was the product of the admixture of ancient tribes and castes.
In the course of time historic races may form themselves; in the meantime an indefinable admixture prevails.
This complication of castes, this admixture of divers bloods, has created many problems. For example, is the formation of a national consciousness possible with such disparate elements? Would such heterogeneous democracies be able to resist the invasion of superior races? Finally, is the South American half-caste absolutely incapable of organisation and culture?
Facile generalisations will not suffice to solve these questions. Here the experience of travellers and of American history even is of greater value than the verdicts of the anthropologists. In the first place the half-breeds are not all hybrids, and it is not true that the union of the Spaniard and the American has always been sterile. Hence the absolute necessity of understanding the proper character of each of the races which have formed modern America.
The Spaniards who arrived in the New World came from different provinces; here alone is a prime cause {353} of variety. Simultaneously with the languid Andalusian and the austere Basque, the grave Catalonian and the impetuous Estremaduran left Spain. Where the descendants of the Basque prevail, as in Chili, the political organism is more stable, if less brilliant, than elsewhere, and a strong will-power shows itself in work and success. The Castilians brought to America their arrogance, and the fruitless gestures of the hidalgo; where the Andalusians are in the majority their agile fantasy, their gentle non curanza, militates against all serious or continuous effort. The descendants of the Portuguese are far more practical than those of the Spaniards; they are also more disciplined and more laborious. The psychological characteristics of the Indian are just as various; the descendant of the Quechuas does not resemble the descendant of the Charruas, any more than the temperament of the Araucanian resembles that of the Aztec. In Chili, Uruguay, and the Argentine, there were warlike populations whose union with the conquerors has formed virile half-castes, an energetic and laborious plebs. In Chili Araucanians and Basques have intermingled; and is it not in this fusion that we must seek the explanation of the persistent character of the Chilian nation, and its military spirit? The Aymara of Bolivia and the south-east of Peru is hard and sanguinary; the Quechua of the table-lands of the Andes is gentle and servile. It is by no means a matter of indifference whether the modern citizen of the Latin democracies is descended from a Guarani, an Aztec, an Araucan, or a Chibcha; he will, as the case may be, prove aggressive or passive, a nomadic shepherd or a quiet tiller of the common soil.
The Indian of the present time, undermined by alcohol and poverty, is free according to the law, but a serf by virtue of the permanance of authoritative manners. Petty tyrannies make him a slave; he {354} works for the cacique, the baron of American feudalism. The curé, the sub-prefect, and the judge, all-powerful in these young democracies, exploit him and despoil him of his possessions.[1] The communities, very like the Russian mir, are disappearing, and the Indian is losing his traditional rights to the lands of the collectivity. Without sufficient food, without hygiene, a distracted and laborious beast, he decays and perishes; to forget the misery of his daily lot he drinks, becomes an alcoholic, and his numerous progeny present the characteristics of degeneracy. He lives in the mountains or table-lands, where a glacial cold prevails and the solitude is eternal. Nothing disturbs the monotony of these desolate stretches; nothing breaks the inflexible line of the limitless horizons; there the Indian grows as melancholy and as desiccated as the desert that surrounds him. The great occasions of his civil life—birth, marriage, and death—are the subjects of a religious exploitation. Servile and superstitious, he finally loves the tyrannies that oppress him. He adores the familiar gods of the Cerros, of the mountain. He is at once a Christian and a fetish-worshipper; he sees in mysterious nature demons and goblins, occult powers which are favourable and hostile by turn.
There are, nevertheless, regions where despotism has developed in the Indian a sort of passive resistance. There he is sober and vigorous, and by his complete adaptation to the maternal soil he has grown apathetic and a creature of routine. He hates all that might destroy his age-long traditions: schools, military training, and the authority that despoils him. Conservative and melancholy, he lives on the border of the Republic and its laws; his heart grows hot against the tyranny from which he forever suffers. Dissimulation, servility, and melancholy are {355} his leading traits; rancour, hardness, and hypocrisy are the forms of his defensive energy. He supports his slavery upon this cold earth, but he sometimes revolts against his exploiters; and at Huanta and Ayoayo he fought against his oppressors with true courage, sustained by hatred, as in the heroic times of Tupac-Amaru.[2] After this bloody epic he resumed his monotonous existence under the heedless sky. In his songs he curses his birth and his destiny. In the evening he leaves the narrow valley where in his slavery he is employed in agricultural labours, to journey into the cerros and mourn the abandonment of his household gods. A weird lamentation passes over the darkening earth, and from summit to summit the Cordillera re-echoes the sorrowful and melodious plaint of the Indian as he curses conquest and warfare.
The negroes of Angola or the Congo have mingled equally with the Spaniard and the Indian. The African woman satisfied the ardour of the conquerors; she has darkened the skin of the race.
The negroes arrived as slaves; sold a usanza de feria (as beasts of burden), they were primitive creatures, impulsive and sensual. Idle and servile, they have not contributed to the progress of the race. In the dwelling-houses of the colonial period they were domestics, acting as pions to their masters' children; in the fields and the plantations of sugar-cane they were slaves, branded by the lash of the overseer. They form an illiterate population which exercises a depressing influence on the American imagination and character. They increase still further the voluptuous intensity of the tropical temper, weaken it, and infuse into the blood of the Creole elements of {356} idleness, recklessness, and servility which are becoming permanent.
The three races—Iberian, Indian, and African—united by blood, form the population of South America. In the United States union with the aborigines is regarded by the colonist with repugnance; in the South miscegenation is a great national fact; it is universal. The Chilian oligarchy has kept aloof from the Araucanians, but even in that country unions between whites and Indians abound. Mestizos are the descendants of whites and Indians; mulattos the children of Spaniards and negroes; zambos the sons of negroes and Indians. Besides these there are a multitude of social sub-divisions. On the Pacific coast Chinese and negroes have interbred. From the Caucasian white, bronzed by the tropics, to the pure negro, we find an infinite variety in the cephalic index, in the colour of the skin, and in the stature.
It is always the Indian that prevails, and the Latin democracies are mestizo or indigenous. The ruling class has adopted the costume, the usages, and the laws of Europe, but the population which forms the national mass is Quechua, Aymara, or Aztec. In Peru, in Bolivia, and in Ecuador the Indian of pure race, not having as yet mingled his blood with that of the Spanish conquerors, constitutes the ethnic base. In the Sierra the people speak Quechua and Aymara; there also the vanquished races preserve their traditional communism. Of the total population of Peru and Ecuador the white element only attains to the feeble proportion of 6 per cent., while the Indian element represents 70 per cent. of the population of these countries, and 50 per cent. in Bolivia. In Mexico the Indian is equally in the majority, and we may say that there are four Indian nations on the continent: Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia.
In countries where the pure native has not survived {357} the mestizos abound; they form the population of Colombia, Chili, Uruguay, and Paraguay; in this latter country Guarani is spoken much more frequently than Spanish. The true American of the South is the mestizo, the descendant of Spaniards and Indians; but this new race, which is almost the rule from Mexico to Buenos-Ayres, is not always a hybrid product. The warlike peoples, like those of Paraguay and Chili, are descended from Spaniards, Araucanians, and Guaranis. Energetic leaders have been found among the mestizos: Paez in Venezuela, Castilla in Peru, Diaz in Mexico, and Santa-Cruz in Bolivia. An Argentine anthropologist, Señor Ayarragaray, says that "the primary mestizo is inferior to his European progenitors, but at the same time he is often superior to his native ancestors." He is haughty, virile, and ambitious if his ancestors were Charruas, Guaranis, or Araucanians; even the descendant of the peaceable Quechuas is superior to the Indian. He learns Spanish, assimilates the manners of a new and superior civilisation, and forms the ruling caste at the bar and in politics. The mestizo, the product of a first crossing, is not otherwise a useful element of the political and economic unity of America; he retains too much the defects of the native; he is false and servile, and often incapable of effort. It is only after fresh unions with Europeans that he manifests the full force of the characteristics obtained from the white. The heir of the colonising race and of the autocthonous race, both adapted to the same soil, he is extremely patriotic; Americanism, a doctrine hostile to foreigners, is his work. He wishes to obtain power in order to usurp the privileges of the Creole oligarchies.
One may say that the admixture of the prevailing strains with black blood has been disastrous for these democracies. In applying John Stuart Mill's law {358} of concomitant variations to the development of Spanish America one may determine a necessary relation between the numerical proportion of negroes and the intensity of civilisation. Wealth increases and internal order is greater in the Argentine, Uruguay, and Chili, and it is precisely in these countries that the proportion of negroes has always been low; they have disappeared in the admixture of European races. In Cuba, San Domingo, and some of the republics of Central America, and certain of the States of the Brazilial Confederation, where the children of slaves constitute the greater portion of the population, internal disorders are continual. A black republic, Hayti, demonstrates by its revolutionary history the political incapacity of the negro race.
The mulatto and the zambo are the true American hybrids. D'Orbigny believed the mestizo to be superior to the descendants of the Africans imported as slaves; Burmeister is of opinion that in the mulatto the characteristics of the negro are predominant. Ayarragaray states that the children born of the union of negroes with zambos or natives are in general inferior to their parents, as much in intelligence as in physical energy. The inferior elements of the races which unite are evidently combined in their offspring. It is observed also that both in the mulattos and the zambos certain internal contradictions may be noted; their will is weak and uncertain, and is dominated by instinct and gross and violent passions. Weakness of character corresponds with a turgid intelligence, incapable of profound analysis, or method, or general ideas, and a certain oratorical extravagance, a pompous rhetoric. The mulatto loves luxury and extravagance; he is servile, and lacks moral feeling. The invasion of negroes affected all the Iberian colonies, where, to replace the outrageously exploited Indian, African slaves were imported by the ingenuous evangelists {359} of the time. In Brazil, Cuba, Panama, Venezuela, and Peru this caste forms a high proportion of the total population. In Brazil 15 per cent. of the population is composed of negroes, without counting the immense number of mulattos and zambos. Bahia is half an African city. In Rio de Janeiro the negroes of pure blood abound. In Panama the full-blooded Africans form 10 per cent. of the population. Between 1759 and 1803 642,000 negroes entered Brazil; between 1792 and 1810 Cuba received 89,000. These figures prove the formidable influence of the former slaves in modern America. But they are revenged for their enslavement in that their blood is mingled with that of their masters. Incapable of order and self-government, they are a factor of anarchy; every species of vain outer show attracts them—sonorous phraseology and ostentation. They make a show of an official function, a university title, or an academic diploma. As the Indian could not work in the tropics black immigration was directed principally upon those regions, and the enervating climate, the indiscipline of the mulatto, and the weakness of the white element have contributed to the decadence of the Equatorial nations.
