Of the third class good examples may be found in Chile and Argentina, both of which are bona fide republics. Chile is of all the Latin-American states the one which best answers to European or North American notions of a free constitutional commonwealth, one of the chief reasons being that her population is unusually homogeneous and unusually concentrated within a comparatively small area. Northern Chile is an arid desert, southern Chile a forest wilderness, but in the centre there is an area five hundred miles long by fifty wide within which the large majority of her 3,300,000 citizens dwell. The suffrage is limited, and governing power is practically in the hands of a comparatively small landed aristocracy, and a few lawyers. Government, including what we called the party game, is carried on with the same spirit and by the same methods as it was in England during the eighteenth century, allowing for the differences between a monarchy and a republic. There are constant changes in the ministers, but the machine works, and the general lines of national policy are preserved. There have been no revolutions within the living memory, but there was once a civil war. President Balmaceda, finding that he could not carry out his policies within the strict limits of his constitutional powers, exceeded them and defied the legislature. Each party, like the English Charles I and his Parliament, took up arms to fight out the question of right. Balmaceda, defeated in battle, put an end to his own life. He had the weaker legal case, but was a man with some ideas, quite above the common type of ambitious adventurer. After him, Chilean politics resumed their normal constitutional course. There were, in 1910, six parties, one Conservative and five Liberal sections, the latter sometimes acting together, sometimes divided. The level of capacity, as well as of eloquence, is high, and so is the national spirit of the people.
Argentina has had a more troubled and more sanguinary history than Chile, and has more recently emerged from among the breakers into smooth water. Sixty years ago she had in Rosas a tyrant as cruel as Barrios of Guatemala and as bloodthirsty as Lopez of Paraguay, and even later, civil wars raged between the people of Buenos Aires and those of the northern states. But as the country began to be settled and railroads were made and labour was provided by the influx of Italian and Spanish immigrants and large cities sprang up, the effect of general prosperity was felt in a growing sense of the value of order and peace. Though the foreign merchants whose interests were involved took no direct part in politics, their influence was felt not only in promoting sounder finance, but in making the native men of substance feel that frequent revolutions were retarding the development of their properties. Thus, since 1893, there has been no armed civil strife of the old kind and the public tranquillity is now disturbed only by alarms similar to those which the spread and the violent methods of anarchism have caused in some parts of Europe. That flavour of militarism which was so strong in former years has now virtually disappeared. The administration is conducted by civilians, and is pervaded by a legal spirit. In short, Argentina is now, like Chile, a constitutional republic, whose defects, whatever they may be, are the defects of a republic, not of a despotism disguised under republican forms.
The examples of these two countries prove that there is nothing in South American air or Spanish blood to prevent republican institutions from working. If the working is not perfect, neither is it perfect anywhere else in the world. What these countries have shewn is that with favouring conditions the true constitutional spirit can be more and more infused into constitutional forms and the old habits of violence eradicated. The case of Argentina in particular suggests the process by which we may expect that other Latin-American states will, by degrees, advance towards a more settled and genuinely legal government. What is the first thing that is needed to enable any community to prosper? Is it not the desire for order and the respect for order, the sense that there must be a curb on the impulses and passions of individuals, some law duly enforced, some means of checking violence and of protecting life and property against physical force? This sense grows with the growth of property and with the development of industrial habits. The larger the number, and the greater the influence in a community, of those who feel that revolutions injure not only the country, but also themselves personally, the better is the prospect of breaking the revolutionary habit, for a public opinion grows up which condemns violence and actively opposes those who resort to it. Moreover, the more property there is and the more industry there is in a country, the smaller is the proportion of those who join in a revolution either from a love of fighting or in the hope of bettering their fortunes. In a prosperous country, more can be done and more is likely to be done for public instruction, one of the most urgent needs of these nations. Argentina's recent efforts in that direction are an instance, and education, if it does not make men good citizens, makes it at least easier for them to become so.
To speak of increasing wealth as a factor making for the political progress of a country may sound strange to those who in Europe and the United States see how the working of free institutions may be endangered and perverted by the corrupting influences of money and the money power. Nevertheless, according to the proverb, "One man's meat is another man's poison," there are stages in a nation's growth when it is so essential to establish security and give everybody a sense of the need for it, that whatever makes for security makes for progress. The heart is better than the pocket, but it is easier to fill the pocket than to purify the heart. The love of liberty is a nobler thing than the love of security, but sometimes the latter needs to be diffused before the former can have its perfect work.
