Not only the Quichuas and Aymarás, but the Indians of the northern republics and of southern Chile are quite illiterate, and, as respects education, just where they were under the Incas, perhaps rather farther back, because there was then a sort of national life which has been long since quenched. There seems to be among them little or no desire for instruction. Even should any seek to rise in life, he would find no means of doing so, unless perchance some kindly priest should give the rudiments of knowledge to a boy brighter than the rest. Religion does nothing to stir their minds. They are nominally Christians, but of many of them that may be said to-day which was said in 1746 by the humane and orthodox Spaniards, Antonio de Ulloa and Jorge Juan, whose secret report upon things in South America, and among others upon the condition of the Indians in Peru and Ecuador, made to the king of Spain, was published in England eighty years later. They say: —
"The religion of the Indians is no more like the Christian religion than it is to that which they had while they were pagans, for if the matter be well examined it will be found that notwithstanding the nominal conversion of these tribes, so small is the progress they have made in knowledge that it will be hard to discover any difference between the state in which they now find themselves, and that in which they were at the time of the Conquest."113
That the influence of the priesthood did not commend religion to the people nor relieve their misery may be gathered from this further extract from the same secret report: —
"The miserable state of the Indians is to be ascribed to the vices of the parish priests (curas), the extortions of the corregidores, and the bad treatment which they generally receive from all Spaniards. Unable to endure their sufferings, and longing to escape from slavery, many of them have risen up and moved off to unconquered districts, there to continue in the barbarous practices of heathenism… In the community of Pimampiro in the province of Quito, which consisted of more than 5000 Indians, and was prosperous, the conduct of the parish priest drove the Indians to despair. Uniting in one body, they rose in rebellion and in one night passed to the Cordillera, where they joined themselves to the wild heathen Indians, with whom they have continued until now."114
It ought to be remembered that the avarice and moral faults charged upon the clergy in these reports, as well as in other accounts belonging to the eighteenth century are brought against the parish priests rather than the religious orders, although Ulloa describes the level of conduct as having sadly declined among these also. To some of the orders, most of all to the Jesuits, and in a less degree to the early Dominicans, much credit is due for their efforts not only to spread the gospel, often at the risk of their lives, but also to secure justice for the unfortunate Indians. The great Las Casas was only the most conspicuous among many admirable Spanish churchmen who threw their hearts into this campaign of humanity, though they seldom prevailed against the hard-hearted rapacity of the landowners and mine owners who wished to keep the Indians in serfdom and did not care how many perished under their hands. These worthy ecclesiastics sometimes secured good ordinances from the Council of the Indies in Spain, but the colonial governors found that the path of least resistance was to proclaim the ordinance and wink at its neglect. On many a law was the note made, "It is obeyed, but not executed" (Se obedece pero no se ejecuta). In Paraguay, where the population was almost wholly Indian, the reign of the Jesuits was generally beneficent. They could not do much for the education of the mass of their subjects, but while they trained some few of the promising youth, they impressed habits of industry and good conduct upon the rest. Perhaps it is to the excessive inculcation of obedience that the blind submissiveness of the later Paraguayans to such despots as Francia and Lopez may be partly attributed.115
The oppressions, both civil and ecclesiastical, referred to in the extracts given above, have long since ceased, but their consequences remain in the abject state of the aborigines and their ignorance of the truths and precepts of Christianity. As a learned student of Indian life observes, it is to them a kind of magic, more powerful for some purposes than their own ancient magic which was based on nature worship. "They believe in Dios (God)," says Mr. Bandelier,116 "but believe more in Nuestra Señora de la Luz (Our Lady of the Light) at Copacavana." They worship evil spirits and make offerings to the mountain Achachilas and to the Earth. Even in Mexico, where the Indians are, as a rule, much more subject to enlightening influences, I was told in 1901 that an archbishop, visiting the parishes of his diocese not long before, had found the ancient idols hidden away behind the altars and occasionally brought out at night to receive marks of reverence. The Peruvians had at the conquest hardly advanced to the stage of a regular mythology with images of the deities, so idols were less common and prominent, while the worship of the spirits immanent in natural objects was universal.