The mulatto is more despised than the mestizo because he often shows the abjectness of the slave and the indecision of the hybrid; he is at once servile and arrogant, envious and ambitious. His violent desire to mount to a higher social rank, to acquire wealth, power, and display, is, as Señor Bunge very justly remarks, a "hyperæsthesia of arrivism."
The zambos have created nothing in America. On the other hand, the robust mestizo populations, the Mamelucos of Brazil, the Cholos of Peru and Bolivia, the Rotos of Chili, descendants of Spaniards and the Guarani Indians, are distinguished by their pride {360} and virility. Instability, apathy, degeneration—all the signs of exhausted race—are encountered far more frequently in the mulatto than in the mestizo.
The European established in America becomes a Creole; his is a new race, the final product of secular unions. He is neither Indian, nor black, nor Spaniard. The castes are confounded and have formed an American stock, in which we may distinguish the psychological traits of the Indian and the negro, while the shades of skin and forms of skull reveal a remote intermixture. If all the races of the New World were finally to unite, the Creole would be the real American.
He is idle and brilliant. There is nothing excessive either in his ideals or his passions; all is mediocre, measured, harmonious. His fine and caustic irony chills his more exuberant enthusiasms; he triumphs by means of laughter. He loves grace, verbal elegance, quibbles even, and artistic form; great passions or desires do not move him. In religion he is sceptical, indifferent, and in politics he disputes in the Byzantine manner. No one could discover in him a trace of his Spanish forefather, stoical and adventurous.
But is unity possible with such numerous castes? Must we not wait for the work of many centuries before a clearly American population be formed? The admixture of Indian, European, mestizo, and mulatto blood continues. How form a homogeneous race of these varieties? There will be a period of painful unrest: American revolutions reveal the disequilibrium of men and races. Miscegenation often produces types devoid of all proportion, either physical or moral.
The resistance of neo-Americans to fatigue and disease is considerably diminished. In the seething retort of the future the elements of a novel synthesis combine and grow yet more complex. If the {361} castes remain divided there will be no unity possible to oppose a probable invasion. "Three conditions are necessary," says M. Gustave Le Bon, "before races can achieve fusion and form a new race, more or less homogeneous. The first of these conditions is that the races subjected to the process of crossing must not be too inequal in number; the second, that they must not differ too greatly in character; the third, that they must be for a long time subjected to an identical environment."
Examining the mixed peoples of America in conformity with these principles we see that the Indian and the negro are greatly superior to the whites in numbers; the pure European element does not amount to 10 per cent. of the total population. In Brazil and the Argentine there are numbers of German and Italian immigrants, but in other countries the necessary stream of invasion of superior races does not exist.
We have indicated the profound differences which divide the bold Spaniard from the negro slave; we have said that the servility of the Indian race contrasts with the pride of the conquerors; that is to say, that the mixture of rival castes, Iberians, Indians, and negroes, has generally had disastrous consequences. Perhaps we may except the fortunate combinations of mestizo blood in Chili, Southern Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. Finally, the territory has not yet exercised a decisive influence upon the races in contact. The modern Frenchman and Anglo-Saxon are born of the admixture of ancient races subjected for centuries to the influences of the soil. The great invasions which modified the traditional stock took place a thousand years ago; they explain the terrible struggles of the Middle Ages. The new American type has not so long a history.
In short, none of the conditions established by the {362} French psychologists are realised by the Latin-American democracies, and their populations are therefore degenerate.
The lower castes struggle successfully against the traditional rules: the order which formerly existed is followed by moral anarchy; solid conviction by a superficial scepticism, and the Castilian tenacity by indecision. The black race is doing its work and the continent is returning to its primitive barbarism.
This retrogression constitutes a very serious menace. In South America civilisation is dependent upon the numerical predominance of the victorious Spaniard, on the triumph of the white man over the mulatto, the negro, and the Indian. Only a plentiful European immigration can re-establish the shattered equilibrium of the American races. In the Argentine the cosmopolitan alluvium has destroyed the negro and mitigated the Indian. A century ago there were 20 per cent. of Africans in Buenos-Ayres; the ancient slave has now disappeared, and mulattos are rare. In Mexico, on the other hand, in 1810 the Europeans formed a sixth part of the population; to-day they do not form more than a twentieth part.
Dr. Karl Pearson, in his celebrated book National Life and Character, writes: "In the long run the inferior civilisations give proof of a vigour greater than that of the superior civilisations; the disinherited gain upon the privileged castes, and the conquered people absorbs the conquering people." He declared further that Brazil would quickly fall into the power of the negroes, and that while the Indians would multiply and develop in the inaccessible regions of the north and the centre, the white peoples, crowded out by the progress of these races, would be numerous only in the cities and the more salubrious districts. This painful prophecy will be accomplished to the letter if, in the conflict of castes, {363} the white population is not promptly reinforced by the arrival of new colonists.
But crossing alone will not communicate the superior characteristics of the race to the mestizo in a lasting manner. "It is necessary that he should be the fruit of a union of the third, fourth, or fifth degree; that is, that there should have been as many successive crossings, with a father or a mother of the white race, before the mestizo can be in a condition to assimilate European culture," writes an Argentine sociologist. For this vast process of selection to be realised to the profit of the white man not only must the races subjected to admixture exist in certain proportions, but the mass of Europeans must prevail and impose their temper upon the future castes. In short, the problem of race depends upon the solution given to the demographic problem. Without the help of a new population there will be in America not merely a lamentable exhaustion but also a prompt recoil of the race. The phrase of Alberdi is still true: "In America to govern means to populate."
The colonists brought with them the traditions and manners of the disciplined races, a moral organisation which was the work of centuries of common life. People of rural extraction, when they reached America, upheld the established interests, the government, the law, and the peace; they worked, fought, and laid up treasure. Moreover, only the most enterprising of men emigrated, and they transmitted to the new democracies an element of vitality they had not before known. As early as the second generation the descendants of the foreign colonists were already Argentines, Brazilians, or Peruvians; their patriotism was as ardent and devoted and exclusive as that of their fathers. They completely adopted the local manners. They had been transformed by the action of the American environment.
Basques or Italians have already transformed the Argentine. They arrive as artisans, or labourers, or clerks and traders; they form agricultural colonies and become landowners. They soon break their fetters; their sons become merchants, financial agents, or wealthy plutocrats. Of 1,000 inhabitants there are 128 Italians and only 99 Argentines who own land. These Latins are prolific; in 1904 1,000 Argentine women gave life to 80 infants; 1,000 Spanish women to 123, and 1,000 Italian women to 175.[3] These immigrants thus increase the national wealth and people the desert.[4] Moreover, their descendants figure in politics and letters. Let us mention only a few Argentine names remarkable on one count or another: Groussac, Magnasco, Becher, Bunge, Ingegnieros, Chiappori, Banchs, and Gerchunoff.
[1] The Indianista Society in Mexico and the Pro Indigena in Peru were founded for the protection and rehabilitation of the Indians.
[2] The Bolivian sociologist, A. Argüedas, writes of the Aymara Indians: "They are hard, rancorous, egotistic, and cruel. The Indian herdsmen have no ambition other than to increase the number of the heads of cattle which they pasture."
[3] V. Gonnard, L'Emigration européenne au XIXe siècle, Paris, 1906, p. 220 et seq.
[4] To understand the significance of immigration, it is enough to remark that there are in Mexico 7 inhabitants per square kilometre, in Brazil 1.7, in the Argentine 1.6, while there are 72 in France, 105 in Germany, no in Italy, 120 in England, and 248 in Belgium.
The caudillos: their action—Revolutions—Divorce between written Constitutions and political life—The future parties—The bureaucracy.
The development of the Ibero-American democracies differs considerably from the admirable spirit of their political charters. The latter include all the principles of government applied by the great European nations: the equilibrium of powers, natural rights, a liberal suffrage, and representative assemblies, but the reality contradicts the idealism of the statutes imported from Europe. The traditions of the prevailing race, in fact, have created simple and barbarous systems of government. The caudillo is the pivot of this political system: leader of a party, of a social group, or a family whose important relations make it powerful, he enforces his tyrannical will upon the multitude. In him resides the power of government and the law. On his permanent action depends the internal order of the State, its economic development, and the national organisation. His authority is inviolable, superior to the Constitution and its laws.
All the history of America, and the inheritance of the Spaniard and the Indian, has ended in the exaltation of the caudillo. Government by caciques, absolute masters, like the caudillos themselves, is very ancient in Spain, as was shown by Joaquin {366} Costa in his analysis of the foundations of Spanish politics. In each province, in each city, was a central personage in whom justice and might were incarnated; admired by the crowd, obeyed by opinion, enforcing his manners and his ideas. The American Indians obeyed caciques, and the first conquerors quickly saw that by winning over the local chiefs they would at the same time subject the native populations. The existence of the caudillos may also be explained by territorial influences. It has been written that the desert is monotheistic; over its arid uniformity one imposing God reigns supreme. It is the same with the steppes, the pampas, and the table-lands of America; vast and monotonous tracts; Paez and Quiroga were divinities of such regions. No other force could limit their authority. Contrasted with the uniform level of mankind which is the work of the plains, their firm chieftainship assumed divine attributes. American revolutions are like the Moorish wars directed by mystic Kaids.