It is true that the desire for order and security may lead men to submit willingly to arbitrary power. This has often happened since the days of Julius Cæsar and his nephew. But it has usually happened not because men have ceased to value liberty, but because, finding that they are failing to secure either security or liberty, they think it better to have one than to have neither.
There are, in Spanish America, some communities still so far from being capable of genuine popular self-government that the best thing for them is the strong rule of an able ruler which will give them prosperity through peace, shew them how to develop their resources, make them, by education and by better communications, a more homogeneous people. Those things done, such communities will, like Argentina, find themselves fitter to work free institutions. At present, under the rule of selfish adventurers and corrupt legislatures who are the tools of the adventurer, the conditions of progress are absent. Two or three of the South American republics – they are not among those which I saw – are still in this condition. The rule of a man like Porfirio Diaz would seem to give them the best chance of emerging from it. At present they advance neither morally nor materially.
Nevertheless, taking the eleven South American states as a whole, their condition is better than it was sixty years ago. In most of them the civil element has tended to grow and the military element to decline. The lawyer-politician is not always a law-abiding politician, yet on the whole preferable to the soldier-politician. His methods are less brutal. May not even a perversion of the law be a trifle better than a disregard of all law? Revolutions and civil wars have become less sanguinary; the execution of political opponents less frequent. Political assassinations, which in Europe have unhappily been growing more frequent,148 are now more rare here. The sort of savagery that existed in the days when Artigas, fighting for the independence of his country, used (according to the story) to sew up prisoners in oxhides by batches and roll them downhill into the river has long since passed away. Nor is it to be forgotten that there is extremely little brigandage or insecurity in most of these states, far less than there was a few years ago in Sicily. The ordinary citizen is little affected even by the revolutions which, where they occur, are carried on by a small part of the population. Perhaps if the ordinary citizen suffered more, revolutions would be fewer.
Ecclesiastical questions have been almost wholly eliminated from politics in all the larger and some of the smaller states, and religious liberty has been established on a basis not likely to be shaken. A long-standing and bitter cause of strife has thus been removed.
All the Spanish-American countries, even Paraguay, are now more open to the world than they used to be; and the currents of its opinion reach them in ever increasing volume. As few of them have peaceful political traditions of their own to guide or inspire them – when they invoke the past, it is the exploits of revolutionary heroes that are recalled – they must needs look to the thought and practice of the older nations for principles and precedents in the art of government; so whatever brings them into intellectual touch with Europe and North America is helpful. Already one discovers an increasing number of men who perceive that for their nations the only path upward and forward is through the creation of a spirit of self-control and a higher sense of civic duty.
To understand these countries, one must think of them as having, under the rule of the Spanish Crown and of the Church, dropped two centuries behind the general march of civilized mankind. When they were finally liberated in 1825, they were practically still in the seventeenth, while Europe and the United States were in the nineteenth, century, with the additional disadvantages of a large aboriginal population, a thinly peopled land, fifteen years of bloodshed and disorder, such as Europe had not seen for nigh three hundred years, and no preëxisting constitutional forms or usages. A few of them, favoured by physical or by racial conditions, have already overcome these difficulties. Their example will tell upon and encourage the rest.
In the middle of last century, when European Liberals, disappointed at the failure of their earlier hopes, had begun to pass a severe judgment on the peoples of these republics because freedom had not made them at once virtuous, happy, and prosperous, were not those Liberals themselves misled by their own too sanguine temper? Had they not too implicit a faith in the power of liberty? They ascribed all the faults of existing governments to the monarchies or oligarchies of the past and did not understand, having little experience of popular rule, how many faults in governments have been, and will continue to be, due not to their form, but to human nature itself. Since 1859, power has in many countries passed from the hands of the few into the hands of the many, but no millennium of virtue and peace has yet followed. There is still bitterness and discontent, there are still complaints that the law is not fair between classes, still a distrust of legislative bodies, still demands for an extension of direct popular control over the whole machinery of administration and, in North America, even over the judiciary. No sensible man proposes to go back to the absolutism and repression of the older time; but every sensible man feels that the problems of government are far more difficult than our grandfathers had perceived, and that men have still much to learn from a fuller experience. These things being so, ought not the judgment passed on the Spanish Americans to be more lenient? Their difficulties were greater than any European people had to face, and there is no need to be despondent for their future.