Where the church fails to stir the currents of intellectual life among the masses of such a people as this, what other influence is there to make for progress?
These Peruvian races were specially unfortunate because their natural leaders, the caciques or local chieftains who had formed a sort of aristocracy before the Conquest, were either slaughtered or, in some few cases, incorporated into the colonial upper class, so that they were lost, as protectors, to the subject class, who, having little force of character, sank unresistingly into serfdom. Once, in 1781–1783, under the leadership of Tupac Amaru, of whom I have spoken briefly in an earlier chapter, they rose in a revolt which lasted for three years. Being unwarlike and untrained, ill-armed and ill-led, they were defeated with great slaughter, after atrocious cruelties had been perpetrated on both sides. But they accomplished one feat rare in the annals of war in destroying, along with its Spanish garrison, the city of Sorata, which they had long besieged in vain, by damming up the course of a mountain torrent and turning its full stream on the place. Since those days, even the few chiefs that then remained have vanished, and the aboriginal race consists wholly of the poorest and most neglected part of the population. That which to them makes life tolerable is the incessant chewing of coca, a very old habit, but now less costly than in Inca days, because the leaf can be more easily imported from the hot country east of the Andes.
Their enjoyments are two. One is intoxication, mostly with chicha, the old native beverage, but now also with fiery alcohol, made from the sugar-cane. The other is dancing at their festivals. The priests, when they were converting the natives, thought it better not to disturb the ancient heathen dances, but to transfer them to the days which the church sets apart for its feasts, expunging, so far as they could, the more offensive features of the dance, though what remains is sufficiently repulsive. Such ceremonial performances are common among the Indians of North America, also, and used often to be kept up for days together before a declaration of war. The dances of the Hopi and other Indians which the visitor sees to-day in Arizona are dull and decorous affairs. A striking description of the dances which he saw at Tiahuanaco on Corpus Christi Day is given by Mr. Squier,117 and the much more recent account given by Mr. Bandelier of those he witnessed on another festival at Copacavana shew that things are much the same to-day.118 The music, of a drum-and-fife type, is loud, harsh, and discordant, but this does not imply that a taste for sweet sound is wanting, for the Indian often carries his simple flute or pipe with him on his journeys and enjoys the monotonous ditties which he makes it discourse.
Three other facts may be adduced to illustrate the condition of the aborigines. There is no recent literature in their languages, not even a newspaper or magazine. They seem to be very rarely ordained as priests, though I was told in Mexico that there are a good many Indian priests there; and it seldom happens that any Indian rises into the learned or even into the educated class. I heard of one such at Lima, who had a remarkable knowledge of natural history; there may have been others.
Whether owing to the character of the Indians, or to their fear of the white man, robberies and assaults are rare not only among the more gentle Quichuas, but also in Bolivia, where the Aymarás, a more dour and sullen race, frequently break the peace among themselves, village attacking village with sticks and slings, while the women carry bags of stones to supply ammunition for the men's slings. In fact, the safety of the solitary European traveller in most parts of South America is almost as remarkable as the like circumstance in India.
