Some publicists have suggested that troubles might arise to affect South America from without if Japan or China were to insist on flooding her with their emigrants, and that if this were attempted against one of the weaker South American republics, either the greater South American Powers, or the United States, or both, might be tempted to intervene. There are at present some Chinese and a very few Japanese on the Pacific coast, but no more seem to have been arriving in recent years. Any danger of this nature seems remote and improbable.
With these three things, however, – republican forms, social equality, and detachment from European politics, – the list of the things which the two Americas have in common ends. Far more numerous and more important are the points in which they stand contrasted.
Many causes have gone to the making of the contrast. Race and religion, climate and history have all had their share. The contrast appears both in ideas and in temperament. The Spanish American is more proud and more sensitive to any slight. He is not so punctilious in his politeness as is the Spaniard of Europe, and is, indeed, in some countries a little brusque or offhand in manners and speech. But he feels a slight keenly; and he knows how to respect the susceptibilities of his fellow-citizens. I will not say that he is more pleasure-loving than the North American, for the latter has developed of late years a passion for amusement which would have startled his Puritan ancestors. But he is less assiduous and less strenuous in work, being, in this respect, unlike the immigrant who comes from Old Spain, especially the Asturian and the Gallego, who is the soul of thrift and the steadiest of toilers. He is not so fond of commercial business, nor so apt for it, nor so eager to "get on" and get rich. The process of money making has not for him that fatal attraction which enslaves so many capable men in the United States and (to a less degree) in England and Germany, leading them to forget the things that make life worth living, till it is too late in life to enjoy them. In South America things are taken easily and business concerns are largely in the hands of foreigners. The South American – and here I include the Mexican – is an excitable being and prone to express his feelings forcibly, having absorbed from the Indians none of their stolid taciturnity. He is generally good natured and hospitable, and responds quickly to anything said or done which shews appreciation of his country and its ways. Private friendship or family relationship have a great effect on his conduct, and often an undue effect, for one is everywhere told that the difficulty of securing justice in these republics lies not so much in the corruptibility of judges, as in their tendency to be influenced by personal partiality. Things go by favour.
These contrasts of temperament between North and South Americans give rise to different tastes and a different view of life, so that, broadly speaking, the latter are not "sympathetic" either to the former or to Englishmen.134 To say that they are antipathetic would be going too far, for there is nothing to make unfriendliness, nor, indeed, is there any unfriendliness. But both North Americans and Englishmen are built on lines of thought and feeling so different from those which belong to South Americans that the races do not draw naturally together, and find it hard to appreciate duly one another's good qualities.135
The use of nicknames has a certain significance. In South America a North American or Englishman is popularly called a "Gringo," as in North America a person speaking Italian or Spanish or Portuguese is vulgarly called a "Dago." Neither term has any eulogistic flavour.
Thus we return to the question whence we started, and ask again whether there is any sort of unity or community in the two Americas. Are the peoples of these continents a group by themselves, nearer to one another than they are to other peoples, possessing a common character, common ties of interest and feeling? Or does the common American name mean nothing more than mere local juxtaposition beyond the Atlantic? Is it, in fact, anything more than a historical accident?
The answer would seem to be that Teutonic Americans and Spanish Americans have nothing in common except two names, the name American and the name Republican. In essentials they differ as widely as either of them does from any other group of peoples, and far more widely than citizens of the United States differ from Englishmen, or than Chileans and Argentines differ from Spaniards and Frenchmen.
Nevertheless, juxtaposition has induced contact, though a contact which we shall find to have been rather political than intellectual or social. It is worth while to examine the attitude of each to the other.
When the Spanish colonies revolted136 against the Crown of Spain, the sympathy of the United States went out to them profusely, and continued with them throughout the war and long after. Their victories were acclaimed as victories won for freedom and for America, and children were called after the name of Simon Bolivar, whose exploits in Venezuela had early fixed upon him the attention of the world, and have given him a fame possibly beyond his merits.