CHAPTER XVI
SOME REFLECTIONS AND FORECASTS
Whether it is well to rejoice that the population of our planet has grown so fast during the last century, even as the inhabitants of a city rejoice when a decennial census reveals a rapid growth in their city, is a question which may be deemed a branch of the larger one whether life is worth living. The fact, however, being unquestionable, raises a practical question. If the present rate of growth should continue for a few centuries, there presently will be little room left on the planet. What will then happen? During the nineteenth century the surface of the earth has been explored sufficiently to enable us to know how much of it is available for the production of food. Of that part which was available and unused in 1800 a great deal had been settled by 1900. In Europe there is no more land to be occupied, because the waste spaces of southern Russia have now been almost filled by settlers from the rest of that country. In the temperate parts of Asia, though there has been considerable Russian immigration into western Siberia and considerable Chinese immigration into Manchuria, there still remain in those countries large tracts unoccupied and not too dry for cultivation. In Australia it is still doubtful how much of the land whose aridity has discouraged settlement can be turned to account either for tillage or for pasture. In North America the immense rush to the West, which began after 1830 with the building of railways, has now filled nearly the whole of the United States, and a very large part of Canada, so that another forty or fifty years may see the country filled up as far as the frozen north. In Africa there are parts of Tunisia and Algeria which irrigation might reclaim, there are parts of Morocco which could support a larger population than now dwells in them, and there is also a limited highland area on the eastern side of the continent fit to be inhabited by men of European stock. The rest, including not only the Sahara, but most of the country south of the Tropic of Capricorn, is either arid desert, or else so hot and humid that it must be given up to the black races, who have so far shewn no capacity for settled industry when left to themselves. Thus, if we omit the tropical countries inhabited by savage peoples (central Africa and the islands of southeastern Asia), it will appear that, should the present increase of the civilized peoples be maintained, the rest of the world will not suffice for their agricultural expansion for more than a short period, that is to say, a period shorter than the four centuries which have elapsed since the outward movement of the European peoples began with the discovery of the New World.
What then of South America? Before dealing with it, let me advert to two considerations which may modify the conclusions suggested by any review of the total area now available to meet a continued growth of population.
May not intensive cultivation and the further developments of chemical science greatly increase the food-producing power of lands already occupied? Doubtless they may. They are doing so already. But such an increase cannot be expected to go on indefinitely. The urgency of the problem may be postponed, but the problem will remain ahead of us.
May not the rate of increase of the world's population decline, and perhaps go on declining until an equilibrium between that increase and food production has been reached? This is possible. Observations made during the last thirty years have already thrown grave doubts upon the propositions advanced by Malthus three generations ago which were for a long time taken as irrefragable. That the signs of decreasing birth-rate are so far visible only among some of the most advanced peoples is not a cheering circumstance, for what we must desire in the interests of mankind at large is that the more highly civilized races should increase faster than the more backward, so as to enable the former to prevail not merely by force, but by numbers and amicable influence. All these considerations, however, regarding birth-rate are still too uncertain to be allowed to affect any enquiries regarding future food supply and the regions from which it is to come. Whatever light the next few decades may throw upon the former question, the latter deserves to be investigated as a subject of growing significance.
And now we may return to South America, the only continent containing both a large temperate and a large tropical area capable of cultivation which still remains greatly underpeopled. It is, therefore, the chief resource to which the overpeopled countries may look as providing a field for their emigration, and to which the world at large may look as capable of reinforcing its food supply. That it has not been sooner occupied is due partly to the political disorders which have given it a bad name, partly to its being less accessible than North America. Both these adverse conditions no longer apply to its temperate regions.
Considered as a field for emigration, South America may be divided into three sections. There are, first, the tropical and forest-covered regions of Colombia, Venezuela, Guiana, and eastern Brazil; secondly, the temperate and grassy or wooded regions of Argentina, Uruguay, and southern Brazil outside the tropics; and lastly, the great central plain of the Amazon and its tributaries which the Brazilians call the Selvas (woods). I exclude altogether the mountainous parts of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, because they are already as well inhabited as they deserve to be. A very small part of them is fit for stock or for agriculture, and the climatic conditions (except in a few valleys) are repellent to persons not accustomed to great altitudes. Not even Italians can be expected to cultivate fields twelve thousand feet above sea-level.
The other three sections just mentioned are much underpeopled. The first is better fitted for negro or Indian labour than for that of whites, yet there are many parts of it where men of south European stock can work in the open air and thrive. In an area of about two millions of square miles, it has about seven and a half million inhabitants, of whom a small minority are pure whites, the rest Indians or negroes or mixed. Four or five times that number could easily find accommodation.