Señor Raphael Salillas writes that in Spain the cacique is a hypertrophy of the political personage; he symbolises the excess of power and of the ambition of Spanish individualism. In America the first conquistadors quarrelled for the supreme authority. The civil wars of the Conquest arose from conflicts between chiefs; none of them could conceive of power as real unless it was unlimited and despotic. After them the all-powerful viceroy, a demi-god in his powers, exercised a similar domination. The South American President, the heir to the traditions of the governors of the colonial epoch, also possesses the maximum of authority; the Constitution confers upon him powers like those of the Czars of Russia.
Power for its own sake is the ideal of such men. The less important chieftains are satisfied by the government of a province; the great leader aspires {367} to rule a republic. Questions of personality are the prevailing characteristics of politics; and despotic rulers abound. When a "Regenerator" usurps the supreme power a "Restorer" appears to dispute it with him; then a "Liberator," and finally a "Defender of the Constitution." The lesser gods fight to their hearts' content, and the democracy accepts the victor, in whom it admires the representative leader, the robust creation of the race. Such a man is not like the character of Ibsen's, who is strong in his isolation; in the caudillo the average characteristics of the nation, its vices and its qualities, are better defined and more strongly accentuated; he obeys his instincts and certain fixed ideas; he conceives of no ideals; he is impressionable and fanatical.
Señor Ayarragarray distinguishes two varieties of caudillo; the cunning and the violent. The latter was above all peculiar to the military period of Ibero-American history. The leader of a band that ravaged like the Huns, he ruled by terror and audacity, enforcing the discipline of the barracks in civil life. The caudillo of the cunning type exercised a more prolonged moral dictatorship; he belongs to a period of transition between the military period and the industrial period. This new master retained the supreme power by lies and subterfuges. A half-civilised tyrant, he used wealth as others used force, and instead of brutally thrusting himself on the people he employed a system of tortuous corruption.
The rule of the caudillos led to presidential government. The Constitutions established assemblies; but tradition triumphed in spite of these theoretical structures. Since the colonial period centralisation and unity have been the American forms of government.
In the person of the President of these democracies resides all the authority which usually devolves upon {368} the public functionaries. He commands the army, multiplies the wheels of administration, and surrounds himself with doctors of law and Prætorian soldiers. The Assemblies obey him; he intervenes in the course of elections, and obtains the Parliamentary majorities that he requires. The upper magistracy is sometimes indocile to the desires of the Government, but in the life of the provinces the judges depend absolutely upon the political leaders. The supreme direction of the finances, the army, the fleet, and the administration in general rests with the President, as before the republican era it belonged to the viceroy.
The parties fight among themselves, not only for power, but to obtain this omnipotent presidency. They realise that the chief of the Executive is the effective agent of all political changes; that ministers and parliaments are only secondary factors in political life. An Argentine sociologist, Señor Joaquin Gonzalez, has said very justly that "each governmental period is characterised by the condition and the worth of the man who presides over it. This presidential system, in default of a solid and elevated political education, has in great measure favoured the return to the personal régime."
To this system correspond the political groups without programmes; men do not struggle for the triumph of ideas, but for that of certain individuals. The consecrated terms lose their traditional meaning. There are civilists who uphold militarism; liberals who strive to increase the presidential authority; nationalists who favour cosmopolitanism; constitutionalists who violate the political charter. The personal system groups conservatives and liberals together. Even in Chili, where the activity of the parties has been unusually continuous, the older parties have split up into shapeless factions. The President establishes his despotic authority over the {369} confusion of these rival groups; he tries to dissolve the small factions, to divide them, in order to rule them.
Without ideals or unity of action the parties are transformed into greedy cliques, which are distinguished by the colour of their favours. As in Byzantium, so in Venezuela, the Blues struggle against the Yellows, while in Uruguay the Whites oppose the Reds, red being the distinctive colour of the Argentine federalists. An aggressive intolerance divides these groups; they gather round their gonfaloniere and their party symbol in irreducible factions. No common interest can reconcile them, not even that of their native country. Each party supports a leader, an interest, a dogma; on the one side a man beholds his own party, the missionaries of truth and culture; the other are his enemies, mercenary and corrupt. Each group believes that it seeks to retain the supremacy in the name of disinterested virtue and patriotism. Rosas used to call his opponents "infamous savages." For the gang in possession of power, the revolutionaries are malefactors; for the latter the ruling party are merely a government of thieves and tyrants. There are gods of good and evil, as in the Oriental theogonies. Educated in the Roman Church, Americans bring into politics the absolutism of religious dogmas; they have no conception of toleration. The dominant party prefers to annihilate its adversaries, to realise the complete unanimity of the nation; the hatred of one's opponents is the first duty of the prominent politician. The opposition can hardly pretend to fill a place of influence in the assemblies, or slowly to acquire power. It is only by violence that the parties can emerge from the condition of ostracism in which they are held by the faction in power, and it is by violence that they return to that condition. Apart from the rule of the caudillos the political lie is {370} triumphant; the freedom of the suffrage is only a platonic promise inscribed in the Constitution; the elections are the work of the Government; there is no public opinion. Journalism, almost always opportunist, merely reflects the indecision of the parties. Political statutes and social conditions contradict each other; the former proclaim equality, and there are many races; there is universal suffrage, and the races are illiterate; liberty and despotic rulers enforce an arbitrary power. By means of the prefects and governors the President directs the elections, supports this or that candidate, and even chooses his successor. He is the supreme elector.
The representative assemblies become veritable bureaucratic institutions; deputies and senators accept the orders of the President. According to Señor L. A. de Herrera, two castes are in process of formation, "on the one hand the oligarchies, which possess the supreme power in defiance of the public will, and on the other the citizens, who are deprived of all participation in the government." Frequent revolutions and pronunciamentos, according to Spanish tradition, disturb the ruling class in the exercise of power; these superficial movements cannot be compared to the great crises of European history, which result in the disappearance of a political system or bring about the advent of a new social class. They are merely the result of the perpetual conflict between the caudillos; the leaders and the oligarchies change, but the system, with its secular vices, remains.
The South American revolutions may be regarded as a necessary form of political activity: in Venezuela fifty-two important revolts have broken out within a century. The victorious party tries to destroy the other groups; revolution thus represents a political weapon to those parties which are deprived of the suffrage. It corresponds to the protests of European {371} minorities, to the anarchical strikes of the proletariat, to the great public meetings of England, in which the opposing parties attack the Government. It is to the excessive simplicity of the political system, in which opinion has no other means of expression than the tyranny of oligarchies on the one hand and the rebellion of the vanquished on the other, that the interminable and sanguinary conflicts of Spanish America are due. These internal wars continually retard the economic development of the State and decrease its stability; they ruin the foreign credit of the republics, prepare the way for humiliating interventions, and give rise to tyrannies; but it must not be forgotten that revolution, in these democracies without law and without real suffrage, has often been the only means of defending liberty. Against the tyrants even conservative spirits have revolted, and rebellion has become reaction.
For the rest, the civil wars have lost their former character. They used to symbolise the return to primeval chaos; vagabond multitudes, armed bands, desolated the fields and burned the towns. Assassination, theft, the devastation of property and estates, war without mercy, fire, and all the powers of destruction were in revolt against the feeble foundations of nationality.
As by the inverse selection of the Spanish Inquisition, the most intelligent and the most cultivated perished. Brutal horsemen occupied the cities in which Spanish civilisation had attained its apogee. Sarmiento has described the assault on the nomad wagons which bore the national penates across the Argentine pampas in a sort of Tartar Odyssey amid the infinite desolation of the plains. Even when the social classes were organised and the economic interests defined the rivality of the leaders continued, and politics remained personal. However, civil war is already no longer the brutal onset of men with neither {372} law nor faith, no longer an irruption of outlaws. The drama has replaced the epic; the conflict of passions and interests succeeds to the battles of semi-divine personages, proud of their tragic mission. Men buy votes; electoral committees falsify the suffrage, as in the United States, by force of money.
Thus the plutocracy conquers the benches of Congress.
If the continent spontaneously creates dictators then is all the ambitious structure of American politics—parliaments, ministers, and municipalities—merely a delusive invention?
In some States in which the economic life is intense, as in the Argentine, Chili, Brazil, and Uruguay, benevolent despotism does not mark the high-water limit of national development; there new parties are forming themselves, and the caudillos will soon disappear. Dr. Ingegnieros foresees the creation in the Argentine of new political groups, with financial tendencies. The rural class which rules in the provinces and possesses the great mass of the national wealth, which is derived from stock-raising and agriculture, and the commercial and industrial middle-class of the cities, will form, like the Tories and Whigs in England, the two parties of the future. Once the secondary parties have disappeared, the two great political organisations will prevail alone.
This transformation of the old groups is logical. In the colonial period the conflict for the possession of power took place within the narrow limits of public life; the Spaniards were in the majority in the audiencas, the courts, and the Creoles in the cabildos, the municipalities. The former upheld religious intolerance, economic monopoly, and the exclusive and universal empire of the metropolis; the latter endeavoured to obtain economic and political equality, the abolition of privileges, and a national government. After the revolution these divisions grew more {373} complex; federalism and unity, religious quarrels, and sometimes the mutual hostility of the different castes, divided men into shifting groups. Politics became the warfare of irreducible clans. In the organised nations of the south the dissensions gradually lost their importance, and a general indifference succeeded to the old theological hatreds. Federals and municipalists were still fighting, but the original bitterness of their antagonism was dead. On the other hand, the castes were progressively becoming confounded by intermarriage.
However, the economic factors persisted, and their importance has increased as towns and industries have developed. Financial questions will in future divide the citizens of those democracies which have become plainly industrial; the agrarians will oppose the manufacturers and the free-traders the protectionists. Like the republicans and democrats of the United States, certain groups will favour imperialism and others neutrality. The group which would stimulate Yankee or German influence will be opposed by another, the partisan of Italian or French activity.
Already in Cuba there are some who favour annexation by the United States, while others demand complete autonomy. Some politicians would agree to immigration without reserve or restriction, while others, the nationalists, would defend the integrity of their inheritance against foreign invasion. America, like modern France, will have its métèques; they will be the Europeans, the Yankees, and the yellow races.