The struggling colonists were cheered by this as by the similar sympathy that came to them from England. They were, as already observed, grateful for the support given them by the diplomacy of Canning and John Quincy Adams, and when they framed their constitutions, took that of the United States for their model. Their regard for the United States, and confidence in its purposes, never quite recovered the blow given by the Mexican War of 1846 and the annexation of California; but this change of sentiment did not affect the patronage and good-will extended to them by the United States, whose people, and for a time the English Whigs also, maintained their touching faith that countries called republics must needs be graced by republican virtues and were entitled to favour whenever they came into collision with monarchies. This tendency of mind, natural in the days when the monarchies of continental Europe were more or less despotic, has begun to die down of late years, as educated men have come to look more at things than at names, and as United States statesmen found themselves from time to time annoyed by the perversity or shiftiness of military dictators ruling Spanish-American countries. The big nation has, however, generally borne such provocations with patience, abusing its strength less than the rulers of the little ones abuse their weakness. For many years after the achievement by the Spanish colonies of their independence, a political tie between them and the United States was found in the declared intention of the latter to resist any attempt by European Powers either to overthrow republican government in any American state or to attempt annexation of its territory. So long as any such action was feared from Europe, the protection thus promised was welcome, and the United States felt a corresponding interest in their clients. But circumstances alter cases. To-day, when apprehensions of the old kind have vanished, and when some of the South American states feel themselves already powerful, one is told that they have begun to regard the situation with different eyes. "Since there are no longer rain-clouds coming up from the east, why should a friend, however well-intentioned, insist on holding an umbrella over us? We are quite able to do that for ourselves if necessary." In a very recent book by one of the most acute and thoughtful of North American travellers, there occurs a passage which presents this view: —
"Many a Chileno and Argentino resents the idea of our Monroe Doctrine applying in any sense to his country and declares that we had better keep it at home. He regards it as only another sign of our overweening national conceit: and on mature consideration it does seem as though the justification for the doctrine both in its original and in its present form had passed. Europe is no longer ruled by despots who desire to crush the liberties of their subjects. As is frequently remarked, England has a more democratic government than the United States. In all the leading countries of Europe the people have practically as much to say about the government as they have in America. There is not the slightest danger that any European tyrant will attempt to enslave the weak republics of this hemisphere. Furthermore, such republics as Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, Chile, and Peru, no more need our Monroe Doctrine to keep them from being robbed of their territory by European nations, than does Italy or Spain. If it be true that some of the others, like the notoriously lawless group in Central America, need to be looked after by their neighbours, let us amend our outgrown Monroe Doctrine, as already suggested by one of our writers on International Law, so as to include in the police force in the Western Hemisphere those who have shown themselves able to practise self-control."137
There is truth in this. The talk often heard in the United States about the Doctrine has injured and is injuring her influence in South America. It excites suspicion and alarm. It is taken to imply an intent to claim a sort of protectorate over the other American republics, than which nothing could more offend Spanish-American sentiment. The wisest among American foreign ministers, such as Mr. Hay and Mr. Root, are those who have least frequently referred to the Doctrine. To examine this subject, however, would lead me into the field of politics, and with politics I have nothing to do, seeking only to indicate the influences of interest, of intellectual affinity, and of temperamental sympathy which draw the peoples of Spanish America towards one or other of the great peoples of the Northern Hemisphere.138
As regards the United States there is a balance between attraction and suspicion. The South Americans desire good relations, and recognize the value of her diplomatic action in trying to preserve peace between those of their republics whose smouldering enmities often threaten to burst into flame. On the other hand, as already observed, they are jealous of their own dignity, not at all disposed to be patronized, and quick to resent anything bordering on a threat, even when addressed, not to themselves, but to some other republic. It is as the disinterested, the absolutely disinterested and unselfish, advocate of peace and good will, that the United States will have most influence in the Western Hemisphere, and that influence, gently and tactfully used, may be of incalculable service to mankind.
