KNOWING OUR NEIGHBORS
Whatever the cause or results, the fact stands that we are not well acquainted with our nearest national neighbors. Like the modern city-dweller, we know least about those who live nearest. The North American knows more about the other side of the world than he does about those who live on the same continent with him. Neither the North American nor his southern neighbor has treated the other fairly.
Many of us have not yet discovered that there be any Latin-American. Some one lives south of the line, of course, but that fact has made little impression on our minds. In our mental geography the American world shades off into a hazy and troubled region southward about which we have known little and cared less. Our geographical studies have helped us but little. It is possible to know every physical fact about a country without knowing the hearts of the people.
It is an anomaly that we know less about our Latin neighbors than we do of Europe or Asia. By historical ties and constant reminders of commerce and immigration we are aware of our transatlantic cousins. We have discovered the Far East and have some interest therein, even though it be the interest pertaining to a museum or a menagerie. But until very recently neither immigration, commerce, nor curiosity has stirred us to acquaintance with our continental neighbors.
INDIAN BOY GOES TO SCHOOL
This ignorance is part of our general antebellum attitude toward all the world lying south and east. In fact, we never bothered much with anybody outside of the United States. Over a century we lived on, secure in the idea that we were immune from European militaristic contagion and all-sufficient unto ourselves. The rest of the world might perchance sink into the sea, but we would go on blissfully without it. Our "free institutions" were self-sufficient and all-inclusive. And because we were able to compose our own troubles and keep out of other peoples' quarrels, more or less, we assumed that we were automatically superior to the rest of the world, "of course."
We of the United States have been likened unto a householder living on a plot of ground rich enough to support his family. Resolving not to become entangled in neighborhood alliances, he constructed a hundred-foot wall about his property and lived securely within. The righthand neighbor might be an anarchist and the man on the left a cannibal. If the man in the rear were a polygamist and the dweller across the street had a habit of using firearms indiscriminately it mattered nothing to the householder—so long as the wall held. But it came to pass that an earthquake destroyed that wall, and the said exclusive citizen suddenly found himself out on the street with his neighbors. And behold, it mattered much what sort of neighbors they were. There was nothing to do but get acquainted and help make the neighborhood a decent place in which to live.
Since the world war has battered down the wall with which we sought to separate ourselves from other nations, we have nothing left but to recognize and accept our place in the national neighborhood and do our share to make it decent.
The Latin-American has been at a disadvantage in the character of the continent in which he lives. South America is a land for promoters, organizers of industry, hardy pioneers of production, engineers, planters, and rugged explorers of commercial frontiers. The poetic and artistic temperament of the Latin has suffered an unfair criticism because of the ill adaptation of his temperament to his environment. Sunny Italy and picturesque France and vine-clad Spain were more to his tastes and abilities. That he has done as well as he has speaks much for his adaptability to a situation better suited to a more executive type of character. Give him a chance in his own best environment and he shows capacity of high achievement.
WASHDAY IN COSTA RICA
Probably the two most arrogant travelers have been the Englishman and the American, but our British cousins have assumed their superiority with silent contempt, while the newly rich America globe-trotters have vaunted their ignorance from the piazzas of every tourist hotel and upon the steamer decks of every sea. It is really not strange that we failed to notice the very considerable and important populations of countries lying at our doors.
The North Americans are not travelers. Few of us do go anywhere, and fewer still know how to travel successfully. The poorest traveler in the world is the society tourist who goes about trying to reproduce home conditions in a foreign land. So far as possible he escapes the life and message of the country in which he sojourns and returns with little else but tales of social functions, a la American, and comparative accounts of expenses at tourist hotels. From the first day out he isolates and fortifies himself against the very things that travel alone can give. He brings home a few trinkets made to sell, some cocksure criticisms of customs, people, and missionaries, and a swelled head. But he has been abroad—save the mark!
Travel is a specific for provincialism, but it must be real travel and not imitation home-swagger. Intelligent and sympathetic travel breaks up the hardening strata of thought, pushes back the narrowing horizon, loosens the set fibers of the soul, and is the surest cure yet known for mental arterial sclerosis. The right kind of travel shifts the viewpoint, readjusts life forces, and shakes up the provincialism of the man with the "township horizon." And when the disturbed atoms of character reassemble it is in a different mode and with a new cycle.
It is to be said that the South American has not taken much interest in us. Since he has made out to get along without us, he cannot be very important. The Oriental has shown some desire to move into our basement, or at least the wood-*shed or the washhouse, and we have discovered him. The European has shown his good taste by coming over and moving right in with us, and in time we cannot distinguish him from ourselves. But the South American has gone his way, and in the main has minded his own affairs, and therefore cannot amount to much. If he were a social problem, we would know him better. If he had a penchant for the police force or an itch for office among us, we would cultivate his acquaintance, and perhaps invite him to call.
