CHAPTER XV
THE CONDITIONS OF POLITICAL LIFE IN SPANISH AMERICA
It is not my purpose to describe or discuss either the political institutions or the practical politics of the South American states. Even with a fuller knowledge of them than I was able to acquire in the short time at my disposal it would have been difficult for me to treat of them with the requisite freedom. But that which a traveller who has been the recipient of many courtesies may do without offence, and that which even a limited knowledge may qualify him to do, is to present a summary account of those physical, economic, and social features of the South American countries which are the basis of its political life, and constitute the conditions under which that life has to be carried on. Whoever has seen and understands these, realizing how altogether different they are from those of any European country, will find himself able to judge the troubled history and the present prospects of these states more fairly than those can do who apply to them a West European or a North American standard. The maxim, "To comprehend everything is to pardon everything," goes too far, but such truth as belongs to it is eminently applicable to these countries. One must know their conditions before attempting to pass judgment on their defects.
When republican governments sprang up on Central and South American soil as the authority of Spain was slowly swept away from one region after another, those governments were eagerly welcomed by European Liberals and still more effusively acclaimed by the people of the United States. The latter found in them a double source of satisfaction. Their appearance meant the disappearance of an old enemy, and their democratic institutions were a tribute of imitation to the success of popular government in the United States, where people still believed that there could be no freedom under a monarchy. Though this sympathy of the North Americans long continued to be extended to the new republics, especially when they came into collision with any European power, the friends of freedom in Europe presently lost interest in communities which were not reflecting credit upon democracy; and European writers of the opposite school soon began to point to them as shocking examples of liberty that had degenerated into license and violence. The last Spanish troops left the American continent in 1826. Decade after decade passed with no signs of improvement. Revolutions and dictators succeeded one another so quickly, and seemed to mean so little, that after a while the only Europeans who followed the fortunes of South America were the bondholders whose loans remained unpaid. The financial credit as well as the political character of the new states fell very low. Newspapers ridiculed them. Conservative statesmen and cloistered political philosophers drew warnings from them. Sir Henry Maine, one of the most brilliant writers of the last generation, in his ingenious, but elusive and unsatisfying, book on Popular Government, whenever he seeks to supply a link or point an epigram in his long indictment of democracy, constantly refers to the South American republics as instances of its failure in this or that respect. Yet such a line of argument is really no more legitimate than that of the enthusiastic North Americans who were prepared to defend the government of any South American country that called itself a republic. Both the assailant and the apologist looked only at the name, and did not stop to enquire into the thing. Sir Henry Maine's reasonings were valid against those who held, as did the North Americans, that the name of republic is enough to ensure good government, but valid against them only. There are always people ready to assume that things are what they are called, because it is much easier to deal with names than to examine facts. Paraguay under the military tyrannies of Francia and the elder and younger Lopez was called a republic and had a republican constitution.141 The same was true of Venezuela under the tyrannies of Guzman Blanco and of Castro. Were Paraguay and Venezuela, therefore, true republics, entitled to the sympathy which democrats give to "governments deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"? If they were, then arguments drawn from the misdeeds of Lopez and Castro are good arguments against the champions of republican or democratic government. If they were not, then the sympathy felt by North Americans for these so-called republics is groundless, and the incidents of their history prove nothing either for or against democracy. It is a mere question of names, and not of things.
Throwing names aside, let us go to the facts. I shall have to speak of these states as republics, because they are so called, but the term is meant not to describe, but only to denote. Europeans have been wont until lately to lump all of them in a general condemnation. That was always unjust, and is still more unjust now than it was formerly. There is as great a difference between the best and the worst of them as there is between the best and the worst of European monarchies. Some of them are true republics in the European sense, countries in which the constitutional machinery is a reality and not a sham. Others are petty despotisms, created and maintained by military force. In the fairly large class which lies between these two groups, the machinery works, but more or less irregularly and imperfectly. The legislature has some influence as an expression of public opinion; the rights of individuals to personal safety and to property receive some respect; the application and enforcement of the law, though uncertain, are not subjected to the arbitrary will of the executive.