The matters in which these republics are wont to imitate or draw lessons from the United States are education, especially scientific and technical education, and engineering. Of the influence upon their constitutions of the North American Federal Constitution I have already spoken. Their publicists continue to follow with attention the decisions given upon the application of its principles to new conditions as they arise, and attach value to the opinions of North American international jurists. Otherwise, there is little intellectual affinity, and still less temperamental sympathy. The South Americans do not feel that the name "American" involves any closer community or co-operation with the great Teutonic republic of the north than it does with any other people or peoples. They are just as much a race or group of peoples standing by themselves as if the lands they occupy had been that entirely detached continent out in the southern seas, supposed to lie far away from all other continents, to which the name of Amerigo Vespucci was first applied.
With whom, then, have the Spanish Americans real affinities of mental and moral constitution? With the peoples of southern Europe. If anyone likes to call them the "Latin" peoples,139 there is no harm in the term so long as it does not seem to ignore the fact that there exist the greatest differences between Italians and Frenchmen and Spaniards, for whoever has studied the history and the literature of those peoples knows that it is only the existence of still more marked differences between them and the Teutonic peoples that makes them seem to resemble one another.
It might be supposed that the relations of the Spanish Americans would be most close with their motherland, Old Spain. But these relations are not intimate, and have never been so since the War of Independence. Even in those old colonial days when the ports were closed to all but Spanish vessels, in order to stop all trade, export and import, except with the mother country, the days when Englishmen and Dutchmen were detested as heretics, and Frenchmen as dangerous rivals, there was an undercurrent of anti-Spanish feeling. It was chiefly due to the practice of reserving all well-paid posts for natives of Spain. The criollos, as they were called, men born in the colonies, were naturally envious of the strangers, and resented their own exclusion and disparagement. They suffered in many ways, economic as well as sentimental, both from laws issued in Spain and from authority exercised on the spot by men from Europe who did not share their sentiments, treated them as socially inferior, and flouted their local opinion. Accordingly, when the separation came, there was less sense of the breaking of a family tie than there had been among the North American colonists in the earlier stages of their revolution. This antagonism to Spanish government was, of course, accentuated and envenomed by the long duration of the struggle for independence, which in Peru lasted for fifteen years, and in the course of which many severities were exercised by the governors and generals who fought for the Crown. As for the Indians, the oppressions they suffered and the memory of the hideous cruelties with which the rebellion of Tupac Amaru was suppressed, made the name of Spain hateful to them. After the flag of Castile had ceased to fly anywhere on the continent, and the last Spanish officials had departed, there were few occasions for communication of any kind. Spain herself was in a depressed and distracted state for many years after 1825. There is to-day little trade between her and the New World, nor is there, except to Mexico and Argentina, any large Spanish immigration. Where it does exist, it is valued, for the men who come from northern Spain (as most settlers do) are of excellent quality.
Family ties between colonists and the motherland had, moreover, become few or loose. Seldom in Spanish America does one hear anyone speak of the place his ancestors came from, as one constantly hears North Americans talk of the English village where are the graves of their forefathers. Seldom do South Americans or Mexicans seem to visit Spain, either to see her ancient cities and her superb pictures or to study her present economic problems. They do not feel as if they had much to learn from her governmental methods, and her modern literature has apparently little message for them. For the Spanish Americans there seems to be no Past at all earlier than their own War of Independence. In all these respects the contrast between the position of Spain towards South America and that of Britain towards North America strikes an Englishman with surprise. If that revival in Spanish literature and art, of which there have recently been signs, should continue, and if Spanish commerce should develop, the position may change, for the tie of language will always have its importance.