In respect of civil rights, there is no legal distinction between the Indian and the white. Both enjoy the same citizenship for all private and public purposes, to both is granted the equal protection of the laws, equal suffrage, equal eligibility to office. This is to some extent a guarantee to the Indian against ill treatment, but it does not raise him in the social scale. He seldom casts a vote; not, indeed, that it makes much difference in these countries whether the citizen votes or not, for a paternal government takes charge of the elections. He is never – so far as I could learn – a candidate for any national office. The laws of the two republics interfere very little with his life, which is regulated by ancestral custom. Even in revolutions he does not seem to come to the front. He is, however, willing to fight, and a good fighter both in foreign and in civil wars, however little interest he may take in the cause. But for this fact there would have been fewer and shorter revolutions. Thus the Indian is a member of the nation for military, if not for political, purposes. The former are at least nearer to his comprehension than the latter, for he cares, and thinks of caring, about politics no more than did the needy knife-grinder in Canning's verses. No one has yet preached to him the gospel of democracy; no one has told him that he has anything to gain from action as a citizen. The whole thing is as completely out of his sphere as if he were still living under the Spanish viceroys, or, indeed, under the rule of the Inca Huayna Capac. There is, therefore, not yet any "Indian question" in South America.119 There ought to be an Indian question: that is to say, there ought to be an effort to raise the Indians economically and educationally. But they have not yet begun to ask to be raised.
So much for the Indian as he is in Peru and Bolivia; and, apparently, also in those settled parts of northwestern Argentina where Indians still remain. In Paraguay the position is so far different that the Indians form not the lowest class, but the bulk of the nation. In the forest-covered regions of the Amazon and its tributaries, the Indios bravos are outside civilization altogether.
To understand the social relations of the white and Indian races one must begin by remembering that there is in Spanish and Portuguese countries no such sharp colour line as exists where men of Teutonic stock are settled in countries outside Europe. As this is true of the negro, it is even more true of the Indian. He may be despised as a weakling, he may be ignored as a citizen, he may be, as he was at one time, abominably oppressed and ill treated, but he excites no personal repulsion. It is not his race that is against him, but his debased condition. Whatever he suffers, is suffered because he is ignorant or timid or helpless, not because he is of a different blood and colour. Accordingly the Spanish Americans do not strive to keep off and keep down the Indian in such wise as the North Americans and the Dutch and the English – I do not mean the governments, but the individuals – treat their black subjects. There is not even such aversion to him as is shewn in California and in Australia to the Chinese, Japanese, and Hindus. The distinction between the races is in Spanish America a distinction of rank or class rather than of colour. Against intermarriage there is, therefore, no more feeling than that which exists against any union palpably below a man's or woman's own rank in life. If it is rare for a pure white to espouse a pure Indian, that is because they are of different ranks, just as it is rare for a well-born Englishman to marry a peasant girl. There is nothing in the law to oppose such a union, and though whites seldom marry pure Indians, because the classes come little into contact, the presence of an unmistakable Indian strain in a suitor makes no difference to his acceptability to a white woman of the same rank. Whether this contrast between the Spanish attitude towards the Indian and the Anglo-American attitude to the negro is due to differences between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism,120 or to the fact that the Indian was never legally a slave, or to the fact that the aboriginal American races shew a less marked divergence in colour and features from the white than does the negro, is a question which need not be here discussed. Possibly all three causes may contribute to the result; and probably the circumstance that most of the early Spaniards, having brought no wives with them, treated their numerous children by Indian women as being legitimate and belonging to their own race, was also a factor. Such a usage, established in the days of the Conquest, would naturally continue to affect men's attitude. The result is anyhow one of great significance, and makes the racial problem here quite different from what it is in the southern states of North America.
The most salient point of difference lies in the position of the half-breed or mestizo. In North America a mulatto, a quadroon, even an octoroon who is only one-eighth black, counts as a negro. Here, except perhaps in a few of the oldest cities, a mestizo counts as a white. His half-Indian blood is no disparagement to his social standing, no obstacle to his reaching any public position. One may remark of such and such a person that he has evidently a strong infusion of Indian blood, of such another that he looks a Spaniard through and through, and the latter doubtless cherishes a secret satisfaction in his pure Iberian stock. But for the practical purposes of business and politics, the two, supposing them to belong to the same educated class, stand upon the same level. The families which value their lineage so highly that they would deem the marriage of a child to a person of mixed blood, otherwise desirable, to be a mésalliance, must be now few, and hardly exist outside five or six cities – such as Bogotá, Lima, Arequipa, and Santiago.