During the past two decades the once despised Chinese have become popular among us. Their utter difference from ourselves, their solid human qualities, their marvelous vitality, their commercial solidarity, their response to the stimuli of the modern world, their astonishing versatility, their wonderful national history—these and a hundred other things stir our imagination, and we have rather suddenly discovered that we like the Chinese—especially at a distance.
We are well aware of Japan, not so much through any perceptions of our own as through Japan's insistence upon attention. We can on short notice make out a rather comprehensive list of Japanese characteristics, and, in truth, we find Japan interesting. The marvelous energy of her people, her high ambitions, her Oriental viewpoint, her great commercial and military successes, her artistic setting, her marvelous skill of hand, and, not least, her abundant interest in our own affairs—these and other items make it quite the thing to be interested in Japan. But who cares anything about a lot of dirty peons? They are not in good form.
But this interest in the Orient is more curiosity than it is race sympathy. There is a great gulf fixed between the yellow man and the white, and racially that gulf can never be bridged. The occasional marriages between the East and West need no comment; they tell their own story. Neither China nor Japan can ever become American in any racial sense. When Chinese and Japanese come to America for any but educational and temporary purposes, they set up Chinatown and little Japan wherever they go. American character is a most complicated composite of many races, but from Tokyo to Bombay there is no Oriental factor that will blend with the mixture of races that makes up America.
Our Oriental interest is confined to the races that have impressed themselves upon our imagination. The Philippines, in spite of our national relation to the islands, do not seem to us very real nor very important. They will soon be keeping house for themselves, and then we shall forget them except as an interesting historical incident. And as for India, that is British, and about all we know is that the Hindu wears a turban, maintains a very undemocratic caste, exists in unaccountable numbers, is subject to annoying and frequent famines, and on the whole is a rather helpless lot, except as some bearded fakir entertains companies of badly balanced American society women with hyperbolated essence of sublimated nonsense.
RIVERSIDE PLANTATION
But the Latin-American is blood of our blood, kin of our kind, and lives on the same continental street, which is why we are so little interested in him. He is neither quaint, curious, nor crazy. He is not good for first-page headlines except when he breaks out in revolution or forgets our Monroe Doctrine. There is no fixed gulf of difference between him and us, and in the final fusing of American character he must contribute a large part.
To ignore the Latin-American is to be convicted of historical ignorance. From Dante to the great South American leaders and scholars of to-day the Latin races have been neither sleeping nor idle. During the last five hundred years more than one half of Western history has been made by Latin races. It was a Latin who discovered America. Another first sailed around the globe. Latin peoples explored, conquered, and settled both Western continents, and gave a language which has become the permanent speech of two thirds of the Western world. To call the roll of artists, painters, sculptors, poets, dramatists, novelists, musicians, explorers, missionaries, and scientists for the past five centuries is to prove that a majority of the names mentioned in the world's illustrious hall of fame are from Latin races. To mention Curé, Pasteur, and Marconi is to remind us of the scientific progress of modern Latin minds, and to speak of France and Italy as pioneers in democracy is to keep within the facts. It was in Italy that Browning and Tennyson and George Eliot and a host of other writers found inspiration and material to feed the fires of genius.
Whatever may be said of the modern degeneracy of the dominant religious system of Latin-American countries, it is true that the sixteenth century saw in Spain one of the most virile and comprehensive missionary movements of all history. Never before nor since have missionary efforts been projected on so vast a scale or by so powerful procedure. Monks and priests went out and established the cross and the confessional through the Western world and in the islands of the sea, and, whatever else we may say, there can be no disparagement of the permanency of the results of these conquests. The Latin world is still dominantly Roman in its religious life, and shows very positive preferences for the religion of the conquistadores. To give a language and a religion to two thirds of the American continents is not the work of weaklings nor of degenerates.
This Latin neighbor of ours not only lives on the same street but he lives in a bigger and better house than ours. To the "lick-all-creation" type of Fourth-of-July American this is rank heresy, but facts have little regard for fireworks. With twenty-eight per cent of the population of the Americas, the Latin holds sixty-five per cent of the territory and fully the same proportion of natural resources. His soil, his rivers, his mountains, his harbors, his mines are as good as ours, and he has more of them. In the western hemisphere he controls the longest rivers, the highest mountains, the largest area of habitable land, the longest sea-coast, and the entire inexhaustible fertility of the tropics. His untouched and uncharted natural resources are beyond computation. His estate is second to none in the entire world, and he could spare enough for the crowded millions of India or the swarming islands of Japan and never miss it. All of this we would have discovered sooner but for the world war, which focused all attention on the main issue and postponed the direct results of the successful completion of the Panama Canal. With a normal supply of shipping, the west coast alone of South America would keep the Canal busy much of the time and affect American markets profoundly.
