The little that I have to say about the political life of the country must be reserved for another and more general chapter, so I will here note only two facts peculiar to Argentina. It is, of all the Spanish-American republics, that in which the church has least to do with politics. Though Roman Catholicism is declared by the constitution to be supported by the state, and the president and vice-president must profess it, that freedom of religious worship which is guaranteed by law is fully carried out in practice, and all denominations may, without let or hindrance, erect churches and preach and teach. The legislature has shewn itself so broad-minded as to grant subventions to a system of Protestant schools founded originally as a missionary enterprise by a Protestant Episcopal clergyman, and many of the Roman Catholic families of Buenos Aires send their children to schools provided by the American Methodist Episcopal Church. In liberality of spirit, Argentina is rather more advanced than either Peru or Chile, not to speak of bigoted Ecuador. Still more noteworthy is it that there seems to be little or no effort on the part of the church to influence public affairs. No political party is allied with the clergy, no clerical influence is felt in elections. The happy detachment of the two spheres which travellers observe and admire in North America deserves even more credit when found in a country where intolerance long reigned supreme.
The other phenomenon which no one will connect with religious freedom, inasmuch as it has appeared in nearly every country of Europe and of North America, whatever be the religious conditions that prevail, is the emergence here and nowhere else in South America of a vehement anarchist propaganda. Among the immigrants from Italy and from eastern Spain there have been enough persons engaged in this movement to cause great alarm to the government. Not long ago the chief of the police was killed by an explosive thrown by a Russian anarchist, and in the summer of 1910 a bomb was exploded in the great Opera-house during a performance, wounding a number of persons. These occurrences led to the proclamation of a state of siege which was maintained for many weeks. The police is said to be efficient,
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I was told that many of the street police are Indians from the north of the country.
and the Executive did not hesitate to use powers which it would be less easy to obtain or use in the United States or in England. Our age has seen too many strange incidents to be surprised that these acts of violence should be perpetrated in a country where, though no doubt there is an ostentatious display of wealth, work is more abundant and wages are higher than in any other part of the world. Such acts are aimed not at oppression, nor at bad industrial conditions, but at government itself.
Here, as generally in South America, though less in Chile than elsewhere, politics is mainly in the hands of the lawyers. A great deal of the best intellect of the country, probably more in proportion than in any European country or in the United States, goes into this profession; and the contributions to the world's store of thought and learning made by Argentine writers have been perhaps more considerable in this branch of enquiry than in any other. In the sphere of historical or philosophical or imaginative literature, not much has yet been done, nor is the class prepared to read such books a large one. Fiction is supplied by France. The press is a factor in public affairs whose power is comparable to that exercised by the leading newspapers in Australia. It is conducted on large and bold lines, especially conspicuous in two journals of the capital
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They have a mass of readers near at hand and a revenue from advertisements comparable to those which are found in the United States and Australia, but are not found in Spanish America outside Buenos Aires.
Mr. F. Seebey states that, in 1903, 212 periodicals were published in Buenos Aires in various languages or dialects, including Basque, Catalan, and Genoese.
which have now a long record of vigour and success behind them. The concentration of political and commercial activities in Buenos Aires gives to them the same advantage that belongs to the leading organs of Sydney and Melbourne.
The world is to-day ruled by physical science and by business, which, in the vast proportions industry and commerce have now attained, is itself the child of physical science. Argentina is thoroughly modern in the predominance of business over all other interests. Only one other comes near it. The Bostonian man of letters who complained that London was no place to live in because people talked of nothing but sport and politics, would have been even less happy in Buenos Aires, because there, when men do not talk of sport, they talk of business. Politics is left to the politicians; it is the
estancia
, its cattle and its crops, and the race-course, with its betting, that are always in the mind and on the tongue, and are moulding the character, of the wealthier class. Business is no doubt still so largely in the hands of foreigners that one cannot say that the average Argentine has developed a talent for it comparable to that of those whom he calls the North Americans, seeing that much of his wealth has come to him by the rise in the values of his land and the immense demand for its products. He is seldom a hard worker, for it has been his ill fortune to be able to get by sitting still what others have had to work for, but he does not yield to New York in what is called a "go-ahead spirit." He is completely up to date. He has both that jubilant patriotism and that exuberant confidence in his country which marked the North American of 1830–1860. His pride in his city has had the excellent result of making him eager to put it, and keep it, in the forefront of progress, with buildings as fine, parks as large, a water supply as ample, provisions for public health as perfect, as money can buy or science can devise. The wealth and the expansion of Buenos Aires inspire him, as the wealth and expansion of Chicago have inspired her citizens, and give him, if not all of their forceful energy, yet a great deal of their civic idealism.