The second section is the one pre-eminently fitted to receive white men. Its area may be roughly conjectured at a million and a half of square miles, but so much of the Argentine part of it is desert that it would not be safe to reckon more than two-thirds of it as available for settlement. As there are now only twelve millions of people in this million of square miles, there is evidently plenty of room for more.
This is the part of South America which has drawn most immigrants during the last sixty years, southern Brazil leading the way, Argentina and Uruguay following. It is also the region which will chiefly continue to attract Europeans for many years to come.
In Argentina and most of Uruguay, as in the prairie states of North America and the Canadian Northwest, there are no trees to be felled, so the land, extremely fertile, can be brought under crops immediately. The estates are at present large, but if there were settlers with enough capital to buy small lots, these could soon be had, and already some Italians are establishing themselves as peasant cultivators.149 It is a country where the labour is at present small in proportion to the area utilized, partly because much of the land is in pasture, partly because its flatness makes the use of agricultural machinery specially easy, partly because the harvests are largely reaped by migratory Europeans who return home for part of the year. Nevertheless, after making all allowances, both Argentina and the other tracts I have referred to are capable, supposing immigration to continue at the present rate, of providing work and homes for immigrants for at least sixty or seventy years to come. Locusts are said to destroy the crop once in three or four years, but this plague is deemed likely to diminish as settlement and civilization extend northwards to the regions whence it now comes. The estimate that before the end of the century Argentina may have fifty, Uruguay ten, and southern Brazil thirty millions of people (assuming the birth-rate to be maintained) need not seem extravagant to anyone who knows how rapidly settlement has advanced in North America and who realizes that before long the stream of agricultural immigration will cease to flow into the United States and may slacken in its flow towards Canada.
The cultivable areas of Chile are relatively small; and the Chileans themselves seem to think they need more land for their national development. To one who travels through southern Chile there seems, however, to be still room for a greatly increased population in its well-watered valleys, which enjoy a delightful climate. The future of these four countries is assured, so far as the gifts of nature can assure it. The world will always want what they produce.
Far more doubtful is the future of the third section, the Selvas, or forest-covered Amazonian plain. It includes nearly all the western half of Brazil, and the eastern parts of Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. An estimate of its area at 2,300,000 square miles, including the basin of the Tocantins river, might not be extravagant. It is an almost absolute level 1200 miles long, from north to south, and 1500 wide. Those parts which lie along the great river and its larger tributaries are so low that these rivers when they rise in the rainy season spread out their waters for from sixty to eighty miles or more on each side, and immense stretches of country not actually flooded become impassable morasses. But away back from the rivers there are higher grounds, flat, but raised sufficiently to be above the inundations; and on its western margin the great plain is bordered by a stretch of undulating country before the foot of the Andes is reached. All the country, whether level or undulating, is covered with forest. The trees grow so close that there is no way of travelling except by boat along the streams. Intense heat and abundant moisture combine to make vegetation so profuse and rank that ground cleared of trees is, after three or four years, covered thick again.
In this vast area there are, except in a few trading stations along the river, only one of them a considerable town,150 practically no inhabitants, perhaps not a human being to a square mile. The few and scattered inhabitants outside these stations are Indians, nearly all savages, most of them heathens. Some are warlike, and skilful in the use of their bows and of the long blow pipe from which they discharge poisoned darts, but the greater number are timid and feeble, an easy prey to the rubber gatherers, who have in some places shewn themselves more cruel than the wildest Indian.151 Here and there in Peru and Bolivia there are a few cultivated districts in the undulating ground along the base of the Andes, where some sugar, coffee, and cocoa are raised. But the only product of any commercial importance is rubber, collected from several kinds of trees, and exported in vast quantities down the tributary rivers into the Amazon and thence to the sea. The whole region, however, appears to be of extreme fertility, and to this the size of the trees, as well as the profusion of the vegetation, bears witness. Most of it is covered with vegetable soil accumulated during many thousands of years, and has never been touched by human hand. As many of the woods are valuable, there might be a considerable trade in timber, but the cost of getting out great logs is practically prohibitive, for the trees are of so many different kinds that it is hard to obtain a large supply of the same kind on any given area, and there has hitherto been no means of transport, except by water.
Can these Amazonian Selvas, which form the largest unoccupied fertile space on the earth's surface, be reclaimed for the service of man?