Apart from the southern nations there has as yet been no formation of classes or social interests. None of the problems which agitate Europe—extension of the suffrage, proportional representation, municipal autonomy—have any immediate importance among them. The State is the necessary guardian, a kind of social providence whence derive riches, strength, {374} and progress. To weaken this influence would be to encourage internal disorder; only those Constitutions have been of use in America which have reinforced the central power against the attacks of a perpetual anarchy.
The progress of these democracies is the work of foreign capital, and when political anarchy prevails credit collapses. Governments which ensure peace and paternal tyrants are therefore preferable to demagogues. A young Venezuelan critic, Señor Machado Hernandez, having studied the history of his country, rent as it has been by revolutions, considers that the best form of government for America is that which reinforces the attributions of the executive and establishes a dictatorship. In place of the Swiss referendum and the federal organisation of the United States autocracy is, it seems to us, the only practical practical means of government.
To increase the duration of the presidency in order to avoid the too frequent conflicts of parties; to simplify the political machine, which transforms the increasingly numerous parliaments into mere bureaucratic institutions; to prolong the mandate of senators and deputies, so that the life of the people shall not be disturbed by continual elections; in short, to surrender the ingenuous dogmas of the political statutes in favour of concrete reforms: such would appear to be the ideal which in Tropical America—in Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia—would arrest the destructive action of revolutions.
It is obvious that a president furnished with a strong authority may quickly become a tyrant, but in these nations is not political power always a semi-dictatorship which is tolerated? The head of the State governs for four years according to the term of the Constitution, but his action is continued by his successor. The real duration of his political action is twenty years.
If a tutelary president is necessary it is none the less essential to oppose his autocracy by a moderative power which would recall, in its constitution, the life-Senate of Bolivar. One may even conceive of a Senate which would represent the real national interests: a stable body, the union of all the forces of social conservation; a serene assembly untroubled by democratic cravings, in which the clergy, the universities, commerce, the industries, the army, the marine, and the judiciary, might defend the Constitution and tradition against the assaults of demagogy, against too audacious reformers. Garcia-Moreno wished to see the mandate of the senators extended to a term of twelve years.
The quality of the legislative chambers is ineffective in America. In fact, both being elected by the popular vote, and having like electoral majorities, the Lower Chamber always gets its way with the Senate, which represents neither interests nor traditions. There is in reality one uniform assembly artificially divided into two independent bodies. The whole is dominated, there being no conservative institutions as a useful corrective, by the anonymous or Jacobin will of the multitude, which is moved by all sorts of divided interests: the craving for power, provincial pride, and a passion for cabal and intrigue.
A factor of American politics which is as serious as the periodical revolutions is the development of the bureaucracy.
In the still simple life of the nation the organs of the public administration are complicated in the most exaggerated manner. The budget supports a sterile class recruited principally among the Creoles, who prefer the security of officialism to the conquest of the soil. Energy and hope diminish with the almost infinite increase of the "budgetivores."
Foreigners monopolise trade and industry, and {376} thus acquire property in the soil which has been inherited by a race of Americans without energy.
A North American observer[1] writes that the great fortunes of the Argentines of American extraction have been made by the ever-increasing value of real estate, and are due to the natural development of the country rather than to their own initiative or enterprise. But the South Americans are on the way to waste these fortunes, and the fortunate colonists from Spain and Italy are gradually replacing them in the social hierarchy.
According to a Mexican statesman, Señor Justo Sierra, the government in South America is an administration of employés, protected by other employés, the army. These nations, which are being invaded by active immigrants, are thus directed by a group of mandarins, and if the young men of these countries are not encouraged in commercial and industrial vocations by a practical education the enriched colonists will expel the Creole from his ancient position. A few writers defend the bureaucracy as the refuge, in the face of the cosmopolitan invasion, of the choice spirits of the nation: writers, artists, and politicians. "If foreigners dispose of the material fortune of the country," says a distinguished young observer, Señor Manuel Galvez, "it is just that we others, Argentines, should dispose of its intellectual fortune." A noble idealism, satisfied by an unreal wealth! But from the point of view of the national life this lack of equilibrium is disturbing. In face of the progress of the victorious foreigners who are making themselves masters of the soil, to shut oneself up in a tower of ivory would be the most complete of renunciations.
In the organisation of the America of the future we must not forget the suggestions of Caliban. {377} Among the innumerable bureaucrats who devour the budgets there will not always be writers worthy of official protection; they will rather be recruited among an indolent youth, restive under any sustained effort.
The encouragement of "choice spirits" must not be confounded with the unjustifiable maintenance of a legion of parasites. The caudillo multiplies functions in order to reward his friends; nepotism prevails in the world of politics.
The great political transformations of the future will be due to the development of the common wealth; new parties will appear and the bureaucracy will have to be considerably diminished.
[1] Cited by J. V. Gonzalez in La Nación, Buenos-Ayres, May 25, 1910.
Loans—Budgets—Paper money—The formation of national capital.
Unexploited wealth abounds in America. Forests of rubber, as in the African Congo; mines of gold and diamonds, which recall the treasures of the Transvaal and the Klondyke; rivers which flow over beds of auriferous sand, like the Pactolus of ancient legend; coffee, cocoa, and wheat, whose abundance is such that these products are enough to glut the markets of the world. But there is no national capital. This contrast between the wealth of the soil and the poverty of the State gives rise to serious economic problems.
By means of long-sustained efforts, an active race would have won financial independence. The Latin-Americans, idle, and accustomed to leave everything to the initiative of the State, have been unable to effect the conquest of the soil, and it is foreign capital that exploits the treasure of America.
Since the very beginnings of independence the Latin democracies, lacking financial reserves, have had need of European gold. The government of Spain used to seize upon the wealth of her colonies to satisfy the needs of a prodigal court, and to prevent its own bankruptcy. The independence of America was won with the aid of English money, hence the first of the necessary loans. Canning encouraged the South American revolutionaries, and the English {379} bankers gave their support to their plans, in the shape of loans to the new governments. Colombian, Argentine, and Peruvian agents solicited heavy loans in the City of London, without which assistance the Spanish power could never have been defeated.
The republican régime thus commenced its career by assuming imperious financial responsibilities. Before commencing to practise a policy of fiscal economy, it was necessary to accept the conclusion of the most urgent loans, but once the European markets were open the financial orgy commenced. In 1820 Señor Zea concluded the first Colombian loan; in 1821 the government of that country declared that it could not ensure the service of the debt. The necessities of the war with Spain and the always difficult task of building up a new society demanded the assistance of foreign gold; loans accumulated, and very soon various States were obliged to solicit the simultaneous reduction of the capital borrowed and the rate of interest paid. The lamentable history of these bankrupt democracies dates from this period.
Little by little these financial contracts lost all semblance of serious business. In the impossibility of obtaining really solid guarantees the bankers imposed preposterous conditions, and issue at a discount became the rule with the new conventions. A series of interventions in Buenos-Ayres, Mexico, San Domingo, and Venezuela, diplomatic conflicts, and claims for indemnity resulted from this precarious procedure. Moreover, thanks to the protection accorded by their respective countries, foreigners acquired a privileged position. The Americans were subjected to the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts, before which they could demand the payment of their claims on the State; foreigners enjoyed exceptional treatment. A statute was enacted in their favour, and their governments supported them in the {380} recovery of unjustifiable claims. Sir Charles Wyke, English minister to Mexico, wrote to the Foreign Office in 1862: "Nineteen out of twenty foreigners who reside in this unfortunate country have some claim against the government in one way or another. Many of these claims are really based on the denial of real justice, while others have been fabricated throughout, as a good speculation, which would enable the claimant to obtain money for some imaginary wrong; for example, three days' imprisonment which was intentionally provoked with the object of formulating a claim which might be pushed to an exorbitant figure."[1]
In face of the string of debts which arose from the loans themselves, or from claims for damages suffered during the civil wars, the governments could only succumb. The immorality of the fiscal agents and the greed of the foreigner will explain these continual bankruptcies, which constitute the financial history of America.
The descendants of the prodigal Spanish conquerors, who knew nothing of labour or thrift, have incessantly resorted to fresh loans in order to fill the gaps in their budgets. Politicians knew of only one solution of the economic disorder—to borrow, so that little by little the Latin-American countries became actually the financial colonies of Europe.
Economic dependence has a necessary corollary—political servitude. French intervention in Mexico was originally caused by the mass of unsatisfied financial claims; foreigners, the creditors of the State, were in favour of intervention. England and France, who began by seeking to ensure the recovery of certain debts, finally forced a monarch upon the debitor nation. The United States entertained the ambition of becoming the sole creditor of the American peoples: this remarkable privilege would {381} have assured them of an incontestable hegemony over the whole continent.
In the history of Latin America loans symbolise political disorder, lack of foresight, and waste; it is thanks to loans that revolutions are carried out, and it is by loans that the caudillos have enriched themselves. Old debts are liquidated by means of new, and budgetary deficits are balanced by means of foreign gold. When the poverty caused by political disorder becomes too great the American governments clamour feverishly in the markets of Europe for the hypothecation of the public revenues, and the issue of fresh funds, offering to pay a high interest, and recognising the rights of suspended creditors.
On the one hand the budget is loaded to create new employments in order to assuage the national appetite for sinecures, while the protective tariffs are raised to enrich the State. Thus the forces of production disappear, life becomes dearer, and poverty can only increase. America has until lately known little of productive loans intended for use in the construction of railways, irrigation works, harbours, or for the organisation of colonies of immigrants.
The product of the customs and other fiscal dues is not enough to stimulate the material progress of a nation. So application is made to the bankers of London or Paris; but it is the very excess of these loan operations and the bad employment of the funds obtained that impoverishes the continent. The excessive number of administrative sinecures, the greed of the leaders, the vanity of governments, all call for gold; and when the normal revenues are not sufficient to enrich these hungry oligarchies, a loan which may involve the very future of the country appears to all to be the natural remedy.