Thus one may say that there is no "colour question" in South America. Its republics have political and economic problems enough, but they are spared a source of embarrassment and danger constantly present to the minds of thoughtful North Americans, and present also (though less painfully) to the minds of South Africans. Although, therefore, both in Spanish America and in the United States there are social distinctions which coincide with race distinctions, the character of those distinctions is different. In both countries there are two sections. But in the United States everyone who is not white is classed as coloured, however slight the trace. In Spanish America everyone who is not wholly Indian is classed as white, however marked the Indian tinge.121 Thus the mixed population, which in the United States swells the negro element, is in Spanish America a part of the white nation, and helps to give that element its preponderance. And a further difference appears in the fact that whereas in the United States the man of colour is discriminated against for social purposes, irrespective of his wealth, education, or personal qualities, in Spanish countries race counts for so little that when he emerges out of the poverty and ignorance which mark the Indian, his equality with the white man is admitted. So rarely, however, does he emerge that one may broadly say that the Nation consists in these republics of white men and mestizos only, the Indian constituting, if not another nation, yet a separate nationality, marked off not merely by poverty, but by its language and the adherence of its members to ancient superstitions. They have nothing, except the worship of the saints and a fondness for liquor, in common with the class above them, for they speak a different language, think differently, feel differently, have their own amusements, and cherish, in a dim way, faint memories of a time when their forefathers were masters of the land. They are not actively hostile to the white people, and, indeed, get on better with their landlords than some European peasantries have done with theirs. But they live apart, inside the nation, but not of it. The Aymarás are silent, suspicious, sullen. The Quichuas are more kindly, but hardly less reserved. This reserve and suspicion characterize the Mexican Indian also, who is generally more intelligent than the Peruvian.122 Both Aymarás and Quichuas are tenacious of their customs, and do not seek to assimilate any of that modern life and lore which has found its slow way even into the recesses of the Andes. No one from without tries to give it to them, no one rises from among themselves stirred by a desire to acquire it and then impart it to his fellows.
This want of leading, and want not only of light but of a wish for light, is the feature of the Indian population which most surprises the traveller, because he knows of no parallel to it among the subject races of Europe in the past or those of western Asia to-day. The Greek and Armenian in Turkey have at times suffered as much from the Turk as the Quichua has suffered from his conquerors in Peru, but in intelligence and capacity for progress they have been the superiors of the Turk; and had there been more of them, they would before now have shaken off his control.
If it is asked how the presence of this solid Indian mass, unassimilated by the white nation, has affected that nation and the progress of the country as a whole, the answer is that in the first place it prevented all chance of the growth of a free European agricultural population, even in those high valleys where Europeans could work and thrive. Had the hardy and laborious peasantry of Galicia, Asturias, and Aragon settled in these regions, how much more robust, mentally and physically, might the nation have been! How much might agriculture have been improved had there been intelligent labour! But besides this want, and besides the weakening of the state by the lack of national spirit in half of its population, the presence of a large mass of ignorance and superstition has operated to reduce the general intellectual level. There have been countries where a small rich and ruling class, living on the toil of inferiors, has cultivated art and letters with brilliant success, but we find nothing of the sort here. The ignorant mass has depressed the whole, as a glacier chills the air of its valley.
Whether the Spanish stock has deteriorated through the mixture of Indian blood is a more difficult matter to determine. The Peruvians and Bolivians of to-day, both whites and mestizos – and the same thing is true of Venezuelans and Ecuadoreans – differ much from the Spaniards of the sixteenth century and from the European Spaniards of to-day. They are probably more excitable; they are naturally less industrious because they live in hot countries and have Indians to work for them. But in Spain itself there are great differences between the peoples of the north and the south and the east. The Catalans are more energetic than the Andalusians, the Gallegos more industrious than the Valencians. The conditions of colonial life in the presence of a large aboriginal population, coupled with long misgovernment and intellectual stagnation, account for a good deal of the variation from the Spanish type. It is a sound maxim never to lay weight upon uncertain causes when certain causes are available as explanations. Moreover our knowledge of heredity in its influence on race development is still imperfect. The Argentines, who are of an almost pure white stock, also differ much from the modern Spaniard.