To enquire into the causes which have determined the history of the Spanish-American states as a whole, and prevented them from realizing the hopes that gilded their birth ninety years ago, would be a long and serious undertaking, too large for this book. What may, however, be done concisely is to indicate the conditions under which independent political life had to begin in the lands that had thrown off the dominion of Spain. I will place these conditions in five classes: —
I. Physical or geographical conditions.
II. Racial conditions.
III. Economic and social conditions.
IV. Historical conditions belonging to the Colonial period.
V. Historical conditions attending the struggle for independence.
I. Physical Conditions.– In nearly all the republics the population was and is small in proportion to the area, and in most of them communication across this thinly peopled area is hindered by mountains or deserts or forests. Colombia, for instance, with a territory of 435,000 square miles (more than twice the size of France) has only ten persons to the square mile (whereas France has nearly two hundred), and is so intersected by lofty and heavily wooded ranges that most parts of it are accessible only by long and difficult journeys along mule paths. Bolivia, three times the size of France, has only three and a half persons to the square mile, and its few towns, only one of which has more than twenty-five thousand inhabitants, are separated by long spaces of wilderness. Peru is cut up by the numerous chains of the Andes into narrow valleys, each of which has little intercourse with the others. In such countries – and this applies to nearly all of them – there is, and there can be, very little public opinion common to the nation, because the means of intercommunication are defective and slow. Officials representing the central government cannot easily be supervised or controlled. When local discontent exists, it may find no constitutional vent, because the legislature is distant and cannot be got to understand the situation. When a revolt breaks out, it may spread fast, and become formidable before any adequate force can be collected and despatched to the spot to suppress it. All these conditions also prevent the growth of a press capable of informing and aiding the growth of opinion. Nothing but an efficient system of popular local self-government could secure good administration under such conditions, and the rule of such a public opinion as England and the United States possess becomes almost impossible, because people know little either of one another, or of current questions, or of the conduct of their representatives sent to the capital. Patriotism there may be, and passion may be excited far and wide over the country by some event touching the honour or the supposed interest of the nation, but there can hardly be that controlling influence of the whole people which is needed in free governments to keep the rulers steady and to impress upon them a sense of responsibility.
II. Racial Conditions.– It has been shewn in an earlier chapter that in all the republics, except Argentina and Uruguay, the native Indians and the mestizos form a large element in the population. In Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Paraguay, the pure Indians are a majority of the whole. In Chile the poorer class is practically all mestizo; in Venezuela and Colombia and Panama, there are few pure Europeans. Speaking little or no Spanish, the Indians constitute a practically distinct nation. They have nothing to do with the white people, except in so far as they pay rent or work for employers. By the constitution they are, in many states, citizens and have votes. But they have never heard of the constitution and they never think of voting, having, although free, no more to do with the government than the slaves had in the southern United States before the Civil War.
Bolivia, though its population is not so preponderatingly aboriginal as that of Paraguay, furnishes a good instance. The Indians, mostly Aymarás, are either tillers of the soil, or engaged in the transportation of goods by mule or llama, or are artisans of the ruder sort. They are entirely illiterate. Nominally Catholics, their religion is the primitive spirit worship of their ancestors with a varnish of Christian forms and the cult of Christian saints. Politics are left entirely to a few Spaniards and mestizos living in four or five towns, each of which, in default of a common interest and general public opinion, is obliged to try to get as much as it can for itself. Thus, politically regarded, the Bolivian nation of two millions shrinks to some thousands. A few thousands gathered into one city may give a vigorous life to a genuine republic, as happened in many a city of ancient Greece and mediæval Italy; but where citizens are scattered over many thousands of square miles, without railways to bring them together and newspapers to convey the ideas of each group to the other, democratic government becomes scarcely possible. What all sections of such a population can do is to fight, for defects that unfit them to be voters do not unfit them to be soldiers. The aboriginal races of the central and northern Andes have not that love of fighting for its own sake which the Aztecs or the Araucanians had. But they have little fear of death and can be readily forced or tempted to swell the forces of a revolting general. Although in Venezuela, Colombia, and Panama, the proportion of whites and mestizos is larger, the general result is the same, for the vast majority of the people are illiterate and qualified only for the fighting side of public life.142
Some may conceive that the racial facts of the country are unfavourable in a further way. That an admixture of the blood of a backward race must injure the white element, is a view which suggests itself naturally to European pride. There are even persons who assume that the Indo-European or so-called Aryan races are superior to others – a gratuitous assumption, for there are three non-Aryan races in Europe, the average members of which are equal in talent and character to the average members of the other peoples among whom they dwell.143 It is, of course, possible that the Spanish race has suffered by intermarriage with Indians, but who can tell how much of the difference between the Spaniards of Old Spain and those of Peru or Venezuela is due to blood, how much to climatic and other local conditions? One high Chilean authority thinks his countrymen all the better for having reinforced their stock from the hardy Indians of the south.144