The budgets of various States complicate still further a situation already difficult. They increase beyond all measure, without the slightest relation to {382} the progress made by the nation. They are based upon taxes which are one of the causes of the national impoverishment, or upon a protectionist tariff which adds greatly to the cost of life. The politicians, thinking chiefly of appearances, neglect the development of the national resources for the immediate augmentation of the fiscal revenues; thanks to fresh taxes, the budgets increase. These resources are not employed in furthering profitable undertakings, such as building railroads or highways, or increasing the navigability of the rivers. The bureaucracy is increased in a like proportion, and the budgets, swelled in order to dupe the outside world, serve only to support a nest of parasites. In the economic life of these countries the State is a kind of beneficent providence which creates and preserves the fortune of individual persons, increases the common poverty by taxation, display, useless enterprises, the upkeep of military and civil officials, and the waste of money borrowed abroad; such is the "alimentary politics" of which Le Play speaks. The government is the public treasury; by the government all citizens live, directly or indirectly, and the foreigner profits by exploiting the national wealth. A centralising power, the State forces a golden livery upon this bureaucratic mob of magistrates and deputies, political masters and teachers.
To sum up, the new continent, politically free, is economically a vassal. This dependence is inevitable; without European capital there would have been no railways, no ports, and no stable government in America. But the disorder which prevails in the finances of the country changes into a real servitude what might otherwise have been a beneficial relation. By the accumulation of loans frequent crises are provoked, and frequent occasions of foreign intervention.
A policy of thrift would have led to the establishment of economic equilibrium. Foreign gold has {383} poured in continually, not only in the form of loans but in the shape of material works—railways, ports, industries, and industrial undertakings. It is in this way that English capital has accumulated in the Argentine, Uruguay, Brazil, and Chili, where it has become a prominent factor in the industrial development of the country. In the Argentine it amounts to 300 millions, in Brazil to 150 millions, in Chili to 51 millions, and in Uruguay to 46 millions of pounds sterling.
New problems arise from the relation between the size of the population and the amount of the capital imported. The increase of alien wealth in nations which are not fertilised by powerful currents of immigration constitutes a real danger. To pay the incessantly increasing interest of the wealth borrowed, fresh sources of production and a constant increase of economic exchanges are necessary; in a word, a greater density of population. The exhaustion of the human stock in the debitor nations creates a very serious lack of financial equilibrium, which may result, not only in bankruptcy but also in the loss of political independence by annexation.
The solution of the financial problem depends, then, upon the solution of the problem of population. Immigrants will solve it by increasing the number of productive units, by accumulating their savings, by irresistible efforts which lay the foundations of solid fortunes. It is true that the wealth which they will create will also be of foreign origin, but in the second or third generation the descendants of the enriched colonists will become true citizens of the country in which their fathers have established themselves. They will have forgotten their country of origin, and will mingle with the old families which conserve the national traditions.
The ideal of peoples whose economic condition is dependence is naturally autonomy; without it all {384} liberty is precarious. A considerable stream of exports flows from America to Europe to pay for imports and the interest on foreign capital. Only this large exportation of products, as in the case of the Argentine, Mexico, and Brazil, can maintain a favourable commercial balance. The Argentine economist Alberto Martinez has demonstrated that as in his country there is neither an economic reserve nor a national capital, the diminution of exports causes serious financial disturbances; exchange is unstable, the rate rises, trade falls off, and credit is suspended.
In other countries the economic system is instability itself. It depends almost entirely on two or three agricultural products—coffee, cane-sugar, and rubber—and the incessant fluctuations in the prices of these products, which constitute the wealth of the country. One does not observe the regularity of the exports of the Argentine and Brazil, nor any important industrial development. To remedy the lack of equilibrium in the budget and to pay the interest on the foreign debt, the State, the guardian of the public fortune, once more resorts to loans. The creation of a national capital is thus an urgent necessity for these prodigal democracies.
By stimulating the development of agriculture, by creating or protecting industry, by diminishing the budgetary charges by the reduction of useless bureaucratic employments and sumptuary expenses, the Latin-American governments could gradually establish the necessary reserves.
On the other hand, fiscal agreements, commercial treaties, and railways must contribute to the solidarity of these nations among themselves. Europe has invested vast sums of capital in America; she sends thither large quantities of the products of her industries, but there are peoples more favoured than others by this invasion of capital. It should be possible by a series of practical conventions to lay the foundations {385} of a Zollverein. The dependence of certain republics as compared with others should tend to make them commercially independent of Europe. Already a number of industries are being developed in America; in Brazil their yield attains the annual value of 46 million pounds; in 1909 the imports were diminished by 3 million pounds in consequence of this new economic factor. It may be supposed that in the still distant future the agricultural peoples of America will buy the products of their industrial neighbours, the Argentine, Brazil, and Uruguay. The unification of the monetary system will still further facilitate the development of this inter-state commerce, this trade between zones almost exclusively agricultural, and other regions both agricultural and industrial; thus closer economic relations will be the basis of a lasting political understanding. No American republic has yet reached the term of its economic development.
We may distinguish three periods in the evolution of the nations towards autonomy; during the first their dependence is absolute, in respect of ideas as much as of men and capital; such is the present situation of the majority of the Latin democracies. During the second period agriculture suffices for the national necessities and industry develops; the Argentine, Brazil, and Mexico are already in this state of partial liberty. Finally, the period of agricultural and industrial exportation commences, and the intellectual influence of the country makes itself felt beyond the frontiers. After France and England, Germany and the United States reached this glorious phase. Neither Mexico nor the Argentine nor Brazil is as yet flooding the world with its industrial products nor affecting it by its original intellectual activities; there is no culture or philosophy that we can properly term Argentine or Chilian. Europe is tributary to the Argentine for her wheat and meats, {386} and to Brazil for her coffee, but ideas and machines come from Paris, London, and New York.
M. Limantour, who tried to save the Mexican railways from the Yankee capitalists, and the Argentine economists, who endeavoured to convert the foreign into a national debt, are preparing the way for the future reign of financial liberty; but this transformation depends on the increase of public or private wealth and the activity of immigrants, who in hospitable America soon become landed proprietors or merchants.
In the country districts, as in the cities, which are every day more numerous, the common wealth and the fiscal revenues are increasing, owing to the efforts of industrious men. Not only are foreign industrial undertakings being founded, but national institutions also, fed by national capital. When the necessary loans can be subscribed in the country itself, when railways and ports are constructed with State or private capital, or with the financial aid of other South American governments; when American multi-millionaires (there are already plenty of them in the Argentine) have effected the nationalisation of the public works now in the hands of foreigners, then the economic ideal of these democracies will be realised.
Latin America may already be considered as independent from the agricultural point of view; it possesses riches which are peculiar to it: coffee to Brazil, wheat to the Argentine, sugar to Peru, fruits and rubber to the Tropics. Its productive capacity is considerable. It may rule the markets of the world. The systematic exploitation of its mines will reveal treasures which are not even suspected. We may say, then, that even without great industries the American continent, independent in the agricultural domain, and an exporter of precious metals, may win a doubtless precarious economic liberty.
[1] Cited by F. Bulnes, El Verdadero Juarez, Paris, 1904, p. 29.
The Panama Canal and the two Americas—The future conflicts between Slavs, Germans, Anglo-Saxons, and Latins—The role of Latin America.
A new route offered to human commerce transforms the politics of the world. The Suez Canal opened the legendary East to Europe, directed the stream of European emigration towards Australia, and favoured the formation, in South Africa, of an Anglo-Saxon Confederation. The Panama Canal is destined to produce profound perturbations in the equilibrium of the nations of the New World. Humboldt announced these changes in 1804:[1] "The products of China will be brought more than 6,000 miles nearer Europe and the United States; great changes will take place in the political condition of eastern Asia, because this tongue of earth (Panama) has for centuries been the rampart of the independence of China and Japan."
The Atlantic is to-day the ocean of the civilised world. The opening of the canal will thus displace the political axis of the world. The Pacific, an ocean separated from the civilising currents of Europe, will receive directly from the Old World the wealth and products of its labour and its emigrants. Until the present time the United States {388} and Japan have shared in its rule as a mare clausum, and they are disputing the supremacy in Asia and Western America. Once the isthmus is pierced, new commercial peoples may invade with their victorious industries the enchanted lands of Asia and the distant republics of South America. New York will be nearer to Callao, but the distance between Hamburg and Havre and the Peruvian coast will be equally diminished. It has been calculated that by the new route the voyage between Liverpool and the great ports of the Pacific will be reduced by 2,600 to 6,000 miles, according to the respective positions of the latter, and the distance between New York and the same centres of commercial activity will be diminished by 1,000 to 8,400 miles. German, French, and English navigation companies will run a service of modern vessels direct to the great ports of Chili and China. The paths of the world's trade will be changed; Panama will form the gate of civilisation to Eastern Asia and Western America, as Suez is to Central Asia, Eastern Africa, and Oceania. The Atlantic will become the ocean of the Old World.
The trade of the new era must undergo unexpected transformations. The influence of Europe in China and Western America will be considerably increased. Germany should become the rival of the United States in the commercial supremacy in the East and in the republics of Latin America. Her vessels, messengers of imperialism, which now make long voyages through the Straits of Magellan to reach Valparaiso and Callao, will then employ the canal route. The vessels of Japan will bear to Europe, as formerly did the Phoenician navigators, the products of the exotic Orient; New York will dethrone Antwerp, Hamburg, and Liverpool; the English will lose their historic position as intermediaries between Europe and Asia. The United States, masters of {389} the canal, will create in New York a great fair in which the merchandise of East and West will be accumulated: the treasures of Asia, the gold of Europe, and the products of their own overgrown industries. They will thus have won an economic hegemony over the Pacific, South America, and China, where they will be at least privileged competitors in the struggle between England and Germany. Between New York and Hong Kong, New York and Yokohama, and New York and Melbourne new commercial relations will be established. In approaching New York the East will recede from Liverpool and the ports of Europe, and the Panama route will favour the industries of the United States in Asia and Oceania. It may already be foreseen that the United States will be terrible competitors in Australia, and above all in New Zealand, where they will drive the English merchants from the markets. It is difficult to write, like Tarde, a "fragment of future history"; too many unknown forces intervene in the historical drama of the peoples. But no doubt, unless some extraordinary event occurs to disturb the evolution of the modern peoples, the great nations of industrial Europe and Japan, the champion of Asiatic integrity, will oppose the formidable progress of the United States.