I may add in this connection that among the educated classes of Spanish America one finds few signs of that sort of interest in the history of Old Spain which the best North Americans take in the history of England. The former have no link of free institutions brought from the old soil to flourish in a new one. Is it because the Conquistadores were Spaniards, or because many of their deeds shock modern consciences, or because it is felt that to honour them would be an offence to Indian sentiment, faint as that sentiment is in Mexico and still fainter in Peru, that there are in Spanish America no statues or other honorific memorials of these brilliant and terrible figures? Even the statue of Queen Isabella the Catholic, which stood in Havana, was shipped back to Spain after the independence of Cuba had been declared in 1898. There is no monument to Cortes in Mexico, nor to Pizarro in Lima, nor (so far as I know) any statue of any of his companions except one of Pedro de Valdivia, set up on the hill of Santa Lucia in Santiago, where he built his fort and founded the capital of Chile. On the other hand, Cuahtémoc or Guatemozin, the last of the Aztec kings,140 has a fine statue in the park that lies between the city of Mexico and the castle palace of Chapultepec, and the name of Caupolican, the Araucanian chieftain whom the Spaniards shot to death with arrows, like St. Sebastian, is about to be commemorated by a charitable foundation at Temuco in Chile.
Between Italy and Latin America there never were any direct relations except, of course, ecclesiastical relations with Rome, until in recent years Italian immigrants began to pour into Argentina and southern Brazil. As many of these go backwards and forwards, and as swift lines of ocean steamers have been established between Buenos Aires and the ports of Italy, there is now a good deal of intercourse, but this has not so far led to any closer connection either political or intellectual. The Italian immigrants belong almost entirely to the scantily educated classes, and have brought with them little that is Italian except their language and their habits of industry. If, however, the Italians, who, in Argentina, are now nearly one-third of the population, do not too quickly lose their language and become assimilated to the native Argentines, these people may not only form an intellectual link between their old home and their new one, but may give an impetus to the progress of art and music, perhaps of literature also.
With England and Germany the commercial relations of most of the South American countries are close and constant. Nearly £300,000,000 sterling of British capital ($1,500,000,000) have been invested in railroads and otherwise in Argentina alone, besides very large sums in Uruguay, Brazil, and some of the lesser countries. Many Englishmen own ranches or farms in Argentina. Germans have done less in railroad construction and in the acquisition of landed properties, but they run lines of ocean steamers, and a great part of the commerce of the more progressive republics is now in their hands. They take more pains than do the English to master Spanish and understand the customs of the land. The German army and its arrangements are taken as a model for South American ministers and officers to follow, and a like deference is paid to the British navy and its methods. Upon thought and art and taste, however, neither of these countries exerts much influence. Though a certain number of Argentines, Chileans, and Brazilians can read English and a smaller number German, and though statesmen and serious students appreciate the English political system and the German administrative system, and follow the scientific work done in both countries, books in these languages are not widely read. The members of the English and German colonies in seaports like Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Rio, and Valparaiso are personally liked and respected, but they have not done much to popularize the ideas and habits and tastes of their countries. The mental quality and the views of life are essentially dissimilar. Between the peoples, there is little more than reciprocal good-will and what Thomas Carlyle calls the "cash nexus." English fashions are, however, followed in horse-racing and other branches of sport.
There remains France. Her influence may be traced to several causes. Though the North American Revolution of 1775–1783 had suggested to the Spanish Americans the idea of separation from their mother country, the French Revolution of 1789–1799 stirred their minds more deeply, and the literature produced in France, both before and during those years and still later, was the strongest and most novel intellectual force that had ever fallen on these previously backward countries, as well as upon those few colonists who visited Europe in the end of the eighteenth century. Severed by a violent shock from Spain, the Spanish Americans must needs turn elsewhere. French had for a century been the one foreign language which was learnt by men who learnt any foreign language. Whoever travelled to Europe needed it and the similarity of its vocabulary to their own made it easier for them than any Teutonic tongue. With England there was in those days very little intercourse, with Germany and the United States still less, for commerce was insignificant. Thus French established itself as what might be called the gateway to European thought. French literature has, moreover, a double attraction for the South Americans, including the Brazilians. It gratifies their fondness for graceful and pointed and rhetorical expression. Spaniards, like Frenchmen, love style, and French style has for them a peculiar charm. With a great liking for what they call "general ideas" they set less store by an accumulation of facts and an elaborate examination of them than do the Germans or the English, and prefer what may be called the French way of treating a subject. In short, they have an intellectual affinity for France, for the brightness of her ideas, the gaiety of her spirit, the finish of her literary methods, the quality of her sentiment.