This question is not a practical one for our generation, and I mention it only because it raises an interesting problem, the solution of which will one day be attempted, since so vast and so fertile an area cannot be left forever useless. Since men have begun to make railways through mountains and deserts, and to build bridges across arms of the sea like the Firth of Forth, and most of all since the cutting of the Panama Canal, it has become an accepted doctrine that every work is only a question of cost.
If ever, when the world is fuller than it is now, it becomes worth while to attempt the reclamation of this vast region, the process would probably begin by placing colonists on the more elevated grounds above the annual inundation and setting them to clear away the wood and cultivate the soil. Hard work would be needed to keep down the efforts of Nature to hold her own against man by her tremendous vegetative power, but those who know the country believe that this could be done, and that the difficulties of transport through the lower parts of the forest to the banks of navigable streams might also be overcome. Hundreds of thousands of square miles might be in this way rendered habitable and cultivable, assuming that capital and the proper kind of labour could be obtained. To reclaim the lower land along the banks of the rivers by constructing embankments or levees like those along the lower Mississippi would be a more arduous undertaking, and might involve an expenditure disproportionate to the results.
Whence would come the capital? If the country belonged to some great and wealthy nation, in which there were many enterprising men seeking employment for their wealth, the thing might be attempted on a great scale, perhaps even by the nation itself. Whether capitalists from other countries will embark on such an enterprise, which could hardly be carried out except by the aid of a government, is doubtful. If attempted at all, it must be on a large scale, for such gradual colonization by settlers coming in small groups, as would be the natural process in temperate regions, is scarcely possible in a country where man has so powerful a nature to overcome.
Supposing the capital provided, the question of labour would remain. Who would do the work? and when the work was done, who would inhabit and cultivate the lands reclaimed? Thirty years ago the fear of tropical diseases would have made these regions seem impossible for white men, even as foremen or overseers. To-day the discovery that insects are the chief poison carriers of disease has reduced our fears. But to-day it still remains doubtful whether the men of any European race can retain health and vigour in a climate so moist and so hot, and so far away from sea or mountain breezes, as are the central parts of the Selvas. It is at any rate unlikely that they could do continuous open-air work there. If white men cannot be employed, what other labour would be available? As the native Indians are too few and too feeble to be worth regarding, it would be necessary to bring in some race native to the tropics which had already formed habits of steady industry. If the world were to-day what it was a century ago, this would be a simple matter. Negroes would be kidnapped in Africa and taken up the rivers to work under white or mulatto overseers. Nowadays, compulsion being impossible, persuasion alone remains. Negroes abound on the east side of Brazil, but they have plenty of land there and are masters of the situation, seeing that the planters are more eager to get them than they are to work for the planters. Nowhere in South America is there a problem of the unemployed. Whether Chinese or Indian coolies could be brought into the Selvas, and whether if brought they would remain under the control of the white employers who had imported them, are questions which may one day arise. Nothing is being done now to exploit these regions except as sources of wild rubber supply. But it seems certain that coming generations will endeavour to turn to the service of man the largest unused piece of productive soil that remains anywhere on the earth's surface.
Leaving this forest wilderness out of account, and confining our view to the near future, can any estimate be made of the probable growth of population in South America generally, and of the total it may reach by the end of the present century?
As respects the temperate regions, there exist some data for a conjecture: Should the influx of immigrants belonging, as do the Italians, to a prolific stock be maintained, the countries south of the Tropic of Capricorn may in A.D. 2000 contain at least one hundred millions of people.
As respects the equatorial regions, which now receive hardly any immigrants and in which the natural growth of population is slow, no such data exist. Considering, however, the material development which is going on in some, and may be expected in all, of them, they also may probably increase in population which would bring them from twenty-eight up to at least forty millions.152 Were this to happen, the continent would have by A.D. 2000 a population not far short of one hundred and fifty millions. At present, with only about forty-five millions, it has much less than half the population of North America, now about one hundred and twenty millions. The rapid growth of North America, likely to continue for two generations at least, may make the proportion between the two much the same in A.D. 2000 as it is to-day.
All such speculations are, however, subject to the possibility that the birth-rate, either in the temperate regions, or generally, may decrease. Such a decrease has, as respects Australia, thrown out the calculations made forty or fifty years ago.153
More important than the quantity of a population is its quality. Any enquiry as to what that of the South American countries will be when they are tolerably well filled up at the end of the present century can profitably address itself to one point only, viz. the several races and their relations to one another. There are now three races, Whites (of Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian origin),154 Indians, of many tribes speaking different languages, and Negroes. A very rough estimate of the racial elements in the whole continent155 might give some such results as these: —