The canal sets a frontier to Yankee ambition; it is the southern line, the "South Coast Line" of which a North American politician, Jefferson, used to dream. As early as 1809 he believed that Cuba and Canada would become incorporated, as States of the Union, in the immense Confederation; anticipating the rude lyrics of Walt Whitman, he dreamed of founding "an empire of liberty so vast that the like has never been seen." Heirs to the Anglo-Saxon genius, the Americans of the North wish to form a democratic federation.
They have succeeded in doing in Cuba what Japan {390} has done in Korea: first, the struggle for autonomy, then the necessary intervention, then a protectorate, and perhaps annexation. Thus the prophecy of Jefferson will be realised. Between Canada, an autonomous colony, and the United States, there are common economic interests, and commercial treaties have created such a plexus of interests that the evolution from these practical alliances to political union would seem to be a simple matter. The disintegration of the Anglo-Saxon Empire will be the work of the United States. American activities in Canada are steadily increasing; the Yankee capital employed in various Canadian industries amounts to £20,000,000. Trade is increasing, and by virtue of new conventions the United States will be even better situated than ever to dispute the Canadian markets with England. In this free colony there is a Far West which the States have peopled. The East is Anglo-Saxon, industrial, aristocratic; the West, barbarian and agrarian, desires union with the neighbouring democracy. Münsterberg reports that a Boston journal prints every day, in large letters, on the first page, that the first duty of the United States is the annexation of Canada.
The friendship of England, and the moral harmony of the English-speaking world, will perhaps check the progress of American imperialism northward; but the capital which develops and exploits the west of Canada is a competitor which cannot be resisted. Moreover, such men as Goldwin Smith, a moral authority in Canada, counsel union with the great Republican neighbour. Free trade, which the English radicals wish to maintain, relaxes the economic ties which might ensure the duration of the British Empire, and prevents the formation of a Zollverein, of that fiscal union between Great Britain and her colonies which was the great project of Chamberlain. It is to guarantee commercial and economic {391} interests that Canada is approaching the United States and withdrawing from England.
Mexico, where £100,000,000 of American capital is invested; Panama, a republic subjected to the protectorate of the Anglo-Saxon North; the Canal Zone, which the Yankees have acquired as a remote southern possession; the Antilles, which they are gradually absorbing; Central America, where ever turbulent republics tolerate pacificatory intervention; and Canada, rich and autonomous, form, for the statesmen of Washington and the Yellow Press, a great and desirable empire. In two centuries the small Puritan colonies of the Atlantic seaboard will perhaps have come to govern the continent from the Pole to the Tropics; and will create, with the aid of all the races of mankind, a new Anglo-Saxon humanity, industrial and democratic. Thus the Roman Republic, from her narrow home between the Apennines, governed the world, as did Great Britain, peopled by a tenacious race, the sea.
To check the advance of the United States the South will lack a political force of the same weight. The conflict between the united Americans of the North and the divided inhabitants of the South will necessarily terminate fatally for the Latin New World.
The Pacific will be the theatre of racial wars and vast and transforming emigrations. Once the canal is open it is extremely probable that European emigrants will descend in large numbers upon the seaboard of Western America. Brazil and the Argentine attract the modern adventurer; their Eldorado is in the Argentine plains or the forests of Brazil. Venezuela, invaded by emigrants of Germanic race, will be born again; a dense population will fill her valleys, and Caracas will become a great Latin city. But in Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia, there is a great lack of centres of civilisation in the {392} interior, and the sierra is largely wild and unpeopled; all progress is in the small towns of the coast, set amidst the aridity of the desert. Chinese and Japanese, who are content with low wages, are crushing the European worker by their competition. Japanese colonies will people the American West from Panama to Chili, and in these new countries the fusion of Japanese and Indian blood is by no means impossible.
There will always be two distinct regions in South America, separated by the Andes and divided by the Tropics. The Atlantic region will retain its liberty, and increase in wealth and in power. It is possible that the south of Brazil will become German, but the Argentine, Chili, Uruguay, and the great Brazilian States will defend the Latin heritage and European tradition. To the north and the west depopulated and divided nations will struggle against an invasion of peoples of similar races coming from the east and against a conquering people from the north. Thanks to the protection of Japan, they may be able to free themselves from the tutelage of the United States, or they may be able to hold off the subjects of the Mikado by submitting to the influence of North America. Only the federation of all the Latin republics under the pressure of Europe—that is to say, of England, France, and Italy, who have important markets in America—might save the nations of the Pacific, just as a century ago Great Britain was able to defend the autonomy of these peoples against the mystic projects of the Holy Alliance.
The Monroe doctrine, which prohibits the intervention of Europe in the affairs of America and angers the German imperialists, the professors of external expansion, like Münsterberg, may become obsolete. If Germany or Japan were to defeat the United States, this tutelary doctrine would be only a melancholy memory. Latin America would emerge {393} from the isolation imposed upon it by the Yankee nation, and would form part of the European concert, the combination of political forces—alliances and understandings—which is the basis of the modern equilibrium. It would become united by political ties to the nations which enrich it with their capital and buy its products.
Japan has not lost her originality as an Asiatic nation, because she is united to England by a treaty which assures the status quo in the East. The Latin republics will not renounce their character as American nations because they may conclude understandings with the nations of the West. Already there are commercial treaties between these nations and Europe, as well as a harmony of economic and intellectual interests. Brazil and the Argentine, where British money and French ideals prevail, might themselves unite to form a vast combination of alliances with the group of European nations which conquered, civilised, and enriched America: that is, Spain, France, and England. Will not a community of interests in America give a new strength to the union of these peoples in Europe? Great political changes would result from these new influences: the American Latins, by entering into the combinations of European politics, would divide Italy, whose interests in the Argentine and Brazil are so great, from the Triple Alliance, and would strengthen the understanding between England and France against Germany, which disputes with them not only the hegemony of Europe but also the preponderance in America. Canning, who opposed the designs of the Holy Alliance, used to say a century ago that he had given the New World liberty in order to restore equilibrium to the Old World. Against the theocratic peoples who were seeking to overshadow the destinies of the earth he evoked the apparition of these free democracies destined to {394} establish the benefits of liberty on a firm footing. His hope was premature, because it was hardly possible for perfect republics to rise from the ruins of Spanish absolutism. Even to-day, after a century of attempts at constitutional government, only a few Latin American States—the Argentine, Brazil, Chili, Peru, and Bolivia—seem capable of fulfilling the desires of Canning.
These peoples would contribute to the defence of the Latin ideal. But is not this an excessive ambition for nations still semi-barbarous? The old races of the West contemplate their impetuous advance with much the same distrust as that which Rome experienced as she watched the turbulent migrations of Goths and Germans. And even if the Latin race could check its irremediable decadence by the aid of the wealth and youth of these American peoples, would it really be profitable to oppose the triumph of the Anglo-Saxons and the Slavs for the sake of saving a fallen caste? Seventy years ago Tocqueville visited the United States and divined their future greatness. To-day M. Clemenceau, a politician and a great admirer of the North American Republic, praises the Latin vigour, as he sees it in Buenos-Ayres, Uruguay, and Rio de Janeiro. The Yankee republic has realised the prophecies of the former critic, and it would not be strange if the southern democracies of America were to confirm the optimism of the latter. A new energy, undeniable material progress, and a fertile creative faith announce the advent, in the new continent, if not of the Eldorado of which the hungry emigrant dreams, at least of wealthy nations, rich in industry and agriculture; the advent of a world in which the glorious age of the exhausted Latin world may renew itself, as in the classic fountain. When Emerson visited England fifty years ago he declared that the heart of the Britannic race was in the United States, and that {395} the "mother island," exhausted, would some day, like many parents, be satisfied with the vigour which she had bestowed upon her own children.[2] In speaking of Spain and Portugal, might not Argentines, Brazilians, and Chilians employ the same proud language?
The decadence of the Latins, which seems obvious to the sociologist, may really be only a long period of abeyance. The adventures in which such an exuberant force of heroism was expended might well result in a reaction, a weariness after creation. At the beginning of the modern period, in the sixteenth century, the English, undisciplined adventurers, were hostile to the regularity and monotony of industrial life; in the nineteenth century they built an empire, organised a powerful industrialism, and became slow and methodical; and in 1894 Dr. Karl Pearson was uneasy as to "the decadence of British energy which is revealed by the adoption of State socialism and by the poverty of mechanical invention."[3]
In the future the Latins may regain their old virility. The ricorsi which Vico saw in history cause certain peoples to recover the pre-eminence they have lost, while others, prosperous nations, fall back into decadence; no privilege is eternal, no reaction is irremediable and inevitable.
"Multa renascentur quæ jam cecidere, cadentque
Quæ nunc sunt in honore...."
The imperial policy of Charles V. and Philip II., the conquest of a continent by the Spaniards, Portuguese, and French, the glorious festival of the Renaissance, the triumph of Lepanto, the splendid empire of Venice, the political activity of Richelieu, {396} the great century of French classicism, the Revolution which proclaimed the Rights of Man, and the Napoleonic epic, the liberation of Spanish America: this is the hymn of glory of the Latin race. To-day Belgium, Italy, and the Argentine give signs of a renaissance of that race, which men have supposed to be exhausted.
Heirs of the Latin spirit in the moral, religious, and political domain, the Ibero-American peoples are seeking to conserve their glorious heritage. The idea of race, in the sense of traditions and culture, is predominant in modern politics. Flourishing on every hand, we see Pan-Slavism, Pan-Islamism, Pan-Asianism, Pan-Germanism, Pan-Latinism—barbarous words which give an indication as to the struggles of the future. The Slavs of Dalmatia, Germany, Servia, and Bosnia would reconstitute, with the fragments of many divided nations, a State which would also be a race. Islam unites divers peoples by the ardour of a new fanaticism, under the inspiration of popular Khalifs or marabouts, from Soudan to Fez, from Bombay to Stamboul. Vast unions of scattered peoples are thus springing into formation, in the name of a religion or a common origin. Slavs, Saxons, Latins, and Mongols are contending for the possession of the world. It is thus that the drama of history becomes simplified; above the quarrels of precarious nations are rising the profound antagonisms of millennial races.
