The Argentine in the Twentieth Century

by Alberto B. Martínez; Maurice Lewandowski

prejudiced facts, which have been gathered from the writings of a dyspeptic and ill-tempered journalist. Such data have caused M. Gustave Lebon to deduce psychological laws which are hardly favourable to the South American races.

If we wish to gain some idea of the true causes of this diversity of destiny between the peoples of North and South America, we must study the origin of each and the particular form which colonisation has assumed in each case; forms imposed by the force of historic facts rather than by the will of man.

The Anglo-Saxons arrived in the American coasts and founded, in the first half of the seventeenth century, such cities as Boston, Charleston, Philadelphia, etc., when America had already been discovered and explored by the Spaniards a century and a half before. These colonies were formed of groups of families who had abandoned their mother-country to seek a new one, where they could live and labour free from the persecutions of religious and political intolerance.

When these colonies attained a certain fame, the surplus of the overflowing populations of Europe was naturally attracted by these virgin and fertile lands, relatively near at hand though across the ocean. Thus there formed a current of immigration which rapidly peopled America and utilised the great natural resources of its enormous territory. In this way was gradually formed a new people, which was to a certain extent a development of the various nations from which it originated, and which preserved their customs and their political and social habits.

These colonists began by buying land of the native tribes; but, increasing in numbers and in strength, they found it more convenient to rob them, thus forcing the Red Indians to retreat towards the north and west; and for reasons of self-respect, or on account of religious principles, no deliberate attempt was made to mingle with the indigenous population.

This form of colonisation, whose prime cause was to be found in persecution, not in the execution of a preconceived plan, resulted in the existence, at the end of the eighteenth century, of thirteen colonies peopled exclusively by men of the white races, originally natives of the countries of Northern Europe, who had transported to this new soil their

manners and customs, their social and political laws, their liberal traditions and their economic system, so that from the moment they declared themselves independent, they were able immediately to form a single nation, united by all the ties which make for the cohesion of a people.[11]

[11] The late Signor Pellegrini, in his anxiety to defend the Latin races, is not strictly impartial. At the time of the Declaration of Independence the population of the States was very largely English (with a substratum of Dutch in New York) but of different periods; and these different periods preserved their own traditions. The difference between the New England Quaker and the Kentucky trapper, or the Virginian fox-hunting squire, and the Dutch patroon or Highland crofter, was as great as any to be found among the Latin races, if not greater, and was largely a difference of arrested periods as well as a racial and a social difference. The result was that Federalism was accomplished peacefully only by the genius of Hamilton.—[Trans.]

To attain such progress, to reach the summit on which they rest to-day, the United States had only to persist in the same path, to follow the same groove, and the incontestable merit of this people and of its great statesmen is that they have been faithful to the principles of liberty and equality which they inherited from their ancestors, the venerable “conscript fathers”; principles which they ratified in the admirable Constitution whence this vast political organism has derived its cohesion, its vitality, and its strength.

How different were the origins of the peoples of Latin America! The Spanish sailors did not cross the ocean like the passengers of the Mayflower, or the companions of Penn, seeking solitary shores, known though distant, where they might establish a home, there to live and labour in peace and liberty.