It is the only kind of idealism that one finds in the city or the country. Every visitor is struck by the dominance of material interests and a material view of things. Compared with the raking in of money and the spending it in betting or in ostentatious luxury, a passion for the development of the country's resources and the adornment of its capital stand out as aims that widen the vision and elevate the soul. A recent acute and friendly observer has said that patriotism among the Argentines amounts to a mania. Such excess of sentiment is not only natural in a young and growing nation, and innocent too (so long as it is not aggressive), but is helpful in giving men something beyond their own material enjoyments and vanities to think of and to work for. It makes them wish to stand well in the world's eyes, and do in the best way what they see others doing. If there is an excess, time will correct it.
Loitering in the great Avenida de Mayo and watching the hurrying crowd and the whirl of motor cars, and the gay shop-windows, and the open-air cafés on the sidewalks, and the Parisian glitter of the women's dresses, one feels much nearer to Europe than anywhere else in South America. Bolivia suggests the seventeenth century and Peru the eighteenth, and even in energetic Chile there is an air of the elder time, and a soothing sense of detachment. But here all is twentieth century, with suggestions of the twenty-first. Yet, modern as they are, and reminding one sometimes of the gaiety of Paris and sometimes of the stir and hurry of Kansas City, the Argentines are essentially unlike either Europeans or North Americans. To say in what the difference consists is all the harder because one doubts whether there yet exists a definite Argentine type. They have ceased to be Spaniards without becoming something new of their own. They seem to be a nation in the making, not yet made. Elements more than half of which are Spanish and Basque, and one-third of which are Italian, are all being shaken up together and beginning to mix and fuse under conditions not before seen in South American life. That which will emerge, if more Spanish than Italian in blood, will be entirely South American in sentiment and largely French in its ways of thinking, for from France come the intellectual influences that chiefly play upon it. It will spring from new conditions and new forces, acting on people who have left all their traditions and many of their habits behind them, and have retained but little of that religion which was the strongest of all powers in their former home. Men now living may see this nation, what with its growing numbers and its wealth, take rank beside France, Italy, and Spain. It may be, in the New World, the head and champion of what are called the Latin races. Will the artistic and literary genius of Italy, France, and Spain flower again in their transplanted descendants, now that they seem to have at last emerged from those long civil wars and revolutions which followed their separation from Spain? The very magnitude of the interests which any fresh civil wars would endanger furnishes a security against their recurrence, and the temper of the people seems entirely disposed to internal peace. No race or colour questions have arisen, and religious questions have ceased to vex them. They have an agricultural area still undeveloped which for fifty years to come will be large enough both to attract immigrants and to provide for the needs of their own citizens. Seldom has Nature lavished gifts upon a people with a more bountiful hand.
CHAPTER X
URUGUAY
Whoever wishes to have something by which to distinguish Uruguay from its many sister republics, the size and character of each of which are unfamiliar to many of us in Europe, may learn to remember that it is the smallest of the South American states, and that it has neither mountains, nor deserts, nor antiquities, nor aboriginal Indians. Nevertheless, it is by no means a country to be described by negatives, but has, as we shall presently see, a marked character of its own.