There are also those who carry race disparagement still further and hold that the Spanish or "Iberian" races are unfitted for constitutional government, in company, it would appear, with the Celtic and Slavonic and all others except the favoured Teutons. This doctrine is not worth discussing, because it cannot be brought to any test of history, and it is history alone that enables us to test such theories. The collapse in the sixteenth century of that free constitutional government for which there seemed at one time to be almost as good a chance in Spain as there was in contemporary England, can be explained by causes altogether irrespective of race. It is not in the hypothetical inferiority of any pure or any mixed race that the importance of race questions for South America lies, but in the fact that the existence in the same state of different races, speaking different languages, prevents that homogeneity and solidarity of the community which are almost indispensable conditions to the success of democratic government.145
III. Economic and Social Conditions.– Economic phenomena and social phenomena may be considered together, because the latter depend largely on the former. All the republics except Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, of which I shall speak presently, are poor countries, not that natural resources are wanting, but that these have been so imperfectly developed as to bring little wealth to the native population. Almost the only fortunes made in them are made by foreigners or foreign companies who have got concessions for mines, or have bought plantations, because there is very little native capital and not much talent or experience to work mines or develop estates.146 The land, it is true, belongs to large proprietors, but they do not form a class of men who, having a common and solid interest in the country, constitute a sort of natural aristocracy, concerned to preserve order, and make the government stable. Similarly, there is only a small native class of substantial business men, with a like interest in public tranquillity and good administration. The want of local capital has left the larger industrial and financial enterprises to foreigners. It is better that the country should be developed by foreign capital than that it should not be developed at all, yet we may regret that what is gained in the way of experience as well as of money is not gained for the people of the country. That which Europeans call a "lower middle class," composed of shopkeepers and skilled artisans, is small, and the towns in which it exists are so few and far apart from one another, that it has been hitherto a feeble political factor. Lastly, the agricultural population consists in some states largely, in others almost entirely, of those ignorant aborigines who have no sense of their interest in progress or good government. The absence of that class of intelligent small landowners, which is the soundest and most stable element in the United States and in Switzerland, and is equally stable, if less politically trained, in France and parts of Germany, is a grave misfortune for South and Central America. What is wanting in these countries is a sufficient number of citizens who have no personal ends to secure, and nothing to get out of government, except good administration, but whose interest in such administration is intelligent enough and strong enough to rouse them to their civic duty. Public spirit and an active participation in public life without the prospect of such private gains as professional politicians make out of politics, – that and nothing else is what provides in every country the public opinion needed to guide and control the ruling authorities of a state.
It may be said that nowhere in the world can we expect ideal conditions for popular governments. Such governments have existed and have attained creditable results in countries where both physical conditions and racial conditions might have seemed unfavourable, because the people possessed the gifts and the training that enable the rule of the people to succeed.
Admitting this to be true, it raises the question whether those who were summoned to govern the new republics that emerged from the War of Independence did possess, and could have been expected to possess, the requisite gifts and the training. Such gifts are not natural. They are the result of a people's previous career and of experience gained therein. What, then, had been the history of the colonial dominion of Spain and what sort of practice in government had the Crown allowed to its Spanish-American subjects?
This brings us to a fourth branch of the enquiry, – viz.: —
IV. Historical Conditions during the Colonial Period.– The Spanish Conquerors of the New World were men of extraordinary audacity and energy. No such forcible individualities had been seen in the world since the Norsemen of the tenth century and their children, the Normans, of the eleventh. They were, however, loyally submissive to the Spanish Crown and never thought of asking for, or of setting up for themselves, any self-governing institutions. Neither did the Spanish Crown ever think of granting such institutions. Those which existed in Castile had just disappeared; but even had they continued, it is improbable that any idea of reproducing them in the colonies would have been entertained. The English Crown granted charters to the companies which undertook colonization in North America, and the settlers themselves were soon organized by counties in Virginia, by townships and counties in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Forms of local self-government more effective than those which then existed in England were in full working order in those colonies, all through the eighteenth century, until they separated from the mother country. But everywhere in Spanish America the authority of the viceroy, or captain-general, or Audiencia and their subordinate officers, was paramount, and covered the whole field. There were no elected assemblies or elected officials. All power came from above; the people had nothing to do with administration, and were not enough permitted to subject it to public criticism. The only exception was furnished by the sort of municipal council in the towns which was called a Cabildo or Ayuntamiento, and the members of which, while in a few towns freely elected by the householders, or perhaps by the more substantial householders, were in others nominated, and often nominated because they had bought the nomination. The despotic power of a viceroy or other governor was, of course, restrained by the instructions he received and by the laws which the Crown enacted for the colonies, and to some extent also both by the ecclesiastical magnates and by local sentiment. But there were no responsibilities devolved on the people, and no machinery in and by which they could acquire any training in public affairs. In the English North American colonies the management of church affairs belonged to the laity as well as to the clergy; and the New England Congregational churches in particular, founded on the principles of liberty, became direct exponents of popular feeling. In the Spanish colonies the Roman Church represented the principle of authority, and impressed it on the minds of the laity by all the sanctions she possessed. All books and publications of every kind were subjected to a searching ecclesiastical censorship; and the right of freely expressing opinion either by speech or in writing was steadily denied.