JUNGLE PRODUCTS
In material achievements our neighbor has not been idle, though some of his attempts have resulted in failure or fiasco. He has built great and beautiful cities, he has constructed long and difficult railroads over tortuous mountain systems, he has developed huge industries and organized big commercial enterprises. He has produced a civilization in keeping with his character, artistic, homogeneous, progressive, and on a high intellectual plane. His libraries, theaters, and public buildings are a credit to his taste and skill, and his churches are massive and stately as the rock-ribbed mountains that tie together the whole system from El Paso to Patagonia.
We have heard more or less of a Pan-Americanism, but we have never taken it seriously. As subject for diplomatic papers, magazine articles, and after-dinner oratory the all-America idea has been a refuge of word-venders. But so long as the bulk of South American trade was with Europe our brand of fraternal talk was harmless—also helpless; and the reason for our failure to do business with South America has not been entirely the neglect of our shippers. The larger exports of South America have all been to Europe, and with ships loaded both ways the American exporter was hopelessly handicapped in his effort to secure favorable freight rates. When American salesmen tried to compete with German and French and Spanish exporters they always failed to secure freight rates that gave them an even chance.
For years American manufacturers ignored the Orient and lagged far behind European dealers in the same class of goods, to their own large loss. The same neglect has produced the same result in South America. Germany pursued a very different policy. Without trumpet or flag Germany sent her agents to practically every Latin-American center and seaport, and there the unostentatious German proceeded to control as much business as possible, and generally get hold of the situation. Often he took unto himself a wife of the country, but never for one day did he forget that he was a representative of the Vaterland. His house, his furniture, his methods, his ideas were one hundred per cent German. An American ship doctor went ashore from a German liner in a small South American seaport and stumbled upon the inevitable German man of business. He was invited home to dinner and shown through the house with much pride by the half-German children. One after the other, furniture, books, pictures, clothing even were exhibited and with every article was repeated the formula, "Es war in Deutschland gemacht." It was a great game, and it was working along smoothly until things slipped in Europe, and now the end no man can see. But there is going to be a great chance for American capital and enterprise and business energy in the years when German energy will be needed at home.
In one of the Central American republics an American, while present at a social function, remarked casually to a friend that in his opinion the cure for the political upheavals of that country would be in the polite but firm intervention of the United States. A German business man, overhearing the remark, hastily interposed, "Not at all, sir; that is what Germany is in this country for." With a concerted and well-considered policy of business extension in South American countries Germany deserved the commercial advantages that she had gained in the twenty-five years preceding the war period.
When questioned as to the remarkable success of the German commercial propaganda, South American leaders rarely fail to mention the fact that the German business man in Latin lands invariably speak the language of the country. Catalogues are issued in Spanish or Portuguese, as local conditions require. Measures, technical terms, and methods of handling goods are all adapted to local usage, and the South American merchant is considered and consulted in all the mechanism of exchange and handling of goods. Contrasted with North American ignorance of conditions and ignoring of language and custom, it is not strange that Europe has controlled the trade of Latin-America.
In view of all that is involved of national development, international entanglements, commercial expansion, and racial affinity, it would seem to be about time that we become acquainted with our neighbors, or, rather, in our neighborhood. If we are going to live on this great American highway, it may be well to be on good terms with the rest of the folks.
Aside from commercial and linguistic considerations, there are four reasons for our ignorance of the lands and people south of the United States.
1. The American people are not well acquainted with any other people on earth. Geographical isolation has had much to do with this, and racial self-sufficiency has had still more effect upon our lack-of-thinking about our neighbors. Had South and Central American countries been pouring millions of immigrants into our cities, we would know something about them, but the Latin has had no need to immigrate, since he has more room in his own house than he could find in ours.
2. American travel abroad has been practically all to Europe, with an increasing number who have seen something of the Far East. And it is impossible to be anything but densely ignorant of any people whose faces we have never seen, whose country we have never visited, whose history we have ignored, and whose language we cannot understand. No real interest is possible without knowledge, and the main trouble between the American and his neighbors is plain ignorance.
3. The war with Spain in 1898 resulted in much indifferent prejudice on our part against everything Spanish. Spain was not prepared for the blow that fell upon her, and perhaps her colonial system deserved the destruction that was administered, but we came out of the war with a more or less good-natured contempt for anything and everything that savored of Spain. We escaped with little or no spirit of hatred or lust of conquest, but we marked down the Latin world at bargain prices—and then let Europe walk away with the bargain. As a matter of fact, Spain has little to do with the American situation. Spain herself in the past fifteen years has made rapid strides forward, but in the average American mind anything Spanish cannot be very efficient.
4. Our Monroe Doctrine has begotten a certain arrogance of attitude toward all our southern neighbors. Our attention has been called southward only when revolution or anarchy or European interference has compelled us to take a hand for our own ultimate self-protection. It is only when our neighbors have failed to keep the peace and have threatened to carry their quarrels into our yard, or have been in danger of being beaten up by European military police, that we have taken the trouble to notice them. From this situation it was inevitable that an attitude of patronage should arise, and patronage is not a basis of national cooperation or mutual understanding.