Onésime Reclus, in an excellent volume, the Partage du monde, has gone into the respective positions of each of these powerful groups. The conclusions of his analysis are full of hope; in spite of the Saxons and Slavs the Latins still hold vast territories, which they must people. Their geographical position, despite Anglo-Saxon imperialism and the immense surface of all the Russias of Europe and Asia, is certainly not inferior.
There are a hundred million Slavs scattered over an immense Asiatic and European territory, which stretches from Vladivostock to the Baltic Sea; two and a half milliards of hectares are waiting for the children of this prodigious race. By uniting the peoples of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland to the Germans of Austria, the German race, whether it propagates the gospel of Pan-Germanism by commercial penetration or by violence, possesses about 100 million hectares for 93 millions of men. The Anglo-Saxons, the natural enemies of German expansion, the rivals of the Deutschtum in Asia, Africa, and America, rule an almost unlimited area of milliards of hectares; India, Canada, the United States, South Africa, Egypt, Australia, conquered territories and kingdoms held in tutelage, peoples of all faiths and all races. More than 200 millions of Anglo-Saxons people this "greater Britain" without including India, which is not assimilable.
The territory occupied by the Latin peoples in Europe, America, and Africa is 3.9 million hectares, inhabited by 250 millions of men; the number of Latins is thus not really inferior to that of the Anglo-Saxons, nor are the territories open to Latin expansion inferior to those reserved for the rival race. With the French colonies in Asia they amount to 4 milliards of hectares.
Here we have a Latin superiority; by the extent of their territories and their numbers the Latins outnumber the Slavs and the Germans. They do not yield to the English either in human capital nor in wealth of exploitable territory. And England has reached the zenith of her industrial period, the maximum of her political development; the figures of the birth-rate in the industrial towns are diminishing, and emigration has almost ceased. The State is becoming the protector of a demagogic and decadent {398} crowd. The United States seek to conquer new territories for their imperialist race. But the Latins possess in South America a rich and almost uninhabited continent, and in the north of Africa the French are in process of founding a colonial empire which will rival Egypt in wealth and importance, and will reach from Morocco to the Congo and from Dakar to Tunis.
Reclus calculates that Latin America could feed a hundred persons per square kilometre. While the natality of the Anglo-Saxon cities of the Atlantic seaboard in the United States remains stationary the Latin American population is increasing prodigiously; it is to-day 80 millions, and a century ago, when Humboldt visited the New World, it was approximately only 15 millions. It is possible that by the last years of the present century the number of South Americans will have reached 250 millions; the equilibrium between Latins and Anglo-Saxons will then be broken in favour of the former.
America is thus an essential factor of the future of the Latin nations. The destiny of France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy would be different if the 80 millions of Latin Americans were to lose their racial traditions; if in a century or two America were to pass under the sceptre of the United States, or if the Germans and Anglo-Saxons were to attack and oppress the nucleus of civilisation formed by the Argentine, Uruguay, and Southern Brazil. Economically America would lose markets; intellectually, docile colonies; practically, centres of expansion. To-day Anglo-Saxons, Germans, Slavs, and Neo-Latins are balancing forces which may develop in harmony in the framework of Christian civilisation without wars of conquest and without ambitions of monopoly. The moral unity of South America would contribute to the realisation of such an ideal. A new Anglo-Saxon continent running from Alaska {399} to Cape Horn, built on the ruins of twenty Spanish republics, would be the presage of a final decadence. In the struggles of hundreds of years' duration between the Latin States and the barbarians, between Catholicism and Protestantism, between the French genius and the Teutonic spirit, between the Renaissance and the Reformation, the Latins would have lost the last battle.
America is a laboratory of free peoples. Dr. Charles W. Eliott, rector of the great University of Harvard, has studied the contribution of the United States to modern civilisation. Arbitration as a universal principle, toleration, universal suffrage, material well-being, and political liberty seem to him to be the characteristics of North American culture. In the Latin South we encounter similar principles. Arbitration is the basis of international relations; tolerance from the religious point of view is in process of development. Political liberty is still more a matter of Constitutions than of custom; but the liberal political charters, adapted to the principles of modern civilisation, are the ideal of these republics. When the wilderness is peopled by new races, democracies will grow to maturity within this scaffolding, and universal suffrage, individual rights and tolerance will be realities.
In Latin America, above all among the southern nations, one cannot conceive of the restoration of the old social order, or of despotism and religious inquisition. The new continent, whether Saxon or Latin, is democratic and liberal.
If as in the time of the Holy Alliance the theocratic peoples were to ally themselves—Catholic and warlike Austria, Germany, dominated by Prussian feudalism, Russia, mystic and formidable—the whole American continent would be the bulwark of liberty. If Germans and Latins or Latins and Anglo-Saxtons were to fight between themselves the overseas {400} democracies would greatly contribute to the vitality of the Latin race. If in a Europe dominated by Slavs and Germans the peoples of the Mediterranean were forced to withdraw in painful exodus towards the blue sea peopled by the Greek islands and symbols old as the world, it is probable that the ancient myth would be realised anew, and that the torch which bears the ideal of Latin civilisation would pass from Paris to Buenos-Ayres or Rio de Janeiro, as it passed from Rome to Paris in the modern epoch, or from Greece to Rome in the classic period. America, to-day desert and divided, would save the culture of France and Italy, the heritage of the Revolution and the Renaissance, and would thus have justified to the utmost the fortunate audacity of Christopher Columbus.
[1] Essai sur le gouvernement de la Nouvelle Espagne, vol. i.
[2] Works, vol. ii. p. 160.
[3] National Life and Character, pp. 102 et seq.
Names in italics are those of literary men, philosophers, &c.
A.B.C., the (federation), 348-9
Aberdeen, Lord, 64
Absolutism, 51
Acosta, 247
African elements in Spain, 40-1
African race, see Negroes
Agriculture, 384-5
Alberdi, 236
Alcantara, President of Venezuela, 110
Alva, Duke of, 30
America, Anglo-Saxon, 16, see United States
America, South, the conquest of, 16, 44; early Constitutions, 82
Anarchy, military (86-94); leads to dictatorship, 88; spontaneity of, 89; in Colombia, 201; in the tropics, 222-31
Andes, San Martin crosses the, 67
Antilles, the, 222
Arabs in Spain, 40-1
Aranda, 64
Aranha, Graça, 268
Arbitration, Court of, 347, 399
Argentine, the, 48, 77-8; first Constitution of, 83; 92 (134-46); revolution in, 134; early Constitutions, 134; federation of, 135; democracy in, 135; Constitution of 1826, 137-8
Autocracy, follows revolution, 88, 93
Avellanada, 255
Ayacucho, 71
Ayagarray, 307
BALMES, 274
Balmaceda, President of Chili, 170-8
Barreto, 273
Basques in S. America, 364
Bentham, 245
Bilbao, 236-7
Blanco-Encalada, 125
Bolivar, 61, 63-9; youth of, 70; as general, 71; President, 71; downfall of, 72; character and principles, 72-80, 81-3, 102, 113, 122-3
Bourget, Paul, 15
Boyer, President of Hayti, 229
Brazil (180-90); revolution in, 180; slavery abolished, 189; revolution in, 189
Buenos Ayres, 65
Bunge, C. O., 279
Bustamente, 150-1
Bureaucracy, 376-7
CABILDO, the, 98
California, Japanese in, 326
Canning, 393-4
Canovas, 314
Carabobo, 76
Caracas, Congress of, 348
Caro, 253-4
Carrera (Guatemalan), 224
Casimiro-Ulloa, 117
Castillo, 115-6
Castro, General, 105
Catholicism in S. America, 286
Caudillos, the, 16, 89, 94-5, 365-70
Central America, 83, 222-6; confederation of, 347
Chamberlain, Mr., 346
Charrua Indians, 131
Chibcha Indians, 47
Chili, 48, 92, 104 (164-79); social revolution in, 178, 342
Chivalry, literature of, 34
Church, the, in the colonies, 52-3
Cid, the, 34
Cities of Spain, 30, 33, 38, 40
Civil wars, 371
Clemenceau, M., 15
Clergy in Spain, 42
Cochrane, Lord, 68
Colombia (201-12); anarchy in, 201; parties, 202-3
Colonies, the Spanish (44-57); life in, 54-7; revolution, 58
Commune in Spain, 38
Comte, 274-5
Conquest of S. America, 16