Then there is Paris. When South Americans began to be rich enough to travel to Europe and enjoy themselves there, Paris became the Mecca of these pilgrims of pleasure. Many a wealthy Argentine landowner, many a Brazilian coffee planter, every dictator of a Caribbean republic who, like Guzman Blanco of Venezuela, has drawn from the public revenues funds to invest in European securities, goes to the metropolis of fashion and amusement to spend his fortune there. All the young literary men, all the young artists who can afford the journey, flock thither. There is a large South American colony in Paris, and through it, as well as through books and magazines, the French drama and art, French ideas and tastes dominate both the fashionable and the intellectual world in the cities of South America. The writers of France have often claimed that there is something in the "French spirit," in their way of thinking and their way of expressing thought, which, distinctive of themselves as it is, has, nevertheless, a sort of universality, or an adaptability to the minds of all men, that has more than once in history given it an empire such as no other modern literature has enjoyed. In and for South America this claim has been made good, for here French influence reigns supreme.
All this has, of course, no more to do with the political relations of these republics to foreign powers than has the ownership of Argentine railways by British shareholders. But it is a further illustration of the fact that South America has nothing in common with Teutonic North America beyond the name and the form (in some countries an empty form) of institutions called republican. She is much nearer to being an Ibero-Celtic West European group of nations, planted far out in the midst of southern seas.
But can the South Americans really be classed among south or west European peoples? May they not be – if one can speak of them as a whole, ignoring the differences between Chileans, Argentines, and Brazilians – a new thing in the world, a racial group with a character all its own?
This is their own view of themselves. It would need more knowledge than I possess either to deny or to affirm it. They are all, except Argentines and Uruguayans, largely Indian or (in Brazil) African in blood. Even the Uruguayans and Argentines strike one as differing at least as much from Spaniards as North Americans differ from Englishmen. They give the impression of being still nations in the making, whose type or types, both the common type of all Spanish America and the special types of each nation, will grow more sharp and definite as the years roll on and as life becomes for them more rich and more intense.
When this happens and the world of A.D. 2000 recognizes a definite South American type (or types), may there be thence expected any distinctively new contribution to the world's stock of thought, of literature, of art? Each nation is in the long run judged and valued by the rest of the world more for such contributions than for anything else. There is a sense in which Shakespeare is a greater glory to England than the empire of India. Homer and Virgil, Plato and Tacitus are a gift made by the ancient world to all the ages, more precious, because more enduring, than any achievements in war, or government, or commerce. The opportunities for the growing up of new nations with creative gifts specifically their own seem to be getting few because the world is getting full; there is no more room for new nations.
That there is vitality and virility in the Spanish-American peoples appears from the number of strong, bold, forceful men who have figured in their history, including one the Mexican Juarez, of pure, and many of mixed, Indian blood. Few, indeed, have shewn that higher kind of greatness which lies in the union of large constructive ideas with decisive energy in action, the Napoleonic or Bismarckian gift. In most of the republics, political conditions have been so unstable as to give little scope for constructive statesmanship. Still there is no want of vigour, and it is something to have produced in San Martin one truly heroic figure in whom brilliant military and political talents were united to a lofty and disinterested character.
If Latin America has not yet produced any thinker or poet or artist even of the second rank, this will not surprise anyone who knows what was her condition before the War of Independence and what it has been from that time till recent years. Could any one of those ancient sages whom Dante heard in Limbo, speaking with voices sweet and soft, have been brought back to earth and permitted to survey Europe as it was in the welter of the tenth century, such an one might have thought that art and letters, as well as freedom and order, had forever vanished from the earth. Yet out of that welter what glories of art and letters were to arise.