Having belonged to the viceroyalty of Buenos Aires, and being peopled by men of the same pure Spanish stock as those who dwelt in Argentina, it would probably have continued to be a part of that country but for the fact that, as it lay close to Brazil, it was from time to time occupied and held by the Portuguese of that county, sometimes by conquest, sometimes by formal cession from the crown of Spain. Thus its people, who had, when part of the Spanish dominions, a governor of their own under the Viceroy, began to acquire a sort of national consciousness as a community distinct from their fellow-countrymen on the opposite shore of the Rio de la Plata and the Uruguay river. They got the name of the
Banda Oriental
(East Side), as opposed to the rest of Argentina on the west side of the Uruguay. When the colonists began, from 1810 onwards, to assert their independence of the crown of Spain, the Orientales, as the Uruguayans were then usually called, had to fight their own battle and fought it valiantly. The Portuguese of Brazil, now allying themselves with Spain in defence of monarchy, invaded the country, and it was their expulsion in 1814, as the outcome of a long struggle under the famous patriot leader Artigas, that finally set Uruguay free. After the Argentines had tried more than once to force her into their federation, and the Portuguese had again invaded and occupied the devastated land, Uruguay was ultimately recognized as a sovereign State in 1828 by both Argentina and Brazil, the latter now independent of Portugal. By this time incessant wars and sufferings had formed a distinctive type of character and lit up a flame of national feeling which has burnt strongly ever since.
With an area of only 72,000 square miles, as against 1,135,000 in Argentina and 3,208,000 in Brazil, Uruguay seems like a garden plot between two vast estates. But she is a veritable garden. There is hardly an acre of useless ground within her borders. Except a few bare hilltops and a few sandy stretches on the coast, all is available, either for cattle and sheep, or for tillage, or for forest growth. No country is more favoured by nature. The surface is gently undulating along the sea and rises inland into swelling downs intersected here and there by ranges of hills. The abundant grass is deemed the best for cattle in all South America, so for many years ranching was practically the only industry. Latterly, however, a great deal of land has been brought under cultivation. Wheat and maize are the principal crops, and there are now many vineyards. As the climate, while generally resembling that of central Argentina, is tempered by the neighbourhood of the Atlantic, the winters are less cold and the summers cooler in Montevideo than they are on the other side of the Plate estuary. Further north, where Uruguay adjoins Brazil, the midsummer heats are severe and the vegetation becomes subtropical. It is a cheerful country, with scenery constructed, so to speak, on a small scale, as befits a small republic. Broad uplands of waving grass, with here and there tree clumps, and in the centre and north of the country bosky glens winding through rocky hills, make the landscape always pleasing and sometimes romantic. There are no great forests, no deserts, no volcanoes, nothing half so grand as the peaks of the Argentine Andes, but nothing half so monotonous as the flats of the Argentine Pampa.
Montevideo the capital has the same air of freshness and cheerfulness which belong to Uruguayan landscape and the Uruguayan climate. It has grown to be a great and prosperous city in respect of its port, which makes it the chief seat of the republic's commerce. The estuary of the River Plate is much deeper on this northern side than on the southern, so large ships have always been able to approach nearer to this shore than they could do to the Argentine. By deepening the entrance and running out breakwaters, a good harbour has now been created, accessible to vessels of exceptionally deep draught which could not (in 1910) come up to the docks in Buenos Aires. The city is also more fortunate in its site, for the ground, a dead flat on the Argentine side, here rises from the shore in a slope steep enough to afford fine views over the sea and to enable the church towers and other tall buildings to present an effective sky-line.