Constitutions of Chili and Venezuela, 82; of Bolivia, the Argentine, and Colombia, 83; of Venezuela, 103; of Chili, 104; of Venezuela, 105; of Colombia, 203-4; of Greater Colombia, 204; of Ecuador, 214; of Central America, 233
Convention, the French, 88
Cortez, 45
Costa-Rica, 225-6
Creole, the, 29, 50, 59, 360-1
Cuba (313-22); civil war in, 315; purchase mooted, 317; racial factors, 318
DARIO, RUBEN, 261-5
Decadence of conquerors, 44, 50, 85
Democracy in Spain, 37-40; in S. America, 93
Diaz, G., 255-6
Diaz, Leopoldo, 258
Diaz, President of Mexico, 77, 155-63
Dictators, the, 16
Directory of Buenos Ayres, 82
Don Quixote, 34
ECHENIQUE, President of Peru, 115
Echeverria, 254
Economic Problems (378-86); loans, 379, 381; foreign capital, 383
Ecuador, 92-3 (213-21)
England, policy of, 64; influence of, 83, 390
Equalitarianism, 63
Estrade, Angel de, 268
FALCON, President of Venezuela, 106-7
Faustinas I. of Hayti, 229
Federation, in Spain, 35; Bolivar's prophecies of, 77; see Unity
Feijó, Diego, 184-5
Flores, Dictator of Uruguay, 132-3
Flores, J. J., founder of Ecuador, 87, 213
Fouillée, 277
France, Anatole, 15
France, intellectual influence of, 81-2
Francia, Dr., tyrant of Paraguay, 191-5
Free cities of Spain, 30, 35, 40
GARCIA-MORENO, President of Ecuador, 215-21
German capital, 292-4
German colonists, 291-7
German Emperor, the, 323
German Peril, the, 290-7
Gongorism, 34
Goths, the, 41
Guarani Indians, 191
Guatemala, 223
Guayaquil, 213
Guizot, 245
Guyau, 278
Guzman-Blanco, Dictator of Venezuela, 101, 106-8; policy of reconstruction, 108-10; return to power, 110-12
HALF-CASTES, 93, 338; see Mestizos
Hawaii, annexation of 303; Japanese in, 325-6
Hayti, 226-31
Heredity, in the Spanish republics, 97
Hispaniola, 226
Hostos, E. de, 272-3
Humboldt, 50
Ibero-Americans, 283-9
Ideology, political, 235-48
Ignatius of Loyola, 33
Incas, the, 47
Independence, wars of, 29, 58-81
Indians, at conquest, 46-8, 91; distribution of, 93, 352-3
Individualism, in Spain, 31-5; in S. America, 88
Industrialism, rise of, 94-6
Isthmus, States of the, 77
Itaborahy, 186
Italians in South America, 364
Iturbide, Emperor of Mexico, 61, 82, 149-50
JACOBINISM, 81
Japan, 393
Japanese Peril (323-31); emigrants, 327; spies, 329
Jaurès, 15
João VI., 180-2
Juarez, Mexican Dictator, 152-5
Junin, 71,76
Juntas, 30; colonial, 60; revolutionary, 84
KING, see Monarchy
LA PAZ, revolt at, 65
La Plata, confederation of, 343
Lamartine, 244-5
Lansdowne, Lord, 83
Larreta, E. R., 269
Lastarria, 236-9
Latin race, the, 17; future of the, (387-400); decadence of, 395
Latin spirit, the, 17; in S. America, 287-9
Lavalleja, President of Uruguay, 127-9, 131
Law, influence of Spanish, 54
Lee, Gen. Homer, 325
Liberators, the, 66
Liniers, 65
Literature, 249-70
Lodges, revolutionary, 65-81
Lopez, Argentine caudillo, 89, 139
Lopez, tyrants of Paraguay, 196
Loyola, 33
Lugones, 265
MAIA, J. J. de, 82
"Maine," sinking of the, 315
Marmol, 254-5
Marti, 315
Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico, 154-5
Mexico, 48; first Constitution of, 83, 92-3 (149-63); intervention of the French, 153
Militarism, 86-94
Mill, James, 272
Mill, J. S., 274-5
Miscegenation, 48-50; in Peru, 194; see Indians, Mestizos, Negro, Race
Monagas, J. T. and J. G., Presidents of Venezuela, 103-5
Monagas, J. R., President of Venezuela, 107
Monarchy in Spain, 35-8; its relations at time of revolution with the revolted colonies, 60-1, 63
Monks, 52-3
Monopoly, 51-2
Monroe Doctrine, 290-1, 302-4, 392
Montalvo, 239-40
Montezuma, 48
Montt, President of Chili, 168-9
Mosquera, President of Colombia 206-7
Münsterberg, Professor, 294
Mystics of Spain, 33
NABUCO, J., 274
Nationality, early phases of, 84
Negroes, first introduction of, 49, 50; distribution of, 53, 355-6, 358-9
Nervo, A., 265
New Granada, 77
Nietzsche, 278
North American Peril, 298-312
Nuñez, Rafael, President of Colombia, 201, 206-11, 276
OLMEDO, 251
Olney, Secretary, 300
Orbegoso, 123
Ordoñez, President of Uruguay, 132
Oribe, President of Uruguay, 129
PACIFIC, Confederation of the, 343
Paez, President of Venezuela, 61, 87, 91, 101-6
Palma, R., 267
Pando, 126
Paraguay, 191-7; the great war in, 196-7
Pardo, Felipe, 252
Pardo, President of Peru, 117-9
Paz, 140
Pearson, Karl, 362
Pedro, Dom, I., 182
Pelucones, 92
Peru, 68, 70-1; first Constitution, 82; 92-3 (113-121); War of Independence, 113, 342
Philosophy, 271-80
Picaro, the, in literature, 34, 43
Pierola, President of Peru, 120
Pitt, 83
Plutocracy, rise of, 94; future of, 97
Poincaré, R., 14
Political conflict, the, 92; problems, 365-77
Popham, Sir Home, 65
Portales, President of Chili, 118, 124, 165-8
Porto Rico, 303
Portuguese in S. America, 45-6
Posadas, 61
Quiroga, General, 139-40
Quito, 65
RACE, problems of, 283-9, 351-64
Regenerators, the, 87
Renaissance, the, 45
Republics, early S. American, 39, 61
Revolutions, 65-81; ideology of, 81-5; 94
Reyles, Carlos, 206-9
Rio Branco, 187
Rivadavia, Dictator of the Argentine, 135-8
Rivera, President of Uruguay, 127-30
Rocafuerte, President of Ecuador, 214
Rodo, J. E., 133, 264, 266, 274
Rome, in Spain, 33
Root, Secretary, 300
Rosas, Argentine tyrant, 139-46
Rousseau, J. J., influence of, 81
Salisbury, Lord, 300
Salvador, 223
San Domingo, 226-31
San Martin, Protector of Peru, crosses the Andes, 67, 68-9, 72
San Martin, Zorilla, 256
Sancho Panza, 53
Santa-Ana, President of Mexico, 150-1
Santa-Cruz, President of Bolivia, 87, 114, 125
Santana, Dictator of San Domingo, 230
Santander, President of Colombia, 87, 205
Sarmiento, 242-3
Sierra, the, 91-2
Silva, J. A., 265
Slavery, 104; abolished in Brazil, 189
Soublette, 103
Spain, early history of, 30-43; religion in, 33; laws of, in S. America, 285
Stoicism, 33
TAFT, President, 320
Teresa, Saint, 33
Territorial overlords, 97-8
"Thirty-three, the," 128
Toussaint Louverture, 228-9
Trade, future of, 388-9
Tyranny, advantages of, 96
UGARTE, MANUEL, 266
United States, supremacy of, 299 intervention in South and Central America, 303-4; race troubles in, 308, 311; future influence of, 390-1
Unity, problems of, 335-50
Urbina, President of Ecuador, 215!
Uruguay, 127-33
VALENCIA, Convention of, 105
Varas, 168
Vargas, Dr., President of Venezuela, 102
Velasco, 125-6
Venezuela, 82, 92-3, 101-3; civil war in, 106; revolution of 1870, 108
Verlaine, 263
Viceroys, the, 51
Vivanco, 115
Voltaire, 81
WASHINGTON, 82
Weyler, 315
Wood, General, 318-9
YEGROS, Consul of Paraguay, 192
ZALDUA, DR., President of Colombia, 211
Zambos, 358-9
The Gresham Press
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED,
WOKING AND LONDON
THE SOUTH AMERICAN SERIES.
Demy 8vo, Cloth.
VOL. I.—CHILE.
By G. F. SCOTT ELLIOT, M.A., F.R.G.S., Author of "A NATURALIST IN MID-AFRICA." With an Introduction by MARTIN HUME, a Map, and 39 Illustrations.
"An exhaustive and interesting account, not only of the turbulent history of this country, but of the present conditions and seeming prospects, ... and the characters of the Chileno and English and German colonists there."—Westminster Gazette.
VOL. II.—PERU.
By C. REGINALD ENOCK, F.R.G.S., Author of "THE ANDES AND THE AMAZON." With an Introduction by MARTIN HUME, a Map, and 72 Illustrations.
"An important work.... The writer possesses a quick eye and a keen intelligence, is many-sided in his interests, and on certain subjects speaks as an expert. The volume deals fully with the development of the country.... Illustrated by a large number of excellent photographs."—Times.
VOL. III.—MEXICO.
By C. REGINALD ENOCK, F.R.G.S. With an Introduction by MARTIN HUME, a Map, and 64 full-page Illustrations.
"Mr. Enock unites to a terse and vivid literary style the commercial instinct and trained observation of a shrewd man of affairs."—Aberdeen Free Press.
"Mr. Enock transmutes the hard material of ancient chronicles into gleaming romance; he describes scenery with a poet's skill. Full of charm he makes his pages, alluring as a fairy tale, an epic stirring and virile."—Manchester City News.
VOL. IV.—ARGENTINA.
By W. A. HIRST. With an Introduction by MARTIN HUME, a Map, and 64 Illustrations.
"The best and most comprehensive of recent works on the greatest and most progressive of the Republics of South America."—Manchester Guardian.
"In the treatment of both the main divisions of a complex theme, the historical and descriptive, Mr. Hirst shows judgment and skill that are decidedly rare.... Mr. Hirst's exceedingly able and interesting book."—Westminster Gazette.
"A very interesting and trustworthy survey of the present conditions and prospects of the country."—Times.
VOL. V.—BRAZIL.
By PIERRE DENIS. With Historical Chapter by BERNARD MIALL, a Map, and 36 Illustrations.
"It is a mine of information, arranged with all the lucidity of a Frenchman; and in one case, in the long chapter devoted to the valorization of coffee, the treatment deserves to be called masterly."—Globe.
VOL. VI.—URUGUAY.
By W. H. KOEBEL. With a Map and 55 Illustrations.
VOL. VII.—GUIANA: BRITISH, FRENCH, AND DUTCH.
By JAMES RODWAY. With a Map and 36 Illustrations.
VOL. VIII.—VENEZUELA.
By LEONARD DALTON, F.G.S., F.R.G.S. With a Map and 34 Illustrations.
VOL. IX.—LATIN AMERICA: ITS RISE AND PROGRESS.
By F. GARCIA CALDERON. With a Preface by RAYMOND POINCARÉ, Prime Minister of France, a Map, and 34 Illustrations.
VOL. X.—COLOMBIA.
By P. J. EDER. With 2 Maps and 40 Illustrations.