It might seem natural to assume a priori that men of pure European race would continue to hold the foremost place in these countries, and would shew both greater talents and a more humane temper than those in whose veins Indian blood flows. But I doubt if the facts support such a view. Some of the most forceful leaders who have figured in the politics of these republics have been mestizos. I remember one, as capable and energetic and upright a man as I met anywhere in the continent, who looked at least half an Indian, and very little of a Spaniard. Nor have there been any more sinister figures in the history of South America since the days of Pedro de Arias the infamous governor of Darien who put to death Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, than some who were pure Spaniards. No half-breeds have shewn more ruthlessness than the Spanish Carbajal in the days of Pizarro, or than Rosas, the Argentine dictator of seventy years ago. And in this connection it deserves to be noticed that the ancient Peruvian Indians, though they thought nothing of indiscriminate slaughter and occasionally tortured captive enemies, did not generally shew the same taste for blood as the Aztecs shewed in their sacrifices nor the same propensity to methods of elaborate and long-drawn-out cruelty as did the Red men of North America.
As I have so far been speaking chiefly of Peru and Bolivia, where the Indian population is larger and more civilized than elsewhere, a few observations ought to be added regarding the other republics in which a considerable aboriginal population remains. I omit Uruguay, because it has none at all. In Argentina there are some civilized Indians in the northwestern districts round the cities of Jujuy and Tucuman, and to these the remarks made regarding their neighbours, the Bolivian Indians, apply. There are also wild Indians, perhaps one hundred thousand, perhaps more, on the Gran Chaco of the far north,123 and the scattered remnants of nomad Patagonians in the far south and in Tierra del Fuego. These seem to be disappearing. The Onas in that island have been freely killed off by the ranchmen on whose flocks they preyed, and tubercular disease is destroying the rest. In Chile, besides the Araucanians, described in Chapter VI, there are a few small tribes, in a low state of barbarism, left in the archipelago of wet and woody isles along the Pacific coast. The rural population of the republic – indeed, nearly all of the poorer and less educated part of it – is mestizo, a bold and vigorous race, good workers and fine fighters. Paraguay is an almost purely Indian country.
Of the four northern republics, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador, I have seen only the first. In each of these the number of purely Spanish families is small. It is probably largest in Colombia. In Venezuela the Indians have been more largely absorbed into the general population than has happened in Colombia and Ecuador. In all four states such of the Indians as remain wild forest dwellers are passive, and practically outside the nation, which is, as a social and political entity, predominantly mestizo. What has been said of Peru and Bolivia is true of these states also: there is no colour line; the mestizos are treated as white and are not, as a class, intellectually inferior to the white. The Indian forms the lowest stratum, and seldom rises out of it.
There remains Brazil, distinguished from the other republics by the fact that in addition to her small mestizo population and her pure Indian population, most of it wild, she has a great mass of negroes and a still larger mass of mulattoes and quadroons. It is hardly too much to say that along the coast from Rio to Bahia and Pernambuco, as well as in parts of the interior behind these two cities, the black population predominates. In character and habits it somewhat resembles the negroes of the British West Indies and Santo Domingo, being superior to the Haytians, but inferior in education and enterprise to the coloured people of the southern states of North America. High as is its fecundity, its death-rate is also so high, owing to the general neglect of sanitary precautions, that it does not appear to be increasing relatively to the general population. It is well treated – slavery was seldom harsh among the kindly natured, easy-going Portuguese – and bears no ill-will to its former masters. Neither do they feel towards it that repulsion which marks the attitude of the whites to the negroes in North America and South Africa. The Brazilian lower class intermarries freely with the black people; the Brazilian middle class intermarries with mulattoes and quadroons. Brazil is the one country in the world, besides the Portuguese colonies on the east and west coasts of Africa, in which a fusion of the European and African races is proceeding unchecked by law or custom. The doctrines of human equality and human solidarity have here their perfect work. The result is so far satisfactory that there is little or no class friction. The white man does not lynch or maltreat the negro: indeed, I have never heard of a lynching anywhere in South America except occasionally as part of a political convulsion. The negro is not accused of insolence and does not seem to develop any more criminality than naturally belongs to any ignorant population with loose notions of morality and property.