Montevideo, with its 300,000 inhabitants against the 1,300,000 of Buenos Aires, has streets by no means so thronged as are those of the Argentine capital. Neither are the houses quite so high, nor is there the same sense of a vast country behind, pouring its products out by this water-gate that leads to Europe. But here, just as in Buenos Aires, everything is modern. Only one public building, the old Town Hall in the chief plaza, dates from colonial times and has, or seems by its quaintness to have, a sort of artistic quality which is absent from the work, all French rather than Spanish in character, of the last sixty years. The plazas are handsome, well laid out and planted, and the street architecture creditable, with fewer contrasts of meanness and magnificence than one usually sees in the growing cities of North America. There is an absence not only of external squalor, but of any marks of poverty, for the people seem brisk and thriving, with plenty of money coming in. For many miles round the environs are studded with tasteful villas, and the well-kept roads that traverse them are lined by splendid rows of Australian blue gums. Three points of interest deserve to be specially mentioned. One is the Cerro, an isolated conical hill on the southwestern side of the bay, opposite the main city, and an object so conspicuous and picturesque on this generally tame coast that it has found a place in the arms of the republic. The castle that surmounts it has no merit as a building, but the view is superb along the coast and out to sea where the pale grey waters of the Paraná and Uruguay meet the ocean blue. The second ornament of the suburbs is the Botanical Garden. Its display of spring flowers, both native and European, and the wonderful variety of trees from semitropical and temperate regions, give a vivid sense of the powers of this admirable climate, not oppressive in the blaze of its sunlight, yet warm enough for roses twice as luxuriant as the best that Europe can show. Lastly, there is a fine collection of wild animals in a garden belonging to a private gentleman of large means, who is unique in the personal relations which his kindly disposition has enabled him to establish with the creatures, even with the beasts of prey. There were splendid jaguars and pumas, and there were South American ant-eaters with tongues longer than themselves. But what most delighted the holiday crowd, who are permitted to ramble through the gardens, was to see a brace of lion cubs strolling about in a friendly way among men, women, and children, while the owner led us close up to the bars of the cage in which his pet lion, a superb giant, sat peacefully blinking and made us stroke it and rub its back. The lion took the attention benignly and beamed on his master, but the attitude of the lioness in the further corner of the cage did not encourage any such familiarities.
Like Argentina, Uruguay is destined to be a pastoral and agricultural, not a mining or manufacturing country. There are some minerals, including gold, manganese, iron, and coal, but none of these is worked on a large scale, and it has not yet been proved that either coal or iron is present in quantities sufficient to form the basis of any important industry. Cattle are at present the chief source of wealth, the export of meat having been greatly increased by the recently invented methods of freezing and chilling. Meat, hides, wool, wheat, and maize are likely to continue to be the mainstay of the country's prosperity; and as only about one-eighth of the surface is at present under tillage, there is room for great expansion. No better evidence of progress can be furnished than the extension of railways. The first was begun in 1866. There were, in 1910, 1472 miles in operation, and construction continues to go briskly forward. The chief centres of population are either on the coast or on the banks of the great navigable river Uruguay, whence cattle, meat, and wool are shipped.
So far, therefore, Uruguay has all the material conditions required for prosperity and happiness, an abundance of good land, a temperate and genial climate, water highways for traffic provided by Nature in her rivers, artificial iron highways on land, supplied by enterprising British capitalists. What is to be said of her inhabitants?
They were, till recent years, almost entirely of Spanish stock. The warlike native Indians, one of whose tribes, the Charruas, were fierce fighters, having been killed off, and the weaker tribes having quietly melted away, very little aboriginal blood has mingled itself with the Iberian stock. Some negroes are to be found along the Brazilian frontier, but they do not seem to have perceptibly affected the European element. Of late years a stream of immigrants has flowed in from Italy, yet in no such volume as toward Argentina. There is also a steady, though smaller, inflow from Spain; among whom there are, fortunately, many industrious Basques. Rather more than a fifth of the population are of foreign birth, a proportion small compared to that of the foreign-born population of Rhode Island or Massachusetts. These new-comers will soon be assimilated and are not likely to modify the national type.
