II
Salvador is the smallest nation in Central America, but with the exception of Costa Rica the most progressive.
The railway train which carried me to the capital the next day was neat and clean, and the coaches freshly painted by an artist who had covered the interior with bright colors, and had traced designs of lilies and tulips wherever there was sufficient woodwork to permit of ornamentation.
As in Guatemala, the way led through a land of volcanoes, wherewith Salvador is so abundantly supplied that for some years she did not bother to construct lighthouses on her coast. At a distance, from the railway train, one could count several of them, some in mild eruption. For miles we rode through a congealed river of metal, a great stream that traced its way downward through the green of Mount San Salvador—a tumbled river of black rock that had hardened into fantastic shapes while still foaming and boiling. But already it had decomposed in places, and islands of green jungle were appearing along its surface.
Salvador, like Guatemala, is mainly a coffee country. It is not, however, a country of large estates, but of small holdings. Patches of farm-land cover every available space. This is the most thickly populated republic not only in Central America but in the entire hemisphere. Into its 7,225 square miles were packed some 1,500,000 people. As everywhere, over-crowding, by intensifying the struggle for existence, had developed among the Salvadoreans an energy and industry greater than that of their neighbors. Hillsides that would have gone to waste in Guatemala were plowed here to the very summit. Villages, ruined by the last volcanic eruption, were springing up in all the valleys.
One looked upon the heavily populated landscape and wondered why some of the natives did not gravitate over into the next republic. But the people of all these nations are like those of the Balkans in their hatred of one another. When I mentioned the subject to a Salvadorean who shared my seat, he muttered:
“Go to Guatemala? Never! People there are scoundrels!”
Which reminded me that Guatemalans had already warned me against the Salvadoreans, all of whom were said to be cut-throats and purse-snatchers. It is this spirit of mutual distrust that has kept Central America divided into five diminutive states. There has been talk of union ever since they first gained independence from Spain and Mexico back in 1821 and 1823, but it has resulted only in a series of temporary combinations of two or three republics, opposed by the other three or two, and brought to an end through internal bickerings. Politicians in all the countries favor the present multiplicity of offices. Wherefore each little nation staggers under the burden of supporting a president, and a congress, and a complete diplomatic corps, although the whole five could be lost in Texas.
Salvador, the smallest, is so tiny that from its center one could sometimes look westward to the Pacific Ocean, and eastward to the mountains of Honduras.