V. Historical Conditions at the Close of the War of Independence.– Thus, when the revolt from Spain threw all power into the hands of the people, the people were unfit to exercise it. It was easy to frame constitutions modelled on that of the United States. But who were the people and what did they know about the working of free governments? What was the capacity of the citizens whose votes were to choose legislatures, and of what sort of persons were the legislatures to be composed?
Ten or twelve years of fighting against Spanish troops, years in which there had been many severities and cruelties perpetrated on each side, had accustomed everybody to violence and had made soldiers the only leaders. Everyone's mind was full of dreams of liberty, but no one knew how to secure it by coupling liberty with law. Even in the United States the first years after the acknowledgment of the independence of the thirteen colonies had been marked by so many errors and so much legislative weakness that the constitutional convention of 1787 was regarded by the wisest men of the time as a last chance for saving the nation. Yet the North American states were carrying on governments which had existed for several generations and following principles which their forefathers had established in England five centuries before. Small wonder that among the Spanish Americans, who had no experience at all in the most complicated of all human undertakings, – the conducting of government by the will of the majority, but according to settled law and with due respect to the rights of the minority, – small wonder that legislatures were not honestly elected, that, when elected, they wasted time in vain debates and neglected business, that each party in turn drove out its opponents or cowed them by violence, that debts were recklessly contracted and left unpaid, that the government remained one not of laws, but of men, and those men mostly military adventurers at the head of armed bands.
The inhabitants, accustomed to be ruled by others in State and in Church, had never been given a chance of learning to think of government as their own business nor of themselves as responsible for public order. When a long and sanguinary war had destroyed the habit of obedience to constituted authority, they were remitted – constitution or no constitution – to that primitive state of things in which force prevails. There being often either no authority de iure, or one too feeble to protect those who appealed to it, authority de facto had to be recognized, and the notion of legal right and legal duty vanished. It must be remembered that these were small and scattered communities, in each of which there were but few men who were at once law-abiding and intelligent, able to impose some check on the partisans of one or the other of the adventurers who were fighting for power. The parties were usually factions following the banner of a particular chief. Only one set of controversies raising questions of principle emerged from time to time in one republic or another, those that turned on the property and claims of the Church. Other issues were usually either local or personal, seldom economic, hardly ever racial.
Several thoughtful South Americans in the days of the Revolution perceived that their countries were not fit for democracy. The illustrious San Martin favoured a republican government based on a limited suffrage; and Bolivar himself desired to be life president of a confederation of states. Apart, however, from the difficulty of proposing constitutions which would have excluded a large part of those whose arms had secured independence, the enthusiasm for liberty that prevailed and the rapturous belief that liberty was enough to secure peace and prosperity, prescribed democratic arrangements, and it was only in later struggles between rival parties that some leader would enact qualifications calculated to exclude his opponents. Everywhere the system of vesting executive power in a president holding office for a term of years was adopted. It seemed the simplest plan, and was recommended by the example of the United States, but it set up a tempting prize for ambition and generally led straight to dictatorship. Bad men abused it to enrich themselves or their friends, good men found that the quickest and possibly the only way to carry out the reforms which the country needed was to stretch their constitutional authority. High-minded and public-spirited rulers were not wanting, but they could not, with the best will in the world, create the materials for a true democracy.