That type strikes the foreign observer as already distinct and well marked. The Uruguayan is, of course, first and foremost a Colonial Spaniard, but a Spaniard moulded by the conditions of his life during the last ninety years. He has been a man of the country and the open air, strong, active, and lawless, always in the saddle riding after his cattle, handy with his lasso and his gun. Fifty years ago he was a Gaucho, much like his Argentine cousin beyond the river. Now he, too, like that cousin, is settling down, but he has retained something of the breezy recklessness and audacity, the frankness and free-handedness, of the older days. A touch of this Gaucho quality, in a milder form, is felt through all classes of Uruguayan society. Democratic equality in manners is combined with a high sense of personal dignity, an immense hopefulness, an impulsive readiness to try all experiments, a national consciousness none the less intense because it already rejoices over the triumphs it is going to achieve. Whether there is more of "ideality" than in Argentina I will not venture to say, but there is less wealth and less ostentation. Englishmen and North Americans settled in Montevideo like the Uruguayans, and say they are good fellows. There is evidently something attractive about them when the sons of such settlers grow up fond of the country, willing and proud to be its citizens. You will hear an English-speaking youth of either race say, if asked whether he is an Englishman or an American, "I am an Uruguayan."
While we were in Montevideo a revolution broke out in the country. There was sharp fighting about forty miles away from the city and the railways were bringing in the wounded. It caused no great excitement, having been expected for some weeks, and the newspapers told their readers very little of what was happening. They did not know much, for the military authorities had stopped every channel of communication. That, however, would of itself have been a very poor reason for not furnishing details. There were other and more imperative grounds for reticence. We were unfortunately unable to see anything and could learn little of the revolution, but its origin and especially the perfect
sang-froid
of the Montevideans, both natives and Englishmen, struck us as curious. A short explanation of the conditions attending such outbreaks may throw light on the phenomena of other republics as well as Uruguay.
Ever since the colonists declared their independence of Spain, fighting has been almost incessant in this smiling land. They fought first against the Spanish troops, and then against the Portuguese rulers of Brazil; they fought several times against Argentina and Paraguay, and almost incessantly against one another. As soon as independence had been secured and the Portuguese finally expelled, the two leading generals (Rivera and Oribe) who had led the patriots to victory quarrelled, and before long were striving in arms for the chief place in the republic. Their adherents grew into two factions, which soon divided the nation, or so much of it as took an active interest in politics. At the first battle General Oribe, who headed one of the parties, rode a white horse, and his lancers carried white pennons on their spearheads; so they were called the Blancos. The followers of the rival general, Rivera, had red pennons, and he rode a bay horse. They were, therefore, the Colorados. From that day on Uruguayans have been divided into Whites and Reds. Seventy-five years had passed and the grandsons of the men who had fought under Oribe and Rivera in 1835 were still fighting in 1910.
For what have they been fighting? At first there were no principles involved; it was a personal feud between two soldiers, who not long before had stood shoulder to shoulder against the Brazilian invader. But just as political parties sometimes drop the tenets with which they started and yet live on as organizations, so sometimes factions which started without tenets pick them up as they go along and make them watchwords. A party is apt to capture any current issue, or be captured by it, and to become, thereafter, committed to or entangled with it. Thus the Whites became in course of time the country party as opposed to the Reds of the towns, and especially of Montevideo, and thus, as the city is the home of new views and desires for change, the Reds have become the anticlerical and the Whites the church party. It would seem that the colours have nothing to do with the now almost forgotten term (common in France in 1848–1851) of the "Red Republic," but another sort of connection with Europe may be found in the story that the Garibaldian red shirt, which figured on so many battle-fields in Sicily and Italy, was due to Giuseppe Garibaldi's having fought on the Colorado side, in 1842–1846, against Rosas and the Argentine invaders, the emblem being retained when that last of the heroes raised his standard in the Italian revolution of 1848.
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The account of the origin of the red shirt given by Mr. G. M. Trevelyan in his interesting book,
Garibaldi and the Defence of Rome
, is not quite the same as that which I heard in Uruguay, but not incompatible therewith.
When an insurrection is planned in Uruguay, word is sent round that its supporters are to rendezvous, armed and mounted, at certain spots on a certain day, and when the government gets to know of the plan, its first step is to seize all the horses in the disaffected districts and drive them to a place where they are kept under a strong guard. The horse is the life of a revolutionary movement, a tradition from the grand old Gaucho days; and without horses, the insurgents are powerless.