What ultimate effect the intermixture of blood will have on the European element in Brazil I will not venture to predict. If one may judge from a few remarkable cases, it will not necessarily reduce the intellectual standard. One of the ablest and most refined Brazilians I have known had some colour; and other such cases have been mentioned to me. Assumptions and preconceptions must be eschewed, however plausible they may seem.
The chief conclusions which the history of the relations of races in the South American continent suggests are the three following. The first may be thought doubtful. It is negative rather than positive, and though it seems worth stating, I state it with diffidence.
The fusion of two parent stocks, one more advanced, the other more backward, does not necessarily result in producing a race inferior to the stronger parent or superior to the weaker. The mestizo in Peru is not palpably inferior in intellect to the Spanish colonial of unmixed blood, but seems to be substantially his equal. The mestizo in Mexico is not palpably superior – some doubt if he is at all superior either physically, morally, or intellectually – to the pure Tarascan or Zapotec Indian, who is, no doubt, a stronger human being than the South American Quichua or Aymará.
The second conclusion is this: Conquest and control by a race of greater strength have upon some races a depressing and almost ruinous effect. The Peruvian subjects of the Incas had reached a state of advancement which, though much below that of the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians, was remarkable when one considers that their isolation deprived them of the enormous benefit of contact with other progressive peoples, and when one considers also the disadvantage of living at a great altitude, the absence of milk-yielding animals, and the paucity both of animals capable of domestication and of cereal plants. The impact of Spanish invasion not only shattered their own rudimentary civilization to pieces, but so took all the heart and spirit out of them that they have made practically no advances during four centuries, and have profited hardly at all by the western civilization of their masters. The aborigines of Mexico, having more stamina of intellect and will, have suffered less by the shock, but have done almost as little to assimilate the arts and ideas of Europe.
Thirdly, the ease with which the Spaniards have intermingled by marriage with the Indian tribes – and the Portuguese have done the like, not only with the Indians, but with the more physically dissimilar negroes – shews that race repugnance is no such constant and permanent factor in human affairs as members of the Teutonic peoples are apt to assume. Instead of being, as we Teutons suppose, the rule in this matter, we are rather the exception, for in the ancient world there seems to have been little race repulsion; there is very little to-day among Mohammedans; there is none among Chinese. This seems to suggest that since the phenomenon is not of the essence of human nature, it may not be always as strong among the Teutonic peoples as it is to-day. Religion has been in the past almost as powerful a dissevering force as has racial antagonism. In the case of Spaniards and Portuguese, religion, so soon as the Indians had been baptized, made race differences seem insignificant. Islam has always done this in the East and in Africa.
As touching the future, it seems as certain as anything in human affairs can be that the races now inhabiting South America, aboriginal, European, and African, will be all ultimately fused. The Spanish republics (except the purely white Argentina and Uruguay) will be Ibero-American, Brazil will be Ibero-American-African. All present facts point that way, and that any hitherto unfelt repulsion will arise seems most improbable. When, however, will the process be complete? In the Spanish republics, hardly before two centuries, probably not even then. It seems not much nearer now than it was in 1810, when the revolutionary struggles began, though anything which stirred up the Andean population, such as the discovery of a large number of new and rich mines, bringing in foreign labour and increasing the demand for domestic labour, or anything that roused a spirit of economic and political change, might accelerate the consummation.