Whoever travels through these countries, – I include Mexico and Central America, but not Chile or Argentina, of which more anon, – and whoever, having thus obtained some knowledge of their physical and racial character, studies their history, finds himself driven to three conclusions. The first is that these states never have been democracies in any real sense of the word. The second is that they could not have been real democracies. To expect peoples so racially composed, very small peoples, spread over a vast area, peoples with no practice in self-government, to be able to create and work democratic institutions was absurd, though the experience which their history has furnished to the world was needed to demonstrate the absurdity. The third conclusion is that injustice is done to the Spanish Americans by censures and criticisms which ignore these fundamental facts. There is no more Original Sin among them than there is in other peoples. Many of their statesmen and generals were honest patriots, who loved liberty and sought to give their country as much liberty as it was capable of then receiving. It was neither their fault nor the fault of the people that the conditions then existing made real representative and responsible government impracticable. The constitutions did not suit the facts, and the facts had to prevail against the constitutions, sometimes against their letter, usually against their spirit. When voters were obviously unfit to elect, and when fair elections could not be secured, it was not wonderful that power should be seized without legal title, or that an election should be so controlled by force or arranged and put through by fraud, that while the form of it was respected, it did not express any popular will. When one party had done these things, the other party repeated the process as soon as it had a chance, and thereafter things moved round in the same vicious circle.
Why does the machinery of constitutional government work smoothly in Switzerland and the United States and England? Because its forms, being consecrated by tradition and supported by public opinion, are respected by the officials who have to work them. In these South American republics, there were no traditions, and very little public opinion; and this was due not to any inborn defects of the people, but to historical causes which had deprived them of such advantages as the Swiss possess and had given them constitutions quite unfitted to their case.
If the democratic frames of government they adopted were unsuitable, what other frames would have been suitable? Bolivar desired a sort of elective life monarchy, to be sure with himself as monarch. San Martin (as already observed) preferred an oligarchic republic. Either might have been better than what was actually taken. An "honest" oligarchy, i. e. one professing to be what it really is; may be – doubtless is – better than a sham democracy. In a country where only a minority – perhaps a small minority – of the citizens are capable of taking part in the government, it may be safer legally to recognize them as the governing class, and thus bring theory into accord with facts, rather than that the divergence of facts from theory should prove an irresistible temptation to force or fraud. This, however, remains matter for speculation, since no country has permanently established elective monarchy, and few have embodied oligarchical provisions in their constitutions. Let it be added that the better or worse political condition of these states has seldom turned upon the extent to which the suffrage has been granted, for in those where violent methods prevail, the result would be the same whether the number of voting citizens were great or small.
Although for the sake of conciseness I have spoken of these republics as a whole, the remarks made being more or less applicable to them all, still there are marked differences between those which have advanced and are advancing and others whose political health seems little better now than it was fifty years ago. We may distinguish three classes of states. The first consists of those in which republican institutions, purporting to exist legally, are a mere farce, the government being, in fact, a military despotism, more or less oppressive and corrupt, according to the character of the ruler, but carried on for the benefit of the Executive and his friends. The second includes countries where there is a legislature which imposes some restraint upon the executive and in which there is enough public opinion to influence the conduct of both legislature and executive. In these states the rulers, though not scrupulous in their methods of grasping power, recognize some responsibility to the citizens and avoid open violence or gross injustice. The third class are real republics, in which authority has been obtained under constitutional forms, not by armed force, and where the machinery of government works with regularity and reasonable fairness, laws are passed by elected bodies under no executive coercion, and both administrative and judicial work goes on in a duly legal way.
Instances of the first class are too familiar to need mention. By far the worst is Hayti. The most striking example of the second class was Mexico under the government of President Porfirio Diaz. The government of that statesman, one of the most remarkable men of our time, was autocratic. His power had been won by fighting, but was maintained under legal forms. The legislature obeyed him implicitly. Elections were managed by his government, and that with little difficulty because, until 1910, when his hold had begun to be shaken, no one ventured to vote against him. His personal superiority to all the vulgar temptations was recognized and admired. His ministers talked to the Chambers, but took their orders from him alone. His policies were directed to the material development of the country by the construction of railways, the encouragement of manufactures, the opening up of mines and extension of irrigation. Order was maintained by a rural police formed out of former bandits, who by having been enrolled, disciplined, and regularly paid became useful members of society. The lure to conquest which the weakness of the republics to the south held out was firmly resisted, and only a moderate army maintained. Under this régime the country was advancing rapidly in wealth and a class of persons interested in order and prosperity was being formed. Had the President, when old age arrived, been able to find someone like himself to whom he could have handed over the reins, prosperity and order would doubtless have continued. The sort of government he gave the country was probably what best suited it.147 The Indian population, constituting a majority, were (though naturally intelligent) obviously unfit for civic functions. The uneducated mass of the mestizos were almost equally so. An oligarchic government, formed out of the richer class, would have furnished a less efficient administration, and would probably, after some years of quarrelling, have given place to a military chief.