The Blancos have been out of power in Uruguay since 1864, but they hold well together and compose an opposition which acts by constitutional methods in the legislature (when any of its partisans can find an entrance) and by military methods outside the constitution, in the open country, whenever peaceful methods are deemed useless. The parties have become largely hereditary; a child is born a little Blanco or a little Colorado, and rarely deserts his colour. Feeling runs so high that in Blanco districts it is dangerous for a man to wear a red necktie, just as in driving through certain Irish towns a harmless botanist from Britain may, when his car approaches a particular quarter, be warned by the driver to throw away or cover over the ferns which he has gathered in a mountain glen, because the sight of the obnoxious colour will expose him to be stoned by those who regard its display as an affront.
These revolutions, however, have in the course of years been tending to become rather less frequent, and certainly less sanguinary, just as in parts of South America there are volcanoes once terrible by their tremendous eruptions which now content themselves with throwing out a few showers of ashes or discharging a stream of lava from a little crater near the base. This rising ended with a surrender, accompanied by an amnesty which included the absence of any decree of confiscation of property, so no blood was shed except in the field.
When I asked what were the grievances alleged to justify the revolt of November, 1910, the answer was that an election of the legislature was impending, that the new legislature would, when elected, proceed forthwith to the choice of a President of the republic for the next four years, that the Blancos fully expected that the elections would be so handled by the government in power as to secure a majority certain to choose a particular candidate whom the Blancos feared and disliked, and that therefore the only course open to the latter was to avert by an appeal to arms the wrong which would be done to the nation by tampering with the rights of the electors. How much truth there may have been in these allegations the passing traveller could not know, nor was it for him to judge whether, if true, they would warrant an appeal to force.
The conditions in some Latin-American republics are peculiar, and can be paralleled only in one or two other parts of the modern world. In the years between 1848 and 1859 when despotic governments held sway in most parts of Europe, the ingenuous youth of Britain used to assume, as Thomas Jefferson had done fifty years before, that every insurrection was presumably justifiable and entitled to the sympathy of all lovers of freedom. Of recent years, since constitutional governments have been established in nearly all countries, the presumption is deemed to be the other way, and revolts are
prima facie
disapproved. In some American republics, however, – and here I am speaking not of Uruguay, but of more backward communities, – there is no presumption at all either way. A government in Nicaragua or Honduras, for instance, has usually obtained power either by force of arms or by a mock election carried through under military pressure. To eject it by similar means is, therefore, in the eye of a constitutional lawyer, not a breach of law and order, because the government which it is sought to eject has no legal title, being itself the child of wrongdoing. On the other hand the insurgents are probably no better friends of law and order than is the government. If they succeed by arms, they will not hold an honest election, but will rule by force, just as did their predecessors. There is, accordingly, no ground for the award of sympathy or moral approval to either faction, while for foreign powers the problem of when to recognize a government that has come in by the sword, and will presently, like the Priest of the Grove at Nemi, perish by the sword, is no easy one, and must usually be solved by waiting till such a government has made itself so clearly master of the situation as to possess a
de facto
title likely to hold good for some time to come, and perhaps ultimately pass into a title
de iure
.
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Such legal or quasi-legal questions have arisen several times in Central America.
Reverting to Uruguay, the most curious and historically instructive feature of her case is that these recurrent civil wars and attempts at revolution do not seem to have retarded her prosperity. She saw more incessant fighting from 1810 till 1876 than any other part of the world has seen for the last hundred years. Even since then risings and conflicts have been frequent, and though there has been no foreign war since 1870, when that with Paraguay ended, the presence on either side of two great powers, not always friendly to her or to each other, has often caused anxiety. Nevertheless, the country has continued to grow in wealth and population. Capital has flowed in freely to build railways, and the good opinion which European investors entertain is shewn by the fact that the Uruguayan five per cent bonds average j